The art of "content" as divine creativity
How I flow, play, and enjoy sharing my soul message online through creativity & business with ease as a full time mom of 3
I can distinctly remember the moment where my Instagram account shifted from a highlight reel to a space for my authentic creative self-expression.
That spring, 2018, I was just coming out of my postpartum cocoon. Just a year previous, I had found out I was pregnant with twin boys, days after breaking ground on my first business, a brick & mortar infrared sauna and wellness studio called Inner Light. I had the idea for it January 2017, found out I was pregnant in May, opened the shop in July, worked 6 days a week till Thanksgiving, gave birth in an emergency c-section 4 days after Christmas to two healthy boys (now 6 years old).
As happens with entering motherhood, my world had transformed. I was processing this immense change in my life and self, while trying to start and run a new, innovative wellness business. Even seven years later, solo moments are rare, and when they do happen, ideas and insights tend to pop in.
This is what’s become my creative flow, and it started in the powder room of our old home, when I caught my reflection in the mirror, all those years ago.
Like most, my Instagram page had been a space where I shared odd photos here and there, rarely of myself. Something shifted, in that moment, I felt compelled to share a vulnerable insight about my journey, and from there, the inspiration continued to pour out.
Back then, it was static images and long captions only, with occasional posts being the norm. IG wasn’t a booming business, there were no ads, influencer was just becoming a thing. I didn’t seek to be any of those things. I was just a woman, a new mom, going through the big identity shift of new motherhood, while running a new business.
I started sharing BTS both on Instagram, my personal and business account, and writing longer blog posts on topics I was interested in at the intersection of modern life and holistic wellbeing - body, yes, but mind and soul too.
It brings me so much joy to reread these captions. The alignment I felt in these short paragraphs is palpable as my memories of typing them. Dreaming, thinking, writing, laying on the grass outside, watching my twin toddlers play.
This has been my mode of creation from 2018 till now - to write, create, and share amidst the messiness of motherhood.
In 2019 I sold Inner Light and focused on motherhood, alongside a handful of spiritual life coaching clients and Purpose Readings, my signature blend of astrology, Human Design, and numerology.
All of this was taking off, and I was balancing it all in just 2 hours a day of childcare, plus nap time, weaving my own path of creativity, motherhood, and entrepreneurship. I launched my first podcast, Life Anyway, in January 2020. Then the pandemic happened. I dialed my work back, let go of clients, and in a series of wild synchronicities, dove head first into writing a book with a close friend in fall 2020.
I may have taken a year off of Instagram during this challenging yet magical time, our book may still be sitting in drafts, but this was when I honed my craft and owned my creative identity as a writer.
If you understand creativity, you know it has a mind of it’s own. I love Liz Gilbert’s book on this, Big Magic, this is a favorite quote:
“I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
In 2021, my creativity carried me to start writing on Instagram again, and then on Substack. I continued the quiet way I had practiced for years then - nose deep in books, spiraling into esoteric subjects, adventuring in the unknown of spiritual truths and hidden ancient secrets, and sharing bits and bobs of my insights along the way.
Creativity, however it spilled out of me, was always play, and this is the attitude I brought to sharing online - and still do.
That’s why I was so perplexed back in 2021, when I was speaking out against medical mandates, and a woman who had sent me a couple of argumentative messages sent another nasty one about how terrible my “content” was.
Content?
WTF is content?
I had never thought of my creative self-expression in relationship to that term - a word I associated with a dry business task, a need, a to-do, devoid of passion. This was my joy, my magic, my sacred insights, poured forth with love and devotion.
I did not share for likes or recognition. I shared for creative self-expression.
Fast forward a year, I have had our third son, and this entrepreneurial spirit reignites in me. My little Generator (his Human Design energy type) lit me up and inspired me, in the same way his brothers (Projector energy types like me) taught me to slow down and go within.
This was the first time I started to channel my creativity into building a business, at first it was around a network marketing product in the field of wellbeing, and I had immense fun doing it. My account started to grow from 1,000 to 2,000 and then 4k plus followers as I expanded into new forms of content such as reels - an edge for me at first.
What stayed consistent throughout the ebbs and flows of my creative journey on social media is that I have crafted words and shared messages that come from deep in my heart, that are authentic to my individual self-expression, and this is why they flow with joy and ease.
The question I have received again and again, even in those Inner Light days, was this:
How do you share so easily?
It has to do with this consistency I speak of - I stay true to myself, my ever changing evolution, even now.
In 2023, I launched my podcast Ancient Future Heart and that’s when my account took off. Suddenly I was speaking on all the esoteric topics, spirituality, science, quantum realms, diving into subjects that I had kept close to my heart for years. What I thought would be too weird and out there is exactly how I grew.
My reels were gaining tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of views, and my account grew to 20k followers.
I am in another shift, now launching what has always been purely creative at heart, into a full business, a space where I support heart-centered creative entrepreneurs in bringing their soul message into the world, so we can shift paradigms and create New Earth together.
Even now that my space on Instagram transforms more than ever into a place that serves as a digital online business, the art of creativity stays the same.
I actually have to actively hold myself back from sharing the full depth and breadth of my creative flow on Instagram so as not to overwhelm with all the messages that come through. (Instagram has recently been prioritizing accounts that share less content, annoying, but it does help to play their game a little bit, from a space of integrity and true playfulness.)
I have Notes upon Notes on my phone of ideas for posts, reels, Substack essays, podcast episodes, even whole book drafts that I just haven’t gotten to yet.
This is why I’m sharing my Cosmic Content Creation Workshop. I know that creating and sharing online can seem burdensome and intimidating but it doesn’t need to be. It can be pure play and joy and through sharing not only can you begin to share your soul message, your unique vibration that’s here to uplevel and change the world (I mean that), but you can get to know yourself better, feel a sense of fulfillment by itching your creative scratches, hone your craft in writing and authentic self-expression, and over time build a body of work that can become your business.
I would love for you to join this workshop if you feel called - I’m recording it live next week, Tuesday the 23rd at 7:30PM EST. It’s $44 to join live (plus replay). After that it will be available for you to purchase for $127.
I love you all. Thank you for walking down memory lane today with me.
Hello, Kelly! So delighted to meet you here through our soul sister Alicia Assad. This image of you, without husband or children in the photo. Yes! I had this revelation last year, looking for a selfie for a headshot on my phone. When am I ever alone? How has the way I've conceived of myself changed? I wrote a moment of wondering about this in my thesis last spring... link and page below for the paragraph. I'm so happy our worlds are connecting. Happy to follow along here, hope to meet you soon. Love and blessings and abundance and words... xx -Alice
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/divinity_theses/10/ with a quote about this way of documenting myself on end of page 25.
Ohhh the party boy! That’s so funny, we call my little one party girl, she’s a generator too, I have a tough time keeping up but she is such a joy to have a around! X