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Self-Doubt and Worry

May 1, 2014 By Dave Leave a Comment

“Worried Eggs II” by Domiriel

“Worried Eggs II” by Domiriel

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, 
most of which never happened.” – Mark Twain

Self-Doubt plagues many writers, artists, creatives (i.e. worry that they might not have something worthwhile to say, or that they might not be able to say it in a worthwhile way). The often crippling result is that the worry part often gets in the way of the trying part. And that’s a shame.

The worthiness component indicates self-judgement, which indicates time spent in the old noggin.

Writers sometimes worry about the outcome and, as a result, have a difficult time getting started. It is almost impossible to settle into a creative act and to fully immerse yourself if you are worried. Focus is directed to the imagined possible outcome, emotional energy is redirected to the fight or flight response rather than being used for diving down deep where memory and the imagination meet. That’s where the creating happens – in that very out of the way place and it requires a slowing down – it takes solitude of a sort, it takes stillness – to get there.

But when worry becomes anxiety becomes fear, the imagination is so preoccupied there’s not much room for anything else.

Look, we are creatures of emotion and imagination. We have the capacity to feel and to think and to imagine. Our brains are always on. One of those things (a thought, an emotion, etc) can spark the others without our consciously setting out to do so.

That’s part of being human.

But it’s also part of what gets in the way of our realizing our dreams, or even chasing them sometimes. And it sometimes gets in the way of our being happy (regardless of whether we chase our dreams or not).

“Understand not everything is meant to be understood . . .” by deeplifequotes

“Understand not everything is meant to be understood . . .” by deeplifequotes

The key is finding ways to become cognizant of the differences Karen pointed out between fear and worry. Fear being a real, in that moment, threat. Worry being an imagined future possibility (and that doesn’t mean you have to think about the future, you can worry that a thing has already happened that you hope hasn’t happened, but since you don’t know in the present moment, it’s still a possible future consequence that is being given time and space in the present).

So, what can we do, if we in fact identify the culprit, WORRY invading our lives?

The answer will be varied, as we’re all different, the reasons behind our worry are also different.

Here are a few things that might help you get out of the chattering-in-the-head mode so you can be present:

Breathing Exercises – We humans live in our heads. All of the time. Hence the universal appeal of external methods to help get us out of our heads for a bit.

But one thing we often forget is that we also live in our bodies. All the time. The mind, the body, the emotions . . . they’re all connected. And sometimes, rather than dulling the mind, which often leads to worse feelings afterwards and a lack of productivity in the moment, we might get out of our heads through our bodies. By breathing. By moving. By training our brains to focus in on specific things.

Yoga – most people think yoga requires you to be a contortionist, that you have to be super-bendy for it to work, but just sitting still, just slowing down and being aware of the moment, of your body, of your breath, that is yoga. You can do it in a chair, on the floor. You don’t have to go to a studio or be on the mat.

Two poses I like for just slowing down and calming the mind are Savasana (Corpse Pose) and Viparita Karani (Fountain of Youth or Legs-Up-The-Wall Pose).

Get Outside (to Walk and to Observe) – walking by itself is great, but you can still spend the whole time going over and over and over what might come to pass, which is why honing in on the moment is important).

Focus on the air. What’s it doing? How does it feel?

Is the sun out? How does that feel?

What sort of shadows does it create?

What can you smell? Or hear?

What do you truly see?

Allow your senses to be fully engaged.

Most of us tool around on our walks in these beautiful settings (myself included) totally oblivious to the setting itself. We feel good, often much better just by being there. Often without even paying much attention once we’re there. So why do we feel better? You can get an idea of the answer if you allow yourself to engage your senses. If you see something and you slow down or stop and really take it in, you suddenly become aware of the moment and of the place. You are truly present in time and space.

And here are a few things that might help get out of the fight or flight response that happens if worry leads to fear (which Karen also indicated can lead to panic):

Find a Pose – I love Yoga Journal. You can find an assortment of poses with photos on how to do the pose and they also break down the therapeutic and the physiological benefits (i.e. how the poses can benefit the body, as well as the mind and the emotions). Look at all these poses that can help with ANXIETY. That’s right, you don’t have to do an entire sequence to reap the benefits.

Just Stop – Jon Kabat-Zinn defines MINDFULNESS as “moment to moment, non-judgmental awareness.” He claims, the ONLY MOMENT we are EVER ALIVE IN is NOW.” He also says we need to pay attention in the moment.

Meditation– no, that is NOT medication. Nice try! Here’s a simple video with a few suggestions on how to meditate. And this article alludes to “Meditation And Your 40,000-Year-Old Brain.”

Free-Write – (if you’re a painter, then just have at it with no purpose aside from adding color to the blank canvas and see what you get). This is not about quality. It’s merely about letting go! You can still pick something you might want to work on, a new poem, a specific scene for the novel, but don’t worry about using it. Allow yourself fifteen minutes or half-an-hour to just spew words on the page or the computer screen. And if you can use a notepad and a pen or pencil, let your body be part of the process.

This can be quite freeing (no pun intended). And here’s an article on a few of the benefits of free-writing in a journal.

Play – give yourself time to be playful (which free-writing is also aimed at).

“The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.” – Brian Sutton-Smith

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.” – Carl Jung

“Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.” – Henri Matisse

“Drag your thoughts away from your troubles . . . by the ears,
by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.” – Mark Twain

Let’s be honest. If it were as easy as saying, drag your thoughts away, none of us would worry for very long. But Twain’s comment is still on point. Do what you can to free your thoughts from your troubles. It’s already a huge undertaking to turn inward, to hold your breath and dive to your very depths in order to tap that wellspring, and to create.

But if your thoughts are entwined with your worries, breath-holding becomes involuntary, you flounder in the shallow end, and often never truly submerge. You never fully immerse yourself in your unconscious and let it take over. You never get into any sort of flow.

“How much pain they have cost us,
the evils which have never happened.” – Thomas Jefferson

I bet if we went back over the past year, decade, longer, and sorted out all the worries we’ve had from all the real problems that actually happened, one side of that scale would far surpass the other.

Think of all that time and energy spent worrying being used to do the thing you love.

Don’t get me wrong. I worry. Worrying is, as I said before, part of the human condition. The trick comes, I believe, in recognizing worry for what it is and squelching the anxiety before it takes over.

Here’s one suggestion I came across recently for calming the mind, emotions, body:

“Begin with the Lotus position, sitting crossed legged with hands resting on the knees, palms up. The most important thing is to remember to breathe. To calm the rapid breathing often accompanying panic attacks, focus on your breathing at first, a five count in and a five count out, but let the breathing become natural. Let the breathing set the rhythm of the practice. Eyes should be closed, listening to the rhythm of the breathing. After five or ten minutes here, the body should feel calmer.” (This tip comes from an article on “10 Yoga Poses to Fight Depression and Anxiety” which can be found here).

“Don’t worry. Be happy.” Nice song. Wise words. Difficult task. But you can do it. Hopefully a few of the above tips will help. After all, I’m hoping you get to the page, too. Speaking of which, it’s time for me to work on some new poems.

Keep after it, y’all!

The above post was taken from a longer post. You can read the original post here.


““Understand not everything is meant to be understood . . .” by deeplifequotes, “Worried Eggs II” by Domiriel, and “Don’t Worry Be Happy” by Evil Erin are all used as per Creative Commons License on Flickr.

Filed Under: Creative Writing, Creativity, Flow, Meditation, Obstacles, Uncategorized, Writing, Yoga Tagged With: anxiety, art, body, conscious, creativity, emotions, feelings, flow, happiness, Mediation, movement, obstacles, self-doubt, unconscious, worry, yoga

Yoga And Writing

March 20, 2014 By Dave Leave a Comment

Yoga Into Writing

Using Yoga As A Way Into Your Writing

“. . . the intellect is a great danger to creativity . . . because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth — who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads ‘Don’t think!‘ You must never think at the typewriter — you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.” – Ray Bradbury

In addition to the vast disconnect many people have with the world around them, there is also a disconnect from the self which is perpetuated by the multitude of distractions man has created for the purpose of keeping the conscious self from delving into the unconscious, into the subtle body, into one’s feelings.

Back in 1923, Aldous Huxley alluded to those distractions when he wrote, “There are quiet places in the mind, but we build bandstands and factories on them. . . . to put a stop to the quietness . . . All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head–round and round, continually . . . To put an end to the quiet.”

Huxley suggests that it’s not just part of the human condition to have obstacles to overcome, but that we also create them so as to divert our focus. So as to keep ourselves out of the quiet, out of stillness, which is, of course, exactly where the writer must go.

Those defense mechanisms are often set up to keep you away from your emotions, which, as Bradbury states, is a problem if you want to be creative. Yoga offers you a way out of your head, so to speak, a way to pull back from those preoccupations that go round and round, and a way back in – through the body – to your unconscious mind, to your feelings, to the very place where art is created.

Yoga is trendy these days. You can find at least one class of some sort in most communities: often in an assortment of styles and flavors, not to mention a variety of settings from strip malls to churches to dance studios, from fitness facilities to board rooms to classrooms. To some, yoga may possess a “new age” quality – perhaps due to it’s ability to help one reconnect with oneself – mind, body, and emotion – yet it is an art and a philosophy that has been practiced and espoused for thousands of years. So, you could say, it’s a rather ancient trend.

Believe it or not, even if you can’t quite reach your toes, even if you haven’t seen them in decades, a little time on the mat can help you get to the page. And it can also potentially help you transform the white space into something more, to imbue all the possibility you find there with some essential part of yourself.

Writing is an extremely rewarding endeavor, not because it isn’t work, but because it is the sort of work that brings the writer closer to her true self. She turns inward, away from the ubiquitous distractions of the world, but also away from those in her own mind.

She dives down to the darkest depths where imagination and memory spark, where her conscious focus blends with her unconscious subtle body, and she explores that part of herself she could not otherwise see except in the special light of those sparks.

This is, at times, daunting, yet also quite wonderful, especially if she is able to dive when and how she chooses.

If you develop a separate yoga practice, you’re likely to experience the positive physical, mental, and emotional effects of your yoga sessions as they carry over into your writing sessions. But if you intimately and intentionally join the two, if you unite them into one practice, the results can be remarkable.

And that’s one of the things about the retreat that I enjoy most. Showing writers how to do specific yoga sequences as part of their daily writing practice, as a prelude to the writing – whenever they might lack inspiration, or as a way back into that part of the self from which the stories are to be mined.

Depending on your specific writing intention, you can customize the sequence of poses to quiet your mind, to tap into your emotions, to slip out of the conscious mind and into the unconscious, into a creative flow.

“If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art.” – Bradbury


Huxley, Aldous, Antic Hay, London: Chatto & Windus, 1923, 123. 

Filed Under: Creative Writing, Creativity, Flow, Obstacles, Uncategorized, Writing, Yoga Tagged With: Aldous Huxley, body, conscious, distractions, don't think, emotions, feelings, flow, mind, obstacles, Ray Bradbury, sequences, subtle body, unconscious, writing, yoga

Obstacles to Creativity: Get Out of Your Own Way

March 6, 2014 By Dave Leave a Comment

Hang Gliding by Steve Slater

Hang Gliding by Steve Slater

If you go hang gliding and you spend most of your energy and your focus watching your hands to make sure you’re steering the right way, well, is it really any wonder you keep crashing into the cliff face?

You need to throw yourself into the wide open and be aware of your hands, but everything else is you responding to the air around you, to the moment.

A Few Obstacles to Creativity That Start in Your Head

Perfection (or Finding the Right Answer/Writing the Right Thing) – having a desire to do your best is a good thing. Seeking perfection, on the other hand, tends to be a pursuit that gets in the way of creativity.

There are two big problems with a quest for perfection.

For one thing, it presumes that the final outcome is already set.

Planning is important, but most creative work tends to be organic. A plan is often a springboard to other ideas. A plan can also help keep you on track/task (structure is certainly important; shackles, not so much).

The magic, though, is found in the way the unconscious self takes over. Seeking perfection tends to keep that from happening.

Why?

Well, that’s the other problem with perfection – as we create, we have our internal critic turned on. We pass judgment on the work we’re doing, WHILE we’re doing it.

We end up like the poor dog on the leash that sees the bird perhced right there on the backyard fence but the dog can’t get to it. The dog keeps running and running in circles around the post where the leash is tethered. Without intending to, we plant one foot into the soil and then we try to run, but the judging part of us is constantly evaluating, keeping us from getting into any flow.

Think of a dancer with one foot nailed to the floor. The amount of fluidity and movement is quite limited. It’s so much harder to get into a flow.

Creativity Requires Flow!

Another problem with judging while creating is that the focus shifts from whatever it is we’re intending to work on to US. I’m evaluating how I am failing to do it right (or I’m worried that I won’t be able to get it right). When the focus is on the self, it can’t be on whatever it is we’re trying to create.

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything
self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things
.” – Ray Bradbury

A friend recently told me: “Some days I can’t believe I work so hard at a project that may be entirely unsuccessful, by traditional measures.” This is a very common feeling among creatives (the traditionally accomplished ones and the newbies). For example, each time Alice Hoffman starts a new novel, she thinks, “I don’t know how to write a novel. I don’t know how to make it come alive. I don’t know how to tell a story. I don’t know what I’m doing”

My question to this concern is simple – what are you creating for? What is the deep-down intention behind that specific work? The whole concept of “success” again focuses on the outcome . . . before there actually is an outcome. The focus is so fixed on the destination that we often struggle to really get started. But if we remind ourselves, my intention is to explore this relationship and then we allow ourselves to explore, we tend to make discoveries we never even knew were possible.

I mean, Columbus, for all his faults, had no real idea what he would “discover” until after he set sail.

Critical Thinking (or being in your head too much) also gets in the way.

Art is a combination of the artist’s interpretation of something (an object, person, place, event, circumstance, emotion, etc). It is perception and point of view combined with creative expression. It’s the transformation of that perception into an idea that is communicated through the artist’s chosen language.

Critical thinking relies on logic and order and rules. It imposes constraints, and some constraints are useful for shaping a story or a painting, but not for the actual creating which requires “innovation” and response.

I love movies. And the best actors, the ones who have mastered their craft so well that you can’t separate them from the characters they’re portraying, they are the ones who use the framework of the dialogue and the scene to shape their actions, but they react to the other actors, to the environment, to the nuances of a particular moment.

The stiff, cardboard actors are the ones who just do everything as it is on the page. The “natural” or brilliant actors are the ones who embody the character and react intuitively.

When we spend time consciously thinking about what comes next, we’re the stiff actor. When we know this scene takes place here with these characters and then we just let go and see what happens, we tend to get into a flow. After we’re done, we can go back and judge it.

Ever misplace your keys and then spend time getting more and more frustrated the harder you try to remember where you put them . . . then, later, when you’re making dinner or driving to the store or taking a shower, you remember?!? Yep.

Sometimes doing some other activity can free up the creative mojo. One activity that often works is daydreaming (or “mindwandering”).

Being playful can also help. Take whatever it is you’re stuck on and imagine something nonsensical and try to create that. This can actually allow you to discover a sticking point without consciously setting out to do so.

Another way to get into flow is through movement.

Go for a walk. Do some yoga. Or thai chi. Or dance. But do so with intention! That’s the key. Use the movement of your body as a way into your writing or into your painting, as a creative tool you can rely on as part of the process. This is one way to help you get yourself into a flow.

Use your body as a way to get out of your head and into the creative process.

And remember, have fun! Creative expression should be fun. Most of the time, we don’t have fun by thinking hard this is fun this if fun. We just do whatever it is. Like Bradbury said, “Don’t think . . . You simply must do things.”


One of the reasons I like developing specific yoga sequences as a way INTO my writing is because of the way the brain works with the body. We tend to try to separate the two, when bringing them together is really a key.

“Albert Einstein said of the theory of relativity, ‘I thought of it while riding my bicycle.’ Anyone who exercises regularly knows that your thinking process changes when you are walking, jogging, biking, swimming, riding the elliptical trainer, etc. New ideas tend to bubble up and crystallize when you are inside the aerobic zone. You are able to connect the dots and problem solve with a cognitive flexibility that you don’t have when you are sitting at your desk. This is a universal phenomenon, but one that neuroscientists are just beginning to understand. ” To read more of this article on “The Neuroscience of Imagination” (and how moving your body can help with creativity) click here.


Photo Credit: Hang Gliding by Steve Slater photo above is used as per Creative Commons License on Flickr.

Filed Under: Creativity, Flow, Obstacles, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: body, creativity, Critical Thinking, Einstein, getting in yor own way, movement, obstacles, painting, Perfection, Ray Bradbury, writing, yoga

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