Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jenny Velarde MA, LCAT, RDT. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jenny, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.

Creativity is not a luxury. It’s a survival skill. This is not only the anthem I’ve marched to as a psychotherapist working with professional artists in New York for over a decade, but it’s how I’ve existed since my earliest memories. This isn’t to infer that creativity can’t serve as something we luxuriate in. Of course, when we are aligned in our creativity it can provide our most monumental feelings of joy, dimension, glory and (my personal favorite) freedom. Though when it is suggested that creativity is simply a fringe benefit, an add-on or dare I say it, a ‘hobby’ when there’s a scrap of free time, that’s when I situate myself firmly in the belief that our personal creativity is imperative to the functionality of every single part of our lives: our relationships, professions, communities, health, faith, self-image. It’s the heart of it all.

I began my private practice at a time in which it was challenging to find other Drama Therapists (my niche) or Creative Arts Therapists in general with their own businesses, to serve as models. Of the very few therapists I knew in private practice, they tended to be seasoned professors and well established pillars of the field. I only had a few years under my belt as a psychotherapist, though in that period of time I had worked with a wide array of clients with rich and diverse backgrounds. Not to mention, I had entered into grad school after already living a jam-packed life filled with work experience, much of which engaged a wide variety of my artistic skill sets (as of today, I’ve had 73 jobs in my lifetime, starting at age 13.)

Painter, Actor, Scenic Artist, Director, Writer, Producer, Musician. These were all creative roles I had played at some point throughout my professional life and they all served me extremely well as I built out a thriving private practice from the ground up. All crucial skill sets I’ve needed every step of the way, working with a vast client base. There isn’t a single creative modality that hasn’t shown up in my clinical work at some point, and for that I am outrageously grateful. Not to mention, completely reliant.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Even more so than Clinician, my favorite role to play is that of an unabashed advocate for creative people.

My work, therapeutically, is entirely geared at guiding others towards amplifying & fortifying the creativity they put out into the world and the successes they get to relish in, throughout all parts of their lives.

Interestingly, the most streamlined way of doing this over the years has been through taking on a pervasive phenomena I’ve witnessed overwhelmingly in the lives of my clients…what I’ve coined ‘chronic procrastination.’

Chronic procrastination is an extremely well-worn emotional cycle that can become our calcified default behavior. It may show up day after day in the forms of endless scrolling, binge streaming, gaming for hours, drowning in news, etc. and leads to reoccurring feelings of guilt and shame. Chronic Procrastination is impacted by our physiology, the environments and relationships that shape us, the modeling we’ve received, the trauma we’ve endured & the choices we’ve made…the history within us. If these factors aren’t thoughtfully and carefully addressed, chronic procrastination can become our baseline, leaving us swimming in stagnancy and self-sabotage.

Over the past decade, so many of my clients have come to me with incredible creative abilities and aspirations, though have fallen into this extremely well-worn cycle. Devastatingly, I’ve witnessed the pain points within my clients where chronic procrastination has stolen months, years, sometimes even decades from their lives and most shatteringly, their creative impact.

Leaning on my years of experience transforming the cycle of chronic procrastination with my clients, I now have the honor of guiding people all over the world, digitally. Both through my online method, ‘The Procrastination System’ and YouTube channel, ‘Artist As Guide.’ The Procrastination System is an online program that offers a radically different approach to transforming the destruction of procrastination into exciting creative traction.

It’s a a self-paced, 6-hour program with 20 digestible chapters combining powerful thought shifts, real world tools that can be put into action instantly & guided personal reflections, supported by up-to-date neuroscience. It was imperative to me that I develop a highly researched approach that was wildly effective, yet enjoyable and easy to use. Reclaiming one’s creative freedom should absolutely be a fun and inspiring process and that was crux to the creation of The Procrastination System.

After all, that creative vision that is burning inside of deserves to break free, rather than be stuck inside a cycle.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

And the plot thickens. As a psychotherapist steeped in Creative Arts Therapy, I thought I knew quite bit about the importance of creativity central to one’s life. Though it wasn’t until I experienced the volcanic upheaval of chronic illness, that I truly and consciously realized how non-negotiable creativity really was to survival.

For the past eight years, I have been living with invisible disability caused by Severe Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA.) As the name implies, RA impacts the joints, deforming structural integrity over time, though has a systemic inflammatory effect throughout the entire body. In my case, my mobility and fine motor skills were significantly compromised, as well as inflamed circulatory, fascia and lymphatic systems. It also impacted my vision, ability to keep weight and muscle on my body, as well as chronic fatigue and persistently elevated pain levels. At its worst, having a bed sheet on top of me has felt akin to a concrete slab.

Nearly my entire life changed, practically overnight. I went from being a busy and boisterous city dweller to barely even being able to make it to my own bathroom, which was only five feet away from my bed.

My RA diagnosis kicked off a wild journey of incessant researching, investing in every treatment, healing modality and supplement I could find and hearing over and over again from healthcare providers that I looked “young and healthy.” Needless to say, this aggressive disease turned my world upside down and forced my hand in making some pretty massive life changes, pretty darn fast.

A totally unexpected side effect of this enduring commitment to greater health has been an awe-inducing expansion of the Artist Role within me, like I have never experienced before. And just as surprisingly, that would guide me to establishing (and later developing for others) a means of ‘partnering procrastination’ that would offer sustainable, repeatable & enjoyable ways of finding satiating progress throughout all parts of life, even in the most unfathomable moments of pain.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

One incredible way in which chronic illness and invisible disability have led me to a relationship shift with chronic procrastination and an explosion within my creativity, was in how I learned to wield my time.

Due to my sudden RA onset, out of nowhere I was having to lay down more than ever before. (All I could do was just barely travel to my private practice and come home and melt into bed.)

Once I got totally burnt out by hours of laying in bed and binge streaming shows, I decided to do something totally unexpected: I turned it all off. I was still. I began laying in quiet for hours at a time. That’s when my brain started to do something totally outrageous…Imagine.

The more I sat in quiet, turning inward and away from dopamine-driven external stimulation, the more my imagination grew and grew. It became so vibrant and technicolored that it began to remind me of how I creatively functioned as a child.

So not only was my brain abounding with creativity, but this new quiet world aided my chronic procrastination in two tangible ways:

First, it not only afforded my brain ample time to wander and imagine, it also allowed it space to work through and organize my creative approach more efficiently and precisely than ever before. I became extremely skilled in clarifying the meticulous steps of a project way before ever lifting a (very pained) finger.

And secondly, it cut nearly ALL of the guilt out of my life. Rather than berating myself for spending so much time drowning in screens and avoiding my creative purpose that was non-stop ‘knocking at my door,’ I fell in love with allowing stillness and quiet to guide me towards becoming the most creatively competent, focused and spurred on that I have ever been.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.artistasguide.com
• Instagram: artist.as.guide
• Youtube: Artist As Guide

Image Credits
All images taken by myself: Jenny Velarde @artist.as.guide