Member-only story
A Story on Letting Go and Reconnecting With Your Creative Flow
Professional illustrator and creativity coach, Araki Koman, has taken numerous improbable turns to be where she is now. This is the extraordinary story of how after ten years of creative block, she learned to listen to her inner child, let go, and flow.
“I was a very creative child, and becoming an artist was something I always wanted to do,” she began. “Right out of high school, I applied to an art program. But I was terrible at science, and France has quite an elitist education system, so I got rejected from the one school I applied to, and that was it. I decided to stop trying. Instead, I chose to focus on another passion I had of exploring the world and discovering new cultures, and that led me to international business school.”
Between ages 16 and 26, Araki dove into the business world and denied her artistic nature completely. “I had a lot of creative people around me, and still, I would say to myself ‘I’m not that.’” For a while, it seemed not to matter. She got a Masters degree in international marketing and spent most of her time traveling around the world living as a nomad, a lifestyle that shaped an enormous part of her current persona. “Moving from country to country, I was sort of forced to adopt a minimalist mindset. And with this habit of constantly de-cluttering, slowly came the space for clarity…
