Michelle from London asks me: “I have a challenge at the moment of tapping into my creativity and being confident that the big ideas will flow. Instead I overanalyse everything: myself, others, why the creativity doesn’t flow, and this in turn causes me to bottle up even further. How can I let go, be content that I am creative and let the big ideas flow?”
By our true nature as human beings, we are creators. We create our world around us, we create our surroundings, our work opportunities, our relationships. We are actively creating our world we live in, through our beliefs about things, and our feelings towards things. So it’s your birthright to be creative. You are creative. You can own that statement and believe it about yourself right now: “I am a creator” and say it out loud a few times, and own it!
As you know the creative process is: spontaneous, disorganised, unexpected, unreliable, demanding, fluid, unrestricted. Which basically means, you don’t have any control over your process. As scary as this sounds, the sooner you come to terms with that idea the better. We do not have control over life either! It’s an illusion. We think we can control everything, but most things will always be out-of-our control, which makes us anxious.
Instead learn to surrender to your process. You can use a mantra to help you. Try this simple one: “I surrender my process, and I choose to let go” (if “process” doesn’t work for you, choose another word that makes more sense: thoughts, everything, frustrations etc) and repeat it a few times. Explore your practice of letting go. Discover what words make the most sense to you. E.g. is it “surrender”, or “giving in”, or “letting go”. Whenever we adopt a practice using any of these, and we learn to let go, we immediately create more space for our creation, and our sanity!
Fear and resistance comes up whenever we’re doing something new. It makes everything much harder than it needs to be. It’s like an opposing force, which pushes you back into the safety of the direction you’re coming from, the old place. All is not lost however, as resistance is GOOD! it comes up because what’s on the other side of the resistance will be something juicy and new. The more resistance you feel, the juicer the idea coming into form.
The first step is to catch yourself in the resistance, and learn to label it as resistance and fear. Next to honour it, and allow it to be here, rather than allowing it to boss you about and rule the roost!
You also mentioned the word “big” in relation to your ideas, which immediately puts pressure on yourself to have to come up with something huge (whatever your definition of that is). Some of the best creative ideas I’ve seen are simple, practical and lovely. Surrender the need to control yourself to come up with a big idea.
When you create something: a book, art, poem, blog post, it’s actually energy flowing through you, and the more open and surrendered you are, the more easily the energy can flow. An easier way to create it to let the heart lead you.
Head to the freebies page / meditations and download the meditation for heart opening.
Another two resources I’d highly recommend are these books:
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.
The War on Art by Stephen Pressfield
Good luck 🙂
