When a writer or composer feels it’s time to create an often paralysing resistance can descend. It’s like fear and dread, even alarm. The excruciating resistance to sitting down and getting on with it is a syndrome that plagues numerous creators, both famously acclaimed and unknown. Why?
The answer is very connected to what a child feels at bed time when it wants to stay up and play. It’s not the just the excitement of being up late, it’s the fear and resistance of the ‘ego’ part of the child which doesn’t want to let go into sleep. The entrenched ego wants to stay in the driving seat and bedtime represents a kind of death, the surrender of consciousness, of the child’s idea of self, of presence. So bedtime, for many children, becomes a drama of refusal and strategic avoidance.
The same is true for the creator because when we sit down to create we have to let our ego dissolve and be taken by the channel. We can’t, as a mere personality and brain, come up with any real magic. We can come up with some good stuff, sometimes even get lucky with a few really good bits, but usually the magic, the genius, the high grade download happens when the thinking mind allows itself to take a back-seat and the juicy ‘Big Mind’ can come through. Great writers and composers are really glorified secretaries in the Listening. It feels edgy to let go in this way and is oddly hardly taught in Creative classes.
The moment before letting the channel take over feels like a death, both because the thinky, ego part doesn’t want to give up it’s power, its autonomy, and also because there’s a fear of the unknown, of the chaos of letting go and maybe not producing anything and feeling disappointment. It’s uncertain if it will yield any gold and that vulnerability is uncomfortable. The dual experience of this death of autonomy and the vulnerability of pessimism are what stop countless writers and composers from sitting down and getting on with it.
If you don’t mind letting your ego dissolve and not knowing if anything good will happen you’ll be much more productive.
Come to INSANELY GIFTED in London this January
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