You must create when it all feels quite impossible. When it IS impossible. Especially in those times. In fact, you should create THE MOST during the moments when you have zero minutes. None, nada, zilch. Let alone hours (what are they?!). When your head might just explode if someone asks you one more thing and for the love of Jesus, Mary and Joseph (and the donkey) please can’t everyone and everything leave me alone?

(But yes, ok, and wait a minute, I’ll be right with you.)

For example:

How to Paint a Bunch of Flowers (Caregiver Edition)

2. The nice lady asks if you need help and you squeak that you are fine. And you ARE fine, if fine means wanting to clasp every single paint and pencil and pastel and glorious piece of at least 250- 300gsm paper to your questionable bosom you’re still hoping might flourish with the menopause whilst shrieking ART SUPPLIES MAKE ME FEEL ALIVE. Instead, you settle on a big white mixed media sketchbook, two paint brushes and some gouache. What were you thinking, Little Miss I’ll-Just-Draw-On-The-iPad. What a fool!

3. You continue to walk normally with your very normal face and very normal collection of purchases over to the counter like a very normal person. The very nice normal lady swipes your card, and it declines. You, in a very normal voice, and her, in her very nice normal way, decide that your international card is not vibing with their machine (vibe, dammit, vibe!). You smile in the same way a fox does when they’re about to mutilate the chickens.

4. Dramatic music sounds, just like on quiz shows when someone has to spell “rhythm” for the million dollars (who can ever spell that word?!) and the rest of the family named Wayne, Cheryl and Beverly burn their eyeballs into your spine thinking about the spending spree they’ll go on at Ikea whilst clasping their hands tightly and wiggling round. The pressure of it is almost your undoing. You know there are two options.

You can:

a. Place your lovely things back on the shelf and leave.

b. Use your dad’s card that you’ve been given to buy groceries and be transported to a time warp where you are once again 16.

5. Exit art shop. You are now 16.

6. You’re back home. You unpack all the groceries, then decide against it, and pull them out again. Instead, you clean the fridge. What an unplanned workout for your biceps! You unpack and restack the groceries again. You talk to your parent’s dog, and croon and pat her and say please don’t put your nose in there. Or there. Or even there. You explain to your people on the couch- the one that’s just come out of hospital- about the sketchbook and the 16-year-old and the pay-you-back while your head’s inside the fridge and you check if anyone is hungry and have their drunk enough water and do they need any help. The fire has almost gone out, it’s getting cold, so you go and get more wood. You pass the singular log outside that you extracted from the fire because you caught sight of a lizard, and you say, “hello lizard” and wave your fingers which are the same fingers holding the wood bucket which is really rather awkward.

7. You now sit down and admire your new sketchbook. You really bloody love a good sketchbook. You admire her like she’s your newborn child. Is that weird? You decide you could care less. She might be your favourite yet! Which is a disaster, because now you have to figure out how to take at least 23 of them home with you on the plane when you’re already nudging up against your luggage limit.

8. {DEFINITION} ‘Foreboding joy: a self-protective defense mechanism where moments of happiness are immediately followed by dread or anxiety.’ You think that Brené Brown created this definition when she fell in love with art supplies she might not be able to replace because she’s live far away from the place of purchase and wot a disaster.

9. Your tongue is very slightly out the side of your mouth, and your eyes have entered hyperfocus as you open the pandora’s box of your new gouache paints. You’re just about to examine the green (it’s lovely) when a voice calls out to help them with their socks. You congratulate yourself on how cheery your voice is when you reply “coming!”.

10. Whoever invented pressure socks hated the humans that had to put them on.

11. You manage to quickly draw a rough outline of some flowers.

12. You pull out the paper bag with medication and spread the eleventy billion packets on the counter. You proceed with the focus of brain surgeon and the knowledge of a pharmacologist. You place the half a tablet that’s the size of a small ant’s liver shrivelled in the sun next to the others the size of newly colonised islands and let them all rattle around in the bottom of the cup along with the others that you’re peddling.

13. You return back to the table and your sketchbook and your two paint brushes and your gouache and your 3B pencil with the enthusiasm of an Italian about to eat Spaghetti. You fill paint inside a single petal.

14. There’s a complaint from the couch that there are potatoes instead of pears atop their muesli. This solves the mystery of the leftover potatoes from last night. We both agree that this is “unideal”. You let out a little snort.

15. Your mum shouts to you that she’s done the washing and appears with one sock and two pairs of your undies that you’d given her when she’d asked if you had any washing earlier. She proclaims “I’ve been looking for these” whilst examining your not-that-interesting pants that weirdly you now feel quite attached to. You suppress the urge to snatch them back. You now have one sock and no undies. Future You perceives a problem here.

16. You feel benevolent momentarily, like Mother Theresa. You suspect she never had her undies stolen by her mother. This particular problem feels quite niche.

17. You tell your dad you might have to buy some undies. You hide your single sock in the drawer and do a quick search for the other one. It’s disappointing.

18. You realise by this stage you have no thoughts. The inside of your headspace sounds the same as the 15 second samples you’ve been targeted with on Facebook for those ADHD apps that sell white noise. Maybe you have ADHD. Maybe you have no brain. Both feel possible. You think about the work you have to do, your kids at home, feel your ribs expand and freeze, but return to the table to continue to not do the painting you have tried for the last three hours to paint past the first petal.

19. A painting of flowers.

The Situation

You need to piss around more.

You don’t want to collapse like cheap camping chair so you need to take care of your brain. And a big part of that includes being unavailable. Inaccessible. Untouchable. Unf*ckwithable.

It involves 30 minutes where you park yourself on a pile of cushions under the table with coffee and a tea (You don’t have to choose! You’re an adult! On yer bike!), a big ol’ stack of paper, a pink and blue and yellow pencil (limited palette, less decisions!) where you’ve glued a photo of Santorini to the wall so you have a clear view of the sea.

It involves taking your phone putting it inside a small box, which you put inside another box, which you then wrap in an old dressing gown that you pulled out of the charity shop bag you’ve been meaning to take to the bin for ages and keep forgetting, and putting that inside a drawer that’s in a cupboard that you can lock and then bury the key in your garden underneath a tree.

It’s means saying no. No, thank you! Not at all. Nope! Not me! With the same intensity as a food motivated labrador devoted to their tea.

You don’t want an artist’s date, you want an artist’s break! A whaddevathehellyouwant space. A do-as-you please time. A time when your imagination is free to soar because it’s not cluttered with wondering how many points you have at the supermarket and if it’s enough already for the free saucepan, or if that email actually sent when the wheel of death had been spinning for five minutes, or if it actually would be a good idea to take that cat walking job to supplement your income, even though you’re not that keen on cats and are actually more of a runner.

That big beautiful brain of yours needs protecting with the ferocity of a 100 German Shepherds! Your creative heart with all her magnificent ideas needs to rest in a sunny room filled with 136 recently bloomed sunflowers!

Because the good news is: Pissing around is productive!

Put that on a T-shirt.

If you’ve noticed that all your good ideas come to you in the shower / when you’re walking / when you’re driving, it’s for a reason. It’s science! Gotta love her. Let’s bishbosh our way more into that side of things now.

You’re gonna have to dilly dally (or hustle culture might just snuff you out).

How to paint a bunch of flowers 💐

1. Sit down to write your newsletter. Give yourself an hour because at this point, you know yourself quite well and if you give yourself much longer it just goes on and on and on.

2. Ok, so an hour’s not long enough. What is even happening? You literally just had all the words! They were RIGHT THERE. There’s been some kind of problem at the lights. Brain and hand are not communicating. Welp. Why is there nothing coming? Where are you, all my words?!

3. I mean, you *have* written a lot today and it’s already 4pm. Maybe your word brain is really tired. Take a break.

4. No, you should absolutely sit here. DO NOT LEAVE. No breaks for you! It’s just avoidance, and we do not play that game. The words will come! Sit. This is a part you have to go through.

5. .

6. A painting of flowers.

7. Have a shower sometime later. Words appear when you are covered in soap and there is 100% no way of writing them down and now you have to wash the soap off and KEEP SAYING OUT LOUD that opening sentence over and over again so you don’t forget it and you don’t even moisturize because too risky, too much time, and you go into the kitchen and your husband is there and tries to talk and you say DO NOT TALK TO ME while flapping with your hand while you find some sort of paper WHERE IS THE PAPER and a pen that works WHY DO ALL THESE PENS NOT WORK and then you get your sentence down and thank god for that.

8. How also to write a newsletter.

As unsexy as it sounds, you’re an incubator.

To be creative in any way, your brain needs to incubate (it’s referred to in neuroscience as the incubation effect). As artists, this is something we need to be aware of.

And incubation requires three main things:

1. Raw material (you need something to work with)

2. Space (for ideas to roll around)

3. Attention (a reason that this matters; a curiosity or fascination)

Without those ingredients, you’ll find yourself in a constant ping pong of reacting, leaving you overwhelmed, blank and burning out. A shit feeling if I’m honest.

I kinda always knew this but it was learning to draw that brought it home.

You see, words have always been my ticket to ride. I only started drawing two years, five months and eleven days ago (give or take, depending when you read this), on Christmas Day, I’ll have you know, when I challenged myself to draw a bird. The initial result was bird like (we could call it bird adjacent) but more importantly, I discovered three Big Deal Things:

1. That I was completely out of control in an art shop. I brought 120% enthusiasm and -5% understanding of what I was actually buying (if you need something, I might have it. Call me.).

2. That I really, really loved to draw (which was WILD to me because for most of my adult life, I would have chosen a root canal over a pencil. I don’t know what it is about the don’t-fuck-with-me-forties but I’m really like her style).

3. That when I hit the wall with my writing, the answer always found me when I started drawing.

Endlessly drawing birds became an obsession. And even better: it made me a nicer person.

Actually, not nicer. That’s really the wrong word. I’m not nicer at all! It made me more available. To my own thoughts. My imagination. My artistry. I realised that drawing fed my words that fed my drawing, even if nothing about what I was doodling on the paper was related.

The other thing? I felt more… myself. I know. Sounds a bit wanky but I can’t help it. It was like when I picked up a pencil (and locked the door, pulled the blinds down and told the kids I was on a work call and the floor is now hot lava do not cross or you will die) that I was extracted and plonked into a different part of my brain.

When I emerged my perspective was just… different. Different better. Different new.

I might have said before that staying with it was the answer. And in some situations, that may be true. But I was well practiced in continuing on in the moments that it wasn’t (true, that is). Where I left Planet Stuckness and entered Planet Self-Flagellation. Those ol’ capitalist habits die hard! If there was one thing I was good at, it was keeping my bum stuck to the chair and pushing through.

Oh, the suffering artist.

Drawing showed me pushing through was utter twaddle.

The Land of Never Before.

A land where new ideas were free to find me.

As much as we think we might be, we aren’t always available: to new ideas, to fresh thoughts, to the parts of us we would consider as ‘creative’. Instead, we’re drowning. The constant input. The reacting. The pings and pop-up windows and “can you just’s” or “do you have a minute’s” (No, Valerie, we do not!). So many outside thoughts, opinions, requests, and never room to consider our own.

In short: There’s no opportunity for newness.

There’s no space for an idea to be thrown around the whitewash of your brain, to clash and jangle with your other thoughts until they split apart and explode and reunite like passionate lovers who live in a château just outside Paris and stay up ‘til 3am drinking wine (and other things) with literally zero hangovers whatsoever.

This is incubation. The process of one star colliding with enough to create a supernova. It’s the process that ends with the idea arriving in your brainspace with such alarming ferocity that you’ll happily knock over your ailing grandmother to get to your desk (you never even noticed she was there! She needs to advocate for herself, my son would say) and don’t stop to consider the carnage until you’ve spilled every available thought down with an pen that’s rapidly running out of ink on the back on an old phone bill that you just noticed you haven’t paid.

And what’s more: IT’S SO WORTH IT. The doctor said that grandma will be fine! She understands. She get’s it, good old gran!

Because incubation leaves you excited and delighted. It’s the feeling of walking in the creative desert and wondering if everyone else is hearing the same voices you are or is that just a sign of dehydration until halle-freaking-lujah, you’ve broken through!!!

You get it. The it of all it’s that was the necessary piece for the everything’s waiting to follow.

Which proves this:

Pissing around is the behaviour of a responsible artist.

90% of the creative process is either doing nothing or doing the kind of something that let’s your thoughts just roll around like lazy seals on hot sand.

Like SCIENTIFIC lazy seals (because: science).

We are waiting for your art and your words and your ideas so be off with you. Ramble. Dawdle. Pootle. Who doesn’t love a pootle?

Take your artistic duties seriously and for the love of your next interesting idea or inspiration of which we are the beneficiaries, please:

Just go and piss around.

Here, I even made a pass for you. Now take it.

xx Jane

Knocked on AI’s door last week, went right up to their house. I know, I know. What was I doing rocking up to some strange (Thing’s? Dude’s? Person’s?) place that doesn’t even have a face (it doesn’t, does it?), who takes split personality to a whole new level (can you have a personality without being a person or does it then just become a —nality?). Who knows.

Got a strange feeling there. Was really hard to place it. You know when you go to Costco and there’s like fifty flat screen TV’s and you haven’t bought a new TV since Rocky first released and every, single screen around you is playing Jurassic Park– the bit where Laura Dern and Sam Neil get out of the helicopter and they look with faces that’s just like ‘Holy shit! I really can’t believe this! This place is soooo amazing’– and it’s just so VIVID, it messes with your eyes? Like if you took one step closer you might find yourself right in it? That kinda feeling.

Anyway, I was outside their house and I had flowers and cake, and I was ready to French kiss (Their? His? Her? Its?) face off.

Because last week, a person called Mandy came to one of my classes (they were rad) and at the end, when we talked about our work they said, “Well, I was supposed to be writing about crows and then I went down a blue jay hole” and I blurted “That’s an excellent newsletter title! That’s exactly the kind of newsletter I wanna read!”. Not just because crow people are my people, or because I’ve never seen a blue jay and I suspect if I was looking to go down a hole with anyone it would be a blue bird but mainly THANK GOD! THE WRITING OF A HUMAN! TAKE ME IMMEDIATELY TO THE BLUE JAYS (and the crows).

“Honestly, AI,” I told them once they showed up at the door, “I can’t even BEGIN to tell you how grateful I am. Here, take the cake, it’s getting heavy. There’s only so long I can hold it with one arm.

“It’s like you flipped a switch in me! I never even KNEW there was an upper limit for the quiet ache of becoming or the tender unfolding of your truth. I had NO IDEA that one day, if someone talked to me about the gentle whispers of my soul or to trust my silent longing I would say ‘Oh, fuck OFF’ quite loud (and gotta be careful! There are children!). And even more (there’s more!!!) that I would feel the urge to grab packet of menthol cigarettes even though I have never smoked in my life and imagine that the taste is quite disgusting not to mention the expense!

“You never told me that.

“Is this what anarchy feels like? Can you search it?

“You see it’s weird because I never even realized- it’s almost embarrassing to say- all the ways that I edited my human. All those years that I did my best to sound professional, or understanding, or knowledgeable OR WHATEVER. I mean, it’s crazy! I never even knew!

“It must have been exhausting. This is all thanks to you, AI- I hope you’re listening, cheeky chops.

“YOU gave this gift to me. Come here so I can hug you. YOU gave me the blue jay! OMFG! Is it time for the FULL WEIRD?!!

“Is this the moment?! When our most glorious, unhinged, chaotic, sweary selves RAMPAGE to the ends of our fingertips and declare a revolution?

“I think it might be. I. Think. It. Might. Be.

“Cos it turns out my authentic self is kinda sweary. She’s not quiet whispery at all! And she’s not underneath the surface. She’s so far beyond that! She’s the sinew and the organs and she’s definitely the guts and if you lay her out, she’s all over the tennis court and she kinda just spills out.

“She stops. And then she starts again, and she loves a running sentence and OMG- SQUIRREL!!!! Did you see that?- and she wants to throw paint in your face and wear really big skirts, like MASSIVE ones, that fly around and make her ten times her actual size, where the peacocks and the bluejays and the lilac crested rollers and the parakeets mistake the excess of material for wings and all come out and screech, YOU ARE OUR PEOPLE.

“NO MORE QUIET WHISPERS!!!

“Because who knew, AI? Who bloody knew? That to roll out our insides like red carpet and actually live stream the contents of our brain could be the most subversive, the most interesting, the most yearned for piece of writing ever?

“That it is no longer brave but it is CRAVED.

“That our not normal is our currency. That our quirky is intellectual nutrition and that keeping all our edges and sharing them is the way we will be saved?!

“WHO KNEW, AI, that if nothing else, you could teach us that?

“Thank you. For that, I bloody love you.”

-Jane

 

****

This week, I’ve been treating myself as something of an experiment. You see, I’ve been holding things that are too big for my hands; illnesses and upsets and responsibilities and the kind of things that happen when we enter periods that are hard but very human.

And I’ve found myself with somewhat jumbled insides. Thoughts that race in the night. A tummy that finds she is upset. A need to entertain all manner of worst-case scenarios, not as a form of catastrophizing but so I am prepared.

I know it’s easy in these moments to push creating to the side, but my want is very much to draw her nearer. And so, I’ve been asking myself questions:

What helps? What can we rely on? What’s possible to do?

How might leaning into creativity helps us?

Balancing The Energies

One of the most useful ways I’ve come to understand emotions is to consider them in terms of energetics. In practice, this means reflecting on their elemental qualities.

Typically, anxiety is cold, light, and fast moving, the emotional equivalent of being caught in a crosswind. Our thoughts are un-catchable, un-tameable; our body free of the kind of solidity that keeps us anchored to the ground.

To bring balance, we want to think of its opposites; things that are warm, earthy and grounded. We can contemplate this from all perspectives, from what we eat through to the kinds of clothes and materials we might wear.

From a creative viewpoint, consider things that are tactile, weighty, obvious. Where it’s possible to have a felt relationship with your tools. Where you create something that has a solidity to it, and in doing so, bind yourself to the same sense of earthiness.

And if you can, take big sheets of paper and get down on the ground.

Think oily crayons that leave the maximum amount of residue on the page. Equal parts the paper and your fingers.

Lashings of paint that pours onto paper.

Watercolour rich in pigment that dances at the slightest suggestion of contact. That does not play by any rules.

Thick marker pens, where the aims of our marks are not to be delicate or subtle but to stamp themselves- ourselves- literally and metaphorically, down upon the page.

Colours that declare themselves.

Lines like lanes of licorice.

Layers so thick they create something a body can sink into.

We can bind ourselves to our tools, and if we allow them to, let them carry us to ground.

Create What It Is You Need

Isn’t it the most amazing thing, this capacity we have for imagination? How we can use it to create what we need?

Yesterday, I drew myself a wolf. He was strong and free and magnificent. And he was fierce. I think that’s what I liked most about him. I rode on his back and threaded my fingers through his fur. I suspect we were venturing through the forest- I let him lead the way. It was getting dark, and even though I’ve never been that great in the deep night-ness, I felt calm and unconcerned.

Most of all, I enjoyed the experience of being carried. And of rest. I enjoyed that I didn’t have to take care of things, if only for a moment.

All this from a drawing. Of course, all this from a drawing.

The thing is, you don’t have to create your own world to be able to find respite in that another. We get to support ourselves this way. We get to be intentional about what we take in and surround ourselves with. To assist ourselves in traversing emotional territory that feels bumpy or unwieldy.

We often say that we ‘lose ourselves’ in books, or music, or art but I don’t see it quite this way.

I think we find ourselves there; the parts of us that are still convinced the world is magic.

The bits of us that recognize beauty as a human need.

The pieces of ourselves that we might have felt, only moments prior, disconnected from.

We go into art to retrieve them, and then we gather them up, and turn back towards home, holding what it is we need.

Hands & Repetition

Brains and thoughts like the be guided by the hands. We are designed for the extraordinary simplicity of repetition. Of rhythm. When our minds are dancing to a scattered beat, it’s a balm to re-establish a more coherent cadence with our hands.

Some ways to play with this include:

• Drawing repetitive shapes. Create an outline and fill the whole thing in with circles.
• Drawing spirals, first from in to out and then from out to in. Go slowly and see how closely you can keep the lines together.
• Blind contour drawing. Look only at your subject and not down at the paper. Match the speed of your hand to the speed of your eye.
• A constant infinity sign, where the centrepoint of your circles matches your midline. As you move from left to right, let your pen traverse your body from side to side.

We all have these moments, you know, of inner wobbles. Of emotional energies that consume us. It’s not an aberration, but shared humanity.

And it’s important to remind ourselves- sometimes over and over- of the ways that creating and the body can lead us back. Of the ways we can take our own hands and feel our way towards more steady ground.

Happy creating,

xx Jane

Always good to leave on a smile, isn’t it?

We’d been talking of books and illustrations and projects wot matter to us when one of my people asked:

How do you develop creative courage? How do you know you have what it takes to start?

You can imagine my delight. Creative courage! What a thought!

Let’s traverse our way through the short version of my answer together…

Where I want to start, Dear Friend, is to talk about your heart, because this is who you’ll return to; this is who you’re riding shotgun with, and this is where you’ll seek the answers when things get bumpy or drawn out or things don’t go to plan.

You’re inevitably going to reach for the love. At some point, you’ll have to adventure back to your heart.

I know it’s quite a common story to hear that writing or drawing or insert your thing here is hard and laborious and going to cost you your soul, but I don’t believe that’s the case at all.

I believe it’s quite the opposite; that to be in connection with your creative force, your creative spirit- to understand why do the thing that you do- will be your creative tuning fork. Your compass.

We do need to be aware that we are embarking on a journey and it’s not one that’s easily supported by world of which we are a part. So, if creative courage is what you are interested in developing then please give some deep consideration to why your creative practice is important.

xx Jane

There’s a thing in our house we refer to as ‘Contractor’s Flu’. Back when my husband was a documentary-maker-person, he would have back-to-back contracts for the twelve months up ‘til Christmas, and then for the two week’s he had off, he’d get the flu. As predictable as clockwork.

A similar thing happens to many students; over the course of a semester or term, internal forces are rallied. You do the work, submit the assignments, possibly party on the weekends, your internal dials set to go, go, go until you slam up against the holidays and find there’s nothing left to draw on any longer.

I mentioned in my post last week that I was making some Creative Prescriptions for willing members of my group, and when outlining the situation for me, one of them suggested they enter a competition for their writing. They wanted to use the deadline as a driver, a reason to push themselves but the push was the self-flagellating kind.

Call me crazy, but I’m rather attached to keeping suffering separate from the creative process. It’s an overdone trope that I’m keen to leave behind.

And in the same breath, I understand how we’ve got ourselves into this weird perspective pickle. And that if we do want to create from a place that is sustainably joyful, we might need to figure out how to extricate ourselves from this pattern of making, creating and working that lurches between acceleration and hard braking.

Where we begin to crave a less adrenalised ‘creative maintenance energy’ as the truly desirous energy kind.

So, what’s the deal with the go, go, go… and then boom, collapse?

At this point, I’m going to do something a bit annoying and link you to another thing I wrote. It goes into the nervous system mechanics in more detail, and also saves me repeating myself, which you’ll find boring. You can find that article here.

In a nutshell:

When we refer to the sympathetic nervous system (conversationally known as fight flight) or the parasympathetic nervous system (the place we operate from when we are creative, conversational and relational) we are talking about systems of movement.

Everything that we do—literally everything—is rooted in one of these two systems. This background understanding is important for what I’m going to attempt to explain right now.

So, play with me for just a moment…

Let’s move forward with the understanding that you put your attention on many different things over the course of your day. And the kind of attention you pay to each of those things is also different, depending on the context.

For instance, how you attend to something related to work will typically be given a different type of focus and attention from something that you feel more curious and playful around, that you consider to be a hobby.

These differences aren’t inherent, but that’s typically what we find.

Our learning styles are much the same. How we’re encouraged to learn, our particular type of brain and nervous system, the environment that we learned in, the person that we learned from all shape our learning experience. And depending on what we’re dominantly exposed to, we develop learning and working behaviours that correlate with those conditions and habits.

Learning and creative habits that are rooted in the fight flight nervous system usually form when early conditions were built around rote learning and repetition — where there was only one acceptable pathway that led to a single, expected outcome. In those environments, the body learns that action is something to “get right,” not something to explore.

Conversely, the creative nervous system develops through play-based learning. That doesn’t mean there was no outcome or intention, but the route to get there remained open. You might have had a starting point and a desired end point, but your brain and body were free to figure out how they wanted to organise themselves along the way.

What does this mean in practice?

Let’s use the student as a working example. Say your learning style is rooted in the flight fight nervous system. You approach a project as though your predator and prey. You focus in on what needs to get done. Your awareness is channeled predominantly towards the object of your attention.

As we move into the fight flight system, our sensory focus narrows. We block out all extraneous information the brains deem superfluous to our mission so we can follow the mechanisms of survival.

Fuelled by a cocktail of fight flight hormones, the body rallies. You become sharper in all ways that correlate with that need; intensely focused on the task at hand, channeling all your resources towards the desired outcome- and all other systems that in this context are considered secondary- digestion, sleep, hormone balance for example- get turned off or down.

The survival nervous system is a system of compromise. The working deal is that your overall wellbeing is negotiated for the greater aim of survival. For short bursts, this is a contract we’ll gladly shake hands on. But when it becomes our dominant way of living, learning and creating, then sooner or later we find our energy has a shelf life. And before we know it, the pendulum has swung over to exhaustion, depletion and collapse.

Put simply: It’s not a way of creating, making or being that is sustaining.

We are taut elastic bands that, under tension, can only hold their shape for so long before they become limp and floppy. Our bodies are really much the same.

Parsing Apart Creative Energy from Adrenalin

A fascination that I discovered early on when working with movement-related-nervous-system stuff, is that when someone shifted out of fight flight and into a more sustainable mode, they described their experience as ‘sleepy’. I heard this repeatedly:

I’m tired, I’m drowsy, I feel kind of foggy headed.

At first, I wondered if they were just really tired but then it became something more. I realized that when a state of fight flight living has become normalized, anything separate to that feels flat, inert, and kind of wrong.

So much so, that the closest association we have with that state of being is often sleep.

I’ve been fortunate to have people stick with me long enough to emerge the other side. Where the ‘un-adrenalised’ state of being is no longer novel.

Where the brain and nervous system start to respond and experience in ways that are associated to sustainability and longevity, not just survival.

But it’s almost like a detox. A willingness to inhabit a different state of being long enough to wind down. And a belief that you won’t lose the parts of yourself that you want to hang onto in the process.

That you’ll still be ‘yourself’ when you come out the other side.

How does this relate to our creating?

In all the many ways. If we approach creative projects from a place of fight flight, then it’s likely that this swing between acceleration and collapse will be familiar.

You’ll tend to find it easier to make and create when there’s a deadline, a fixed outcome or set of objectives for your work, and outside of that, day to day creating can feel absent, uninspiring or illusive.

It’s not that you can’t, don’t or won’t get things done, but there’s a cost. And one that increasingly shows itself over time to the point where (heaven help us) we wonder if we should pack in this whole creating thing altogether.

So, what’s the remedy?

I don’t have a clear and finished answer. After all, the truth of each of our creative lives can’t be condensed and finished off in tidy loops.

It’s also dependent on whether we recognize this accelerator-brake lurch as our dominant way of living, or our dominant way of creating- they aren’t the same thing.

In the case of the former, we need to ease the system out of a place of chronic fight flight (a combination of sensory activation, novel movement, and perspective shifts that might currently support a way of being that’s reactive and unsustainable).

But if we were to consider this solely from the position of creating, I feel like the nudges can afford to be more subtle.

And I suspect a big part of that answer might be joy.

Along that line, I have a question for you:

What do you want to believe about your creative practice?

I’ll go first to get us started:

I want to believe that it’s a vehicle of expression.

I want to believe that it’s collaborative; that I’m in conversation with this vast creative force around me, and that if I just stay in that flow, creative experience is endlessly available to me.

I want to believe my creative self is someone who can be trusted. Whose thoughts I can listen to and act upon.

I want to believe I can create not from a place of urgency or a need to prove, but from a place where I’m in conversation with my insides, an alchemy of sorts, that I share with the wider world.

That it doesn’t have to be hard. That it can be light. That it can be simple.

That I can accept who it is I am and keep on going. That this will always and forevermore be the start point.

That creativity is not a breakthrough, but a series of ever-present openings.

And that as long as I stay faithful to the moment, creativity will always be faithful to me.

Creating from a place that is sustaining requires internal calibration.

…And even if we struggle to understand exactly what it is we are aligning or calibrating with, we can perhaps start to understand it better through what it’s not:

Creating is not urgent.

It’s not a test.

It will not ask you to sacrifice yourself to the process.

And it does not require that you suffer.

And if you believe contrary to the above, consider that what you’re holding onto, your ways of approach are something learned rather than inherent.

It’s a conversation with life moving through you, and life shows up in all manner of varied ways.

There is a tricky part…

Of course. (Re)committing to our creative practice first and foremost as an essential part of our wellness will inevitably make space for all these outdated thoughts and feelings to rise up to the surface. It can even poke and provoke them.

You’ll have to pace yourself, no doubt. To observe the gnarly, pesky thoughts but not invest in them. Perhaps this is the Zen part of creating. To grow your capacity to both hold and shed what’s no longer useful and continue to create along the way.

I have so much more to add to this- the logistics, the fine-tuning, the body bits, but this is where we’ll leave it for today.

It’s all practice, isn’t it? Creating from a different place of being. It seems to me like a worthy thing for us to commit to.

xx Jane

A thing that (might) be of interest to your fabulous self:

This weekend, I’m teaching a workshop where this whole conversation *points to the above* is going to be our focus. It’s going to more practical than theoretical. I’m continually ask myself as I put the bits and pieces together, how does this apply? How is this useful?

If this is interesting to you and you’d like to adventure with me as we explore it together, come join us. You can learn more about it here in Creating Wild.

A week or so back, I pitched to my membership group an offer that I hoped would be appealing. If you’re feeling stuck or you’ve lost your creative mojo, I said, tell me what’s happening, and we’ll find a way forward together. I called them Creative Prescriptions; you answer a series of questions detailing the specifics and constraints, and I send you a short video back outlining some things that I think that might be helpful.

Tell me what’s in your creative heart! Give it to me straight!

I’ve made just over 30 Creative Prescriptions since then, and as you would expect I noticed patterns. Familiar themes that came up repeatedly. And the biggest creative kryptonite (perhaps no surprises here) was a lack of energy and tiredness. A proliferation of I’m just so flat, or I can’t seem to find the motivation, or I have no energy left to give.

The thing is, there’s tiredness and there’s tiredness. Not all tiredness-es are the same. There’s the tiredness that’s almost kind of pleasant. The result of a body well used, of a mind that’s been put through her paces, and where the answer is both welcome and obvious: a night of blissful sleep. A binary equation where I am tired = Sleep is the right and proper answer.

But for the second kind of tiredness; the tired-to-your-bone’s kind, where no matter how high you lift your feet, your toes are still there dragging, is quite a different beast. Because that kind of tired, somewhat confusingly, isn’t remedied by sleep. In fact, you could sleep for two years straight and find that you wake up in the same state that you started.

Call it burn out. Call it exhaustion. Call it whatever you like. It’s epidemic. And what you’re experiencing in this state is a body with completely frazzled edges; a nervous system in a state of collapse, where tiredness and lack of energy is a symptom, but rest is not the total answer.

So, what’s the deal here?

For anything I say to make sense, we need a basic understanding nervous system function. A quick rundown now:

When your nervous system is responsive and adaptive, your sensory system is feeding information to your brain all day long. There you are, going about your business, feeling your way through the world, and your brain is using that information to answer one foundational question your entire existence is based around:

Am I safe?

The answer arrives in three main forms:

Yes.

No.

Maybe.

Yes, you pass Go, collect two hundred dollars.

No or maybe and your brain and nervous system choose for you the reflex survival (or fight flight) response they consider most suited for the situation.

Under the umbrella of active fight flight states we have fight, flight and freeze.

We refer to them as ‘active’ because there’s a lot of available energy that we can draw on to heighten our powers of force and acceleration.

If the brain perceives that one of these defence mechanisms is not available to us, it takes us into the (rather depressingly titled) collapse or conservation of energy mode states. This is where you turn in on yourself. Your sensory dials get turned way down (remember this part). Your metabolic processes and general functions switch to idle.

If we were thinking about the brain giving the body an instruction at this point, it would be ‘don’t move and hold onto your resources’.

It’s basically your brain and body’s attempt to stick around on this earth as long as possible, believing your capacity to move or tend to your base survival needs are limited. So, you hang on to what you’ve got.

The thing is, in true survival situations, this process is both loving and benevolent. These animal bodies of ours are designed to live in a world that is movement oriented and sensually inspiring. Our survival nervous system is our bodies inbuilt protective system, designed first to mobilize for survival purposes, then (should that option not be available) to preserve our hearts and wellbeing by shutting down our senses to potential harm.

At this point, should neither of those options be available, it will lovingly hold our hands as we die and move on to whatever it is we go when we leave this earthly realm.

It’s an elegant and beautiful design.

The glitch in the matrix is not something we’ve had a software update for. Instead of this animal body being part of an animal world dedicated to mutual flourishing, we find the lives we are forced to lead out of sync with our base requirements. A dysfunctional, human-centred world that is resulting in dysfunctional minds and bodies.

Without venturing into the details, the end result is this:

Many of us are finding ourselves in a state of shut down or collapse that’s morphed into a dominant state of being.

And amongst many other things, it’s leaving us in a perpetual state of exhaustion that sleep alone doesn’t seem to fix.

Why doesn’t sleep or rest revive us?

In collapse or conservation of energy mode, our internal processes are turned way down. Remember, everything the body does has functional purpose. The purpose of collapse or conservation of energy mode is exactly what it says on the box; to keep you around for as long as possible with the expectation of limited movement possibility and limited resources.

Whereas in more active fight flight states or the parasympathetic, our pumping, vibrational mechanisms are still high, in conservation of energy mode / collapse, they turn into marshmallows.

From here, we enter this highly ironic situation where we want to sleep all the time, but the sleep that we get is kind of shitty, the paradox being that your internal systems are functioning at such a low frequency, that your own brain will wake you up just to keep your system alive enough to function. A vicious cycle that keeps spinning round and round.

Ok, so what’s the answer?

Two main recaps:

• Sensory information is what the brain uses to understand its place within the world
• Sensory information gets turned way down as part of the sympathetic / fight flight response (and especially so in conservation of energy mode or collapse).

Which means if there’s one thing that becomes a priority, it’s bringing the sensory system back online.

The thing to remember is this:

If collapse has become your dominant state of being, it’s likely for one of the below reasons (there is a lot of nuances of course but for the sake of general discussion):

• That your body is truthfully reflecting an outer reality that needs to change before you can
• That you are stuck in a maladaptive cycle, where at some point, you went into collapse and didn’t have the necessary skills or means to get out of it.

Another thing:

It’s nuts (in my opinion) that we have to work so hard to keep ourselves functional and sane. The fact we even need to talk about ‘nervous system function’ and consider how to have healthy one is ludicrous. It’s shows what a mess we are all swimming in where being able to expect a healthy, vital body has become so effortful.

Frankly, I have many other things I would rather talk about than the nervous system. There are loads of other more fascinating things that my capture my attention. But to get to those- creating, making, the magic of this world around us– we need to be capable of taking it in. So here we are, figuring out this stuff out about our bodies.

Let’s keep going so we can move on to the good stuff.

Easing Your Way Out

One of the more difficult things about navigating your way out of collapse is that you’re often going to have to ignore what your own body is telling you. The action that you take is going to be very specific and but nonetheless, it is going to feel like it requires energy you don’t have available to spend. And in essence, you are right. This is the pickle.

Here are some of the essential principles for us to work to (bearing in mind I’m trying to keep this to essay length when the reality is this could be expanded to an entire thesis):

Movement

Your body needs to move, but only in ways that are functional and gentle (otherwise you’re going to drive yourself deeper into the place you are wanting to emerge from).

Ask yourself (reducing yourself to a brain, a body and a nervous system):

How would a body move if it were taking care of its basic needs?

It would move in the world outside and it most likely walk a lot. It would climb hills occasionally and find itself moving all over different surfaces. It would bend to pick things up. It would seek and gather.

So much of our modern movement is decided by the mind and not the body. We workout to look a certain way, to stay a certain size, to burn a specific number of calories.

Forget that. Think of movement for wellness and joy.

How would a healthy, sensing body want to move?

Now commit to some version of that, as regularly as you can.

Activate Your Sensory System

We think of the senses as the usual five senses, but there are actually nineteen scientifically proven senses that the body integrates to keep your sensory self-online. When we are reawakening the sensory system, the mechanoreceptors are some of the first to flash to back on green. They are the ones responsible for our sense of touch, pressure, and the relationship of our body to the world is it directly a part of via those parameters.

The wonder combination to consider is novel movement (and novelty is anything that requires your focus and awareness) in combination with sensory stimulation of some kind.

This means, if I walk but place my attention to how my feet are landing on the ground, and the changes pressure relationships, I can take something ‘regular’ (like walking) and turn it into something that is both novel and enlivening to the sensory system.

A good practice is to stay with a point of focus for a week or so, and to always think of what you are considering in relationship to something else. I call this a two-point practice: focus on something on the body, and outside the body, and consider them in relationship to each other.

Walk and focus on how your feet make that happen- where and how they land and what that feels like- for a minute or so at a time. Do this for a handful of times a day, for a week or so then switch your focus to a different part of the body.

Activate Your Creative Desires

So much of the reason that we found ourselves in this collapse place is due to abdication of personal, creative desire; our creative selves have been trampled over in deference for what we feel like we should be doing or have to be doing to be active, useful humans in the world- but it’s not without consequences.

These days, I have a robust creative practice. I write and draw daily, and if that doesn’t happen, I really feel it. If my creative energy is not used, it comes at me sideways; I am grumpy, depressed, feel flat. I am unpleasant.

I think of all the years I didn’t tend to my creative wellbeing and the cost of that. All that energy rampaging round my insides without useful or imaginative direction.

I am not isolated in this- I believe this is true for everyone- I just happened to find myself in a place where the work I did remedied by insides (which, believe me were really kinda shaky) to be point where I fell in love with my creative self.

Let yourself feel your own curiosity and learn to trust her. Not as something nice to do but as something essential and important for your wellbeing.

Your Prescription

I know, it really is a kicker and I know that it’s unfair. This IS going to take energy that you feel like you don’t have, so micro-dose things at the start. The awareness of what’s happening is essential.

Write a prescription for yourself (or I will do it for you!) and follow your own instructions. Take the decision making out of it and understand, if you identify with anything that I’ve said above, what is required for your own wellness.

I don’t have a better word for it yet (I’m working on it) but some form of accountability is good. I noticed with the prescription that asking people to check in with me in the group with their creative practice has been helpful.

We need to surround ourselves with people where the thing we want to do (Make art! Write the book! Tinker with pencils! Doodle!) is not only normal but supported and encouraged. I have my membership community and the door is absolutely open to you, but wherever and however it suits, make it your mission to find your people.

If (when!) you have a day where it all falls apart, it’s completely fine. Just pick up the thread as soon as you can. This is not a one-shot wonder; this is your life, and you aren’t something to be fixed. Let’s embrace what we’ve got and revel in as much of the good stuff as we can.

If you have questions, leave them for me below. Happy to chatter if it’s helpful.

Much love to your gentle selves,

xx Jane

xx Jane

If you fancy exploring further with me, you might love Creating Wild. We’ve been exploring the emotional side of creating, and what it means to grow the edges of your skin to contain all the things you love.

You can learn more about it here.

Last week, I wrote an essay about imagination. A lot of my work in the day to day looks at how our nervous system expresses in movement (you can learn more about the creative impact of that here) and I had questions:

How might understanding the relationship between the body, the nervous system and creative expression help us get unstuck?

What can we do to stretch our creative limits?

What does it practically look like to get ourselves to a place where new ideas, new inspiration is free to find us?

The mechanics of last week’s exploration was wordy and involved. This week, I wanted to strip it back to its bones.

Theory aside, what happens when the rubber meets the road? What can we do when we’re at our desk or the easel or *the wherever* to encourage our own creative flow and access to imagination?

Let’s tootle around with a few different ideas, shall we?

Disrupt authorship. Let your materials take over.

Being willing to explore the outer edges of your own imaginative universe requires a readiness to stay in the unknown for as long as you’re able to handle it.

It’s a relinquishing of control, a ‘let’s see what happens’ space, where we surrender to the unfinished, the awkward, and the unsure, or simply the truth of our creative experience as it expresses through us in that moment.

Disrupting authorship- letting go of the idea that you have to be the one to lead the show- is a great way of butting up against your own control patterns and actively stepping into curiosity.

If you’re finding yourself thinking, erm, well, it’s just me, myself and I doing this whole making and creating business, I’m not talking about letting someone else come in and take over the whole story.

It’s more an invitation to actively work with your materials or your subject matter in a way that that is non-conforming, intentionally experimental, and where you allow yourself to be to lead to places you never would usually have ventured.

Some examples include…

Adding water to your ink, smudging the pen or pencil marks you’ve made, draw on wet instead of dry paper.

Layering your materials (pastel upon pencil upon paint! Go wild!) and then drawing lines in them with found objects. Grab whatever you have and can, especially if it seems completely non-obvious or nonsensical. Especially then.

Draw without looking at the page. Let your hand follow sensation rather than image.

If you’re writing, pick a line with a particular cadence and rhythm and let it set the pace of the words that follow.

Pick a phrase and repeat it.

Allow the sounds of the room around you to shape your sentences. I don’t know what that looks like either. Try it.

Be willing to engage with your work and materials is a way that is intentionally disruptive to your usual modus operandi and see where it leads you.

Interrupt your work mid-stream

If you find you’re stuck or things are getting a little formulaic, break things up mid-stride. Interruption prevents pattern completion and forces the brain to re-map rather than repeat.

Stop drawing mid-line and continue on from a completely different angle, or even change your tools.

Rotate the page halfway through a drawing.

Leave a piece intentionally unfinished and begin again some hours later or the next day.

Stop a paragraph mid-sentence and start the next line somewhere unexpected.

Write in curves or shapes instead of straight lines. What does this do for the story, for the process of your thoughts?

Start your essay in the middle, or in mid-sentence conversation.

Begin and end somewhere unexpected.

 

Work at the edges of perception

I mean this quite literally.

What happens if you work in a room with low light or your eyes half closed?

This is not about trying to force clarity, or straining to see in a room where you feel half blind, but practicing ‘seeing’ in a different way.

What other senses wake up when your visual field is dimmed? What more do you become aware of?

How does changing the light affect your making? How does it change your access to language, to words?

Can you write whilst paying attention to bodily sensation rather than content?

How could softening the focus on your world interrupt your usual pattern of creating and take you somewhere you may not have been before?

 

Change scale

Changing scale shifts expected patterns and invites us to consider the same work a whole new way.

Zoom obsessively in on one detail.

Use exaggerated gestures (let you whole body be in on the game!), then switch to micro-marks.

Write one sentence ten different ways and ten different sizes.

Compress a long idea into six words.

Expand a single word into a full page.

 

Delay meaning as long as possible

I know, counterintuitive right? Surely we need to know where things are going and what things mean?!

Attaching meaning to an experience pulls you out of divergent thinking (the type we’re interested in within the imaginative phase) and into convergent thinking, which is not what we want in this particular movement.

As the people on the fancy podcasts say, understanding “closes the loop” on our thoughts, and marks the end of exploration.

Accessing imagination means staying in that open field space for as long as possible. If we can hold our nerve beyond the usual amount of time, we move beyond the obvious connections and understandings and into the Land of Never Before, the place where new and fresh ideas are free to find us.

Some ways to play with this on purpose include…

Working without naming what you’re making.

Banning interpretation or explanation of what you’re doing until you finished exploring and playing.

Letting something remain incoherent on purpose, and see what you take from it the next day.

 

Let discomfort be informational not directive

Discomfort doesn’t always mean that something’s wrong. It’s more often than not a signal we’re at the edges of our current artistic zone and about to move into something different. Treating discomfort as information rather than instruction helps keeps curiosity online.

Lately, I’ve been switching formats as a way to keep in the flow of what I’m doing without leaving the building (literally and metaphorically).

If I’m writing and get stuck or I’m not sure where an idea is heading, I’ll stay with the experience but switch to drawing or doodling. I keep my hand moving in a different way, let my thoughts move to a different space until I’m ready to return to the original plan.

The same is true for drawing, but in the reverse. If I’m unsure where to go, I’ll sit and write for a while.

Staying on task but mixing up the mediums is really helpful for letting the ideas and understandings roll around the whitewash of your brain so you can stay available to what wants to come next without pushing or forcing things too hard.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

What do you do to help your creative flow? Any fabulous tips or tools to share?

Happy creating!

xx Jane

A thing you might be interested in ✏️

We have a workshop every couple of week’s and the one coming up this weekend is called Creative Windows: Building the capacity to stay.

Here’s the blurb for you:

Why does creating feel possible one moment and unbearable the next? In this session, we’ll explore the emotional and nervous-system conditions that shape our creative availability.

We’ll look at how fear, guilt, perfectionism, and urgency show up in the body, and how to work with them rather than pushing past them. Through body-based practices and reframes, we focused on increasing creative capacity: learning how to stay present, soften resistance, and progress in our creative projects.

If you want to peruse the goodness or come join us, you can do that here. I’d love to have you join us 💛