Creativity as Spiritual Practice
“What I really want, is to care.”
One simple sentence ended my creative drought.
I was listening to a popular podcast, and this line stopped me in my tracks. My mind flashed back to the previous night when I had been searching for something and gone far back in my post history on Instagram, far back enough that I hit the posts from when I used to really care.
“Wow,” I thought to myself, “This is good writing. This is beautiful art. This is meaningful. Why don’t I do this anymore?”
The answer is that I stopped caring.
I become frustrated with the algorithm, with the ever-shortening attention span. I got tired of feeling like I’m both only as good as my last post, but also need to post daily in order to stay relevant. I became disillusioned by feeling like I’m talking into a void.
Is it still art if we churn it out under these parameters, slogging to feed a machine which has no appreciation for art or soul?
There were other factors at play too. The avalanche of New Age pseudo-spiritual gobbledygook on social media left me with a sticky nausea. I wondered if I were only contributing to what increasingly appears to be nothing more than ego masturbation steeped in unresolved childhood traumas (see, I can spew forth these terms with the best of them) and certainly no path to enlightenment, never mind basic healing.
I had also been trying (unsuccesfully) for some years to create an online business - one which would give me “financial abundance” on “my own time” while being “non-location specific”. Of course it would also be “soul-led”, based on “feminine business practices” and “ethical marketing.” Why the sarcasm? I became sick to death of the amount of coaches and influencers pushing this narrative, only to teach the same old manipulative marketing tactics and blame any practical business hiccups on your lack of “abundance mindset” and your “limiting beliefs”. All while charging upwards of $500 to struggling single moms and boasting about their second property in Miami and brand new Mercedes G63. Excuse my bitter tone, but somebody needs to say it.
Constantly plotting how and what to post in order to maximise engagement and convert customers bled dry every ounce of creative spark.
All of this, coupled with ill health (a topic I’m sure I’ll go into soon) led to my decision to say fuck it, I no longer care.
I decided to experiment with what happens if I simply don’t post.
It was incredibly freeing to no longer put any pressure on myself to come up with anything good, or pretty or meaningful to share. It was a weight off my shoulders to give up on any attempt at online business and no longer worry about how my Instagram account needed to generate income. It freed me up to only post what I want to post, from my heart with no strategising how it would be received by those who saw it or whether anyone would see it at all. And if I had no inspiration to post, no posting. And the kicker? I didn’t lose any followers, I didn’t become any less relevant. Basically, nothing changed in Instagram-land. Successful experiment!
But, in unshackling myself from the algorithm, I also numbed my creativity.
Concurrent to this, I had also been feeling disconnected spiritually and experiencing a general sense of apathy. My meditation had felt more perfunctory and less mystical. I had not been receiving the downloads or inspired thoughts which at some times of my life have felt like a deluge of communication with the universe. And while I know that The All That Is, is of course Always There and therefore this sense of disconnect must be something within myself, I hadn’t quite put it all together until hearing the words, “What I really want, is to care.”
Now I see how deeply they are connected: this triumvirate of wanting to care, spiritual connection and my creativity. For me, they are inextricable. There is no creativity without the other two.
And so I made the decision to share again, from a place of caring about the world, with the caveat that if it is meaningful to me, and it touches even just one person in some small way, that is enough. No more bowing to the Social Media gods.
In speaking about his new book, The Chaos Machine, Max Fisher confirms that yes indeed the algorithm is affecting how and what we share. The algorithm selects for maximum engagement, which means selecting the most controversial or inciteful posts, not the most meaningful, creative or beautiful. This is not how I want to engage with the world. I don't want to incite people to division. Yes, I want to ignite passion; yes, I want to challenge the accepted narratives of our society; but most of all I want to touch people’s hearts in a way that is meaningful and engenders greater love and solidarity.
Now this is where it gets interesting: with this decision to care, in the coming days I felt my spiritual connection start to open up again and a trickle of creativity started to appear. Just three days later I woke up on a Saturday morning with the first few lines of a poem I had dreamt still fresh in my mind. I quickly grabbed my phone (something I am loathe to do first thing in the morning but if ever there is a good reason this is it) and started typing while I was still floating in theta brainwave state. The rest of the poem flowed out of me effortlessly, the first I had written in months.
(If you didn’t read my last post you can catch that poem in written form here, or in spoken form here.)
Ahh… I breathed a sigh of relief. This is what I had been missing so. All these months I had been berating myself for not simply sitting down and forcing myself to write. While there is of course value in the daily discipline of exactly that, what if we give more attention to softening into that openness, so that writing doesn’t need to be forced nor even created, but simply received?
In those first few days of awakening back into my creative/spiritual state, I received many synchronicities which for me is always a green flag of my spiritual connection being open for business. The following piece by Pearl S. Buck stood out to me:
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.
Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him.
He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.
As I read this I first thought of my neurodivergent and almost obsessively creative son, but then realised that this is me too, and always has been. The difference being that I have at various times in my life been able to flick a switch and no longer care, the cost of this ability being a drying up of creativity. My son’s caring, on the other hand, is like an open wound, one which makes me worry about how he will protect himself from the harshness of this world.
And so here I am again, showing up, sharing my writing, being in that state of vulnerability which only other artists can understand. Because I really do want to care, and my art is a way to enact this caring. I am at my happiest, most passionate and most motivated when I care. With my words I can touch someone’s heart, letting them know they are not alone in whatever struggle they’re facing. With my words I can shine light on important social issues. At the very least, I can give someone 10 minutes of respite from the drudgery of their 9 to 5. Even the delicious escape into the fantasy world of fiction has meaning. In her book, Story Genius, Lisa Cron says that story is as fundamental to humans as food and sex. It’s biologically wired into our brains to crave story.
Perhaps Instagram is not the best platform for me to share my love of story, and my time and energy would be better spent elsewhere, like here on Substack. I’ve made a commitment to myself to publish here once a week. How daring of me to state that, but perhaps it will force me to honour this agreement with myself, and to nurture my creativity once again.