Things to do next ✨
Much love to you,
xx Jane
I remember hosting art exhibitions in my bedroom. I must have been around 7 or 8, with various drawings of contrasting size displayed on a corkboard, attached with coloured pins, teetering on a small desk near the window. No doubt at inconvenient times, when mum was in the throes of cooking dinner and dad had finally made it home after a long commute, I would corral them in my bedroom and place their eyeballs on my work.
Coins in the jar, please! No one leaves empty handed! Would you like that wrapped? Thanks for coming!
I can’t remember much about the things I made- my memory, when pressed, serves me up a cartoon dog with floppy ears, clearly the standout piece designed to fetch a premium- but what I do know is that at some point I did and then I didn’t. Draw that is. At some point, I just stopped. And it wasn’t until a couple of years back, some forty turns and then some around the sun, that anything close to drawing came back into my life.
Which makes me think, when did I have that conversation? When did I look at something I made and say:
‘That’s no good. I don’t like it. I’m going to stop.’
Perhaps not explicitly, but that was the decision.
This isn’t the end of the story of course- to end here wouldn’t be a story at all- but I have questions before we continue.
Like, when we say something is no good, what exactly do we mean? In relationship to what? What is the measure of our good-ness?
State your terms, the restrained amongst us say.
It’s a pickle we get ourselves into, this quest for good. This quest to make things we always like.
Even now, as I write to you, I find myself thinking, is this any good?
It creates a particular experience on my insides. One that makes me feel concerned. How interesting. I wonder why we do this, what purpose it all serves.
I can’t tell you what exactly changed and when I decided to begin to paint and draw. I suspect it was the convergence of many things, the main one being this:
I think I became ok with myself. Is that a strange thing to say? That I grew tired of being so concerned with “being good” or needing to like what I made to feel as though I should or could continue.
I became bored of my own neuroses. Boredom is great like that. A necessary point to reach before we say, enough of that already.
And ironically, my decision to be ok- with who I was, with getting things wrong, with letting myself have the experience of doing something I wanted that I wasn’t already skilled at- made me better at navigating uncomfortability. Of being annoyed and frustrated and just getting on with it regardless.
So, you’re frustrated? Who cares. Keep going.
(I know uncomfortabilty is not a word, but it is now because I’ve decided it is, and you understand what I mean and that’s enough.)
There’s a strange thing that happens to adults, when we’re asked to pick up on something we once loved and did freely, like make and create.
We can get angry. Afraid. Ashamed. Or even very, very sad. We can refuse and say it’s stupid and we won’t.
This can happen when you’re asked something simple like,
Please draw a bird, or
Write a 200-word story.
You find you start to panic.
Perhaps we internalize this need to be good as part of a quest for acceptance. Of belonging. Of a desire to be held close and understood. To not be left on our own to figure it all out. And then we make a category error; we mangle it up and tangle it together and take it out of one box and put it in the box labelled ‘Our Art’.
What have we confused inside of us to create this kind of reaction? How have we got to the position where the simple delight of putting pen to paper can feel dangerous, even though we might rationally understand our own reaction as ridiculous?
And could simply letting go of having an opinion be a logical way out? Could we just make that choice and not overcomplicate it?
Could we just make and let it be? Or at least withhold our opinion long enough to let the creative trail continue?
Where might a not having an opinion on what you make or create take you?
A while back, I had a mentor who was kind but uninterested in my stories. Not the magical story kind. But the stories about how we are. The stories that have unfolded that past week. I noticed that although she listened and was nice, she was uninvested in what I had to say. She was simply ready to begin the work. To, well… get on with it.
Now the response to reading this might be to say, ‘she doesn’t sound like a very kind person’, and ‘everyone deserves to be heard’ but stay with me. Because what she taught me through her okay-ness with everything, regardless of which direction they took me in, was where and how my stories got in the way.
And how ultimately, they didn’t matter. In the best possible way. That I was here to do what I was here to do, with or without them, and that was enough.
At first, I found her approach somewhat abrupt. In many ways, we’re expected to let our stories lead. To bond over what was and how we feel about it before we begin. But session after session, I let my stories go. They were still my stories, but I didn’t feel the need to carry them with me.
I put them down, and let me tell you…
… it was a liberation.
Without my stories, without my inferences about who I thought I was based on the day and what had been, I could show up for what is. And what is existed regardless of my opinion about it. What is was present regardless of my stories.
You can get a lot done when you show up for what is and just get on with it.
I suppose when I’m talking about having an opinion, I’m speaking to you of judgement. Judgement doesn’t make any sense at all to your brain, the reason being this:
When we set out to do anything, we have an intention. This is the start.
I want to make this thing, is what we say.
Then, we make that thing. The brain delights! A Thing has been made! Rejoice!
Then a load of busy elves are sent from the part of us concerned with observation and they ask,
How did that go? How far away did the outcome land from our original intention?
This is not a question of judgement. It’s a question of curiosity in its purest form. That information then gets mailed through to our unconscious brain and the elves in that department get busy figuring out how to close the gap. How to bring our original intention and outcome closer together.
Judgement- when we decide something is good or bad, right or wrong- pulls us into our fight flight brain. It pulls us out of the learning process- out of the creative process- and into the Land of Overthinking, which is a dastardly place to live and doesn’t do you any good at all.
Plus, you send a whole host of well-meaning elves into unemployment. Awful.
Discernment, on the other hand, is a decision about what to follow, expand on and allow to flourish. It holds no disdain or bad feeling. It will not make you cry or feel depressed or tell you to give up.
It says things to like,
Well, this part I find fascinating, or
Even though I have no idea why, this thread is a thread I want to follow, or
this part pleases me and so I’ll take that and continue.
Discernment is a process of recognizing your limited capacity for action and attention, and also what delights.
You can’t do all the things you want to do; discernment is the cherry picker that says yes, no and maybe.
Be discerning but not judgmental. Be clear they’re not the same.
To trust that what appeared was what needed to be made, regardless of your thoughts and if you liked it? And to carry on from there?
I wonder what would happen if you tried it…
Happy creating,
xx Jane
I was determined to write this essay really fast. ‘I’m aware’, I told whatever creative co-conspirators were listening, ‘of the predictable trap of overthinking a piece on overthinking. That is not a stick I will be snaring myself on,’ I said.
But then I got to thinking.
If there’s such a thing as overthinking, there must be underthinking too?
And if overthinking and underthinking sit at opposite ends of the spectrum, what’s the part that sits in the middle?
What’s just the right amount of thinking?
This was obviously something I was going to have to give some thought to. Which, as it turns out, I have plenty of. Thoughts, that is.
Oh god. It’s happening.
It’s probably a strange thing to say, coming from someone who’s in the business of bodies and how to balance them, but I do love a good think. I’m a very think-ey person. Not all people are think-ey people, but if you are, it’s important that your thinkey-ness gets put to good use. I consider it a Very Valuable Asset.
Because I spend a lot of time involved in brains and bodies and nervous system speak, I’m curious about how intellectual stimulation is never something that is mentioned or included. I believe that us humans, left to our own devices, and not dumbed down by products of our own creation, who convince us they are more efficient and smarter than we, are both infinitely curious and creative.
We wonder. Full stop wonder. At the world. At each other. At our own state of being. And in the ideal circumstances there is space, consideration, exploration for that wonder to be pondered. Our thinkey-ness is satiated by our engagement with the world and the energy it transmits is consumed as an inherent part of that process.
It’s generated, sent out, and then quickly gobbled up as we think, explore and discover. It finds its own balance.
Our thinking becomes weary in the best possible way, because it’s wandered many miles. It’s flexed its muscles climbing trees and wading through rivers. It’s frolicked in rambunctious conversation, occasionally peppered with hearty profanity. Withstood the elements and developed slightly ruddy cheeks. It’s then returned to a warm and comfortable house to eat and drink and sleep.
A good use of thought, wouldn’t you say?
And while this whole bit I just wrote was nothing of what I planned (writing is miraculous like that, isn’t it? You don’t arrive with the answers, you write your way to them. Or something like that) I truly think there’s something in it.
That as a think-ey person, if I spend too much time online or involved in lightweight garbage, letting my eyes and thoughts absorb mental calories full of fillers and sugar and shit, then I short circuit.
That perhaps when my thinking needs are not being met, then they go rogue. A thinking revolt. Revolting Thinking.
‘To hell with her,’ they say. ‘We ride at dawn!’
Next minute, I’ve woken up, making a coffee and I look out to see my thoughts galloping down the mountain without me.
‘Where are you going?!’ I yell, but they’ve disappeared behind a tree.
The more I think about it, the more accurate this all seems.
Look, we’re still not at the precise overthinking and underthinking part because it turns out my thoughts have a lot to say and there are other things that are important to mention. Or so I think.
One of them is this:
Overthinking is essentially underdoing. Which can both be a product of being already in a fight flight state or pull you into a fight flight state if you aren’t already there. It’s kind of sucky like that.
For example:
A system stuck in a dominant state of freeze will outsource its thinking.
What do you think? It will ask. Can you tell me what to do? What would you do if you were me?
The constant need for advice, to have someone else tell you what to do is a hallmark of the freeze.
Dissociated thinking—where the thoughts are where the body isn’t—is a form of flee. If you find yourself thinking about anything other than where you are, it could be that you are experiencing a dominant state of flight, or it’s been activated within you in response to the circumstances you find yourself in.
These are only a couple of the more common examples, but I mention them because in these instances, overthinking is symptomatic of the foundational nervous system state.
Change that- the freeze or flee template that your body is operating from- and your overthinking tendencies will start to shift too.
Do nothing to shift the foundation and it’s harder to budge the thinking patterns also.
Effective thinking (perhaps we could call this “just the right amount of thinking”. See we fell into that, didn’t we?) is a dance between the conscious and unconscious brain that goes something like this:
You make a decision. You take an action. You observed what happened.
This is the conscious part. This is what the conscious brain is in charge of. That’s it.
Following that flow, your unconscious then does what it needs to do to lay down the myelin to smooth out the neural highways and update the motor patterns, so your outcome better matches your intention next time round.
Very boring in print but this is the prescription for all forward progress. What I just described is essentially how we learn.
The problem?
Never decide and you get trapped up in your head. Your brain doesn’t have the sensory data needed from action to make an informed decision about what to do next.
And consequently, you spin around on yourself, with your thoughts having Thought Babies, and they have more Thought Babies, until it’s basically a zoo in there and you can’t tell Jack from Jill, and you become the thinking equivalent of the Titanic. Seems alright for a moment until the ship starts going down.
If there was only one thing you take from our conversation here, it’s that if you find yourself stuck in your head, unsure what to do, the antidote is to take action of any kind.
Just do something.
Anything.
It’s only by taking action that the path you seek will actually appear (I’m sure there’s a fortune cookie or a Lao Tzu or Rumi quote that says exactly that but, in any case, it’s solid).
The challenge of ‘The Right Amount of Thinking’ is that the creative cycle itself holds us in a strange paradox.
We need to think long enough to let ourselves arrive at something we could consider to be new and novel thought; to stretch our thinking and marination time just beyond the point that it is comfortable.
Why’s that?
Well, our early thoughts about a project or idea tend to be the most predictable. They are the ‘you say cat, I say dog’ thoughts. The ones where our brain is working to its most predictable connections.
We need to give ourselves long enough to extend past the anticipated and into something new, which is where the conversation around creative capacity becomes so important.
This whole Swimming In The Sea of the Unknown is the essence of the creative process, but it requires that we can stay with ourselves (literally and metaphorically) to midwife whatever creative idea or possibility is waiting for us out into the world. It can be not all that comfortable.
There does need to be an endpoint; the moment where you make the decision on what your focus or direction will be and move into the next stage, but it’s a delicate balance of giving yourself just enough— just enough time to stretch your limits and not so much that your limit twangs, springs back and hits you in the face.
In two places:
If what you’re contemplating and undecided on involves a bigger body of work, and you are unsure of the direction to go in or what exactly to commit to, take your most appealing idea and try it out.
Write five pages. Make a series of thumbnails. Sing a few lines. Make some samples.
Whatever your creative medium of choice, commit to a “taster” of the project.
Once you take action, the process itself will inform what needs to happen. It’s the action not the thinking that will work the whole thing out.
Where we are in danger of overthinking (or falling into not useful thinking anyway) is when the quality of the thinking process changes. When how we experience the thinking is different.
We typically describe overthinking as angst ridden. As thoughts going out of control and ensnaring us in tendrils of our own making. Overthinking is thinking that’s coupled with concern; concern that we might not get it right. That our decision will be wrong. That the end product won’t match up with our intention.
In this case, a process to follow could be:
And remember, when in doubt do something. Anything.
It’s the only thing that will make the next thing to do clear to you.
Do you struggle with overthinking?
How to do you deal with it in your creative projects?
I’d love to hear your thoughts (ha! An unintended pun. I do love those).
xx Jane
A few weeks back, I stumbled across a post in a children’s picture book group for budding illustrators. It said something like this:
Help! I just finished a commission for a fine art piece (I have a fine art background) and now I don’t know what to do. I want to make my picture book, but now I wonder if I should focus on my painting?
To be clear, the question was not so much about wanting to do one thing over the other but one of style and artistic voice. They felt they had to make a choice between a specific style of painting on the one hand, and a more illustrative approach on the other.
They were suffering from the idea they had to pick one thing, stay in their lane and be done with it.
To which I say:
(with all due respect).
Don’t get me wrong. I love it when people develop a signature style, and whose brain and body delight in focusing on just one thing.
I love that for them. I just don’t love that for me. Because I’m someone who loves to do different things in different places at different times. Who frolics with multiple voices and approaches and styles and who is unwilling to let go of any one of them.
What I’m looking for consistency is within the work itself. But if different pieces of work I produce have very different styles, then as long as each project as an entity is cohesive, that’s quite ok with me.
The types of questions I might ask include:
What is the essence or the tone of this project?
What style of voice would best support that?
What aesthetic approach would best bring that vision to life?
For instance: In this newsletter, I’ve developed (or am developing) a particular style that’s more playful and illustrative. It’s arisen out of a desire for something fun and free, but the constraints of “the project” has also shaped it. I realised I didn’t have time for long and detailed drawings. That I would have to find a new way of doing things if I wanted to be able to write and illustrate newsletters like this with the regularity I desired and not have it be my full-time job.
Plus, I love illustrative work with a cartooney edge. So, I set out to make my own (it’s still a work in progress, this style to me is new).
But for my other work, such as a creative non-fiction piece I’m writing about Aotearoa New Zealand’s birds, I practice a more realistic kind of art. I’ve decided that in 2026 I want to improve and understand more about painting, so I can develop my skills in that area and become more accurate in what I produce.
I love both. Both are a part of my creative voice and important to my creative expression, even if they are quite wildly different.
In my writing, I love words of many varied forms. I love to write poetry and flash fiction. I’m currently writing my first book, a non-fiction work. All different styles, all different voices. All still mine.
So if you’re anything like me, with multiple creative loves and passions to attend to, perhaps a better thing to search for instead of a singular voice or style that’s true for you, is finding a voice or style that’s true for the project. For the particular thing you’re working on.
Because it may just be that many things are true for you. And that’s what makes this whole creating business all so interesting.
Happy creating!
xx Jane
I listened to an interview recently where the interviewee was asked, if you had an hour every day to create, how would you design it?
I loved this, so I asked it of myself. And then, I asked it of the people that I work with. And whilst you might be thinking, an hour a day! The luxury! The glory! …an enthusiastic gallop towards such creative windows is not always the response that you will get.
After all, there’s a whole landscape of a life to consider before we arrive at such hours in our day. And weirdly and perplexingly, ‘time available to create’ does not necessarily equal ‘time used to create’. As it turns out, they aren’t the same thing at all.
What follows is for those of us who have the time- even if we’re talking minutes and not hours- but for whatever reason, find ourselves not using it the way that we intend to or would like.
And for those of us like me: who have children and work and caregiving roles which assume a constancy of interruption. Lately, for my mindset to be at all useful to my creative endeavours, I’ve had to rally against the rules of “deep work”- You need 90 minutes! Even one distraction will take you 20 mins to recover from!- because if I waited for those types of circumstances to be available to me, I would be getting nothing done. I mean, I’ve been interrupted twice before I got to the end of this sentence.
Which makes me curious about questions such as these:
What makes us able to access our creative minds as easefully and swiftly as possible, perhaps even on cue?
What expedites the transition out of ‘the everyday’ and into ‘creative work’?
How do we become creative ninjas, grabbing hold of those moments for all we are worth and riding that unicorn across the landscape of our most glistening creative intentions?
It seems to get to the place where we can sink into our creative time, we need to look at the many and varied reasons we argue against it. All the things that are truly getting in the way.
I’ll start with three of the top creative suspects.
This one is exactly what it says on the box. Perhaps you have the intentions to create, but when the time comes you end up scrolling / cleaning / organizing and basically doing anything but the thing you intended to do. Which then creates this wonderful loop of not only not doing the thing that you really wanted to do but feeling really crap about not doing the thing that you wanted to do.
If this is a pattern that’s consistent, you’ll find yourself left with prime fodder for an existential crisis about whether you’ve been kidding yourself that you are actually a creative person at all.
We aren’t speaking metaphorically here. In these instances, there’s something that comes up in your physical body that feels so restrictive and controlling that it stops you doing whatever it is you want to do. In my experience, having had many conversations about the bodily experience of creating, whenever someone describes it as an actual physical block (as opposed to a different feeling or sensation) it’s almost always perfectionism we’re dealing with.
You really, really want to create. Like really, really. But it feels like there are more important things that you should do. Which is usually involved to doing something for someone else. Or something mundane, like housework. That on some level, for some unknown reason known to the entire spectrum of humanity except apparently you in that moment, feel like they’re more important. They’re not of course, but in this moment the idea of giving yourself time to create feels like a selfish thing to do.
If I were Dr Creative, what’s the plan I would design for you to pull you out of your creative conundrum and help you manifest your creative dreams, or at least tinker away at them for the minutes or the hours that you have?
I’m so glad you asked!
Here’s the thing: You have to find a way in. You have to find a beginning point that meets you where you’re at so you can lead yourself into the creative experience that you want to have.
This doesn’t mean that you have to veer off track from the work that you intend or want to do, but what you’re looking for is a portal that allows you to alchemize the energy and direct it into something more creatively useful, so you can take advantage of the time that you have. And what that requires is a balancing of forces.
Let’s say you arrive to your hour, zingey and frazzled and perhaps a little anxious. That there is energy that really needs to move. You might shake up and down for a minute on the spot, and then allow yourself to walk and pace, speaking your words out loud if you have to (you can even voice record them). Don’t deny your experience; just meet it. And then seduce it in something that is more conducive to what you are trying to create.
Drawing spirals or blind contour drawing is great for this. Start by drawing a big, fast, crazy spiral and then as you wind in (or out) start to slow it down. And then speed it up, and slow it down again. Start where you are but play with the energetic experience until you have something more shapeable and workable for what you trying to make.
If conversely you feel heavy and stuck, figure out a way to move that energy around. Perhaps you do the reverse of what we just mentioned: start your spirals slow and then speed them up. Give yourself a minute dedicated to slow movements that become more progressively energized. Put on some music and use it to zing your brain cells up.
If you find that you can’t find a way to do what you planned, ask what still is possible?
What piece or part of the creative project you planned to work on suits the state of being you’re currently in?
If things are slow and you feel flat and out of ideas, draw on something you previously made that perhaps needs shaping in a different direction. What’s necessary work for this project that is more methodical, logical or mundane?
You’ll find just by taking action, things naturally start to change.
Which leads us to the next part….
Don’t presuppose you are going to feel the same way you do now in five minutes time.
You have to allow yourself to be different. Emotions and feelings are mecurial. They flux and change, ebb and flow. Even if your start point doesn’t feel that great, there’s no need to assume your middle point or your end point will be anywhere near the same, provided you give yourself the permission to be different.
Let yourself be disembodied. Pull yourself apart and put yourself back together by finding a new arrangement.
Work on the floor. Work standing up. Work and speak out loud. Work while you’re walking (this one actually is genius- it’s so hard to write or draw or whatever while walking, you’ll find the contrast makes it feel easy when you return to sitting down).
Act in support of what you want to come to life. You can’t think your way into creative action: you have to do it.
The annoying truth is that you’re unlikely to find the answer you are looking for in the same part of your brain that’s causing the problem. You have to lead yourself to a different brain space- literally and metaphorically- by changing things up.
Interrogate what you find hard and remove what isn’t necessary. Reduce the friction where you can.
Do something you know the answer to as a start point. To build confidence, begin with something you already know.
Write the answer to a question you’ve asked yourself that you’re clear about. Draw the thing you are most practiced in drawing. Start with the familiar and let it lead you progressively towards the things that are more unknown.
And perhaps the most important:
Work from the assumption that your creativity likes you, that this work that you are doing is work that’s itching and excited to be made. Understand your role is to uncover the adventure.
I read something from a famous author recently who mentioned that their process of writing was full of self-loathing. They offered this as a declarative statement, as though it were an inevitable truth, and it was widely supported by commenters as though it were the most normal thing, this depressive and sludge filled pond that is the creative process.
I whole heartedly reject this, and what’s more I believe I have a world view that supports me in doing so. Here’s a snapshot for you now:
Creativity, I believe, is part of the gift economy. What are inspiration and ideas if not gifts, bestowed on us by forces untamable and untouchable?
And in the presence of that gift, I get to ask:
What is my responsibility to these ideas, to this creating? What is my offering back?
For any ecosystem to thrive- and creating is an ecosystem like any other- we rely on mutual flourishing. We rely on each other to do well in order that we are free to contribute to the creative compost pool from where ideas and inspiration are drawn.
My suffering and certainly my self-loathing, does not benefit this cycle in any way. In fact, beyond it being harmful, it’s nonsensical. It does nothing to contribute to the community or ecology of creative upliftment.
It’s one thing for creating to be hard, but hard-ness and joy are not mutually exclusive. Just like hard-ness and suffering are not intrinsically coupled together. When it comes to creativity, how we approach it is our choice.
Because creativity is the gift. And our job is to put ourselves in the position where we are free to endlessly accept it.
How would you ultimately design an hour dedicated to creating, supposing that were available to you every day?
Happy creating!
xx Jane
What follows is A Tiny Guide For Big Creative Feels. Things that you can do if you find yourself in the midst of emotion when making and creating that threatens to derail you, or perhaps even stops you showing up in the first place. And we can’t be having that. Not with how fabulous you are. To think of you not creating is a travesty.
Let’s dive in.
If you find yourself in the midst of a big feeling, become a curiosity sleuth of your own insides. Is what you are experiencing a familiar pattern?
It might have started with a thought or with a feeling, but if the cycle your observing always plays out the same way, or if you can predict that ‘this will happen when I do this’ with a certain degree of regularity, what you’ve identified is a fight–flight response. A reflex pattern that’s historic, but might not be anything to do with this here moment.
So, it’s starts by giving yourself grace. These patterns are persuasive and they can feel absolutely “right” but the moment you bring awareness in, you create space for choice, a space where new possibilities of experience can arise.
Choosing your next action isn’t a denial of the feeling. It’s an acknowledgement of what’s real for right now (and what’s not), and an intentional decision of how you would like to move forward.
It could equally be that the experience of creating has woken your body up. Remember, creativity begins with novelty, and we can label that novelty as an idea, a spark, a possibility. Novelty is activating and expansive; it has it’s own energy. If you equate a feeling of safety with a neutral feeling body this can set off all of your alarms.
But more often than not, nothing’s wrong. This is what it means to live in a body that’s creating. All our tendrils feeling out into the world, deciding what to make next, deciding how to fuse our ideas into the creative matrix and send the result back into the creative matrix.
To feel that is your body coming to the party. This is your body being informed. It’s really quite delightful.
You are the driver of this creative showboat and you get to stop at any point. But if that’s the case, stop because you want to, not because you feel like you have no choice.
If the feeling your experiencing comes with a lot of energy, that energy needs to move. You can’t think your way out of a physical experience. 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.
It’s easy to lose your edges in the midst of big emotion. Patting or squeezing all over- from head to toe, side to side, back to front- helps consolidate your insides and ground you back inside the edges of your skin. Applying pressure to the body always wakes up your sensory receptors that help place you in the here and now, interrupting old patterns that pull you into unhelpful places and re-positioning you in the present moment.
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 emotions and feelings that arise as part of the creative process.
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.
If you can create a little wiggle room for choice, you can to decide how to move into the next moment.
I know that the second I lose my jokes and my smile disappears the situation has become dire. And even if nothing about my circumstances has changed, if I can laugh about it, something in me has lightened. A situation that once felt immovable opens up the smallest crack. A tiny space where joy can leak back in. And where I’ve opened just enough myself to let it find me.
We have to figure out a way to take the situation seriously whilst holding ourselves lightly.
What’s more, if you want to re-find your creative brain, humour is the way back.
By the way, how do you make a tissue dance?
Put a little boogie in it.
You’re welcome.
Happy creating,
xx Jane
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
I get a twitchy eye when I hear the words “listen to your body.” I realise this is a blasphemous thing to say—maybe even a confusing thing—coming from someone whose work has been body-based for the longest time. Bodies and brains, bodies and emotions, bodies and nervous systems, bodies and creating… it’s all so body-focused that surely listening to them must be an essential?
Well, yes and no.
If I think about the thing that really derails creative work, it’s not that we aren’t listening to our bodies. It’s that we are but sometimes we’re interpreting what we’re feeling in reactive, obscure or inaccurate ways because the whole “listen to your body” approach relies on two big assumptions:
… which might not necessarily be the case.
And before we carry on, I want to mention: it’s vaguely ridiculous that we’re even talking about bodies and nervous systems at all, as though we don’t have more than enough to think about already. When this animal body of ours is moving in a world that matches its physiological design, we don’t need to talk about it. When our senses are stimulated; when movement is purposeful; when we’re in a reciprocal relationship with the land we depend on and the creatures we share it with; when we’re part of a community; when we’re not embedded in systems that reduce us to units of production, our nervous system takes care of itself. As it’s designed to. Most of its decisions are automated and unconscious, the flawed assumption being that it presupposes the world around us allows for health.
But when we find ourselves living in a reality that no longer matches the needs of our animal body, well, this is when things go pear-shaped. This is when bodies get pulled out of intuitive, natural ways of being and flung into levels of dysfunction so widespread we start to mistake them for normal.
At this point, simply “listening” isn’t enough. We need to be skilled and discerning conversationalists with our inner experience. And we need chocolate. Preferably dark. (The Lindt Dark Orange is my current fixation but I digress.)
If you’re going to listen to your body, you need to understand what it means to live in a feeling, sensing body that’s fully online. And you need to know how to tell when you’re listening to something real, and when you’re listening to a pattern.
Because knowing the difference may just change your life. (God, did I just say that? So intense. But, still I’ve found it to be true. If it lands a little heavy, let’s just say this instead: the following is something that’s is very useful.)
To make sense of this, we need to look at the nature of sensation, or feeling. And so we don’t end up tangled in the weeds together, I’m going to break this down into a couple of simple points:
This rearrangement falls into two broad categories:
Expansion, a physiological opening that occurs when we’re operating from our creative or parasympathetic nervous system, and a state of being where our body is talking to our brain all day long, and contraction, a protective reflex state that occurs as part of a fight flight response.
And when I say rearranging, expanding and contracting, I mean everything—posture, organs, bones, muscle tone, breath, pressure, the whole orchestra. Even the way your body prepares for and creates movement changes.
When something is novel (meaning a internal rearrangment to our inner world that’s new or slightly outside the norm) it captures our attention and we register it as “feeling.”
The important thing to understand here is that sensation itself is neutral. It’s just a sign of something changing. It’s just your body doing what bodies do — adjusting, organising, responding.
The trouble begins when we assume that every sensation carries meaning. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Most of the time it’s simply the physical echo of your system shifting gears, not a message about who you are or what you’re capable of.
This is where emotion, sensation and interpretation start to blur together, and where creative people can get pulled off-course.
Still with me? Excellent. Let’s adventure on.
To understand our patterns, we need to understand emotions — specifically how we come to name them.
The scientific definition of an emotion is a physiological change. There’s nuance in there, of course, but that’s the heart of it.
The psychological definition is a physiological change plus a subjective interpretation. And that second part is where things get interesting, because it tells us this:
Emotions are infused with meaning. They are interpretative. And interpretation is the exact point where we can get ourselves into a spectacular tangle.
We can summarise it like this:
The sensation we feel is neutral — it’s simply the body rearranging itself in response to our nervous system state.
The meaning we attach to that sensation is not neutral. And if the sensation arises from an old patterned reaction — not from the present moment — then the story we attach to it will also be recycled, habitual, and often wildly inaccurate.
This is why “truth speaks the language of sensation” can be misleading for people whose patterned responses are louder than their adaptive ones.
Every thought you have comes with its own physical blueprint, a way it expresses itself in your body. You could consider this the physical signature of the emotion.
If you’re a human being (which I assume you are), you’ve likely experienced how a particular thought produces a predictable physical response. Maybe there’s a familiar story you play out, a narrative that loops through your head with the reliability of a broken record.
For example, let’s say you often tell yourself, “I’m not good at this.” And let’s say you’ve told yourself that again and again and again. And in response, there is a feeling.
What you’ve created is an equation, a “when I think this, I feel this” response. This is a motor pattern, or a movement pattern, if that feels easier to grasp.
You’re not just thinking — you’re activating a thought–feeling pair. The feeling arrives so quickly and so convincingly that it seems to confirm the thought, but here’s the thing:
If the thought is learned, the feeling attached to it is learned too. Neither is a signal of truth. Both are patterns running on old wiring.
One of my favourite Anne Lamott quotes is this:
My mind is a dangerous neighbourhood. I never go there alone.
And when you recognise this, you’ll also understand:
Not only does your mind feel dangerous in those moments, but your body feels dangerous also.
In part two tomorrow, I’ll show you how these sensation loops might play out in your creative work and why understanding them will change how you start, stick with, and finish the things that matter to you.
What sensations do you commonly interpret as “dangerous,” “wrong,” or “a sign to stop”?
When you have a familiar self-doubt thought (or something similarly prickly), what’s the familiar feeling that travels with it? Can you recognise this pairing as a pattern?
What sensations do you immediately try to avoid, fix, or make go away?
Happy creating!
xx Jane
Yesterday I wrote what I think was a very useful thing that was quite heavy on the eyeballs. In it, I talked about how your nervous system patterns can play havoc with your creative process, and I ended with a list of things to try when you find yourself spinning in an unhelpful place.
I didn’t want the important bits — the ones you can actually apply — to get lost in the mix, so I’ve made an illustrated version for you here, with a downloadable poster at the end if you need a little creative un-stucking.
Before we dive in, I wanted to tell you that you are witnessing me playing and figuring things out in real time. I love to draw, birds especially, and if you aren’t familiar, this is my usual style:
Fine ink pen and watercolour. I tried illustrating my newsletters this way, but my writing is faster than my drawing, and I eventually had to call my children back from the meadow where they were learning to forage and mend their own clothes outgrown in my absence while I illustrated everything. Which is to say, it was taking me quite a long time.
So I’ve taken it upon myself to learn to draw in ways that are looser, freer, and more playful for you here — a work in progress that involves much tinkering, a little bit of swearing, a good amount of my Concentrating Face, plenty of tea, and a generous dollop of giggle-snorting. A process that I hope you allow yourself also should you ever find yourself in similar circumstances.
So while we stumble and rumble and frolic along together, may I present you with Ways To Get Yourself Unstuck, in the hope that you’ll find it exceedingly and outrageously helpful. Or failing that, just a tiny bit good.
Want to download the poster? It’s all yours! 👇🏻
