How To Holistically Heal... With Creativity, the oldest medicine

Everyone Is Creative (But We Forgot)

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In this edition…

1. Healing: Creativity, A Medicine For Healing

2. Reverence: Everyone Is Creative (But We Forgot)

3. Exploring: Creativity Workshops

1. Healing: Creativity, A Medicine For Healing

Creativity is often defined as the ability to generate ideas, insights, or expressions that are both novel and meaningful. But this modern definition flattens something ancient and vital. Creativity is not limited to art or innovation. It is the instinct to make, to imagine, to respond to life through expression. It is the dance around the fire, the marks on the cave wall, the shaping of clay into healing vessels, and the rhythmic chant of medicine songs. Creativity is our oldest form of communication and our oldest medicine.

Human creativity predates recorded history. Homo habilis, one of our early ancestors who lived around 2.0 to 1.6 million years ago, was the first toolmaker, crafting simple stone tools known as the Oldowan industry. These tools signified more than survival they marked the beginning of intentional design and problem-solving (Natural History Museum, 2024).

It was Homo sapiens, however, who truly expressed symbolic and artistic thinking. From the ochre markings and shell beads found in Blombos Cave (South Africa) dating back over 70,000 years, to the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, early humans used pigment, sound, shape, and ritual to express something deeply felt and widely shared. Music, adornment, sculpture, story - these were not entertainment. They were sacred acts of bonding, sense-making, and healing (World of Paleoanthropology, 2024 and Smithsonian Institution, 2024).

Anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake calls this process “making special”, how humans instinctively ritualise and beautify daily life as a way to create meaning and nurture emotional connection (Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus, 1992).

In traditional cultures, the healer was often also the artist, the one who painted symbols on the body, beat the healing drum, sang prayers, or choreographed rites of passage. Creativity was not something you did after work. It was the medium through which life was honoured, illness was soothed, and the spirit was restored.

Modern research now affirms what traditional cultures always knew: creative expression supports mental, emotional, and even physical healing.