The Value of an Artist
Delia Brett is a transformational coach, yoga teacher, and dancer with 35+ years of experience. Owner of Green Room Yoga and creator of East Van Wisdom School, she guides people to dissolve stuck patterns, reclaim their power, and awaken to deeper purpose and creativity.
For most of my life, I identified as an artist. From the moment I could make my family laugh, draw something beautiful, or move in a way that earned praise from my ballet teacher, I knew. That was me. I was the artist, and I wanted nothing more than to express that potential to its fullest.
I grew up in a large, lively family, a twin among many siblings, in a house that overflowed with play and noise, but not with money. My parents did their best. My mother, a magician of daily design. My father, a harmonizer of chaos. From them, I learned two things, inclusivity, the impulse to do things together and to belong, and ambition, the drive to become all I could be. Those two forces became the twin engines of my life, the desire to belong and the desire to be extraordinary.
The dream and the detour
At fourteen, I decided I would be an actor. Acting seemed like the only visible path to becoming what I already felt inside, immense potential longing for expression. But the reality of poverty closed that door. I couldn’t afford theatre school, nor could I afford the psychic strain of waiting tables between auditions.
By some strange twist of fate, I found myself living in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, surrounded by other artists. One of them introduced me to dance. Classes were cheap, and the studio door was open. I scraped together what I could, took out an overdraft and a student loan, and stepped into a world that would change everything.
Finding my medium
In that old studio, I found the language of my body, and a world of discipline, listening, and craft. Dance taught me to be an instrument of vision. To release, to attune, and to let my movement be generated by the earth and gravity, in other words, from the ground up. Dance became both my spiritual practice and my profession.
But I had also entered a world of scarcity. In this underfunded field, where contemporary dance was nearly invisible, everyone was surviving on too little. Our value was a whisper, not a wage. Still, I gave everything. I worked endlessly, created tirelessly, poured my entire being into the making of works of beauty, freedom, and originality. What I didn’t realize then was the effect that creating from a profound deficit of mirroring would have on me.
The unmirrored life
Let me clarify what I mean by mirroring. It’s not just mimicry, it’s a form of nonverbal communication that recognizes and connects with the other, without judgment. It can also include verbal exchanges. We can intentionally reflect each other through our words by naming what we observe. For children, mirroring helps them discover their self worth. We come to see ourselves through another’s perspective. Like many creative individuals, I wasn’t properly mirrored, neither as a child, as a young artist, nor by the culture I dedicated my life to.
In those studios, I witnessed extraordinary genius in myself and others, yet none of us could admit it openly. We were too preoccupied with survival, competition, and dimming our brilliance to fit into the small, underfunded space assigned to us. We lacked the cultural acknowledgment that affirms, “What you are doing matters. What you are creating is sacred.” Consequently, we abandoned any desire for that level of recognition and instead strove unquestioningly to belong to the existing culture, with all its expectations and values.
If there had been true recognition, genuine reciprocity, and a real sense of mutual care among my fellow dance artists, I might have stayed. However, because we were all trapped in the same scarcity mindset, unable to genuinely acknowledge one another or celebrate our efforts long enough to see their true value, after 30 years of service to the arts, I decided to leave.
The cost of unseen brilliance
By the time I walked away, I was depleted, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I had carried my artist self like a pack animal, dragging her through exhaustion and heartbreak, through sleepless nights and unpaid work. I kept her alive out of loyalty, even as I abandoned my own needs for love, rest, and prosperity.
While the choice to leave the arts world broke my heart, it also freed it. In walking away, I finally began to see. I finally understood that what I had been doing all those years was not marginal or small. It was extraordinary. I had been dancing in a temple, weaving the invisible threads between worlds, embodying the very principles of creation itself, receptivity, surrender, integration, flow.
Remembering the wealth
Looking back with time and healing, I realize that what I experienced was never poverty. Instead, it was a form of practice and alchemy, a way for the soul to reconnect with itself through the body, movement, and collective creation. True art is not merely decoration, it is a sacred act of perception. It helps us break down the illusion of separateness. The artist’s body, voice, and hands function as instruments through which the collective recalls its own wholeness.
When the culture cannot see this, when it cannot mirror it, the artist becomes invisible, even to herself. But when she remembers her own value, the spell is broken, and true wealth returns.
This, too, is a feminist awakening, to see that much of what has been devalued in art, in the body, in care, and in creation itself is precisely the feminine principle of knowing. The relational, the intuitive, the cyclical, the hidden. I now understand that reclaiming the value of the artist is reclaiming the value of the feminine, the source of life that gives, receives, perceives, and connects without demanding proof of worth.
Coming home
I left the arts not because I stopped loving them, but because I needed to grow beyond the confines of a non reflective culture. I needed to rediscover what had always animated my work, the flow of life itself. Now, through meditation, breath, coaching, and spiritual practice, I see it clearly, I have always been dancing amid the riches of the cosmos.
The art was never small. It was I who had forgotten its magnitude. So I return, not to the stage, but to the heart of the question, what is the true value of an artist? It’s not in fame, funding, or applause. It’s in the courage to be a vessel for beauty, truth, and connection in a world that has forgotten how to see. Maybe, finally, to mirror that in myself.
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Delia Brett, Coach, Teacher, Facilitator, Dance Artist
Delia Brett is a transformational coach, embodiment teacher, and yoga instructor with over 23 years of experience. A veteran dance artist and choreographer, she co-directed the interdisciplinary company MACHiNENOiSY for 17 years, creating boundary-pushing productions with youth and adult performers. She is the founder of Art Full Well Coaching and the East Van Wisdom School, and the owner of Green Room Yoga in Vancouver, BC. Delia blends somatics, creativity, and consciousness to help people dissolve stuck patterns, reclaim their power, and reconnect with the wisdom of their bodies. Her work invites others to turn life’s challenges into gateways for growth, clarity, and spiritual awakening.
