65: You Were Always Creative: Reclaiming Your Potential with Lydia Phelps-Alexander

65: You Were Always Creative: Reclaiming Your Potential with Lydia Phelps-Alexander

From Midwife Life: Midwifing you through health, motherhood, and the sacred mess of life’s transformations with Diane Ortega by Diane Ortega of Willow Birth Center

June 8, 2026 · 55 min

About this episode

Diane Ortega interviews Lydia Phelps-Alexander about reclaiming creative potential and the impact of identity on creativity.

What if creativity wasn't something you had to find, but something you never lost? In this episode, I'm talking with Lydia Phelps-Alexander, an art education consultant who has spent 18 years and thousands of hours reminding people - especially women - that their creative potential is not gone. It was never gone. It just got buried under everything life piled on top of it. Lydia grew up as a minority in a rural community, often lonely, often on the outside. But her parents gave her something powerful: time, materials, and space to make things. In that solitude, she didn't just find art, she found herself. And what she discovered changed everything about how she sees human potential. This is a rebirth conversation- the kind where we trace the thread back to who you were before the world told you who to be. We go deep into creativity as identity, boredom as a gift, the lie that you're "not creative," and what it actually means to reclaim the parts of yourself that got quiet. If you've been waiting for permission to create, to make something, to become something, this is the episode. I think you're going to love her. Let's get into it. In this episode: How growing up isolated in a…

People in this episode

Host: Diane Ortega

Guest: Lydia Phelps-Alexander

Topics covered

  • creativity
  • identity
  • self-discovery
  • art
  • boredom
  • potential

Keywords

  • creativity
  • self-discovery
  • art education
  • identity
  • boredom
  • potential
  • women
  • healing

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