Grace Kerina
Grace Kerina
Here’s a little bit about her:
Grace Kerina founded Highly Sensitive Power to encourage sensitive people to stand proud. Focusing on the themes of curiosity, creativity, and community, her website provides pep talks, food for thought, resources, and practical tools.
In addition to writing articles for her website, Grace has written an e-book about healthy boundaries – Stay Afloat When They’re Rocking Your Boat, more than 200 Creativity Prompts, and Compendiums of information on topics such as creativity, sensitivity, building a website the cheap and easy way, and more. She also helps others write, through her co-editing service.
An avid seeker of opportunities for mutually sparky collaboration, Grace has her fingers in a few pies. She’s a member of the Sensitive Professionals Network, a Style Statement consultant, and the North American marketer for OH Cards – cards of association used by creators and healers, such as artists, storytellers, aid and trauma workers, and team-builders.
And here’s how she answered my 6 questions about creativity:
What inspires your creativity?
Besides the view from my desk, my top prompters of juicy ideas are these six elements:
Play. Having a goal of fun rather than purpose. Inhabiting the kid-space of doing what feels best just because it feels best. Letting go. Play invites curiosity and joy to lead.
Tolerance. Being more interested in discovering than defining. Locating the limits of my view and checking for chinks in the wall so I can expand my horizons, even if that means cracking open or wailing or letting go. By revising my views, I see more.
Quickening. Watching for physical signs of intense interest – faster heartbeat, sharpened mind, quickened breathing – and letting myself be led by their hypnotic spell. They know. At such times, I have a sense that my whole body is saying, “Show me.”
Tuning in. Whew! Call it what you will – the Collective Subconscious, the Universe, God, or Alfonso the Magnificent – the forces that reach through and beyond us and between us pack a wallop when it comes to delivering creativity. Tuning in equals opening up to a rich infinity of brilliance.
Fodder. The more raw material, the better. When I seek creative solutions, I tend not to sit quietly and think, but to actively seek information, sights, ideas, or anything at all that swirls in the general vicinity of what I’m questing for. I go to libraries and wander, I listen to or read stories, I embark on conversational journeys, I walk with my camera, all to encourage…
Cross-pollination. The more raw materials swirling in the pot, the more chance there is of something delicious and new and revolutionary being served up. Compatible ingredients attract. Meaning coalesces.
How do people respond to your creativity?
People respond as though they’re suddenly connected, and that seems to me to be what creativity is, at its core: a connection. I tend to think of myself as the conduit. When I share something creative I’ve discovered, I also feel awed, and inspired – as though we’re both receiving the gift.
View From My Desk
What is the wildest journey your creativity has taken you on?
Ten years ago, while living on an island near Seattle, I woke up one day and decided to go to Europe as soon as possible. I’d never been, though I’d long yearned to go. Soon afterwards, I saw a poster for a two-week painting trip on the island of Corsica. I signed up and paid my deposit, though I had no idea where the remaining thousands of dollars would come from. I borrowed some and quested for a solution for the sizeable remainder.
What I came up with was the idea of pre-selling collages I’d make after I returned, from photos I’d take in Corsica. I sat down at the computer, cracked my knuckles, and set out to create an irresistible marketing letter. To my delight, the payments I received in response were enough send me on my way.
I’m still living in the ripples from those two weeks in Corsica, which changed my life forever. I slept in the Countess’s canopied bed in a room with a view that made me cry, I ate gourmet French cuisine, I laughed every day until my face hurt, I explored a culture that rose up from the stones before 8000 BC, I roamed the countryside and discovered ancient stone aqueducts and waterfalls hidden deep in the fragrant maquis, and I learned how to create from the core of me. All of that would have changed me forever.
But I also met the man who became my husband. I became the bonus mom of his beautiful 11-year-old son. I moved to Vancouver, where he lived, and have since become a Canadian citizen. We now live in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, on a stunning little jewel of an island packed with artists and writers and thespians and poets. And when we pool our passports, my husband and I are free to live anywhere in North America or Europe. I feel a tug toward Freiburg, Germany – just a few kilometres from France.
Who loves you for your creativity?
I Want To Work Here
I have a treasured collection of buddies. We spend time together regularly, mostly by phone, helping each other out. We schedule hour-long phone sessions during which each of us gets half an hour of undivided attention and mutual creativity. It’s like weekly doses of rampant mutual appreciation and roaring forward movement. I couldn’t do without them.
In which ways do you see yourself as Breaking New Ground?
I feel a mission to support sensitive people to speak up rather than fold up. We’re all sensitive, in varying ways and degrees, and need all the encouragement we can get to let the world know about our talents and insights. If you hold the key to someone else’s stuck place, figuring out how to share is important. I funnel such tools and cheerleading through my website, Highly Sensitive Power.
I’m a big fan of using creativity to make tough journeys as fun as possible. With that in mind, I wrote an e-book about having fun learning to maintain healthy boundaries, Stay Afloat When They’re Rocking Your Boat.
What’s next for you?
I seem to enjoy having lots of projects on the go. The one that most excites me right now is finishing up production of the first two volumes of my Creativity Prompt Cards. I wrote and published the short prompts on my website and am looking forward to making them available in a format that allows fondling.
And here’s something that inspires her creativity:
On my website is a Creativity Prompts Compendium – a collection of books, websites, tools, quotes, and more – that inspire me to create.
I’m also endless inspired by story and the process of writing. Specific inspiration comes from sources like these:
Heinz Insu Fenkl’s beautiful article, “Story Telling and Healing” – “Telling a story causes you to become its audience, and when you listen to yourself, you learn something about yourself that you did not know before. … Serious storytelling not only has the potential to heal, it can and does heal.”
Holly Lisle’s article, “How I Drew a Map and Sold Three Books and a World” – Make sure to click on the parts of the “Map of Matrin – in parts” to see more.
Thanks Grace! What an amazing journey your creativity has taken you on!
“These gals are shaking the Tree, gathering up around them the fruits of creativity.”
