Unleash your creativity and create an artful, soulful life.
ALCHEMICAL TRANSFORMATION FOR ARTISTS AND DREAMERS OF ALL KINDS. AND DEEP SOUL NOURISHMENT FOR LOVERS OF BEAUTY AND TRUTH.
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Welcome home.
You are an artist. Your life can be a work of art.
I am Maxima Kahn
And this is the Brilliant Playground I created for you.
Are you…
- Feeling stuck, blocked, or uninspired in your art or life?
- Coming up against frustrating patterns that keep you from living the life you imagine?
- Struggling to make time for what you most love?
- Longing for more—creativity, wonder, passion, and joy?
Through my Creative Sparks newsletter & blog, books, programs, and our Brilliant Playmates community,
I‘ll show you how to…
- Unleash your inspired creativity and powerful authentic expression
- Uncover your unique gifts and your path to deep fulfillment
- Discover and realize your heart’s true dreams
- Create an inspired life of passion, purpose, and deep play
- And live from your radiant aliveness, freedom, and joy
Isn’t that what we are here for?
“Don’t ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
– Howard Thurman
Philosopher, educator, and civil rights leader
Brilliant Playground is a space of inclusion and honoring for people of all colors, races, paths, genders, and sexual preferences. You are welcome here!
Featured Offerings
The Artist’s Way Online
Unleash your creativity, passion, and joy in this bestselling, life-changing course for creative souls of all kinds. Discover your unique gifts and heart’s dreams. Free yourself to create a life you deeply love. Small-group, highly interactive live format. Next group begins 2023.
Creative Life Coaching
Individual, heart-centered support to help you get unstuck, whether in art or life. Learn powerful tools to create what you desire and transform what’s been holding you back. Gain clarity, focus, and inner freedom to navigate life’s transitions and realize your heart’s desires.
Brilliant Playground Creative Community
Be a part of a supportive, inspiring creative community. Give yourself structure, accountability, skills, resources, and feedback to nourish your thriving creative life. Receive guidance, find collaborators and friends, and realize your creative dreams, one step at a time. Community is powerful!
“I am stunned. ….so much is flowing and changing in my life in ways that are huge and powerful and empowering, and it’s happening with a grace and generosity and goodness and harmony that I could never have predicted. I feel like I have everything that I need for a rich and full and satisfying life and I thank you with all my heart.”
– Kathy McKeough
– Sara Brownwood
– Eleanor Vincent, award-winning author
About Me
“I am swimming and drowning at once, head barely above water, then not above. Life nearly wiping me out. Yet here in these waves I believe I can hear fragments of luminous song.”
– Maxima Kahn
“Where Everything Is Music”
Hi. I‘m Maxima Kahn, poet and writer, musician and dancer, soul guide, firekeeper, and Empress of Play.
As a passionate lover of Beauty, Wonder, and Imagination, I have gotten messy, noisy, or outlandish in countless acts of creative abandon.
My writing has been featured in numerous literary journals, including the Los Angeles Review, Louisville Review, Wisconsin Review, and many others, and on popular blogs, such as Tiny Buddha, The Creative Penn, and StartItUp, and has twice been nominated for Best of the Net. My poetry has been anthologized in The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and California Fire & Water. I’ve been awarded fellowships and scholarships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Community of Writers.
My first full-length collection of poems, Fierce Aria, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020 and was a finalist for an Eric Hoffer Book Award.
I am an award-winning composer, avant-garde violinist, avid practitioner of Contact Improvisation, and a long-time member of the dance-music-theater troupe Shadow Cabinet.
The challenges and losses in my life led me to discover profound transformational tools, my spiritual calling, and a life-giving relationship with my creativity. And this led to my teaching.
My popular workshops and creative life coaching have helped hundreds of people to unleash their creative gifts, realize their aspirations, and create lives of passion, purpose, and deep play. I have been teaching since 2004, and have also taught at the University of California, Davis extension.
I have studied indigenous wisdom for decades and became initiated as a firekeeper in 2013. I’m an avid devotee of the Divine Feminine and am dedicated to co-creating a world in which all of life is cherished and each of us shines in the fullness of who we are.
To your passionate creative life,
P.S. I’m currently taking a break to attend to a deep healing journey. I’ll be adding programs and offerings back in slowly. And I’ll gradually be more present on my newsletter as well. Thanks for your patience. It’s a deep time of transformation for me, and I’ll have much to share as I return from the fire.
“Distinctive, honed, vulnerable, musical, courageous, honest, Maxima Kahn’s poems are fully ripened, fully considered—each one ready to drop richly into the hand like a subtly contoured fruit. Taste them.”
– Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems
You can purchase Fierce Aria here. I also invite you to explore my other selected works, upcoming events, and recent press.
Creative Sparks
A Quiet Revolution
Something has happened and is happening to me. After all the hours and days and weeks and months of illness and suffering and fear and fierce hope and determination and making endless batches of vegetable juice and countless appointments with doctors and healers of...
Rekindling My Creative Schedule: My Secret to Making Time for Art
When students ask me what’s the secret to making time for what they long to do, I always answer first with this: Schedule it! I’m such a huge fan of scheduling regular time for your art or whatever gives your life meaning. When you want to make progress toward your...
Make Your Mark as an Artist!
I’ve come across this term “making marks” quite a few times recently as I’ve been dabbling more in the world of two-dimensional visual art. I’ve told you about my occasional forays this year into illustrated journaling, which has provided a fun and helpful entry point...
