Building a creative muscle back from atrophy after any significant time away takes a heap of patience.
There is the first attempt at a revisit: sitting down in the same chair, looking at the same materials and instruments that always reflected back to you your standard protocol for producing output, reaching for the same places to ignite that spark, and, sadly, only emerging with shredded fragments that don’t really excite you.
Anxiety speaks up: This isn’t going to be the easy slide back into work you were envisioning. Maybe you’ve just lost it. It doesn’t exist anymore. You’re through.
I desperately wanted to find my own artistic process that would get me there. I’d like to even say I have a process. But the truth is, I don’t have a process at all.
If you’re anything like me, your anxiety causes you to reach outward to research, to guides, to protocols…
This is okay, too. If your self trust is feeling weak, perhaps there’s a tried-and-true method out there that could save you.
Outlines, structures, systems, guidance, pre-chartered territory, can provide some comfort. Like a roadmap, they make us feel safe to know the unknown.
“Lean into the resistance,” said one of the writing guides.
But, I really didn’t want to write anything about how much resistance popped up in me returning to write a newsletter. I’ve read that newsletter before. Yawn.
There had to be a secret formula out there I hadn’t discovered yet!
But, alas, Lady Creativity is at odds with formulas.
She’s a non-rational process. She doesn’t follow rules.
I needed a new approach.
In neglecting my own inner knowing, I was oblivious to the fact that my thirst for research was actually Exhausting the Known - pushing past what I’ve seen, heard, thought, and felt on the subject before me, so I may walk beyond it, where the true insights lie - and now I found myself in a void with some extra breathing space.
I remember my relationship to the newsletter and what I want it to provide for me: a landing place for the experiment of using my study of mindfulness to offer a different way of thinking about challenging things. Oh, riiiiight. Forgot.
I call to mind one of the Attitudinal Foundations of Mindfulness –attitudes to adopt in your life that reduce suffering – Acceptance: Being open and kind to the experience happening just as it is, without trying to change it into something else. With all the research and the frantic exploration for a way out of the resistance, I was neither allowing it or just letting it be there. Being rude.
Like saying “I’m nervous” instead of trying to act like you’re not nervous; allowing the thing and accepting that it’s there, you can soften around it. You can be on the same team.
What would it be like to form an alliance with this resistance? Befriend it even?
Given my previous striving behavior, I’d start by giving it some room without breathing down it’s neck. I would pull back.
I would embrace boredom. *Chills*
You might be surprised I didn’t tell you that my way of befriending this resistance wasn’t ‘being with it’ in meditation practice. I am a meditation teacher, after all, and I believe it to be the guiding star for every single individual on the planet. But, no, even meditation is time accounted for, and what this friendship needed was some wide-open dilly-dallying.
In my staring out the window, my meandering around with nowhere to be, my drifting in and out of the flow of thoughts without cutting it off with technology, I was able to notice other ways I was already being creative in my life: finding ways to make my mid-day dog walk more streamlined, combining ingredients that wouldn’t normally go (almond butter and mustard toast, you’re welcome), taking ‘my own spin’ on what a floral bouquet is supposed to look like…
This noticing is the germ, the seed - everything comes from that. Those little things put you on the playing field. You have to be on the playing field, and you have to notice when you’re there.
Approaching it this way, you see this break in your output as an opportunity to be intrigued by something, to be relaxed, to grow, instead of an alarming sign that you’re a hapless clone. And, yeah, we’re all clones. But we can have some fun with it.
If you’d like to join me in Exhausting the Known, so you can move on to the insights, I host a free, virtual, four-hour gentle deep-work session every other Monday. Comment or email for more details!
I love this so much, Abigail! I think your choice of images is really important too, because the writing is really grounded in yourself and your experience and your hopes for your practice, but the images are all examples of other artists’ depictions of noticing/relaxing/absorbing
Always 🕵️for the perfect process..good to learn I'm not the only one!