A Spiritual Solution to Writer’s Block

October 29th, 2009 | Author: Guest

Chris_Edgar You’re probably familiar with a bunch of techniques for getting through moments when you’re feeling creatively empty. Some suggest forcing yourself to write (or sculpt, or whatever activity you’re doing)—if you just get something on paper, some say, inspiration will strike. Other common examples include free writing, listening to certain kinds of music and mind mapping.

If these techniques work for you, more power to you. But if you’re still finding the creative process agonizing, I invite you to try another approach. The novel exercise I’ll give you for dealing with writer’s block is this: just sit there.

In other words, next time you run out of ideas, try breathing deeply, relaxing your body, and simply allowing that creative emptiness to be, exactly as it is. Hold your attention on that blank sensation until it dissolves.

Welcoming Writer’s Block

What I suspect you’ll find is that the emptiness will fade within a few minutes once you choose to let it be. And when that blankness is gone, in its place you may discover some of the best ideas you’ve had all day, all week or even all month. I think you’ll be surprised at the results.

The power of this approach lies in its willingness to treat writer’s block as a friend rather than an enemy. Like meditation practice, this method has us let go of the judgments we usually make about our experience—”this tightness in my shoulder is bad,” “the vacation plans arising in my mind are good,” and so on. When we drop our resistance to what we’re experiencing, our suffering falls away.

Creative blankness is like any other thought or sensation—as long as we don’t grasp onto it or resist it, it disappears quickly. As Buddhist monk Martine Batchelor writes in Meditation for Life, “if you just let your thoughts come and go, and do not stick to them or magnify them, they will soon disappear of their own accord.”

Beyond “Fighting or Fleeing”

Of course, this isn’t the way we usually relate to writer’s block. Most of us, I think, treat creative emptiness like any other experience we’d rather not have—we either fight it or flee from it. That is, we either shame ourselves for being uncreative and try to force ourselves to come up with something, or we turn our attention to something else, hoping we’ll get inspired later.

At a deeper level, I think, this is because blankness can be a scary experience to confront—particularly in our culture, where we’re usually surrounded by noise and we spend little time in silence. We’d rather do practically anything than stare down the abyss of an empty mind.

Unfortunately, as I’ll bet you know firsthand, the normal approach often falls short. If we try forcing ourselves to produce, we usually just get frustrated, or we end up churning out mediocre work that we scrap in the end. And we won’t create anything, of course, if we take our attention off our work.

We might think of writer’s block as a test of our faith in our intelligence and creativity. If we resist the emptiness, like anything, it persists. But if we trust that we have the resources to excel at whatever we’re doing, and that the emptiness is a chance for us to show our trust, the inspiration we want will arrive. As psychologist Nancy Napier writes in Recreating Your Self, imagination operates best when we “think of the blankness as a creative void, a place where your unconscious takes its own time to give you whatever awareness it wants you to have.”

More about Chris Edgar….
Christopher R. Edgar is an author, speaker and personal coach who specializes in helping professionals transition to careers aligned with their callings, and find more satisfaction and productivity in what they do. Chris’s new book, Inner Productivity: A Mindful Path to Efficiency and Enjoyment in Your Work, uses insights from mindfulness practice and psychology to help readers develop focus and motivation in their work. You can find out more about the book and Chris’s work at www.innerproductivity.com

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Posted in Guest Blogs | Tags: conscious creators, creativity, inspiration

Jannie Funster:

October 29, 2009 at 1:58 PM

YES!!! This is great to add to my own personal writing block philosophy of “it’ll pass.”

Just let it be. Acknowledge it. Give it a big ol’ hug, then let it fade like morning fog into the sunshiney day.

Chris Edgar:

October 30, 2009 at 9:39 PM

Hi Jannie — yes, “it’ll pass” sounds like a great way to sum up this attitude toward writer’s block — if we can really take that on, it doesn’t have to be so painful.

Marie:

November 4, 2009 at 8:05 PM

Hi, Chris -

I have learned to allow enough lead time before a creative project is due . . . mainly because I know I have to “sit with” the subject matter for days or even weeks before an inspired picture or flow of ideas quietly appears at a moment in time I’m not looking for them. Then, the whole creative process becomes relatively easy for me because it feels like the insight is coming from a greater power.

Thanks for the post!

- Marie (Coming Out of the Trees)

November 9, 2009 at 7:17 PM

Hi Marie — yes, I can definitely relate to that experience of insight coming from “somewhere else” — if it is part of us, I think, it’s definitely different from the part of our minds that’s active most of the time.

Living Trust Will:

November 12, 2009 at 12:29 AM

That’s so true. Forget the worries and live your life continuosly. Be happy and contented on whatever you want to do in this life. Cheers!

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A Spiritual Solution to Writer’s Block

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