This is part two of our little Creative Safety duet — the part where we take everything we talked about here in Part One (sensation, interpretation, old wiring, and the body’s potential dramatic tendencies) and bring it directly into the creative process.
Because once you understand how easily feeling or sensation get misread, the next logical question is:
What does that actually do when you try to make something?
The short answer: a lot.
The long answer is what this essay is about.
And for the sake of keeping it simple, I’m going to use ‘feeling’ and ‘sensation’ interchangeably as the felt experience happening in the body. It becomes emotion when we label it a certain thing.
Why Feeling (Or Sensation) Matters When You Make Things
We’ll start from the place of things not going quite right, where the creative experience starts to feel funky. If your mind and body both feel like dangerous neighbourhoods, it makes complete sense that creativity feels hard, because creativity at its core asks you to do three things your nervous system finds deeply suspicious:
- Enter the unknown
- Stay in the unknown
- Make something real in the unknown
And when you enter unknown things, it stands to reason that you feel a bunch of things. Perhaps unsure, perhaps apprehensive, doubtful, maybe you’re afraid, all landing in your body in a very specific way.
And if these feelings (or sensations) are at all familiar, it might be the case that you’ve been unknowingly pairing certain sensations with certain meanings — doubt, danger, inadequacy, wrongness — meaning your creative process then becomes one long tug-of-war between what you want to make and what your body thinks is happening.
This is why creativity can feel so volatile. One minute you’re excited and the next minute you’re convinced you should abandon the whole thing and take up bonsai cultivation instead (and perhaps that’s a bad example because that is actually massively appealing and also looks quite challenging but let’s carry on).
Our feelings can be loud and our interpretations of what they mean outdated.
Let’s break down how this plays out in the different phases of creative work.
The Open Loop Phase (The phase where novelty sets off all your internal alarms)
Creativity begins with novelty, and we can label that novelty as an idea, a spark, a possibility. Novelty is exciting, yes, but what I want to highlight is that physiologically it is also activating.
Novelty = movement = rearrangement = feeling and sensation.
An open, feeling body is a body in conversation with the world. In this place, sensation is not good or bad, right or wrong, it’s simply your body zinging back online in response to something new.
Staying open creativity means developing the capacity to stay in feeling.
And staying in feeling means tolerating the body’s natural activation around uncertainty.
Where we tend to pull ourselves back into contraction — or into a fight–flight state — is through interpretation: the moment we decide that what we are experiencing might be concerning, “dangerous,” or not okay. And when that happens, it drags us out of a creative state of being and straight into our survival brain.
The creative ideation phase asks you to hold uncertainty long enough for something real to form. But if you’ve trained yourself into believing that feeling or sensation is dangerous and that neutrality or calm is the “correct” state of being (which is why the message that a regulated nervous system is a calm nervous system can be so harmful), then you won’t allow yourself this creative experience.
It’s not a mindset issue or anything of the sort.
It’s a feeling issue.
And in my experience, it’s the biggest reason people quit before they start.
In a nutshell: to be creative, we need to increase our capacity for feeling.
The Closed Loop Phase: The Phase Where Things Become Real
The closed loop phase is where we shift out of an open, exploratory state and into the part of the process focused on getting the thing done. It’s the less glamorous side of creativity, where the rubber meets the road, bums are on chairs, and that glorious, nebulous idea you had starts to take form.
It’s also the phase where the stakes begin to rise. This is where urgency creeps in, where questions of quality get louder, and where the possibility for visibility becomes real.
Suddenly you’re convinced your idea is terrible, your skillset is inadequate, and the old “not good enough” narrative gets a fresh gust of wind.
Once again, if we aren’t skilled at separating our internal experience from the act of committing to the work — if we can’t hold the physical nature of those thoughts and feelings in our body and keep showing up anyway — then finishing becomes difficult.
This is the phase where projects often go to die.
And not because they were bad ideas, or because we lacked what was needed to follow through, but because we were unable to stay with ourselves — with our feelings, with our interpretations, with our discomfort — for long enough to let the work unfold.
Where Does This Leave Us?
1. Get curious about what’s happening inside you
Recognise whether what you’re experiencing is a familiar pattern. It might begin with a thought or with a feeling or sensation, but if the cycle always plays out the same way, what you’ve identified is a fight–flight response.
Give yourself grace here. These patterns are persuasive and they can feel absolutely “right” but the moment you bring awareness in, you create space for choice, the space where new possibilities of experience can arise.
2. Metabolise the physical experience
If the feeling comes with a lot of energy, that energy needs to move. You’re not abandoning your creative work you’re simply clearing out the chemical cocktail of fight–flight hormones that aren’t conducive to creativity.
It doesn’t have to be dramatic: a quick walk, shaking out your arms, jumping up and down, rolling yourself out. Anything that helps move the charge through so your system doesn’t short circuit and your brain can start to think straight again.
3. Sense your body
Your brain needs accurate sensory information to understand where you are and what’s happening. Sensing is a way to interrupt habituated patterns and bring your nervous system back into the present.
I use a two-point process, which means either placing your attention on two points and simultaneously holding them in your awareness, or moving back and forth between them.
It goes like this:
Place your attention on one part of your body, really travel your awareness there and then at the same time, notice a point outside yourself, a physical location landmark.
For example: A point on the underside of your feet and a point on the ground beneath them.
Don’t imagine those places, actually travel your attention there. Rest in that awareness for a minute.
It’s a way of teaching your nervous system that uncertainty doesn’t automatically require escape and creates an opening where you can decide what to do next.
4. Build capacity slowly
Capacity isn’t a heroic leap; it’s a slow widening that happens over time. Two minutes here, three minutes there, staying with the experience just a little longer each time.
This is how you expand your creative capacity — not by forcing calm, or a requiring specific state of being to get things done, but by gently increasing your ability to stay with the sensations and feelings that arise as part of the creative process.
5. Treat feeling as information, not instruction
Feeling will always arrive. That’s the nature of a body sensing their way through the world. Your job is to decide whether it’s something to pay attention to or just your body shifting gears.
More often than we realise, it’s the latter.
Creative capacity is the ability to feel what you feel and still choose your next step
And that skill — knowing what you’re feeling and having the capacity to stay with it — is what allows you to create a life where you can show up for your work again and again, not because it always feels good, but because you’ve built the ability to stay with yourself in the process.
Your body will always have something to say. Your job is simply to learn its language, decide what deserves interpretation, and let the rest move through.
Reflections To Play With
Which phase of the creative process brings up the most sensation for you: starting, sticking, or finishing?
What sensations tend to pull you out of the ideation phase too soon?
Do you automatically interpret activation or energy in your body as dangerous, a sign of inadequacy, or a sign to stop?
When your project becomes real, what narratives or stories flare up?
Are these feelings about the work, or about old patterns still running in the background?
If you stayed with the feeling for just one minute longer, what might become possible?
What tiny practice could help you build creative capacity over time?
Would love to hear your thoughts as always!
Happy creating,
xx Jane