We recently connected with Amanda Stone and have shared our conversation below.

Amanda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

To date I am still working to earn a full-time living from my creative passion. I think my biggest struggles which have slowed down my progress have been placing too much emphasis on the outcome and letting myself become discouraged. We are taught by society to hyperfocus on performance and end results, but just like making art, creating a business is its own creative act and has just as many twists and turns along the way.

When I am rigid to change, stubborn about getting the result I want, I set myself up for disappointment. Nothing in art ever ends up exactly how you envisioned it, and that’s a good thing. It gets to receive color and form from the experience of creating it and that’s what I’m trying to lean more into at this time. I am really embracing the process and allowing every phase of growing my business to feel good. I know there is a day I will look back with nostalgic eyes for this moment right now. So I have shifted to measuring my success by how much I genuinely enjoyed myself, rather than how much money it made or how many people showed up. The numbers are the numbers, but they don’t get to determine my joy in life. I no longer want to concern myself with making a full time “living”…I want to create a full time “loving”.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I truly believe that the creative path and spiritual path are one in the same. Artists come into this world with their gifts hanging like a toolbelt at their side. Not only can you use your art to face whatever life throws your way, but you can use it to experience joy, find peace, transform your weaknesses into strengths, and build material abundance. It’s a cosmic multitool.

Unfortunately, many artists are bombarded with messaging that devalues their creative gift. They feel outcasted and alone. Their visionary ideas belittled. Many like me, turned to non-creative industries and scholastic achievement in an effort to fit in. As we attempted to fill the hole that rejecting our own heART caused, we only felt more lost.
Reclaiming my creativity was like coming home.

After I began rediscovering my love for telling stories and joy in creating art again, I noticed how my attitude about life itself began shifting. I was a part of something greater than myself. I could feel it. I started Awakened Creators looking to build a community around myself where I could feel safe and supported to be my authentic self and follow my heART. I quickly found that I was not alone in my desire.

Awakened Creators continues to grow, both in numbers and devotion. We support each other’s spiritual and creative growth, however painful that experience can be sometimes. We share personal development tools, spiritual and creative guidance, and offer each other encouragement inside and outside our virtual home, The Sacred HeARTist Portal. We meet regularly with weekly online gatherings, bi-annual artist retreats, and perform quarterly energy upgrades. Also, in 2024, we’re starting our first annual collaborative charity project. We will design a calendar together to sell and offer the profits to a creative-focused charity. Awakened Creators are game changers, paradigm shifters, healers, starseeds, and misfits with hearts of gold, and we are here to change the world with our joy.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Artists need champions of individuality around them, people who don’t subscribe to one way of doing something, but are open to allow variation. The creative process is intended to help artists better understand themselves and when we put “rules” on what that’s supposed to look like, however well meaning, we start to degrade the opportunity to build true authenticity.

I take pride in supporting artists in learning to value themselves, to create art first and foremost for themselves. When they can start to see that their enjoyment comes before the audiences’ they’ll find real satisfaction, free of the need for external validation.

Community and collaboration is also an indicator of a healthy creative ecosystem. Just like in nature, nothing exists in a vacuum, but instead relies on so many other systems, cycles, and organisms to thrive. Artists are the same. We need each other. We need opportunities to connect, remember we aren’t alone, and exchange ideas, successes, and failures. This goes directly against our society’s “everyone for themselves” mentality. Which is why one of the driving forces behind Awakened Creators is to create that safe space for belonging and support and we are thriving!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

One of the biggest lessons I’ve had to unlearn is to stop waiting to be happy. Again, I think focusing on outcomes is such a poisonous way of thinking and it nearly killed me.

Before I started my creative journey and built a career in art, writing, and with Awakened Creators, I worked professionally in higher education. Educational institutions like most modern businesses are built on the glorification of achievement. It’s all focused on the end product. The degree. The grades. The promotion. The bigger salary. There’s always something dangling ahead of you that you “need” before you can relax and enjoy your life. I bought into it and kept achieving, promoting, climbing and ultimately drove myself to alcoholism and attempted suicide. It was never enough. I was never enough.

Years after freeing myself from my job and pursuing my heARTwork full-time, I am still unlearning that “game” and teaching myself a new one. One where I am rewarded for being vulnerable, authentic, true to my inner guidance, and loving my life as it is right now. Being able to enjoy the present moment, no matter what, is a super power that cannot be matched. Your whole life (your art, your situation, your inner state) becomes magical when you learn to appreciate it for what it is without needing it to be anything else.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://awakenedcreators.passion.io/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/awakened.creators/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/awakened.creators
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/awakenedcreators