The Business of Life with Dr King
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The Business of Life with Dr King
Unleashing Your Creative Power with Dr Matthew McVarish
We're all born creative beings. It's how we learn to walk, talk, and make sense of our world before we even have words to describe these processes. Yet somewhere along the way, many of us lose touch with this essential part of ourselves, dismissing creativity as something reserved for "artistic types" or professional creators.
Dr. Matthew McVarish, Scottish playwright, former actor, and human rights activist, challenges this limited view, presenting creativity as one of four essential cornerstones of a balanced life alongside health, wealth, and love. Drawing from Florence Scovel Shin's century-old "square of life" concept, he explains why creative expression isn't a luxury but a necessity for wellbeing and fulfillment.
The conversation ventures into fascinating territory about our modern relationship with technology and creativity. While we're constantly consuming content, our attention spans have dramatically shortened – from Shakespearean audiences standing attentively through four-hour performances 400 years ago to today's average university student struggling to focus for 45 seconds. McFarish notes that we now receive more sensory information daily than people historically experienced in their entire lifetimes, leaving little space for the contemplation necessary for creative thought.
For those feeling disconnected from their creative selves, McFarish offers practical guidance: slow down, schedule time for creativity, release perfectionism, and consider Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way" course with its solo "artist dates." Most powerfully, he shares advice from fellow Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell: "Write the stuff that scares you." Our most meaningful creative expressions often emerge from vulnerability – the thoughts and experiences we're hesitant to share but that deeply resonate with others.
Whether you're looking to reconnect with a creative practice you've abandoned, discover new forms of expression, or simply understand why humanity has always turned to creativity in our darkest hours, this conversation offers illuminating perspectives on reclaiming our creative birthright in an increasingly digital world.
Music, lyrics, guitar and singing by Dr Ariel Rosita King
Teach me to live one day at a time
with courage love and a sense of pride.
Giving me the ability to love and accept myself
so I can go and give it to someone else.
Teach me to live one day at a time.....
The Business of Life
Dr Ariella (Ariel) Rosita King
Original Song, "Teach Me to Live one Day At A Time"
written, guitar and vocals by Dr. Ariel Rosita King
Dr King Solutions (USA Office)
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Hello and welcome to the Business of Life. Today we have a very special guest, dr Matthew McFarish. Welcome.
Dr Matthew McVarish:Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. It's so good to see you.
Dr Ariel King:It's great to see you again, so would you please tell our audience something about yourself and also our topic for today.
Dr Matthew McVarish:Sure, so I'm Scottish. I'm a creative person, I guess. I began my career as an actor For a long time I was in children's television and then I became a playwright and a screenwriter and also a human rights activist. So I have many facets to my career. I'm also very publicly an advocate for children's rights because I am myself a survivor of sexual violence in my childhood.
Dr Ariel King:Thank you so much. And just one other thing I know that you've written plays on a couple of books. Can you just tell us a little bit about that?
Dr Matthew McVarish:Yeah, so that's kind of where I began. I think my own childhood was quite difficult, and when I started my career as an actor and then I began kind of moving into writing theatre, I realised that actually I could use that medium to explore the difficult things in my own life. So I wrote a play based on my childhood and the play kind of led to me becoming an advocate. It was through the art form that I kind of began to speak out on children's rights. So I now have a book that I've written called the Truth that no One Tells Teenagers, and that's a book for young people about how to navigate your own recovery from these kinds of traumas.
Dr Ariel King:That's fantastic. So you've used creativity all through your life. I guess that's. The topic we'll talk about today is creativity.
Dr Matthew McVarish:Yeah, when you asked me what would I like to speak about. I think creativity for me is such a daily thing that I do in so many different ways, but I think for so many people they kind of assume that they're either they are creative or they're not creative, and I think it's such an important aspect for all humanity. I think it's so overlooked or it becomes kind of commercialized and some people feel like, unless they can create something that has value, that it can sell, then there's not something they can get involved with.
Dr Ariel King:So I think that creativity is very important for our lives and um just to feel human and uh, can you tell us more about why create, why you think creativity is important and how you've seen it actually help people within their lives?
Dr Matthew McVarish:well, well, yeah, so about just over 100 years ago there was an interesting woman. She lived in New York, she was called Florence Scovel Shin. She was a kind of mystic and she had various books that she wrote about life, and she had this thing called the square of life, and the square of life is, imagine a table and it has four corners, and the four corners are health, wealth, love and creativity. And if you have those four things in your life in balance, then your table is flat and everything's good.
Dr Matthew McVarish:But most people focus on their health or their wealth or their relationships, but they don't realise the importance of the other corner, which is creativity, or she calls it perfect self-expression. And I think if you look around our world, there's no coincidence why every time there's a war or there's a dictator who becomes anti-power, the first thing they do is close down the theatres and the cinemas and stop the music, and they control that aspect of humanity, because it's through our creativity that we explore what it is to be human, and if you take that away, we start to suffer in ways that most people don't even realize they're suffering.
Dr Ariel King:That's so interesting and you know, when you talk about that. I'm wondering about technology also, because so many of us are so focused on technology, where we're receiving information, receiving videos, but we're not really creating or doing something with it, and I'm wondering whether or not some of the ways that we have young people that have so much depression or hopelessness is related to the fact that we are not as creative as we used to be. We don't have it necessarily in the schools and it's not seen necessarily as an important aspect of life, of learning, of just being it's.
Dr Matthew McVarish:it's quite frightening what technology is is advancing so rapidly and it's changing the way that we interact with each other and as people, especially young people, and it's it's so frightening that I guess they hope that smartphones would help connect everyone, and what they've done is made it more and more isolated.
Dr Matthew McVarish:You know, and when I studied, I did a master's degree in classical and contemporary text and that was studying the creation of drama right back from the classics, the Greeks, right through to modern day. I spent two months studying at Shakespeare's Globe in London, which was quite like going to Hogwarts, to be honest, because I was in this incredible building with these wonderful teachers and they were all. They weren't called teachers that were called the master of voice or the master of movement, and these were like world-class experts in these different fields and I worked with. The master of voice at that time was Stuart Pierce, and he's the the gentleman who trained them, princess Diana, in how to use her voice powerfully, and various other political figures in the UK. But what was interesting and I learned when I was studying Shakespeare in that environment was that 400 years ago, people, young people, could stand there, because there was no seats, and listen to a performance for up to four hours, and I don't think there's a young person today who could even just stand still for that long, let alone pay attention.
Dr Ariel King:So I think Totally not four hours. Perhaps I mean, without being crafty, maybe 15 minutes.
Dr Matthew McVarish:Yeah, it's frightening, and the technology is shrinking our attention span.
Dr Matthew McVarish:I think it's getting shorter and shorter 45 seconds is the maximum the average kind of university student can look at one thing before they look at something else.
Dr Matthew McVarish:So you know, and I think one of the things we learned, that renaissance man, so people 400 years ago, they, they wouldn't be exposed to as much sensory information as we have today, like you and I, wearing the colour red quite bright Now, it'd be quite rare that you would see even this colour so brightly back then.
Dr Matthew McVarish:So everything was much more muted and they wouldn't see the colour purple almost at all because it was so difficult to make the colour purple. You would only see it on royalty, if you ever saw anyone royal, which was quite rare for most people. So we actually receive, you and I today, we receive more sensory information in one day than people used to receive in their entire lifetime. So we can listen to the phone, we have the radio going, we have the television on the background and we have all this constant colour and noise around us and it kind of bombards us so much, you know, and I think it kind of detaches us from our own sense of connection to the world around us, which is um the opposite of healing, I think it's interesting.
Dr Ariel King:so if we always have something coming in and it's very difficult to produce or to initiate to because there's so much stimulation coming in, there's no time. It's almost as when they say drinking water from a fire hose and you're trying to get your breath but you can't because there's just so much coming out.
Dr Matthew McVarish:Yeah, yeah.
Dr Ariel King:That's quite interesting. Do you think that it helps at all with creativity? Is there any part of it that helps with creativity? And it really is a question, because I'm not sure about that I think the first thing is to slow, slow it all down.
Dr Matthew McVarish:There's a beautiful course which anyone can do. It's called the artist's way and it's it starts with the idea that everyone is inherently creative. People often say, well, I'm not very creative, and that's not true, because every single person you're able to speak and walk because you created a way of doing it. You can't teach a child any of these things. They have to explore. And before they learn to speak, they learn to play and they understand what colours are before they know what the names of these colours are.
Dr Matthew McVarish:So we all begin from a place of just exploring through creativity and then so I think. But as we get older, we kind of unlearn that or we compare ourselves to other people who may be professional creatives in whatever medium, and we say, well, if we're not at that level and there's no point, and we start to shut down our creativity and we live more cerebrally. We focus on, you know, looking at screens all the time, we or living in a kind of cerebral way. But I think the first thing to do is slow down and the artist way encourages you to do these beautiful things.
Dr Matthew McVarish:I think it's called an artist date and you select something and you're not really allowed to go with anyone else to do this. You'll go on your own to engage with something that means something to you and that can be a visit to a museum, it can be going to see the ballet, it can be going to see a play or a piece of a concert, piece of music, and just to fully be present with that creativity and and fully pay attention to it. And that one of the reasons you go on your own is because you're not doing that social thing of going to the bar and chatting and all that stuff. You're literally just being with something that speaks to your being, you know, being present with that and fully immersing yourself in that. I would say, if you want to reconnect with your creativity, then start there.
Dr Ariel King:I like that. That makes all the difference. You know, I think there's something too, that there was a time that I used to create music. I used to create lyrics and poetry in my younger days and now, as I'm older, sometimes I think, you know, I really miss it. There's something missing. So then I think I'm going to tomorrow, I'm going to up to the guitar again well, I mean, I'm laughing, but it shouldn't really be funny or I say, um, I'm going to learn something new, or I'm going to go to a singing class. And what's interesting is that even not myself, who loves, who loved, creativity, find it difficult to actually put it within my quote-unquote schedule, that it's difficult to put in my schedule. Um, what do you think about this idea of scheduling creativity, or should it be spontaneous?
Dr Matthew McVarish:I think most people's lives these days they're so busy and they're so bombarded with noise, really, that you do need to schedule time to ring fence that time to be, you know, creative and be present.
Dr Matthew McVarish:And it does seem I think it does seem like not a priority, but it's interesting that a lot. If you look at a lot of ancient wisdom and the tall text through, you know like the mystics and the christians they all talk about this, this idea of the perfect self-expression or creativity being equal to your health and equal to your, your love, relationships and um to your um, your wealth and all these things. It is, it's an equal footing. It's as important as your health, um, and I think that's, yeah, I think, um, giving yourself permission to do something when you perhaps have other things that would be more beneficial, perhaps financially. But I think you know it's beautiful now to see that there's such a movement towards mindfulness and all of these practices. And it all begins with slowing down. I mean, someone said that most of psychology is asking people to slow down. Actually, recovering from anything is about slowing down. It's always the best first place to start, that's such an interesting idea.
Dr Ariel King:You you were saying that there's a course that you could take. Is that course online? Is the the art of the artist's way I'm sure it is the artist's way.
Dr Matthew McVarish:But it's interesting. That's a course that you can take. If you're a dancer, if you're a writer, if you're someone, you're someone who doesn't have any medium yet, because through doing that course, you would find what is the thing that speaks to you. It could be pottery, it could be sculpture, it could be interior design. You know, a lot of people have these ideas of what is and what isn't creativity, and I say sometimes young people.
Dr Matthew McVarish:I say, if you've got Spotify or other music platforms are available, but just curating your own playlist of what speaks to you and you know you don't need to play it to anyone if you don't want to. But it's about being aware of who you are and that gets revealed through creativity and what different art forms you feel drawn to field through creativity and what, what different art forms you feel drawn to, and giving yourself permission to to make a mess. I think we kind of we put such pressure on people that if they're going to create something, it has to be, you know, world class. But no, you can always start with another fresh piece of paper. It's okay, you can. You know, the first draft doesn't need to be anything.
Dr Ariel King:I love that. It really takes off the pressure, doesn't it? Because when you think of art, many, many times you think of it already, already formed and ready for consumption, ready to be heard, to be seen, to be, um, experienced in some way. But it always started with something but and that something was never perfect, didn't need to be perfect, it just needed to start everything that you love, every movie that you love.
Dr Matthew McVarish:That script is like draft 20 or above. Now it probably doesn't resemble draft one, but they started somewhere. But the audience, the public, don't see that. You know, you don't see what work went into it. And that's the fun place, that's where you get to explore and you don't need an audience for that.
Dr Ariel King:I really love that. What is your, I guess, as you went through your life when you were a child, what was your favorite way to be creative? And then how did that change as a young adult? What I'm saying, I'm guessing your 20s.
Dr Matthew McVarish:Yeah, it's interesting, my older brother he was also. Sadly, he was a victim of the same uncle and he used to play guitar, and when he was still quite young I think he was about 19 he left home, and when he left home, all the music he used to play left our house, and so I picked up the guitar that he left behind and I started playing, and I knew that for my mum that having the house filled with music was very healing for her, and so I learned to to write lyrics, and bizarrely I guess it's due to the subconscious that the lyrics that I wrote expressed what I was trying to process. And when I was like 15 years old, I won a national songwriting contest with a song that I'd written for no one. Really, I just had to express something, and so that was surprising to me I didn't actually enter the competition. Someone entered the song that I'd written and then told me later that I'd won.
Dr Ariel King:That's fantastic.
Dr Matthew McVarish:And I think for me, like realizing that if you, if you go from a place of it doesn't matter what you create.
Dr Matthew McVarish:You create, you just need to express something and find an avenue for that, you'll start to process stuff that comes out of you that maybe you need to process or explore, and if it means something to you, guaranteed there's going to be a million other people that I'll speak to.
Dr Matthew McVarish:And if it's an authentic thing that you're sharing, and what's interesting, one of my favourite writers now is a Scottish playwright. He's called Douglas Maxwell and I asked him what's the best piece of advice he could give me when I started writing plays and he said write the stuff that scares you. Because if you write something and it's really sore and it's there and it's on the edge of what you're comfortable letting people see, then that's really like sore and it's, it's there and it's on the edge of what you're comfortable letting people see, then that's really, really interesting, because lots of people would wish someone could say those things, because that's what they need to hear. Um, and that's that's where we start to really um, push the envelope and we start to move the conversation forward in humanity, you know I really love that.
Dr Ariel King:So it's not necessarily writing or expressing in comfort, but just on the edge of discomfort because you're not sure you want to share it or it should be shared. But that's exactly what is helpful and what feels good for others to share, because sometimes they can't do it. So reading it or understanding it or saying wow, that person experienced that too, or even the feeling of knowing that you're not the only one that has that type of feeling, I guess makes all the difference and I think that I mean theater particularly.
Dr Matthew McVarish:You can. You can do things on theater. You can tell stories on stage that normally it'll take 10 more years before those can be told on television. You know, like theater is normally the cutting edge of the human competition. That's very true. Not everyone goes to the theatre because they kind of sometimes it becomes so expensive and they have famous actors in it and tickets are extortionate. But if you go to your local theatre and see a new play by a new writer, you might see a really interesting drama and you've never seen anything like that on television because it's not ready yet. You know.
Dr Ariel King:I like that. So innovation happens in person and television is not in person, right, you're sitting there and you're watching it, but theater, you're a part of it. Even if you're sitting in an audience, you're a part of that happening in that time, that live event. You're moving, you know, but you're still a part of that. So, even though you're watching, you're still a part of that, that, that theater production.
Dr Matthew McVarish:It's a shared experience and I think because, like, you read a book and you watch a film, but you, you literally do a play. If you go and watch a theater performance, the actors are, they're living the story in the moment. And so there's, there is wonderful experiences in theater when something will happen and the entire room of a thousand people will do gasp at the same time.
Dr Ariel King:it's just you're.
Dr Matthew McVarish:You know, you're fully alive in those moments remember, um, after after 9-11, there was the oscars. It must have been 2002, just after and I remember Tom Cruise coming on stage and people had criticised and said you know, with everything that's going on in the world now, do these movies, does Hollywood really matter? Are we doing anything important? And he said I really believe that what we do matters now more than ever. And I really agreed with that because, as I said earlier, you know fascist dictators and all these people who want to control the population.
Dr Matthew McVarish:The first thing they do is control the cinema, they create propaganda, they don't let people tell stories that really matter or they explore their own creativity.
Dr Matthew McVarish:But also, it doesn't always have to be really heavy, meaningful stories. Not every film has to be Schindler's List or something, but like really heavy, meaningful stories, not every film has to be Schindler's List or something, but like my brother, one of my brothers is a paramedic and so he'll go out to work one day and there'll be people who've had a terrible accident and he'll pick them up and sometimes they don't recover, you know, and he has to deal with that. So he'll come home and he'll put on the television and he'll watch something like Star Trek or some nonsense and that helps him decompress and it helps him process, and then if he wasn't able to do that, he wouldn't be able to go back the next day and pick people up off the road. You know. So, imagine a world without music, without television, without art. You know, it was so important what we do, even though people often tell us it's not a real job I can't, I can't imagine.
Dr Ariel King:I remember, um, a couple years ago, we went to paris and, um, I saw one of my favorite artists. But I walked around the corner and I saw the painting that I'd never seen before, but I knew the artist and I literally started crying because it was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen. And I was just a gasp, you know, to see that that physical beauty not everything moves me or other people in that way, but that that painting just, and I didn't expect it, that was the most, you know, the most fantastic happening. You know, usually you go to museums like I'm going to look at this, I'm going to look at this, I'm going to look at that, but that's not what happened and I'm literally crying, I'm thinking, okay, this is okay because this touched me.
Dr Matthew McVarish:The posters are nice, but it doesn't compare to the real thing yeah this made all the difference in the world and I would say that is a beautiful place to start. For someone who doesn't consider themselves to be creative, I would say take yourself uh to to a museum and walk around with no agenda. Don't look at the program or anything. Just walk around and see what speaks to you, see if anything grabs you, because there's, if it does. There's something within that that perhaps you could explore, you know. But I think that's it.
Dr Matthew McVarish:It's just it's understanding that we are inherently creative and there's no limit to our creativity. You know, and, and what I've noticed is that when, when I go through periods where I get very busy and I'm doing a lot of feels like homework, when I'm doing a lot of promotional stuff and not actually any creating, I get into just a really kind of I'm just living, like from the neck up, like I don't feel like I'm actually part of the world, you know. But I think, like when you do have those, the opposite, that when you have periods when you're just fully creating, it's almost like you you'll run out, your, your well of creativity will run dry. So you have to kind of fill it up. You have to go on these dates, you have to, um, connect with the world around you and it kind of fills you back up it makes all the difference.
Dr Ariel King:You know, while you're talking about that, I was thinking about david bowie in his last months, when he knew that he was going to, he had limited time and he went into the studio and said you know, this is what I want to do. I want to create, and to create what? The music, whether you know it not. What was really important is that he said I'm going to spend the time that I have with people that I love doing things that I like and creating. And he created an incredible album that came out, I think, just after he passed away. To listen to that album was so, so moving, because it was there was no, he's always been someone who doesn doesn't hide, but it was so raw and so human, you know, and so vulnerable. So when you talk about that, I'm just realizing that some people, even in their last days, what they want to do is create, to leave something behind for others to experience I think, yeah, I mean, that's it.
Dr Matthew McVarish:And there's two aspects to what you just said. There's there's one thing like people talk about going on vacation and or recreational activities. Recreation means to recreate. There's, there's activities that you can do that literally help you, your being and your spirit regenerate, you know. And so recreation is like how do you engage with your deeper self? And the other aspect of it is collaboration. If you're new to it or don't consider yourself creative, then I would say spend some time exploring what speaks to you. But the most beautiful thing you can do is collaborate with other artists or other creative people, because two people coming together to create something, whatever they come up with, is so much bigger than the sum of the what you contribute, and magic literally happens when you collaborate with people.
Dr Ariel King:I've seen it so many times thank you so much, and do you have any final thoughts for our guests?
Dr Matthew McVarish:the 30 minutes goes up so quickly um, I think my my hero in the world is charles dickens, I think he created a story which he called the christmas carol and it was, you know, the story of scrooge. And he created that, which was the the most retold story in the uk certainly in around the world it's every christmas because he noticed that christmas had become gluttony people getting together and just feeding themselves and all around us was people who were struggling and Christmas is such a hard time. He wrote one story and it changed the world because in 1843 it stopped being about gluttony and it started to be about giving to the people around you, and he did that through one writing, a little book that became obviously. Nowadays it's a. It's the muppet christmas carol.
Dr Matthew McVarish:Everyone knows this story, um, but I think of it as that way, as a creative person. For me, I I think every play that I write or every tv show that I work on, I think how much joy can I give to the world through this project. And, um, that's really yeah, it's a privilege to be at the level of creativity that I get to work at now.
Dr Ariel King:Thank you so much for that. Thank you so much for spending time with us. Really enjoyed our conversation on creativity and to our audience. Thank you so much for being with us. And remember if I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, then when. That was by the philosopher Hillel and I added if not me, then who? Thank you.
Dr Matthew McVarish:Thank you, Dr King.