Explore your creative passions and creative ideas in my new book, releasing May 17th:
Creative Renewal: An Invitation to Start Making Stuff and to Stop Clicking Stuff
The joy of creativity is for everyone. Creative Renewal helps you move past the fears and doubts that block your creative hopes and dreams, inviting you to explore your creative interests and unleash your creative expressions.
Author Ed Cyzewski shares how creative practices, like writing, painting projects, oil pastels, drawing, and woodworking, can bring peace and mental restoration.
Creative expression is integral to guarding well-being, solving big problems, and improving mental health while reducing stress, anxiety, and depression. With pervasive mental health challenges today, each person’s creative gifts are vital to personal renewal.
Although every person has a longing for creative expression, distractions like social media or never-ending 24-hour news headlines often drown it out. Creative beginners, blocked by doubts and discouragement, may abandon their artistic passions altogether.
In Creative Renewal, author Ed Cyzewski shares how he dramatically improved his mental health and well-being by prioritizing creative pursuits like woodworking projects, oil pastel art projects, drawing, and writing.
Creative Renewal guides aspiring creators past the barriers of doubt and failure so they can discover the restoration that comes through regular creative practices and projects. Cyzewski shares creative ideas for beginners and artistic projects that provide ideal starting points.
There’s no digital substitute for the restoration and enjoyment gained by creative exploration or the peaceful flow of an engaging artistic project. Creative Renewal is an encouraging invitation to overcome the barriers to your creative passion.
What Sets Creative Renewal Apart?
As important as spiritual practices have been in restoring my soul over the years, there’s a very significant other side to my recovery from digital distractions and escape from downward spirals into lousy mental health. I hinted at this in my book Reconnect: Spiritual Restoration from Digital Distraction, but the topic warranted a book of its own.
Creative projects have served as a replacement for the distractions of social media and careless time-wasting on my smartphone. Oil pastels, journaling, drawing, woodworking, and gardening have all been favorite breaks throughout my week and activities during the weekend.
In fact, creativity has become a major part of my week. I devote more time to it some days, but it’s always a major source of renewal and restoration.
Instead of drifting into the doldrums of an afternoon slump flipping through social media feeds or news stories, I get out my oil pastels or retreat to my woodworking bench. Even working on a project around the house, like touching up some paint or fixing trim, leaves me in a better mental state than a 30-minute (or more) “non-break” on social media.
The oil pastel used on the book’s cover and my daughter’s completed bed.
I find immense joy in using a pack of oil pastels or joining together a few clean, freshly sanded boards. A break like this is so wonderfully restorative that I wrote about how to make creativity a regular part of your week.
This is the other half of Reconnect.
If technology influences and shapes us in ways that undermine the fruit of spirituality, creativity is a better way to find restoration and renewal that gives good vibes and doesn’t counteract the health of spiritual practices in our lives.
I wrote this book out of my love and joy for these creative practices. I hope you can nurture a creative practice that delivers that joy in your life.
Creative Renewal releases May 17th and will be on sale for $.99 on Kindle during release week.
Other Books by Ed Cyzewski
Ed Cyzewski: Author // Contemplative 