“If you want to take a step forward,
Creativity is my job, high sensitivity is my nature.
ABOUT ME
Looking, listening and writing about oneself, deeply, authentically, and with no filters, is not easy, because it is terribly intimate. I’d rather write an essay on the advantages of having red hair (or on myself as being a Leo with Leo rising). But it would be another storytelling to which we are used to. And actually I am here to write about another side of me. (And then, there is also all that story about what my clients and the people who know me for my job are going to think, maybe, am I showing myself too much? And then? Ok, the verdict is now suspended, so let’s begin.)
So, here’s a part of me about being highly sensitive:
I’ve always been a sponge for others’ emotions, and this has always affected my levels of energy and vitality.
Feeling constantly invaded by others’ emotions and moods — which blend together with mine — often made me feel like I was, in some aspects, more fragile than others.
I’ve always had the feeling to have less skin than who surrounds me, as if a stratum of my “shield” was missing from my protection. I’ve often felt more exposed than others, to everything, to the world’s events outside and to the big wind which blows inside.
Listening is a part of me and a part of my job. Actively listening. Being emphatic and sympathetic even when you don’t want to.
Learning how to trust in your deep self. Learning how to trust in myself, my feelings, my insightfulness, my instinct, my abnormal capacities of an emotional sensitive person. All of this belongs to the daily story of my life.
There’s a little girl in me, who loves to play and she always has her head in the clouds. She is stubborn, sometimes she puts on a long face, sometimes she cries, sometimes she falls, sometimes…
There’s a rebel in me, who always wants to do things in her way, always different, dressed in courage and dreams.
There’s a despot in me, who stubbornly opposes, so as not to be able to move him at all.
There’s an old and wise woman in me, with long and colourful tunics, with a proud look, with a straight posture, and the center really well grounded.
There’s a judge in me, who is always ready to point an accusing finger at me and to control if the things I’m doing are perfect, putting constantly at risk my feelings.
There’s a genius in me, who has a big stovepipe hat, solves my problems and gets me out of trouble.
Allied spirits walk with me, in order to always find their way home.
Animals always walk with me, real or invisible, I’m not able to live without them.
Once in a while I look outside to see if a spacecraft has come and landed.
I am creative, restless, complex, chaotic, empathic, way too sensitive, and with a (very) thin skin, multitasking since birth.
I am a prime number. I am an odd number.
Marilena Florio, officially, is an art director, a communication expert, a photographer, a painter, a sculptor and a creator of social projects. Actually, she is also an overwhelming shout which shatters the silence of misunderstanding. A hurricane of ideas that is frozen into perception. A flare of genius that tears the dark world’s blindness. She is a feminine fragility which controls the crowd A liquid creativity which solidifies certainty and fresh air that inspires self-exploration. She is an innovation which goes deep into the roots. She is a sea of uncertainties which holds people up. She is an uncontrolled emotion that displays both logic and sense. . Marilena is an unintentional oxymoron of decodified empathy; she is the lucky purple color. She gives something while everyone else is selling. She delivers something while others are giving. She offers something while others are delivering. She is the famous step back which takes someone toward the future. Marilena is a HIGHLY SENSITIVE person which extraordinarily managed to transform her vulnerability into an overflowing CREATIVE FORCE. It is highly recommended to “handle her with care”!
Marco Farinella, Istituto Modai
www.istitutomodai.it/home.php
ABOUT MY NATURE
I’ve always lived in a love relationship with animals and nature. I live into the woods, or perhaps the woods live inside me. I consider the animals, the trees and the Mother Earth as my masters. I can feel and see the magical wire that connects me with them. These last years, the woods have cured the wounds of my life. Everytime the world makes too much noise (very often), I go out and enter the “green”, in order to breathe fresh air. Since I am a Highly Sensitive Person, I can feel the call of nature as a pure source that cleans me up from the responsibility of the world’s meetings. And it charges me, bringing me back to my inner self.
The choice of living surrounded by Nature has been made over the years. The more I bumped into people, the more I felt like I needed something else which could clean and load me up from the fact that I’m way too connected with the world (a world that actually doesn’t look like me).
ABOUT MY JOB
About creativity and identity.
Freelance professional in the world of visual, creative and graphic communication since 1990. Through the years I have specialized in the field that I love the most: research, creation and identity positioning. I’ve been working for companies, enterprises and professionists in Italy and abroad. My investigation mainly deals with creativity and lateral thinking. I hold highly experiential seminars to all the people involved within the company, in order to fully explore their personal, deep and unexpected aspects, which might bring qualities to the company itself and distinguish them with a unique and very personal proposal.
“BEING CREATIVE IN ORDER TO COMMUNICATE”
I hold individual and group seminars to make someone’s Creativity and Soul emerge. Both lateral-visual thinking and some personal techniques of game and color can help someone to find his strengths and talents as well: features that are hidden inside.
Marco Maino: “There are moments in life in which you feel you miss something and you don’t realise what it is straightaway. It happens to me at least twice or three times per year. I’m stuck thinking and thinking about it. And, lately, I’ve understood that I feel like having a space, a formation, a seminar, some time to share with Marilena… Testimonials >
I’ve come to a moment in my life in which I’m often asking myself if my profession is really useful, and the answer is yes. But I’m always feeling that something’s missing. Something that is a great deal to me. I can’t get enough from my profession anymore. My nature is
highly sensitive and it’s trying to tell something about it, somehow. I’ve been planning Creabilità for two years. Creabilità exists in order to be able to go beyond my profession. To share goals and aims of a working path, personal, but most of all, spiritual.
Now, I feel the need to be 100% myself. I feel the need to open up, completely. So, I decided to put together two of my personalities (creativity and high sensitivity). I did that because I wanted to help the world and all the people who feel and live the same way I do.
Authentically. Consciously. Wittingly.
Once you are a creative talent, you remain creative
In many cases, creativity is “something” that makes its own space in spite of teachers, educating programs, school and reassuring modalities of classifying the world. Something personal, deep and so powerful to shatter the river banks and overflow to the unknown. Creative talents are rebels. They deal with unpredictable and chaotic situations in their own and personal way: a shoal of fish that swims against the tide, embracing anxiety and tension of the creative process, with a passion which cannot be self-determined. They don’t follow orders but they follow their own path. Wherever one sees differences, they see paradoxes. This is their starting point in order to open new ways. In the life of a creative person, creativity cannot be ignored: whenever it happens, it can be seriously dangerous: visions, ideas and shapes start imploding from within because they just demand to be expressed and get materialised. When creativity is stuck, it owns an intrinsic force that — through wandering in the mere thought — can create conflicts and bear fruit as anxiety and fear. It starts becoming a river in flood blocked up by a barricade of psychic garbage. Our daily job is to clean up this dyke, rubble by rubble, so as to free the river and let it run towards the sea; so that it could be manifested, recognised and shared. This is my first consideration as a creative person: the creative force still works on us. Whenever it flows, it is such an inexhaustible source which nourishes ourselves. On the contrary, in the moment when it runs into barriers built by ourselves throughout the use of assorted materials, it turns into a demon: a demon who cannot reveal himself but who can create an echo in our inner being. From that, one can realise how much a work based on creativity is first of all an act of working on himself. A profound work which puts us in front of our limits: our insecurities, our cultural beliefs, our own fears to reveal ourselves as independent and not approvable beings. The lateral thinking from which the creative process moves and realises itself is widespread, dynamic and associative. It is capable of picking up and realigning meanings in new forms… Excerpt from the article “Creativi si ritorna” by Marilena Florio, written for Pedagogika 2011 – Volume: “Educare alla creatività”.
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ABOUT MY RESEARCH
My job, the research on creativity and the spiritual work I’m doing on myself have always
grown inside me at the same speed.
I am creative in my job and highly sensitive in my nature.
I’m always interested in something which is undefined and spiritual.
I’ve been working on myself since when I was twenty years old,
I’m fragile, let’s start from here.
I’m fragile within. I feel exposed (almost every time). To what? To everything: from emotion to events or storm. Perhaps, this is why I’ve been always looking for a reason, an answer, a cure, a solution, a counterpart.
Spiritual research has always characterized my life.
Since when I was a teenager, I found comfort and peace in the books written by Carlos Castaneda. This helped me out to feel less lonely, and it confirmed me that my feelings and my perceptions were true. There were others who could see and feel the same things I did.
When words aren’t enough (very often), my art allows me to extract magma from my soul and transpose it into matter, in order to make the unspoken emerge. Something that is inexplicable, deep and invisible. Because I also want to have answers, sometimes, I’m used to traveling to the dimension above and the one below.
Restless and curious. I’ve always been asking myself about very important issues: the ones to which, sometimes, you can’t absolutely answer. Perhaps, this is why I’ve always tried to research. This is why I’ve always felt the yearning to follow and encounter medicine men and women, shamans of the world.
I’ve been following and I was followed by Hiah Park, mudang – the highest level that exists among korean shamans – for a long time, who, kicked my ass (of course, in a caring way) in order to make me experiment how much my fragility and sensitivity were actually my strengths. I lived directly on my skin, her advice and experiences which helped me to keep all the pieces together and move on proudly around this insensitive world.
Meetings are extremely important. Personally, I think that the most important ones are the meetings that happen with people who carry a message of Spiritual Light.
