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
Featured Offerings
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!
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.
Freedom to Write
Dissolve writer’s block, hone your authentic voice and develop tools of the writer’s craft to make your writing shine. Excellent for writers of all kinds and all levels. You’ll get inspired, generate new writing and grow, while enjoying the camaraderie of other creative souls.
“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,
“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
What’s Inspiring Me Now 9.15.23
Don and I watched a gorgeous and incredibly moving and inspiring film called Pride. It’s about a small group of gay and lesbian activists in the UK, deciding to support Welsh miners who were on strike. So beautifully acted, scripted, directed. It’s a testament to the...
Training Like a Spiritual Warrior For Your Art
I've been thinking about how artists need to train like warriors. Or like athletes. Or like monks. I was inspired by one of Steven Pressfield’s excellent posts (https://stevenpressfield.com/2021/12/training-turning-pro/). If we want to become the best artists we can...
Making Art Is Inconvenient
Making art is inconvenient. We have to carve out time for it. We have to carve out space for it. We have to spend our hard-earned money on it. We have to rearrange our schedules, ask for time off from work, and beg out of gatherings with friends and family at times....
