Samantha Mackay: sitting with pain and healing through creativity

Connecting creativity with personal healing. 

Samantha Mackay felt the pressure of conforming to traditional art forms in school, and much later in life found her voice in abstract painting. 

In this episode Samantha and I discuss how the pressures of societal expectations can stifle artistic expression, as she shares her journey from a legal career to rediscovering her creative passions. 

Samantha opens up about the struggles she faced while living in London, grappling with depression and autoimmune issues, and how, years later, creativity became a vital outlet for processing her pain, prompted by an insightful coaching experience that encouraged her to draw without judgment. 

We also explore the Enneagram as a tool for understanding our motivations and barriers to creativity, revealing how it can guide us towards a more authentic self-expression. 

Along the way, we explore the profound connection between creativity and healing, emphasizing the importance of embracing our unique paths. 

This episode is a reminder that creativity is not just about art; it's about how we express our true selves in everyday life.

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Chapters

• 0:55 Career choices
• 10:05 From law to new beginnings
• 18:21 Understanding Enneagram
• 24:51 Enneagram and creativity
• 32:11 Enneagram and personal growth
• 34:43 Buy me a coffee

Transcript

0:08

My stuff was weird and abstract at a time that. That just didn't really feel celebrated or promoted or I couldn't guarantee I'd get the marks for it. And so I chose not to pursue it because it didn't feel like it was going to set me up at success later on in life. Well, I mean, every Australian has to come to the UK at some point. That is part of the deal. It's required. So I had seasonal affective disorder. My autoimmune condition flared up. I was terribly depressed and lonely. I had an insomnia. So I was really, really unwell in London from the chronic stress. I could never sit with it and acknowledge it and be with it. And that's part of what creativity started to help me to do, to sit with the pain. Hi, I'm Claire, founder of Creativity Found, a community for creative learners and educators connecting adults who want to find a creative outlet with the artists and crafters who can help them do so with workshops, courses, online events and kits. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or refound their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two, too. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits, and how their creative lives enrich their practical, necessary, everyday lives. This time, I'm chatting with Samantha Mackay. Hi, Samantha, how are you? Good, thanks. How are you, Claire? Very well, thank you. Start by telling me how you express. Your creativity currently at this present moment. And I feel like it regularly changes. I'm doing interviews with people about what creativity means to them in a very similar fashion to this, but in reverse, but using it through the lens of their Enneagram type. And I'm finding it fascinating because so many people just haven't thought about what creativity means to them. But for me as the interviewer, I'm just finding it really creative to be in the flow of the conversation, what question to ask next, what to pull out, and then you go in through and edit it and shape it into something and. And you just get better and better with practice. But it's more just. I'm loving the curiosity of talking to people about creativity. And I feel like it sort of encapsulates so many aspects of creativity. The conversation, the design of the conversation, the editing, all that piece together. So that's. That's how I'm expressing my creativity at the moment. Well, you sound like you're Talking about me, talking to people, putting the questions together, editing it afterwards. So we will of course come back and talk about why you're speaking to people, what you mean by Enneagram. But we'll go back to childhood to start with. Do you think you had a creative childhood at home or at school? I think so, yeah. For me as a child, I love painting things. I was always about painting, but even then I was also really imaginative. I would love to build Lego cities and imagine all of the cars and the people coming to life while I was asleep and pretending the gardens were these magical fantasy lands. But I think the most tangible expression of creativity for me was painting. And I love to paint. And I think it started really as more like putting paint on paper, but evolved into other sort of forms of creative expression over the years as I got older. And did you have an opportunity or a vision to continue that, maybe in further education? Did you think that might be a part of your career in the future? I think I want it to be. I really crave the idea of being a writer or a dancer or like having a creative career in some form. And then at high school when I was doing art and I could see that I wasn't as good as other people. And by that I mean I wasn't the classical artist. My stuff was weird and abstract at a time that. That just didn't really celebrated or promoted or I couldn't guarantee I'd get the marks for it. And so I chose not to pursue it because it didn't feel like it was gonna set me off at success later on in life. Even though now I look back and think, you know, creativity is one of the most important skills we can develop. And yet in the, like, higher educational system, it. I just didn't feel like it was going to be a win or help me in the long term. Yeah, that's often the way that it's not seen as an important thing to do, or if there's something else you should be doing, do that first and do the creative stuff for fun. Did you go into further education? Did you go to uni? Yeah, I studied law and accounting. Wow. Yeah, a lot of creativity there. A lot of, you know. Where did that come from then? Well, I think I sort of repeatedly got this message that creativity had to be plan B and I needed a plan A. And so I was in high school and I looked around and thought, well, what's my plan A going to be? Because I. I do want to change the world in some way. I do want to have an impact. And you know, there are people I admired around me and I looked at what they were doing and I think because of that I was like, well, I'll do commerce and law because change isn't happening necessarily through governments, it's happening through business. And if you understand how businesses run, then you can use that as a, a tool for influence. And so I studied, you know, commerce, accounting and, and law is really sort of how it all came about. And I loved like at university I did really enjoy studying law to some extent. But the second I started working in a law firm, I just, I just knew it wasn't for me. Almost as soon as I was into my accounting degree, I knew it wasn't for me. But these truths revealed themselves sort of slowly over time. When you say you went to a law firm and then thought, oh God, this isn't for me, did you kind of have to stick with it because you'd got that far? Or what did you think after that? You know, it's funny that. So I started working at a law firm while I was still at university and it was almost like your part time job. So even though I was terribly depressed while doing it, I didn't really question it as the, as a career choice. You know, you sort of just went along with it. And when I started working in law properly, I, it wasn't how I planned on it. You know, I, I came out of law on the other end and I was like, okay, I don't think this is the path I want to go. So I started applying for consultancies and other graduate programs and no one would accept me, no one would have me. And I was like, oh no, I'm going to have to do law. I have no choice. This is the only option available to me. And it, I almost saw it more like a trade than as a profession. This is what I've studied, therefore I have to do it. No one else is accepting me for anything else. Even though the message you repeatedly get told is law is great for any career. It sets you up for success in anything. And I'm like, no, I seem to be stuck having to do law. And so completed the, you know, the certification to be, get to become a lawyer and ended up in law firms. And even when I found a good law firm, I just, I just couldn't see myself doing it for the rest of my life because it just didn't seem creative or interesting enough. How long were you working in law firms? Roughly 10 years or so between both being a paralegal and a lawyer, both in Sydney and in London. Yeah. So, you know, it was quite a while, but just in a variety of roles. Yeah. And you mentioned London there. How and why did you come to the uk? Well, I mean, every Australian has to come to the UK at some point. That is part of the deal. It's required. And for me, I sort of. I hit 28, and I had some friends who were in London at the time, and it just seemed like that I was like, I'll never be able to sleep on couches when I'm over 30, so we're gonna have to go now. Now, I did not once sleep on a couch in London. That never happened. But there was just this perception that I was 28 and I had to go. Now. I got to London, got a, you know, a job with a big law firm, which was awful from start to finish, and really confirmed that it wasn't the path for me. But, yeah, that's how I ended up in London. Were you able to enjoy your time in London around that? And how long did you stay for? I think I was in London like two and a half years in total. And I think the challenge for me, I mean, I loved parts of living in London, but the challenge for me was I was so stressed from the move and from having a career that didn't fit. I was almost too sick to travel. And so I spent a lot of my time trying to just take care of myself. So I had seasonal affective disorder. My autoimmune condition flared up. I was terribly depressed and lonely. I had an insomnia. So I was really, really unwell in London from the chronic stress of the career and the move and underlying trauma that I wasn't aware of. And so in some way, for me, London was. Was really hard. You know, it's like that classic line. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times for me. I love London, and I hated it in equal measure because it was filled with art and museums that I could go to all the time. But at the same time, I was terribly unwell and terribly unhappy. Yeah, you weren't in the place to be able to enjoy it as you would have hoped to be able to. No. Was it next that you went to New Zealand and were things different then? New Zealand was different in the sense of I couldn't do law as a backup career there. You know, in London, you can do paralegaling pretty easily, like a temp job that just doesn't exist in smaller markets. And so when I arrived in New Zealand, they said, well, what do you want to do? What do you want to get a job at? And thankfully at the time, recruiters are pretty, like, flexible and helpful. And so I started doing temp work in organizational development and leadership development because I had this huge background in training and running workshops and in education in a way. And I just sort of slowly transitioned into this new career and I hadn't expected it, it hadn't been planned, but just being in a really small place where you have all these really good credentials on your cv, people find a place for you. That's what I liked about New Zealand. So talking about everything else surrounding that, I'm just going to say, and I may cut this out, but both of us have got all sorts of noise going on around us. I've got my family out there putting the kettle on, making smoothies. I've heard some of children and dogs and stuff around. We are, obviously, we're the UK and Australia, so we're completely opposite ends of the day. And it's obviously busy times in the prime time. It's prime time. It's, it's, it's the. It's the beast time of the day where everyone needs to be fed now. Yeah, yeah, I think that's very real. And that just shows what we. How we all live. That's why I have these on to try and, like, tune some of that out. Yeah, yeah, Very good. You see, Samantha's got her headphones on. I never wear headphones, but well done. So excited. So then back to New Zealand. So then, when you're doing these different roles, does that mean you're feeling happier around yourself as well, with the rest of your life? You know, that is a great question. And I would say no, because again, I was once again in a new country with no support systems. My relationship had just ended. I was once again alone and starting a new career and feeling really unsupported. And it was really difficult for me to express myself. And I didn't fully understand that at the time, but it was so hard for me to take anything I was feeling and say it out loud or bring it outside of myself. What I think is partly one of the reasons I ended up working with a coach at the time and taking that coaching course. And that happened more by accident than by design, but I just was so stuck. And thankfully I ended up in therapy and that started to help, but I don't think I realized how trapped I was trying to be something that I wasn't. You know, that message of plan A versus plan B was so deeply ingrained that I was constantly trying to prove how I could be successful at plan A so I could make time for plan B. And it was really suffocating and strangling me. But I couldn't have articulated that at the time because you're too busy, like being stuck in that noose. But it was hard for me to be happy when I couldn't express myself. So when you're coming to these realizations through the help of another person, is that why you started painting again? I'll just put this in a timeline order for you. So I accidentally ended up in a coaching course and, well, for you to become a coach. Yeah, I wasn't planning on coming a coach, but that's what the course was for. Um, and inside the course, I hadn't worked with a coach at this point in time, but I kept thinking, I'm so smart, no one can possibly. This possibly can't work on me. I'm too smart for that. Such nonsense. And one of the teachers, you know, you do lots of practice sessions during the course. One of the teachers sat down and within, you know, the four or five minute allotted piece of time, she cracked open something and I was like, oh my goodness, I have to work with her. And the thing I started to work on with her was creativity. And the very first exercise she gave me or that we planned together was for me to start drawing like a five year old, you know, and so I got some colored pencils and some paper and I just drew circles and flowers literally like a five year old would with no expectation or effort or any. It was just to start really being able to get my hands to move over paper again to start to get some flow coming back. So that's what we worked on for six months. And ultimately that led to me painting for like four or five years, hosting my own art exhibition, Being really deep into abstract painting and doing it every day and it being a huge practice for me, but it sort of started there. I don't think I could have gone back to it without help. Wow. You said then you were painting abstractly and you said when you were at school that your painting abstractly was perhaps considered weird among what everybody else was painting. So how did you feel about that? I have this distinct memory of being a kid, of painting or trying to paint a person a face and it looking so strange and the colors are all wrong and there's no proportion. And in my mind as a, you know, young girl, I was like, this is Terrible. You should never paint faces, never try to do anything realistic. And such a harsh inner critic for someone so young. It's amazing how quickly we pick up that harsh inner critic. But, you know, as an adult, we could have said, well, looks like you're painting like Picasso. Or of course it's terrible. You've only just started. You know, you need to do a thousand of these before you can possibly critique this. And, you know, no one was there to support me. There was no one with those sort of kind words. I don't know where this sort of inner critic came from. But when I started again, I was older. And I think with the support of the coach and just being older, I was able to say, there is no judgment here. The aim is this. This has to be bad art. The objective is for this to be bad. Really just changing the way I thought about it so the critic didn't get in the way. A lot of permission for it to be bad. And so when I first started painting, I painted with my hands in this very intuitive style, just picking up the color that wanted to be set and applying it in whichever way it needed to be applied. And over time, I learned how to use different mediums and different layers and a whole lot of different textures and things. But at the really, at the beginning, it was just using my hands and moving them in the way that intuitively felt right with the colors that felt right. And each time I did it, a different emotional feeling would come up. And being able to move my hands in the paint, in the color, just allowed me to process all that in a really safe way that I simply never been able to access before. It brings me back to your dancing, actually. When you're talking about moving intuitively and moving the hands in the painting, it's like quite a physical activity rather than a really cerebral activity. And you mentioned that you loved dancing when you were younger as well. Love dancing and love to be able to move in whichever way my body loves to move to the music. And when I started to do actual partner dancing, I did Ciroc, which has the least amount of structure of all the partner dancing available. And it was so hard for me to learn how to do the moves to follow the structure, because for me, moving intuitively is far more natural. And I hadn't made that connection before between painting intuitively and moving intuitively. Yes, there's so much in the body and how we express ourselves. Let's move forward to Enneagram and what that means. So I was doing a lot of leadership development Work on top of my own healing work. I, you know, after being a lawyer, I thought if I just find a job that I love, like I'll never need self care again. I'll never have to look after myself because if I'm in a job I love, everything will be fine. Well, then I was in a job I loved and I burnt out even worse than before as a lawyer. And I was so exhausted that when I finally resigned, I basically slept for three months. And then it took another two years before I had enough energy to work full time. Like it, it really took a lot out of me. And through that journey of trying to figure out what do I need to do to heal, because there's so many different ways you can do things. But what works for me was really the question I kept asking myself. And that led me to different personality models and what they would say about healing for each person. And it wasn't until I found the Enneagram that I sort of answered those questions. I was able to answer those questions because the Enneagram as a model, it's a sort of a psycho spiritual model of development, which really means it speaks to us psychologically, but also on a path of healing and growth of adult development. And it speaks to our core motivations far beyond just how we behave and how we sort of show up in the world, but what's really driving us at a deeper level. And the thing about the Enneagram is it shows us who we're not. And so I know a lot of systems talk about strengths and weaknesses, but here with the Enneagram, it shows us the paradox that we're trapped inside of. So for me, as a seven, I'm trapped inside this paradox of positivity where I keep chasing things that feel good, but. And trying to have unlimited freedom, but ultimately it leads me to have no freedom. And if you're always chasing things that feel good, you can't face anything that feels bad. And for me, so much of my life felt bad because of the depression and the illness, but I could never sit with it and acknowledge it and be with it. And that's part of what creativity started to help me to do, to sit with the pain, because the suffering comes from running away from it. You know, the more able to sit with the pain, and there's caveats to that, but the more able to sit with it, the more we can just hear what it needs to say and witness it and let it integrate and do its thing. And so for me, the Enneagram taught me that If I'm just able to sit with the pain and not run from it, it'll actually go away. It won't lead to endless suffering. And what I liked then about that is because I got so passionate about healing and I was meeting other people on a healing journey, I'd be, oh, you should try this type of healing, or you should meet this person, or you should try this. And I was fascinated by why what worked for me didn't work for them or why they weren't as excited about it as I was. What's the mismatch there? And I feel like the Enneagram really showed me that there are. There's nine types, and so there's nine really different paths to healing. Nine different paradoxes or traps that we're sort of stuck in that need to be untangled or unraveled in their own way. And I think that's, for me, why the Enneagram is stuck more than anything. Because it's not just about how we can be great at work or what are our strengths are and how we can be better. It's just understanding, actually, in some way, we're stuck inside this defensive system that's not. It's limiting us. As kids, we needed it to survive and to grow up and to develop the ego that we needed to. We need to do that in childhood. But in adults, that can limit us. And especially if we want creative lives. And creativity is such a sensitive part of who we are, it's often so wounded that understanding how that wounding manifests and what the defensive system around it looks like can help us start to. Can assist our process of unraveling it so we can be more creative and speak our truth and show up as our authentic selves in whatever that means for us, in all the messy, glorious imperfection that we all are. Yeah, I see. Kind of like when I talk to people on this show, there are lots of feelings of, for example, this is what I think I should be like, or this is what other people think I should be like, especially with regards to actually doing something creative, obviously, and showing it and calling yourself an artist or what you think you should be doing as opposed to what you want to do. So I can see there's a lot of. There's a lot of deeper insidey work than just like, picking up a paintbrush and going, look, here's my art. I spoke to. I interviewed someone last week who's A one, and so they have really tough inner critics, and she's a painter, but she only came to it Like a few years ago, because for so many years she kept telling herself that she couldn't be a painter, she wasn't good enough. And it was only until she discovered that she's a one. And, oh, this is how this inner critic is operating. And, you know, here's a way that we can create some space between me and the inner critic that she really was able to embrace painting and the kind of painting she wanted to do. Oh, that's brilliant. When you mentioned about speaking to other people and gathering what they're saying and editing, why, who, what, when, how? Good question. So I think through this journey, I've discovered, and you would have, too, that we are all creative. Just so many of us have forgotten that we're creative. And it's just clear to me that we are all creative in some way. And yet the Enneagram reports there's nine types often only speak as two types being created. The type four being really unique and original and needing to express themselves in really, you know, unexpected ways. And then the 7 is being sort of inventive and innovative and coming up with really unexpected ideas. And I'm a seven. But I just thought, well, that can't be right. If every person is creative, then what do the other, you know, what are the other types look like in creativity and their creativity? What is that? What does that look like? And so I just set about trying to interview the nine types and then, then expanded that to interviewing the 27 subtypes. And what I found fascinating from the process is you speak to people at all stages of their development journey. Like, some people have really never thought of themselves as creative before, and some people have been practicing creativity for a while or doing a lot of inner work with the Enneagram. So it's all through the spectrum. But for everyone, when they realize they're more creative, they've realized, actually, I do creativity every day, but they just never thought of it before. And it ranged from travel planning and running a business and editing videos to painting and drawing, making music, singing and performing. But I just. Often the ones I found the most interesting were the. The things we don't normally think of as creative, like the travel planning. It is so creative to figure out what kind of experience do I want to have when I travel to Fiji. And yet I never would have thought of that as an act of creativity because we just think of it as this. Some mundane. I'm just doing some planning, you know. Yeah. And yet we're crafting an experience about how we want to feel information and experiences we want to have. And are you doing something with these, these learnings that you're making? Sounds like you might be compiling them into something. I don't know. I'm not. Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not sure yet. So far it has been healing for me. The cultural conditioning about what creativity is and isn't is so ingrained that even after, you know, 15 conversations, I still didn't believe that creativity was anything but painting and drawing and making music. It's only as I've pushed on and done even more that for me I've started to just see, truly accept, not just at a surface intellectual, but truly accept that creativity is, is in everything we do. I think so. For me, it's been really healing. But for everyone I've spoken to, it's been really healing as well. As to what it's going to become next, I'm not sure. I've still got a few types I'm tracking down to interview, but beyond that, I'm waiting to see what it morphs into next. I'm not sure yet. Yeah. Cause it doesn't have to be a thing. You don't have to be doing it to make a thing. You are getting benefits from it. The people you're speaking with are benefiting from it. You're learning stuff and understanding stuff. Just, just, just by doing it, just do it. I wanted to talk about not so much on. This is because it's early in the morning for me. This is why my voice isn't as good, as normal as my excuse. Well, mine's the. It's late at night and there's been children all day. When you're actually coaching people and if you are coaching people who have maybe had the same kind of experiences, negative experiences that you've had in your. Passed over a number of years in different locations in different roles, how does that affect you? Do you have this like special coach's cloak on that protects you from. From everything that you hear? I am a magician. My coach's cloak on and I'm protected from anything? No. You know, like if you're hearing those kind of experiences and then if you're relating to them, is there a way that you cope with it? That's a really good question. So when I'm coaching, and ideally when most people are coaching, you've got a good portion of your attention focused on yourself. Almost like 70% of your attention focused on your reactions and 30% on what the other person is doing in their reaction. What's happening for them. It's funny, I always thought the percentages should be the other way around. But as I was diving into, you know, more research, it suggested it was this way around. And that's because so much of what's happening is happening within us and we need to be so aware of our reactions. And for me, because I've spent so much time really learning to sit with pain when other people's pain arises. It doesn't phase me like it might have before. I don't feel the need to run from it in the way I might have even just a few years ago. The times that it's most challenging is when I'm meeting with someone of my own type of. Because we have similar wounding, even if we've had completely different experiences, we're seeing similar situations through similar lenses. And that's the time where I've. I've noticed that I can freeze up a little inside and get, you know, go into that space of I don't know what to do next, I don't know what happens here, I don't know if I can help you. And I think there's always a moment when you're meeting with someone or you have the. I don't know what to do next. But then you're able just to relax in and allow the creative moment and allow the intuition and just allow the present moment to be whatever it needs to be and to be guided by what's here and now. I find that easy to do except for those times when I'm meeting with someone of my type who is feeling some of the things that I've felt in the past. And in those moments it can just be harder to relax back into the present. And usually when that happens, I'll just have to reflect on it and work with it after the session. Generally because in the session itself I'm not always as it's just so tight, you don't always aware with it. But because I'm becoming more familiar with seeing these patterns that if I am working with someone of my type, I can be more prepared for it. Yeah, it makes sense, doesn't it? What seems to make sense on paper to me that that would be the case. What are your thoughts if you have them for the future? I've never been good at knowing what the future holds. I'm terrible at planning beyond just a few weeks. But what I'm really doing is trying to encapsulate that creative practice of just allowing things to unfold, but combining it with intention and getting this balance between the two, sort of. Right. I'm not having rigid plans, but having things that I want and things I'd like to manifest without being attached to them happening or not. But for me, the focus, I think, is on the Enneagram and teaching that and coaching with it and helping people see that it is such a deep tool for healing and growth. And it's not the, you know, the superficial. Here are the nine types as celebrities that you so often, you know, see with sort of things in the way they get dumbed down for the social media snippets. I get this sense that even though the Enneagram has become almost ubiquitous over the last few years, there is still not a real understanding of just how deep a model for development and healing and growth it is. And I'd love people to understand that more and even just to be able to offer that to more people. And so when people are seeking to use the Enneagram as part of their inner work, they're not just thinking. It's just about, well, let's just have a conversation and talk theoretically about the types. No, let's actually do the practices where you can experience those shifts inside of you. I feel like people find the Enneagram when they're ready for it, rather than, you know, it's something. It finds you, I feel, maybe through this episode. Maybe through this episode. Absolutely. With that in mind, if somebody's interested, if they're. If they are ready for the Enneagram, or if forever. Any other reason. How can people connect with you? Well, they can find me on my website, samanthamackay.com and on Instagram, samanthamacki life, I think, from memory and on YouTube, where all the interviews are, which, again, I think, is Samantha Mackay, Life. No dot. And if you're just interested in finding your Enneagram type, there are plenty of tests you can take. I always encourage a paid test over a free one. But the process of finding your Enneagram type is it's a discovery process. Truly, no one can tell you your type. You know, a test might confirm it, but only you can know your type for yourself, because no one can ever be inside your head. No one can notice your thoughts, experience your feelings. No one ever has lived inside of you. So the only person who could truly see, see those patterns and those sort of automatic responses to situations is you. And so there is sort of a need to almost learn to some extent about the types and see how they show up within you as part of that journey. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Samantha. That has been really, really interesting. Thank you. It's been great to talk to you about creativity a topic so close to my heart. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, perhaps you'd like to financially contribute to future episodes at buymeacoffee.com/CreativityFound There's a link in the show notes. If you are listening on a value for value enabled app such as Fountain Truefans or Podcast Guru, feel free to send a few sats my way. And if you have no idea of what I'm talking about, you can find out more by listening to my sister podcast called Podcasting 2.0 In Practice.