The Experience of Being Creative as a Spiritual Practice: A Hermeneutic-Phenomenological Study

As each artist describes the experience of being creative as a spiritual practice, several universal themes begin to emerge. These themes elucidate how creative activity is experienced, how it is felt as spiritual, and how it is seen as practice. In this chapter these emergent themes are amplified through dialogue as the experiential expressions from each participant artist are affinitively grouped with the experiential expressions of the same emergent theme from the other participant’s descriptions. This is a process of unitive intuition in which the commonalities among experiential expressions point towards particular universal emergent themes. This creates a movement between the parts that amplifies the meaning of the whole. “There is disclosed an understanding of the personal in the universal and the universal in the personal.” [Kidd: 1990, 19]

Amplifying themes means that the researcher brings into focused attention details,
which contribute to the self-meaning constitution in action and experience.
Amplifying is a way to bring to the forefront meaning, which is in experience and
which is at the same time the ground for possibility. [Kidd: 1990, 27]

Four major themes have emerged from my work with these artists: the interplay of intention/reception, the experience of being in relationship, the experience of shift in one’s sense of self/ life/ world, and the experience of a journey. (Italics indicate the participants’ original words.)

-101-