Welcome to School of Shamanism, where ancient wisdom meets everyday life. This is your space to explore shamanic practices, healing, and spiritual transformation in real, practical ways.
SEASON 1: Walking Between Worlds We're kicking things off with conversations that matter. Each episode, I sit down with healers, teachers, and practitioners who live at the crossroads between ancient and modern, spirit and matter, visible and invisible worlds.
SEASON 2: Many Paths, One Mountain Different traditions, same destination. This season I'm exploring how yoga, somatic work, breathwork, energy healing, sound, creativity and more all lead to the same place: healing.
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In this episode of Many Paths, One Mountain, Giada explores creativity as more than art, talent or career. She shares how creating can become a spiritual practice, a way of connecting with something greater than ourselves, moving stuck emotions, accessing the unseen and returning to a deeper sense of aliveness. From writing and painting to dancing, cooking and simply letting the hands move, creativity becomes a path to healing, presence and self-expression.
Originally hailing from the vibrant city of Milan, I’ve spent the past two decades traversing the globe in a quest for spiritual and personal growth, combined with 25 years of international corporate work experience. From navigating the vast landscapes of Australia in a campervan to finding tranquillity living in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal, my journey is nothing short of extraordinary. Along the way, I’ve delved deep into Buddhist teachings, yoga, and shamanism, becoming a Shamanic Teacher, Forest Therapy Guide, Esoteric Numerologist, Shamanic and Integral Yoga Teacher and Ikigai Coach. In 2013, I settled in Edinburgh, where I founded the Art and Spirituality Centre, a social enterprise and the School of Shamanism, where I passionately help others on their own transformative journeys.
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Welcome to School of Shamanism Creativity as a Spiritual Practice Creativity as a Shamanic Journey How Creativity Heals When We Lose Our Creativity Creativity and the Invisible World You Don't Need Talent to Create How to Practise Creativity
The medicine is in making, not in the product. And most of us were creative as children, naturally, effortlessly, joyfully. So we drew pictures, we made up stories, we danced without thinking about how we looked. We built words out of nothing. Creativity was a natural as natural as breathing.
We've been exploring different paths that lead to the same summit: healing, transformation, and coming home to ourselves. So we dealt with Ikigai, Shinrinoku, numerology, and different doorways into the same room. And today I want to talk about something that has been with me my whole life, something that
saved me more times than I can probably count. Something that I believe is one of the most powerful and most overlooked spiritual practices there exist: creativity or art. But not creativity as a career, not creativity as talent or skill, but creativity as a path, a way of connecting to something larger than yourself, as medicine. And when I say creativity, most people think of artists: painters, writers, musicians, people who make things professionally, people with talent. But actually, this is a limiting way of viewing at creativity because creativity isn't being an artist, it's about being alive, co-creating with the divine. Creativity is the force that brings something into existence that wasn't there before. It's life expressing itself through you. It's a spirit moving into form. And when you cook a meal with love and attention, that's creative. When you arrange flowers, when you solve a problem and in an expected way, when you tell a story to a person, when you dance into your kitchen, that's creative. And when you listen deeply and respond from the heart instead of from habit, that's creative too. So creativity is how the soul speaks, it's how the invisible becomes visible, to go back to season one. And every single human being has access to it. So why do I call creativity spiritual practice? Because when you create, something happens, you disappear, the chattering mind uh goes quiet and time shifts. So you enter a state that is not or non-ordinary. And artists have always known this: that moment when you are so absorbed in what you are making that you forgot yourself, when the work seems to flow through you rather than from you. When you look at you look up and hours have passed, but it felt like minutes. And so that's not just focus, that's a state of consciousness, or an altered state of consciousness, it's presence, it's connection to something beyond the personal self. And in shamanic terms, creativity is a form of journey. So you leave ordinary reality and you enter another
space. You bring something back, an image, a song, a story, an object, and you bridge the invisible and the visible. So the process of creating is a process of listening, of receiving, of surrendering control and letting something come through that didn't that you didn't plan, uh, or you could have not even predicted. And that's a spiritual practice, that's a communion with the mystery. Because creativity heals, and I've experienced that, I've
witnessed that millions of times. When you make something, you transform energy. Emotions that have no words find form. And whatever is stuck in the body moves through the hands or onto the page or the canvas or the clay, and something that was inside becomes outside. And in that process it shifts. And that is why art therapy works, why people write in journals when they are grieving, why children draw their nightmares. The act of creating externalizes what's internal, it makes invisible visible. And once you can see that, you can work with it. So um I think I've written my ways some of the darkest times of my life, or I've painted that, not to produce anything for anyone else, just to move energy, to give it form, to hear what I was actually feeling. And every time something was released, something was clarified, was healed. So you don't have to be good at it, you don't need to have a skill. That's not the point. The medicine is in making, not in the product. And most of us were creative as children, naturally, effortlessly, joyfully. So we drew pictures, we made up stories, we danced without thinking about how we looked, we built words out of nothing. Creativity was a natural,
as natural as breathing. And then somewhere along the way we stopped by growing. Or maybe someone told us we weren't good enough, uh, that our drawing didn't look like a horse, that we couldn't carry a tune. Uh, maybe we compared ourselves to others and decided we didn't have talent. Maybe we just got busy with serious odd things and just we forgot to take time for creativity. But the creative impulse didn't die. It just went underground. And when it's underground, it can turn into depression, anxiety, uh, restlessness. So the wall, the soul wants to create, and when it can't, it suffers. So many people I meet are carrying an expressed creativity. They feel uh they feel it as a vague longing, a sense that something is missing, an ache that they can't quite name. And what's missing is the making. The soul is asking to create, and no one is listening. And in shamanic understanding, uh uh creativity is how we work with the invisible world. So ideas come from somewhere, images uh arrive, melodies appear in the mind without being
summoned. And where do they come from? Um, the ancient Greeks uh talk about the muses, the divine beings who inspired artists, and many cultures have similar concepts. The idea that creativity isn't just something we do, it's something we receive. And when you sit down to create with openness, with uh humility, you become uh a channel, and something moves through you that's larger than your personal self. You can call it spirit, you can call it the unconscious, the collective imagination, but the name doesn't matter. The experience is what is really matters, is what is real. I've written thanks and read them back and thought, uh, I didn't write that, where did that come from? And that's the invisible world speaking, and creativity is one of the clearest ways to hear it. You don't need talent to practice creativity as a spiritual path. Because talent is about mastery, uh, about producing things that impress others, and that's fine, but that's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about the act of creation as a practice, as a way of being, as a relationship with spirit, with with whom with whom we co-create. And you don't need to be good, you just need to be present, you just need to show up, you need to let your hands move, you need to let your voice sound, let your body dance without judging what comes out. Because this judgment is what uh actually kills creativity,
that inner critic that says this isn't good enough. Who do you think you are? This is embarrassing, or maybe you also have other people saying that by looking at what you have created. And uh that critic is the mind, and it's in spiritual practice we learn to go beyond the mind. When you create without judgment, just for the joy of creating, something opens. The soul breathes, and energy flows what was stuck before. You feel alive in a way that nothing else quite uh provides. So, how do you practice creativity as uh a spiritual pass, as one of the many paths uh to healing? You can start in a simple way, you can start small, um write for 10 minutes every morning, not for anyone else to read, not to be good, just to move energy. Let the pen move without editing. Draw, even if you haven't drawn since you were eight years old. Get some paper and colors and let your hands make make marks. Sometimes I just paint layers, one layer after the other one, and I cover them. And there is not even an image at the end. It's just color after colors. Or move your body, put on music and dance in your living room, let the body express whatever it's carrying. Not a choreography without mirrors, without uh having your femininity or masculinity come out, just movement. Or sing in the shower, in the car, alone in the woods, in the woods. Uh just let some sound come out of you without worrying uh about how it sounds to anyone else. Or cook with presents, arrange objects, do gardening, knitting, uh build things with your hands. The form doesn't matter. What matters is
the attention, the surrender, the willingness to let something come through that you didn't plan. And for me, creativity and shamanism are uh completely intertwined. When I journey, I'm in a creative space and images come, stories unfold. I'm not in control of what appears, I am receiving.
