May 19, 2026 • 40 mins
Do you ever feel like you’d be more creative if you were simply more disciplined?
Like you need to get your life together to get some creative work done?
That if only your proverbial ducks were in a row, then you’d have access to the creative genius you’ve always imagined?
What if the opposite is true?
In today’s episode, I explore the relationship between creative resistance (procrastination, laziness, lack of discipline, being “stuck”) and creativity itself.
And my take is this: maybe you don’t need to be more disciplined to be more creative. Maybe you need to accept the power of procrastination for what it is: an open door to your creative longings.
Join me to unlock a radical acceptance of your laziness, your messiness, your procrastination, your avoidance, your hesitation and even your self-doubt.
What if they all belong?
Buy Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way here.
Listen to David Whyte’s series on the creative path here!
Send Ally an email: mystory@writeyourstory.com
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story pipecast.
Good job. Really pick up the pieces of your life,
pull them back together with the word you write. All
the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start
too fun When you write your story, you get the
words and said, don't you think it's time to let
(00:23):
them out and write them down and cover what it's
all about and write, Write your story. Write you write
your story.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to talk about creativity and resistance, or creativity
and reluctance, or creativity and avoid hints. However you want
to name this. The essay that I will read in
a little bit calls it procrastination. I've heard people call
this the lack of discipline. I hear people call it laziness.
(00:59):
However you want to qualify this term, it's really creativity
and the lack of creativity, creativity and the avoidance of creativity,
creativity and not creativity, and the contrast between these two
things feels quite stark. This has become extremely clear to
me in the last I don't know month or two
of my life because I feel like I'm in a
(01:20):
bit of a re emergence to my creativity. I have
always been a creative person from the time I was born.
I can trace it back to when I was very,
very little. I've had moments in my lifetimes, in my
life when I have been deeply, deeply in touch with
that creative part of myself and I felt really connected
to something bigger. I've felt connected to that deep well
of wisdom that lives within each one of us. I
(01:42):
felt connected to my surroundings, to my community. And there
have been other times in my life where I've felt
very disconnected. I have felt like a shell of myself.
I felt like I'm just going through the motions. I
felt like I'm kind of alone in the world. No
one's really there for me, even with all evidence to
the contrary, the feeling like I'm help, I'm alone. I
don't have anyone, I can't change my circumstances. That feeling
(02:06):
has popped up at many different parts in my life,
and it's always when I'm disconnected from my own creativity.
And one of the reasons that I want to talk
about this today, perhaps the most important reason, is because
I'm being reminded as I'm coming into this time of
re emergence in my life, that creativity is not just creativity.
In my view, and I believe this to be true,
(02:26):
that creativity is spirituality. It's not just creativity. Is like,
there's creativity and then there's art or being artistic. Not
every person is artistic. Not every person wants to, you know,
sit down and paint a painting, or draw a drawing,
or even write a book. If you're listening to this podcast,
you may have some of those aspirations in your life.
But I would not necessarily call that creativity. I would
(02:49):
call that being artistic. Every single one of us is
linked to this concept of creativity because creativity is about
being deeply connected to the most meaningful part of life.
Creativity is about being connected to the larger energy that
holds us all together, the energy that brought us here.
This is not about a religious narrative or about believing
(03:11):
us certain theology. It's just there is something, a source
from which we all came that connects us all deeply
to one another. There is that source that lives within you,
that speaks to you if you let it, that bubbles
up from inside of you. And compels you to do
whatever it is you do in your life. It compels
you to go and love people, it compels you to
(03:33):
go build a business, it compels you to write a book,
it compels you to whatever it is that you're doing today.
That inner source of direction and wisdom, that compass that
lives within you is what is directing those actions. And
so being connected to your creativity isn't just about like
making art, although making art in many ways can wake
(03:55):
us up to our own creativity. It's not just about
creating art though. Being connected to your creative is about
being alive to what is in the world. The trees
are deeply creative. I'm looking out my window right now
at the trees just full of leaves at the beginning
of the summer season, you know, waving in the wind.
These trees are deeply, deeply creative, more creative than we
(04:17):
would ever know how to be. They are following the
blueprint of who they were made to become without having
to think about it at all. They don't have the
mind to get in the way, and so they are
just expressing themselves unendingly and without reservation. The trees know
nothing of resistance or procrastination or lack of discipline or
(04:38):
lack of creativity. They just absolutely are what they were
created to be. And when I talk about creativity, that
really is what I'm talking about, is living into who
you were created to be, with no resistance, no reluctance,
no hesitation, no procrastination. And to feel the contrast between
these two things, I have felt it quite strongly, because
(04:59):
you know, if you've been around here for a while,
you know that the last six years have been extremely
challenging in a bunch of different ways for me and
my family, and I have felt at many different points
in the last six years very disconnected from my creativity.
I've felt like a shell of myself. I felt like
I'm just barely surviving. I have felt like I was
drowning at points, or like gasping for air. I have
(05:19):
felt that I was in survival mode. I have just
been going through the motions. I have felt disconnected from
my own power and my own instinct and my own wisdom.
And then in the last six weeks or so, I
first of all decided to pick up the Artist's Way
again and start going through Julia Cameron's program. It's like
a twelve week program to reconnect you to your creativity
(05:41):
and your spirituality. In fact, Julia Cameron speaking of which
this is not the first time I've brought her up,
but Julia Cameron is the one who reminded me what
I knew about this connection between creativity and spirituality. She
probably is the one who taught me about this connection
in the first place. It was probably the origin of
that idea that I've carried within me for so many
(06:02):
years now. And as I'm re visiting this program, I'm like, oh, yeah,
your creativity is your spirituality. It's not just about making
content on Instagram. It's not just about writing a book.
It's not about publishing something. It's not about getting your
art out there. Those things are all well and good,
but reconnecting to your creativity is not about getting your
art out there. Reconnecting to your creativity is about reconnecting
(06:25):
to your vitality, to your essence, to the very breath
that just fuels your life. And so for this reason,
we all need to be reconnected to our creativity. Whether
you think you're a creative person or not, now is
the time to reconnect to your creativity because, by the way,
we're also moving into this era where you've got two
(06:49):
opposing or seemingly opposing energies at play. You have one
energy that is the absolute insane acceleration of technologlogy with
the introduction of AI artificial intelligence, and you have artificial
intelligence and this acceleration of technology just taking off at
(07:11):
astronomical speeds, and none of us really even know what
to do with this, right like, we're just like, whoa amazing?
What does this make possible? And then also like, this
is uncharted territory. What pitfalls could this create for us?
What are some ways that we could kind of fail
before we even know that we've failed. So you have
the insane acceleration of technology happening right now and what
(07:34):
seems like infinite possibility on that front. And then you
also have this other energy that I'm feeling very distinctly
of the younger generation in particular, but not just the
younger generation having this resistance to the acceleration of technology
and wanting to go sort of analogue, wanting to create
(07:54):
a nineties summer for our kids. Less activities, less you know,
running around camps, fewer expenses, and just sort of like
playing in the backyard like we did when we were
growing up in the nineties. If you're listening to this
and you're like thirty five or older, that's what you
remember doing in your childhood. You weren't signed up for
a thousand camps. Maybe you went to one camp, but
(08:14):
you were just kind of like wandering your neighborhood for
the whole summer with nothing to do, getting to just
like bathe in your own boredom and your own imagination
and your creativity in the white space. And you see
that the younger generation, now Gen Z in particular, and
maybe even Gen Alpha, are going like, oh, we don't
we don't get that anymore because we're all on TikTok
(08:36):
and Instagram and all the platforms, and so there's a
hunger during this time to go back to a more
analog way of doing things. We're wanting to be off
of our phones. We're wanting to have real experiences. We're
wanting to connect with people. We don't want to be
on zoom. We want to go do real things in
person with people we want to be We want to
(08:58):
live a life that's simpler. We want to move more slowly.
We want to you know, like wake with the light
and go to sleep with the light. We're just craving
I think so many of us a deeper connection with nature, which,
by the way, is your creativity talking to. That is creativity.
Your craving for connection with nature is your creativity. Now,
(09:21):
despite the fact that all of us are created, some
of us are deeply disconnected from our own creativity. Your
longing for that creativity, the longing for the connection with
nature is your creativity speaking to. So that longing is
your connection to your creativity. And I'll say, over the
last six years, I have felt deeply disconnected from my creativity,
and deeply disconnected from in moments, not in every single moment,
(09:46):
deeply disconnected at times, from what makes life meaningful, from
a sense of power and agency, from a feeling of
connectedness to others in the community, like synchronicities, for example,
like feeling like, oh, my life is ordered and it's meaningful,
and I bump into someone and there's like a refreshing
exchange between us and we're all connected in the world.
(10:07):
I have not felt that connection readily and often in
the last six years. Then I pick up Julia Cameron's
The Artist's Way, I start moving through the program. I've
done the program, I don't know a dozen times in
my life before, so I know the drill. So I
immediately start doing the program. I'm reading through the book,
I'm doing my morning pages, and all of a sudden,
(10:30):
I start to feel those little synchronicities again. I start
to feel connected again. I'm reminded it's like breath moving
through your body, Like, oh yeah, this is what it
feels like to feel in touch with my own power
and agency, to feel in touch with the threads that
tie us all together. This is what it feels like.
And it really isn't about writing a book or creating something,
(10:50):
creating content, or being on Instagram or whatever. It is
about feeling deeply connected to yourself, deeply connected to the
energy that ties us all together, the place from which
we all came, and deeply connected to those around me.
So that's what creativity is really about. I pick up
Julia Cameron's program, I'm moving through the program, and all
of a sudden, I'm like, oh, yes, this is what
it feels like to breathe. As I'm moving through Julia
(11:14):
Cameron's program, I get an email in my inbox. I'm
on David White's email list. I've read his poetry to
you on this podcast before, and I will read an
essay from David White today called Procrastination that is a beautiful,
beautiful essay. This man is. If you don't know David White,
he is an absolutely acclaimed, marvelous poet who is truly
(11:35):
one of the great geniuses of our time. I believe
he speaks many different languages. He is more well read
than anyone I have ever learned from or listened to.
He is an insanely prolific poet. He's written so much poetry,
and he also memorizes poetry in a way that I've
never known anyone to be able to memorize anything. He
(11:56):
can regurgitate these poems that are just like you know,
classic poems or very long poems, or his own poetry,
poetry of other people in response to a question, like
if he's teaching a creative workshop or something, someone will
ask a question and he will like spit off out
a poem by Wordsworth and be able to recite almost
the entire thing or the entire thing from memory. It's
(12:18):
truly truly remarkable. But he's an amazingly creative person. His
creative output is a reflection I believe of how deeply
connected he is to his own creativity. And I'm on
his email list, and so I get an email in
my inbox one day about a three week creative program
that David White is doing over Zoom, and I'm instantly like,
I want to sign up for this. This is, again
(12:39):
another sign that you are connected deeply to your creativity
is when you have those moments where you see an
opportunity and you know immediately and intuitively that this opportunity
is for you. So this is another reflection of coming
back into contact with that deep knowing in myself, that
deep well of It's like, Okay, I see that. I
(13:01):
click on the button immediate resonance, and so I go
purchase the course and join this three week program. And
I've only listened to the first week of this three
week program, but he already in this lesson is talking
about resistance, reluctance, avoidance, the opposite of creativity. And I
(13:21):
really really loved his take on this. It helped me
so much to make sense of this contrast that I'm
experiencing of being disconnected and then connected, of being a
distance away from and then up close to listening to
(13:46):
his first episode made me think about another word that
I've talked about in relationship to creativity before two, which
is the word discipline. So many times in my years
of coaching authors, I've heard people say to me, Oh,
you're so disciplined. I could never be as disciplined as you.
I don't have the discipline to write a book. Oh
my goodness, you wake up early and you write your pages,
(14:08):
you get your chapters done early in the morning. I
just simply don't have that discipline. I could never do that.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Well.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
I want to talk about discipline for a second because
I used to say this and believe it to be
true and know that it was insight coming from a
place that I didn't fully understand. Now I feel this
in a much more embodied way as I've grown older
and as my life circumstances have changed. But what I
used to say to people when they would say I
could never have this much discipline, is that you don't
need discipline to be creative. I really believed that at
(14:35):
the time in a deep way, and I don't know
how I even knew that insight, because they were not
wrong in assessing that at that time in my life,
I did have quote unquote discipline. I was waking up
early every morning. I was completing my morning pages every
day without fail. I made space for my creativity. It
was not in question, it was never in threat. My
(14:56):
creativity came first, and it was you know, it was
just that is how it was for me. Another thing
that I was very disciplined about was working out. I
was disciplined about eating. I was disciplined about so many
different things in my life. You know, I would say, like,
I don't overdo it with sugar, don't overdo it with alcohol,
because when I overdo it with those things that affects
my creativity, and my creativity so important to me. So
I was like elevating creativity above all these things. I'm
(15:17):
not saying there's anything wrong with even that, but I
will say that as I moved into a season of motherhood,
I realized that what I had before was not so
much discipline but control, and that I had control over
my life because of the season of life I was
in allowed me to have that much control over my life.
I had utter control over my schedule, utter control over
(15:39):
my environment. I lived alone in a six hundred square
foot apartment. I got to choose who came into my
space and who didn't come into my space. I got
to choose what was in my schedule and what wasn't
in my schedule. I got to decide, you know, if
I was going to go work out, and when I
was going to go work out, and what time I
was going to start my work, and what time I
was going to leave my work, and what time I
was going to schedule an appointment. I had no one
else in my space influencing how I was organizing my
(16:04):
days or organizing my schedules or what was happening in
my space. And so because I had total control, I
also had discipline. Now, when you add a partner and
a couple of kids to the equation, suddenly I don't
have total control over my days. And I mean, I
suppose you could argue like you have as much control
as you want to have, but when you have these
two little people who are dependent on you, they wake
(16:25):
up at whatever time they choose to wake up. And
you know, when a two year old baby wakes up
for the day, you can't just let them be on
their own. You have to wake up with them. And
now you don't just have your own doctor's appointments, schedule,
you have their doctor's appointments, and you've got little mouths
to feed that have needs, so many needs, one hundred
thousand needs in a day, and two of them at once,
that are asking you for every single thing that they need.
(16:47):
So I found as I moved into that season, I
had a lot less control over my environment, a lot
less control over my days, a lot less control over
my schedule and my space. And because of that, I
found myself slipping away from my creative practices. And what
I had said in the past before I was ever
(17:07):
a mother, was that what you don't need to be
creative as discipline, what you need to be creative is ritual,
and ritual is what will really reconnect you with your creativity.
Ritual meaning like you make the commitment to yourself to
write every single day, no matter what, even if it's
a word, you put it on the page, you just
do it, and you do it at the same time
every day, and it doesn't have to be six in
the morning, and it doesn't have to be it doesn't
(17:29):
have to be any time of day. It can be whatever,
like you can it could be two pm. But you
get yourself in the habit in the ritual of doing
these things over and over again. Maybe every night after
your kids are in bed, you choose to take a bath,
because it's just simply the ritual of it. Maybe some
nights that's at seven pm, and some nights it's at
ten pm. But every night you're going to take a
(17:49):
bath when the kids are in bed, because that's a
ritual that nourishes you, and that feeds you, and that
feeds your creativity. Therefore, and I would say this to
my clients before I i'd ever had kids, and even
when I still have, I did have a lot of
control over my life and my schedule. I didn't really
understand it in an embodied way, but I was saying
it believing it was true. And then when I moved
(18:11):
into this season of motherhood, it's like I lost track
of the truth. I had to like learn it in
a new embodied way. Because here's why. Because when I
got into the season of motherhood and I lost a
handle on my quote unquote discipline, I lost a handle
on my control. Then suddenly I lost touch with my creativity.
(18:32):
And so I had to almost be like reintroduced to
this idea of ritual when I started doing morning pages
with the artists way again, I had to like have
a kind of holy rebellion against the idea that these
pages needed to happen first thing in the morning. This
is how Julia Cameron teaches it. First thing in the morning,
you write for forty minutes or three pages, whichever comes first,
and these pages are just stream of consciousness. So you
(18:53):
just write right right until your forty minutes is done
or your three pages is done, and then your morning
pages are over and you close the book and you
never go back and read them. And this is kind
of how you restart your creative engine. Well, I had
told myself this lie that if these pages couldn't happen
first thing in the morning, then forget it. I'm not
going to do them. And because my lifestyle changed so
(19:14):
dramatically when I had kids and I couldn't write my
morning pages first thing in the morning, because first thing
I was doing in the morning was dragging myself, exhausted
out of bed to care for my two little children,
I had told myself this lie that if I couldn't
do them first thing in the morning, then I wasn't
going to do them. And so I wasn't doing them,
and when I reconnected with the Artist's way, I had
to just decide. Just because Julia Cameron says these pages
(19:37):
have to happen first thing in the morning doesn't mean
that they have to. I just have to create a
ritual that works with my actual life where I can
actually sit down and do my morning pages. For me,
that means it's not forty minutes every single time. Some
days I simply don't have forty minutes to give. Five
minutes is better than no minutes, one minute is better
than no minutes. So one minute, five minutes, twenty minutes,
(19:58):
forty minutes, whatever I have, I'm going to give that
to my creativity as a way to restart that engine
and to reconnect. I'm also not going to do it
first thing in the morning every single day. Most days,
it's going to be after I get my kids off
to their little homeschool program that they go to, so
it's going to be like around nine thirty or ten
in the morning. Sometimes I'm going to go for a
walk first and then come back and do my morning
(20:20):
pages just to help my body reset, help my brain reset.
And I've had to find these rituals that work for me.
I haven't settled one hundred percent into any of those rituals,
but I've had to move out of the idea that
discipline and control is the only way to creativity. In fact,
sometimes I think discipline and control can actually remove you
from your creativity. It can fake creativity. It gives you output,
(20:44):
but not necessarily creativity. And I've had to reconnect with
this idea of ritual. So I'm listening to this first
episode with David White where he's talking about reconnecting to
your creativity and he reads this essay called Procrastination that
he wrote that as he's reading it, I'm thinking, this
is exactly what I have been talking about. Procrastination, resistance, avoidance,
(21:07):
being stuck, whatever you want to call this thing. He
is naming it procrastination, And the way he was talking
about it just gave me this utter freedom to let
go of the old ways that I was thinking about procrastination,
let goal of the old ways that I've been thinking
about these last six years of my life, even where
I've talked about being so stuck, or I've talked about
(21:27):
being disconnected from my creativity. I want to read this
to you because I want you to hear in his
words what he says about procrastination. I think it's going
to help you like it did me, to accept and
to receive the gifts of your own procrastination, the gifts
of your own resistance, the gifts of your own stuckness,
(21:48):
the gifts of your own hesitancy, the gifts of your
own you know, avoidance, the gifts of your own lack
of discipline, laziness, whatever you want to call this. There
is a gift inside of this that I didn't know
how to see until I heard David White describe this.
So I want to read this to you. This is
his essay called Procrastination. He says, procrastination is not what
(22:10):
it seems. What looks from the outside, like our delay,
our lack of commitment, even our laziness, may have more
to do with a slow, necessary ripening through time and
a central struggle with the core realities of any endeavor
to which we have set our minds. What looks from
the outside like our delay, our lack of commitment, even
(22:32):
our laziness, may have more to do with a slow,
necessary ripening through time and a central struggle with the
core realities of any endeavor. To which we have set
our minds. To hate our procrastinating tendencies is in some
way to hate our relationship with time itself, to be
unequal to the phenomenology of revelation and the way it
(22:53):
works its own quiet way, in its very own, seasonal
and gifted time, only emerging when the very qualities it
represents have a firm correspondence in our necessary, struggling heart
and imagination. Procrastination, when studied closely, can be a beautiful
opening to the way we are a parallel with patience,
(23:14):
a companionable friend, a reveler of the true pattern. Already
we are surprised to find caught within us. Acknowledging, for instance,
as a writer, that before a book can be written,
most of the ways it cannot be written must be
tried first in our minds, on the blank screen, on
the empty page, or staring at the bedroom ceiling at
four in the morning. Procrastination enables us to taste the
(23:38):
single essence of our own reluctance, an endeavor achieved without delay,
wrong turnings, occasional blank walls, and a vein of self
doubt running through us, all leading eventually to some degree
of heartbreak. Is a thing of the moment, a mere bagatelle,
and often neither use nor ornament. It will be scanned
(23:58):
for a moment and put as Let me read that again.
Procrastination enables us to taste the single malt essence of
our own reluctance. An endeavor achieved without delay, wrong turnings,
occasional blank walls, and a vein of self doubt running
through all leading eventually to some degree of heartbreak. Is
a thing of the moment, a mere bagatelle, and often
(24:20):
neither use nor ornament. It will be scanned for a
moment and put aside. What is worthwhile carries the struggle
of the maker written within it, but wrought into the
shape of an earned understanding. Procrastination helps us to apprentice
ourselves to our own particular reluctance, to understand the hidden,
(24:41):
darker side of the first enthusiastic idea, to learn what
we are afraid of in the endeavor itself, To put
an underbelly into the work so that it becomes a living,
satisfying whole, not a surface trying to manipulate others in
a moment. Procrastination does not stop a project from coming
to fruition. What stops us is giving up an original
(25:03):
idea because we have not yet got to the heart
of the reason we are delaying, or let the true
form of reluctance instruct us in the way ahead. To
properly procrastinate is to be involved with larger entities than
our own ideas, to refuse to settle for an early
underachieving outcome, and wrestle like Jacob with his true angel finding.
(25:24):
As Rilke said, winning does not tempt that man. This
is how he grows by being defeated decisively by greater
and greater beings. Reading this essay, I can't help but
(25:44):
think about the acceleration of AI in this moment, and
how tempting it can be to use AI to you know,
quote unquote assist us in our creative journeys. And I
think you know, my ideas on AI have evolved over
time and will continue to evolve. But my big fear
about using AI to assist us in our creative work
(26:07):
is specifically about what he talks about in this essay,
that what is worthwhile carries the struggle of the maker
written within it. The point is not to make this easier.
In other words, what is worthwhile he says carries the
struggle of the maker within it, written within it, wrought
into the shape of an earned understanding. And he also
(26:29):
says to put an underbelly into the work so that
it becomes a living, satisfying hole, not a surface trying
to manipulate others in a moment, I think when we
put our attention and this is not an episode really
about AI, but I do think AI plays a role
here when we fixate on this idea of discipline, control,
finished product, When we get absolutely attached to an outcome,
(26:54):
to an output, to away things ought to be, we
lose touch with creativity. We move into something else.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
On last week's episode, I talked about the connection, or
maybe the tension between creativity and capitalism, and I think
this is a continuation of that conversation that when we
get confused and we think that capitalism is creativity, then
we tell ourselves, oh, AI can help me with that.
AI can help shortcut the process and short circuit it
(27:23):
and help me get to the finish line sooner. But
just because you arrive at a finish line of a
marathon doesn't mean that you ran a marathon. Just because
you get to the top of Machupicchu doesn't mean that
you understand what it took to climb to the top
of Machupiachu. There is a misnomer there that just because
you have the creative output, that you've somehow achieved something.
Another thing that David White says in this first episode
(27:45):
of his three part Creative series is that one of
the enemies of creativity is success. And this rings so
true to me, and I want to reiterate this point
because for myself and for you, if you're listening to this,
I want to remind you that if there is a
lack of what you would consider success in your life,
consider that a massive blessing as your creativity grows, because,
(28:10):
like he talks about that deep underbelly, the deep underbelly
of the process is where the artist grows into being.
It is in the self doubt, it is in the procrastination,
it is in the laziness. It is in the resistance,
in the avoidance of the work that the work becomes
more whole, so that it is not a surface trying
(28:35):
to manipulate others. In a moment, I immediately thought about
the disconnect between creating content and creativity. Creating content is
creating output in order to generate a financial result. Nothing
wrong with generating a financial result, but that in and
of itself is not creativity. And I do believe over time,
(28:59):
as you create a financial result and ignore your creative essence,
I do believe over time, you become corrupt. I don't
think money in itself is a corruption. David White said
in his first episode, he says there's rich, and then
(29:20):
there's poor, and then there's enough, And that really stuck
out to me. He even talked about Mark Zuckerberg in
that episode. He was talking about how Facebook over time
has become corrupt and Mark Zuckerberg has become corrupt. There
comes a point where when you chase a financial gain
in lieu of or indirect contradiction to your own creativity,
(29:44):
your mindset becomes twisted. And immediately I was reminded of
this journey that Matt and I have been on. My
husband and I have been on over the course of
the last six years. We felt a strong creative calling.
I think this is how creativity starts. You feel a
strong calling to do something or try something new that
is a bit out of reach for you. It is
something unknown, It is unknown territory. You're called into a
(30:08):
world that makes no sense to you. And for us,
that unknown world was called Pinewoods Surf Club. It was
this community that we wanted to build around the culture
of surf because we saw how the culture of surf
brought people together in community. It connected people to something
bigger than them. When Matt and I would go to
the ocean when we lived in California, and Matt would
(30:29):
surf and I would Usually I didn't do a lot
of surfing. I would sit mostly on the beach and
watch him surf. But there's something about being there next
to the ocean, being on the water on your board
that just it just connects you to something bigger than you.
You're like, whoa, I am not alone in the world.
And surf culture is also about sharing resources. It's about
(30:51):
you know, minimalism, living with this little as not you know,
not hoarding resources, not taking more than you need. It's
about connecting to nature, about staying in humility to the water.
If you've watched famous surfers or really amazing surfers surf,
these like huge fifty foot waves or two hundred foot
waves or whatever they surf, I think part of the
(31:12):
draw to that is being reminded of our smallness in
the scope of the earth that we live in. And
so Matt and I were really inspired by surfing and
surf culture, and Matt got connected to this company that
could build a man made surfing lagoon. And so when
we moved to Nashville, the stars all aligned and this
(31:32):
calling felt like it was screaming at us to build
this community around the values of surf. And that was
the creative calling. And we stepped down into the unknown
world without knowing how we would suffer, how our hearts
would break, what we would lose. We went all in
two feet in the whole way. We didn't hesitate, and
(31:53):
over time our creative endeavor became quote unquote corrupt by
slow choy. This is over time choosing outcome, choosing financial gain,
choosing what was going to work in the marketplace, versus
what the creative calling was. And it was such a
subtle thing. And this is why I want to bring
this up because you don't have to be Mark Zuckerberg.
(32:13):
I think any one of us can look at, you know,
some of the worst billionaires of our time and be like, oh, yeah,
that person has been so corrupted by their their wealth.
But you don't have to be Mark Zuckerberg. You don't
have to be Jeff Bezos, you don't have to be
Elon Musk to be corrupted by those small choices over time.
I can look back now at our process and see
the moments in time when we abandoned the creative idea
(32:37):
in lieu of the financial payoff with good reason, like
great logical reason, and we were like, we have a family,
feed we have a mortgage today, like we have to
make this work. We got to make you know, make
the numbers pencil the way the accountants will tell you,
this has to pencil. And so over and over again,
we made these decisions that slowly and subtly corrupted the
(32:57):
creative process. And I'm I'm not blaming us or even
shaming us. I'm actually pointing to this essay by David
White and saying, perhaps those distortions were all part of
our creative process. The absence of creativity is also creativity.
The longing for creativity is also creativity. Another thing he says,
(33:18):
is he's wrapping up this first episode, is that our
first experience with creativity is distance from it. And I
wanted to leave you with this thought, because if in
your life you feel that you are distant from your creativity,
first of all, you will experience a deep longing. And
I think sometimes when we feel that longing, we feel
a longing for a connection to ourselves, to community. It
(33:42):
can feel like a longing for friendship. It can feel
like a longing for being understood. It can feel like
a longing for self expression. It can feel like a
longing for nature, a longing to be outside, a longing
for the analogue life, the nineties summer that you know
we used to have when we were younger. It can
feel like a longing to be away from your cell phone.
I can feel like a longing to paint, or to knit,
(34:03):
or to draw, or to play the piano. This is
why like our artisticness and creativity are not necessarily separate.
Like you're longing to do something artistic, is probably your
creativity speaking to you. But you also might be listening
to this and think like, oh, I've never had a
longing to knit. You know, my longing is more like
to build a business, or to start a family, or
(34:23):
to You might have a deep longing for romantic love.
You know that I believe our deep belonging for romantic love,
by the way, is also our creativity speaking to us.
One of the activities that Julia Cameron has you do
in the artist's way that I felt like was extremely
profound and extremely simple at the same time, and I'll
pass this on to you, is to sit down and
list ten to twenty. I don't know if she doesn't
(34:46):
give you a number, just a number of things that
you would like to do. So make this list like
I would like to, and fill in the blank and
just you know, list out as many things as you
can think of that you would like to do. And
they can be big or they can be small. You know.
My list was things like I would like to to
innovate my house, which is a very big thing and
not something that I have resources for at this moment,
Like I don't have access to do that right this moment,
(35:07):
but it's been something I've been dreaming about for a
while and have all kinds of artistic ideas, and so
it's fun to think about and dream about and look
at pictures and that sort of thing. Something smaller like
I'd like to go get a pedicure. That's also something
that I would like to do. I would like to
go on walks more often through the park that's right
behind my house. So the things on your list can
be big things or small things. But I'm made a
(35:27):
list of like twenty five things that I would like
to do. One of the things I wrote is that
I'd like to read more fiction, because I mostly read nonfiction.
And immediately later that day, I felt inspired to go
to the bookstore up the street and buy a book,
and I picked up the first fiction book that was
displayed right when I walked in, and I've been loving it. I'm,
you know, almost one hundred pages into the book now.
And so what this exercise does is it reconnects you
(35:50):
to those creative callings. Because the creative callings come in
as a little whisper, and we can either act upon
those callings or we can resis to them. And David
White would say both of those things. Are you connecting
to your creativity? Your first experience with creativity is your
distance from it. Your first experience with creativity is your
(36:12):
longing for it. And so if you are longing from
your creativity in your life, that is your creativity speaking
to you. If you're feeling distant from your creativity. That
is your creativity talking to you. You actually may not
be as distant as you think you are. If you
feel like you're stuck, if you feel in resistance, if
you feel in avoidance, if you feel hesitant, if you
(36:32):
feel self doubt, if you feel heartbroken, like absolutely devastatingly heartbroken,
this is your creativity speaking to you. Are not far
from your creativity. It is right here. This is your
spirituality speaking to you. This is God, the God of
your understanding, talking to you in this moment. Is those
just those little whispers? I want to fall in love.
(36:54):
I want to have a baby. I want to read
more fiction. I want to renovate my house. I want
I want to make curtains. I want to learn to
play the piano. I want to go to Italy. I
want to learn Italian. Whatever it is for you, like,
make a list of things that seem completely out of
your reach, and then some things that you could absolutely
do later today if you decide to do I want
to plant a garden. What is it for you that
would be on that list of things that you would
(37:15):
like to do? And I'll encourage you to pick up
Julia Cameron's Morning The Artist's Way. Her book is called
The Artist Way. That's the program, the name of the program.
The main concepts of the program are her Morning Pages
and the Artist State. Those are the two main concepts,
but she gives you hundreds of activities in her book
to try. I'll put the link in the show notes.
(37:36):
I've put it in the show notes of the last
couple of episodes. It is such an incredible program. If
you never do another creative program, do Julia Cameron's creative program,
David White's program that I'm doing. I don't know if
it's any longer for sale or if it's closed for
sale now that it's in session. There are recordings to
the videos, so I will look and see if I
can get a link to those recordings as well, or
(37:57):
a link to purchase them, and put that in the
show notes as well well. But however, your creativity is
calling to you, take advantage of whatever that is, so
it doesn't have to be Artist's Way. That was just
my I went to go get The Artist's Way, the
copy of The Artist Way, to hand it to my
brother in law because he had asked to borrow it.
And as soon as I picked up the book, I
was like, I cannot give this to you. I have
(38:18):
to keep it for myself. I'll buy you a copy.
So I immediately went to go buy him a copy
and kept mine for myself. And whatever it is for you,
that was my creative calling. However your creativity wants to emerge,
it will call to you in that way. And I
will tell you as I have answered the call of
my creativity. The serendipity has returned in my life. The
(38:40):
magic has returned in my life. The access to the
deep wall of wisdom that lives within me has returned
in my life. And there's a lot more work to do.
I feel. Oh, there's so many other callings that I
that I'm still in resistance to. I'm still in avoidance to.
I'm still feeling fear around these other callings that have
(39:02):
been put in front of me. But I will get there.
The resistance, the fear is all part of it. It's
all part of the unfolding. As David White says, procrastination
is not what it seems. What looks from the outside
like our delay, our lack of commitment, even our laziness,
may have more to do with a slow, unnecessary ripening
(39:22):
through time and a central struggle with the core realities
of any endeavor to which we have set our minds. So,
whatever endeavor it is that you have set your mind too,
I hope you will treat your procrastination with care. I
hope you will listen to yourself as you feel afraid
of whatever creative calling has been put in front of you.
(39:43):
And I hope that you'll take small steps in the
right direction to welcome your creativity back to you, because
we need your creativity during this time more than ever.
Thank you for listening. I'll see you back next week
on the Write Your Story podcast.
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story pipecast.
Good job. Really pick up the pieces of your life,
pull them back together with the word you write. All
the beauty and peace and the magic that you'll start
too fun When you write your story, you get the
words and said, don't you think it's time to let
(00:23):
them out and write them down and cover what it's
all about and write, Write your story. Write you write
your story.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to talk about creativity and resistance, or creativity
and reluctance, or creativity and avoid hints. However you want
to name this. The essay that I will read in
a little bit calls it procrastination. I've heard people call
this the lack of discipline. I hear people call it laziness.
(00:59):
However you want to qualify this term, it's really creativity
and the lack of creativity, creativity and the avoidance of creativity,
creativity and not creativity, and the contrast between these two
things feels quite stark. This has become extremely clear to
me in the last I don't know month or two
of my life because I feel like I'm in a
(01:20):
bit of a re emergence to my creativity. I have
always been a creative person from the time I was born.
I can trace it back to when I was very,
very little. I've had moments in my lifetimes, in my
life when I have been deeply, deeply in touch with
that creative part of myself and I felt really connected
to something bigger. I've felt connected to that deep well
of wisdom that lives within each one of us. I
(01:42):
felt connected to my surroundings, to my community. And there
have been other times in my life where I've felt
very disconnected. I have felt like a shell of myself.
I felt like I'm just going through the motions. I
felt like I'm kind of alone in the world. No
one's really there for me, even with all evidence to
the contrary, the feeling like I'm help, I'm alone. I
don't have anyone, I can't change my circumstances. That feeling
(02:06):
has popped up at many different parts in my life,
and it's always when I'm disconnected from my own creativity.
And one of the reasons that I want to talk
about this today, perhaps the most important reason, is because
I'm being reminded as I'm coming into this time of
re emergence in my life, that creativity is not just creativity.
In my view, and I believe this to be true,
(02:26):
that creativity is spirituality. It's not just creativity. Is like,
there's creativity and then there's art or being artistic. Not
every person is artistic. Not every person wants to, you know,
sit down and paint a painting, or draw a drawing,
or even write a book. If you're listening to this podcast,
you may have some of those aspirations in your life.
But I would not necessarily call that creativity. I would
(02:49):
call that being artistic. Every single one of us is
linked to this concept of creativity because creativity is about
being deeply connected to the most meaningful part of life.
Creativity is about being connected to the larger energy that
holds us all together, the energy that brought us here.
This is not about a religious narrative or about believing
(03:11):
us certain theology. It's just there is something, a source
from which we all came that connects us all deeply
to one another. There is that source that lives within you,
that speaks to you if you let it, that bubbles
up from inside of you. And compels you to do
whatever it is you do in your life. It compels
you to go and love people, it compels you to
(03:33):
go build a business, it compels you to write a book,
it compels you to whatever it is that you're doing today.
That inner source of direction and wisdom, that compass that
lives within you is what is directing those actions. And
so being connected to your creativity isn't just about like
making art, although making art in many ways can wake
(03:55):
us up to our own creativity. It's not just about
creating art though. Being connected to your creative is about
being alive to what is in the world. The trees
are deeply creative. I'm looking out my window right now
at the trees just full of leaves at the beginning
of the summer season, you know, waving in the wind.
These trees are deeply, deeply creative, more creative than we
(04:17):
would ever know how to be. They are following the
blueprint of who they were made to become without having
to think about it at all. They don't have the
mind to get in the way, and so they are
just expressing themselves unendingly and without reservation. The trees know
nothing of resistance or procrastination or lack of discipline or
(04:38):
lack of creativity. They just absolutely are what they were
created to be. And when I talk about creativity, that
really is what I'm talking about, is living into who
you were created to be, with no resistance, no reluctance,
no hesitation, no procrastination. And to feel the contrast between
these two things, I have felt it quite strongly, because
(04:59):
you know, if you've been around here for a while,
you know that the last six years have been extremely
challenging in a bunch of different ways for me and
my family, and I have felt at many different points
in the last six years very disconnected from my creativity.
I've felt like a shell of myself. I felt like
I'm just barely surviving. I have felt like I was
drowning at points, or like gasping for air. I have
(05:19):
felt that I was in survival mode. I have just
been going through the motions. I have felt disconnected from
my own power and my own instinct and my own wisdom.
And then in the last six weeks or so, I
first of all decided to pick up the Artist's Way
again and start going through Julia Cameron's program. It's like
a twelve week program to reconnect you to your creativity
(05:41):
and your spirituality. In fact, Julia Cameron speaking of which
this is not the first time I've brought her up,
but Julia Cameron is the one who reminded me what
I knew about this connection between creativity and spirituality. She
probably is the one who taught me about this connection
in the first place. It was probably the origin of
that idea that I've carried within me for so many
(06:02):
years now. And as I'm re visiting this program, I'm like, oh, yeah,
your creativity is your spirituality. It's not just about making
content on Instagram. It's not just about writing a book.
It's not about publishing something. It's not about getting your
art out there. Those things are all well and good,
but reconnecting to your creativity is not about getting your
art out there. Reconnecting to your creativity is about reconnecting
(06:25):
to your vitality, to your essence, to the very breath
that just fuels your life. And so for this reason,
we all need to be reconnected to our creativity. Whether
you think you're a creative person or not, now is
the time to reconnect to your creativity because, by the way,
we're also moving into this era where you've got two
(06:49):
opposing or seemingly opposing energies at play. You have one
energy that is the absolute insane acceleration of technologlogy with
the introduction of AI artificial intelligence, and you have artificial
intelligence and this acceleration of technology just taking off at
(07:11):
astronomical speeds, and none of us really even know what
to do with this, right like, we're just like, whoa amazing?
What does this make possible? And then also like, this
is uncharted territory. What pitfalls could this create for us?
What are some ways that we could kind of fail
before we even know that we've failed. So you have
the insane acceleration of technology happening right now and what
(07:34):
seems like infinite possibility on that front. And then you
also have this other energy that I'm feeling very distinctly
of the younger generation in particular, but not just the
younger generation having this resistance to the acceleration of technology
and wanting to go sort of analogue, wanting to create
(07:54):
a nineties summer for our kids. Less activities, less you know,
running around camps, fewer expenses, and just sort of like
playing in the backyard like we did when we were
growing up in the nineties. If you're listening to this
and you're like thirty five or older, that's what you
remember doing in your childhood. You weren't signed up for
a thousand camps. Maybe you went to one camp, but
(08:14):
you were just kind of like wandering your neighborhood for
the whole summer with nothing to do, getting to just
like bathe in your own boredom and your own imagination
and your creativity in the white space. And you see
that the younger generation, now Gen Z in particular, and
maybe even Gen Alpha, are going like, oh, we don't
we don't get that anymore because we're all on TikTok
(08:36):
and Instagram and all the platforms, and so there's a
hunger during this time to go back to a more
analog way of doing things. We're wanting to be off
of our phones. We're wanting to have real experiences. We're
wanting to connect with people. We don't want to be
on zoom. We want to go do real things in
person with people we want to be We want to
(08:58):
live a life that's simpler. We want to move more slowly.
We want to you know, like wake with the light
and go to sleep with the light. We're just craving
I think so many of us a deeper connection with nature, which,
by the way, is your creativity talking to. That is creativity.
Your craving for connection with nature is your creativity. Now,
(09:21):
despite the fact that all of us are created, some
of us are deeply disconnected from our own creativity. Your
longing for that creativity, the longing for the connection with
nature is your creativity speaking to. So that longing is
your connection to your creativity. And I'll say, over the
last six years, I have felt deeply disconnected from my creativity,
and deeply disconnected from in moments, not in every single moment,
(09:46):
deeply disconnected at times, from what makes life meaningful, from
a sense of power and agency, from a feeling of
connectedness to others in the community, like synchronicities, for example,
like feeling like, oh, my life is ordered and it's meaningful,
and I bump into someone and there's like a refreshing
exchange between us and we're all connected in the world.
(10:07):
I have not felt that connection readily and often in
the last six years. Then I pick up Julia Cameron's
The Artist's Way, I start moving through the program. I've
done the program, I don't know a dozen times in
my life before, so I know the drill. So I
immediately start doing the program. I'm reading through the book,
I'm doing my morning pages, and all of a sudden,
(10:30):
I start to feel those little synchronicities again. I start
to feel connected again. I'm reminded it's like breath moving
through your body, Like, oh yeah, this is what it
feels like to feel in touch with my own power
and agency, to feel in touch with the threads that
tie us all together. This is what it feels like.
And it really isn't about writing a book or creating something,
(10:50):
creating content, or being on Instagram or whatever. It is
about feeling deeply connected to yourself, deeply connected to the
energy that ties us all together, the place from which
we all came, and deeply connected to those around me.
So that's what creativity is really about. I pick up
Julia Cameron's program, I'm moving through the program, and all
of a sudden, I'm like, oh, yes, this is what
it feels like to breathe. As I'm moving through Julia
(11:14):
Cameron's program, I get an email in my inbox. I'm
on David White's email list. I've read his poetry to
you on this podcast before, and I will read an
essay from David White today called Procrastination that is a beautiful,
beautiful essay. This man is. If you don't know David White,
he is an absolutely acclaimed, marvelous poet who is truly
(11:35):
one of the great geniuses of our time. I believe
he speaks many different languages. He is more well read
than anyone I have ever learned from or listened to.
He is an insanely prolific poet. He's written so much poetry,
and he also memorizes poetry in a way that I've
never known anyone to be able to memorize anything. He
(11:56):
can regurgitate these poems that are just like you know,
classic poems or very long poems, or his own poetry,
poetry of other people in response to a question, like
if he's teaching a creative workshop or something, someone will
ask a question and he will like spit off out
a poem by Wordsworth and be able to recite almost
the entire thing or the entire thing from memory. It's
(12:18):
truly truly remarkable. But he's an amazingly creative person. His
creative output is a reflection I believe of how deeply
connected he is to his own creativity. And I'm on
his email list, and so I get an email in
my inbox one day about a three week creative program
that David White is doing over Zoom, and I'm instantly like,
I want to sign up for this. This is, again
(12:39):
another sign that you are connected deeply to your creativity
is when you have those moments where you see an
opportunity and you know immediately and intuitively that this opportunity
is for you. So this is another reflection of coming
back into contact with that deep knowing in myself, that
deep well of It's like, Okay, I see that. I
(13:01):
click on the button immediate resonance, and so I go
purchase the course and join this three week program. And
I've only listened to the first week of this three
week program, but he already in this lesson is talking
about resistance, reluctance, avoidance, the opposite of creativity. And I
(13:21):
really really loved his take on this. It helped me
so much to make sense of this contrast that I'm
experiencing of being disconnected and then connected, of being a
distance away from and then up close to listening to
(13:46):
his first episode made me think about another word that
I've talked about in relationship to creativity before two, which
is the word discipline. So many times in my years
of coaching authors, I've heard people say to me, Oh,
you're so disciplined. I could never be as disciplined as you.
I don't have the discipline to write a book. Oh
my goodness, you wake up early and you write your pages,
(14:08):
you get your chapters done early in the morning. I
just simply don't have that discipline. I could never do that.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Well.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
I want to talk about discipline for a second because
I used to say this and believe it to be
true and know that it was insight coming from a
place that I didn't fully understand. Now I feel this
in a much more embodied way as I've grown older
and as my life circumstances have changed. But what I
used to say to people when they would say I
could never have this much discipline, is that you don't
need discipline to be creative. I really believed that at
(14:35):
the time in a deep way, and I don't know
how I even knew that insight, because they were not
wrong in assessing that at that time in my life,
I did have quote unquote discipline. I was waking up
early every morning. I was completing my morning pages every
day without fail. I made space for my creativity. It
was not in question, it was never in threat. My
(14:56):
creativity came first, and it was you know, it was
just that is how it was for me. Another thing
that I was very disciplined about was working out. I
was disciplined about eating. I was disciplined about so many
different things in my life. You know, I would say, like,
I don't overdo it with sugar, don't overdo it with alcohol,
because when I overdo it with those things that affects
my creativity, and my creativity so important to me. So
I was like elevating creativity above all these things. I'm
(15:17):
not saying there's anything wrong with even that, but I
will say that as I moved into a season of motherhood,
I realized that what I had before was not so
much discipline but control, and that I had control over
my life because of the season of life I was
in allowed me to have that much control over my life.
I had utter control over my schedule, utter control over
(15:39):
my environment. I lived alone in a six hundred square
foot apartment. I got to choose who came into my
space and who didn't come into my space. I got
to choose what was in my schedule and what wasn't
in my schedule. I got to decide, you know, if
I was going to go work out, and when I
was going to go work out, and what time I
was going to start my work, and what time I
was going to leave my work, and what time I
was going to schedule an appointment. I had no one
else in my space influencing how I was organizing my
(16:04):
days or organizing my schedules or what was happening in
my space. And so because I had total control, I
also had discipline. Now, when you add a partner and
a couple of kids to the equation, suddenly I don't
have total control over my days. And I mean, I
suppose you could argue like you have as much control
as you want to have, but when you have these
two little people who are dependent on you, they wake
(16:25):
up at whatever time they choose to wake up. And
you know, when a two year old baby wakes up
for the day, you can't just let them be on
their own. You have to wake up with them. And
now you don't just have your own doctor's appointments, schedule,
you have their doctor's appointments, and you've got little mouths
to feed that have needs, so many needs, one hundred
thousand needs in a day, and two of them at once,
that are asking you for every single thing that they need.
(16:47):
So I found as I moved into that season, I
had a lot less control over my environment, a lot
less control over my days, a lot less control over
my schedule and my space. And because of that, I
found myself slipping away from my creative practices. And what
I had said in the past before I was ever
(17:07):
a mother, was that what you don't need to be
creative as discipline, what you need to be creative is ritual,
and ritual is what will really reconnect you with your creativity.
Ritual meaning like you make the commitment to yourself to
write every single day, no matter what, even if it's
a word, you put it on the page, you just
do it, and you do it at the same time
every day, and it doesn't have to be six in
the morning, and it doesn't have to be it doesn't
(17:29):
have to be any time of day. It can be whatever,
like you can it could be two pm. But you
get yourself in the habit in the ritual of doing
these things over and over again. Maybe every night after
your kids are in bed, you choose to take a bath,
because it's just simply the ritual of it. Maybe some
nights that's at seven pm, and some nights it's at
ten pm. But every night you're going to take a
(17:49):
bath when the kids are in bed, because that's a
ritual that nourishes you, and that feeds you, and that
feeds your creativity. Therefore, and I would say this to
my clients before I i'd ever had kids, and even
when I still have, I did have a lot of
control over my life and my schedule. I didn't really
understand it in an embodied way, but I was saying
it believing it was true. And then when I moved
(18:11):
into this season of motherhood, it's like I lost track
of the truth. I had to like learn it in
a new embodied way. Because here's why. Because when I
got into the season of motherhood and I lost a
handle on my quote unquote discipline, I lost a handle
on my control. Then suddenly I lost touch with my creativity.
(18:32):
And so I had to almost be like reintroduced to
this idea of ritual when I started doing morning pages
with the artists way again, I had to like have
a kind of holy rebellion against the idea that these
pages needed to happen first thing in the morning. This
is how Julia Cameron teaches it. First thing in the morning,
you write for forty minutes or three pages, whichever comes first,
and these pages are just stream of consciousness. So you
(18:53):
just write right right until your forty minutes is done
or your three pages is done, and then your morning
pages are over and you close the book and you
never go back and read them. And this is kind
of how you restart your creative engine. Well, I had
told myself this lie that if these pages couldn't happen
first thing in the morning, then forget it. I'm not
going to do them. And because my lifestyle changed so
(19:14):
dramatically when I had kids and I couldn't write my
morning pages first thing in the morning, because first thing
I was doing in the morning was dragging myself, exhausted
out of bed to care for my two little children,
I had told myself this lie that if I couldn't
do them first thing in the morning, then I wasn't
going to do them. And so I wasn't doing them,
and when I reconnected with the Artist's way, I had
to just decide. Just because Julia Cameron says these pages
(19:37):
have to happen first thing in the morning doesn't mean
that they have to. I just have to create a
ritual that works with my actual life where I can
actually sit down and do my morning pages. For me,
that means it's not forty minutes every single time. Some
days I simply don't have forty minutes to give. Five
minutes is better than no minutes, one minute is better
than no minutes. So one minute, five minutes, twenty minutes,
(19:58):
forty minutes, whatever I have, I'm going to give that
to my creativity as a way to restart that engine
and to reconnect. I'm also not going to do it
first thing in the morning every single day. Most days,
it's going to be after I get my kids off
to their little homeschool program that they go to, so
it's going to be like around nine thirty or ten
in the morning. Sometimes I'm going to go for a
walk first and then come back and do my morning
(20:20):
pages just to help my body reset, help my brain reset.
And I've had to find these rituals that work for me.
I haven't settled one hundred percent into any of those rituals,
but I've had to move out of the idea that
discipline and control is the only way to creativity. In fact,
sometimes I think discipline and control can actually remove you
from your creativity. It can fake creativity. It gives you output,
(20:44):
but not necessarily creativity. And I've had to reconnect with
this idea of ritual. So I'm listening to this first
episode with David White where he's talking about reconnecting to
your creativity and he reads this essay called Procrastination that
he wrote that as he's reading it, I'm thinking, this
is exactly what I have been talking about. Procrastination, resistance, avoidance,
(21:07):
being stuck, whatever you want to call this thing. He
is naming it procrastination, And the way he was talking
about it just gave me this utter freedom to let
go of the old ways that I was thinking about procrastination,
let goal of the old ways that I've been thinking
about these last six years of my life, even where
I've talked about being so stuck, or I've talked about
(21:27):
being disconnected from my creativity. I want to read this
to you because I want you to hear in his
words what he says about procrastination. I think it's going
to help you like it did me, to accept and
to receive the gifts of your own procrastination, the gifts
of your own resistance, the gifts of your own stuckness,
(21:48):
the gifts of your own hesitancy, the gifts of your
own you know, avoidance, the gifts of your own lack
of discipline, laziness, whatever you want to call this. There
is a gift inside of this that I didn't know
how to see until I heard David White describe this.
So I want to read this to you. This is
his essay called Procrastination. He says, procrastination is not what
(22:10):
it seems. What looks from the outside, like our delay,
our lack of commitment, even our laziness, may have more
to do with a slow, necessary ripening through time and
a central struggle with the core realities of any endeavor
to which we have set our minds. What looks from
the outside like our delay, our lack of commitment, even
(22:32):
our laziness, may have more to do with a slow,
necessary ripening through time and a central struggle with the
core realities of any endeavor. To which we have set
our minds. To hate our procrastinating tendencies is in some
way to hate our relationship with time itself, to be
unequal to the phenomenology of revelation and the way it
(22:53):
works its own quiet way, in its very own, seasonal
and gifted time, only emerging when the very qualities it
represents have a firm correspondence in our necessary, struggling heart
and imagination. Procrastination, when studied closely, can be a beautiful
opening to the way we are a parallel with patience,
(23:14):
a companionable friend, a reveler of the true pattern. Already
we are surprised to find caught within us. Acknowledging, for instance,
as a writer, that before a book can be written,
most of the ways it cannot be written must be
tried first in our minds, on the blank screen, on
the empty page, or staring at the bedroom ceiling at
four in the morning. Procrastination enables us to taste the
(23:38):
single essence of our own reluctance, an endeavor achieved without delay,
wrong turnings, occasional blank walls, and a vein of self
doubt running through us, all leading eventually to some degree
of heartbreak. Is a thing of the moment, a mere bagatelle,
and often neither use nor ornament. It will be scanned
(23:58):
for a moment and put as Let me read that again.
Procrastination enables us to taste the single malt essence of
our own reluctance. An endeavor achieved without delay, wrong turnings,
occasional blank walls, and a vein of self doubt running
through all leading eventually to some degree of heartbreak. Is
a thing of the moment, a mere bagatelle, and often
(24:20):
neither use nor ornament. It will be scanned for a
moment and put aside. What is worthwhile carries the struggle
of the maker written within it, but wrought into the
shape of an earned understanding. Procrastination helps us to apprentice
ourselves to our own particular reluctance, to understand the hidden,
(24:41):
darker side of the first enthusiastic idea, to learn what
we are afraid of in the endeavor itself, To put
an underbelly into the work so that it becomes a living,
satisfying whole, not a surface trying to manipulate others in
a moment. Procrastination does not stop a project from coming
to fruition. What stops us is giving up an original
(25:03):
idea because we have not yet got to the heart
of the reason we are delaying, or let the true
form of reluctance instruct us in the way ahead. To
properly procrastinate is to be involved with larger entities than
our own ideas, to refuse to settle for an early
underachieving outcome, and wrestle like Jacob with his true angel finding.
(25:24):
As Rilke said, winning does not tempt that man. This
is how he grows by being defeated decisively by greater
and greater beings. Reading this essay, I can't help but
(25:44):
think about the acceleration of AI in this moment, and
how tempting it can be to use AI to you know,
quote unquote assist us in our creative journeys. And I
think you know, my ideas on AI have evolved over
time and will continue to evolve. But my big fear
about using AI to assist us in our creative work
(26:07):
is specifically about what he talks about in this essay,
that what is worthwhile carries the struggle of the maker
written within it. The point is not to make this easier.
In other words, what is worthwhile he says carries the
struggle of the maker within it, written within it, wrought
into the shape of an earned understanding. And he also
(26:29):
says to put an underbelly into the work so that
it becomes a living, satisfying hole, not a surface trying
to manipulate others in a moment, I think when we
put our attention and this is not an episode really
about AI, but I do think AI plays a role
here when we fixate on this idea of discipline, control,
finished product, When we get absolutely attached to an outcome,
(26:54):
to an output, to away things ought to be, we
lose touch with creativity. We move into something else.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
You know.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
On last week's episode, I talked about the connection, or
maybe the tension between creativity and capitalism, and I think
this is a continuation of that conversation that when we
get confused and we think that capitalism is creativity, then
we tell ourselves, oh, AI can help me with that.
AI can help shortcut the process and short circuit it
(27:23):
and help me get to the finish line sooner. But
just because you arrive at a finish line of a
marathon doesn't mean that you ran a marathon. Just because
you get to the top of Machupicchu doesn't mean that
you understand what it took to climb to the top
of Machupiachu. There is a misnomer there that just because
you have the creative output, that you've somehow achieved something.
Another thing that David White says in this first episode
(27:45):
of his three part Creative series is that one of
the enemies of creativity is success. And this rings so
true to me, and I want to reiterate this point
because for myself and for you, if you're listening to this,
I want to remind you that if there is a
lack of what you would consider success in your life,
consider that a massive blessing as your creativity grows, because,
(28:10):
like he talks about that deep underbelly, the deep underbelly
of the process is where the artist grows into being.
It is in the self doubt, it is in the procrastination,
it is in the laziness. It is in the resistance,
in the avoidance of the work that the work becomes
more whole, so that it is not a surface trying
(28:35):
to manipulate others. In a moment, I immediately thought about
the disconnect between creating content and creativity. Creating content is
creating output in order to generate a financial result. Nothing
wrong with generating a financial result, but that in and
of itself is not creativity. And I do believe over time,
(28:59):
as you create a financial result and ignore your creative essence,
I do believe over time, you become corrupt. I don't
think money in itself is a corruption. David White said
in his first episode, he says there's rich, and then
(29:20):
there's poor, and then there's enough, And that really stuck
out to me. He even talked about Mark Zuckerberg in
that episode. He was talking about how Facebook over time
has become corrupt and Mark Zuckerberg has become corrupt. There
comes a point where when you chase a financial gain
in lieu of or indirect contradiction to your own creativity,
(29:44):
your mindset becomes twisted. And immediately I was reminded of
this journey that Matt and I have been on. My
husband and I have been on over the course of
the last six years. We felt a strong creative calling.
I think this is how creativity starts. You feel a
strong calling to do something or try something new that
is a bit out of reach for you. It is
something unknown, It is unknown territory. You're called into a
(30:08):
world that makes no sense to you. And for us,
that unknown world was called Pinewoods Surf Club. It was
this community that we wanted to build around the culture
of surf because we saw how the culture of surf
brought people together in community. It connected people to something
bigger than them. When Matt and I would go to
the ocean when we lived in California, and Matt would
(30:29):
surf and I would Usually I didn't do a lot
of surfing. I would sit mostly on the beach and
watch him surf. But there's something about being there next
to the ocean, being on the water on your board
that just it just connects you to something bigger than you.
You're like, whoa, I am not alone in the world.
And surf culture is also about sharing resources. It's about
(30:51):
you know, minimalism, living with this little as not you know,
not hoarding resources, not taking more than you need. It's
about connecting to nature, about staying in humility to the water.
If you've watched famous surfers or really amazing surfers surf,
these like huge fifty foot waves or two hundred foot
waves or whatever they surf, I think part of the
(31:12):
draw to that is being reminded of our smallness in
the scope of the earth that we live in. And
so Matt and I were really inspired by surfing and
surf culture, and Matt got connected to this company that
could build a man made surfing lagoon. And so when
we moved to Nashville, the stars all aligned and this
(31:32):
calling felt like it was screaming at us to build
this community around the values of surf. And that was
the creative calling. And we stepped down into the unknown
world without knowing how we would suffer, how our hearts
would break, what we would lose. We went all in
two feet in the whole way. We didn't hesitate, and
(31:53):
over time our creative endeavor became quote unquote corrupt by
slow choy. This is over time choosing outcome, choosing financial gain,
choosing what was going to work in the marketplace, versus
what the creative calling was. And it was such a
subtle thing. And this is why I want to bring
this up because you don't have to be Mark Zuckerberg.
(32:13):
I think any one of us can look at, you know,
some of the worst billionaires of our time and be like, oh, yeah,
that person has been so corrupted by their their wealth.
But you don't have to be Mark Zuckerberg. You don't
have to be Jeff Bezos, you don't have to be
Elon Musk to be corrupted by those small choices over time.
I can look back now at our process and see
the moments in time when we abandoned the creative idea
(32:37):
in lieu of the financial payoff with good reason, like
great logical reason, and we were like, we have a family,
feed we have a mortgage today, like we have to
make this work. We got to make you know, make
the numbers pencil the way the accountants will tell you,
this has to pencil. And so over and over again,
we made these decisions that slowly and subtly corrupted the
(32:57):
creative process. And I'm I'm not blaming us or even
shaming us. I'm actually pointing to this essay by David
White and saying, perhaps those distortions were all part of
our creative process. The absence of creativity is also creativity.
The longing for creativity is also creativity. Another thing he says,
(33:18):
is he's wrapping up this first episode, is that our
first experience with creativity is distance from it. And I
wanted to leave you with this thought, because if in
your life you feel that you are distant from your creativity,
first of all, you will experience a deep longing. And
I think sometimes when we feel that longing, we feel
a longing for a connection to ourselves, to community. It
(33:42):
can feel like a longing for friendship. It can feel
like a longing for being understood. It can feel like
a longing for self expression. It can feel like a
longing for nature, a longing to be outside, a longing
for the analogue life, the nineties summer that you know
we used to have when we were younger. It can
feel like a longing to be away from your cell phone.
I can feel like a longing to paint, or to knit,
(34:03):
or to draw, or to play the piano. This is
why like our artisticness and creativity are not necessarily separate.
Like you're longing to do something artistic, is probably your
creativity speaking to you. But you also might be listening
to this and think like, oh, I've never had a
longing to knit. You know, my longing is more like
to build a business, or to start a family, or
(34:23):
to You might have a deep longing for romantic love.
You know that I believe our deep belonging for romantic love,
by the way, is also our creativity speaking to us.
One of the activities that Julia Cameron has you do
in the artist's way that I felt like was extremely
profound and extremely simple at the same time, and I'll
pass this on to you, is to sit down and
list ten to twenty. I don't know if she doesn't
(34:46):
give you a number, just a number of things that
you would like to do. So make this list like
I would like to, and fill in the blank and
just you know, list out as many things as you
can think of that you would like to do. And
they can be big or they can be small. You know.
My list was things like I would like to to
innovate my house, which is a very big thing and
not something that I have resources for at this moment,
Like I don't have access to do that right this moment,
(35:07):
but it's been something I've been dreaming about for a
while and have all kinds of artistic ideas, and so
it's fun to think about and dream about and look
at pictures and that sort of thing. Something smaller like
I'd like to go get a pedicure. That's also something
that I would like to do. I would like to
go on walks more often through the park that's right
behind my house. So the things on your list can
be big things or small things. But I'm made a
(35:27):
list of like twenty five things that I would like
to do. One of the things I wrote is that
I'd like to read more fiction, because I mostly read nonfiction.
And immediately later that day, I felt inspired to go
to the bookstore up the street and buy a book,
and I picked up the first fiction book that was
displayed right when I walked in, and I've been loving it. I'm,
you know, almost one hundred pages into the book now.
And so what this exercise does is it reconnects you
(35:50):
to those creative callings. Because the creative callings come in
as a little whisper, and we can either act upon
those callings or we can resis to them. And David
White would say both of those things. Are you connecting
to your creativity? Your first experience with creativity is your
distance from it. Your first experience with creativity is your
(36:12):
longing for it. And so if you are longing from
your creativity in your life, that is your creativity speaking
to you. If you're feeling distant from your creativity. That
is your creativity talking to you. You actually may not
be as distant as you think you are. If you
feel like you're stuck, if you feel in resistance, if
you feel in avoidance, if you feel hesitant, if you
(36:32):
feel self doubt, if you feel heartbroken, like absolutely devastatingly heartbroken,
this is your creativity speaking to you. Are not far
from your creativity. It is right here. This is your
spirituality speaking to you. This is God, the God of
your understanding, talking to you in this moment. Is those
just those little whispers? I want to fall in love.
(36:54):
I want to have a baby. I want to read
more fiction. I want to renovate my house. I want
I want to make curtains. I want to learn to
play the piano. I want to go to Italy. I
want to learn Italian. Whatever it is for you, like,
make a list of things that seem completely out of
your reach, and then some things that you could absolutely
do later today if you decide to do I want
to plant a garden. What is it for you that
would be on that list of things that you would
(37:15):
like to do? And I'll encourage you to pick up
Julia Cameron's Morning The Artist's Way. Her book is called
The Artist Way. That's the program, the name of the program.
The main concepts of the program are her Morning Pages
and the Artist State. Those are the two main concepts,
but she gives you hundreds of activities in her book
to try. I'll put the link in the show notes.
(37:36):
I've put it in the show notes of the last
couple of episodes. It is such an incredible program. If
you never do another creative program, do Julia Cameron's creative program,
David White's program that I'm doing. I don't know if
it's any longer for sale or if it's closed for
sale now that it's in session. There are recordings to
the videos, so I will look and see if I
can get a link to those recordings as well, or
(37:57):
a link to purchase them, and put that in the
show notes as well well. But however, your creativity is
calling to you, take advantage of whatever that is, so
it doesn't have to be Artist's Way. That was just
my I went to go get The Artist's Way, the
copy of The Artist Way, to hand it to my
brother in law because he had asked to borrow it.
And as soon as I picked up the book, I
was like, I cannot give this to you. I have
(38:18):
to keep it for myself. I'll buy you a copy.
So I immediately went to go buy him a copy
and kept mine for myself. And whatever it is for you,
that was my creative calling. However your creativity wants to emerge,
it will call to you in that way. And I
will tell you as I have answered the call of
my creativity. The serendipity has returned in my life. The
(38:40):
magic has returned in my life. The access to the
deep wall of wisdom that lives within me has returned
in my life. And there's a lot more work to do.
I feel. Oh, there's so many other callings that I
that I'm still in resistance to. I'm still in avoidance to.
I'm still feeling fear around these other callings that have
(39:02):
been put in front of me. But I will get there.
The resistance, the fear is all part of it. It's
all part of the unfolding. As David White says, procrastination
is not what it seems. What looks from the outside
like our delay, our lack of commitment, even our laziness,
may have more to do with a slow, unnecessary ripening
(39:22):
through time and a central struggle with the core realities
of any endeavor to which we have set our minds. So,
whatever endeavor it is that you have set your mind too,
I hope you will treat your procrastination with care. I
hope you will listen to yourself as you feel afraid
of whatever creative calling has been put in front of you.
(39:43):
And I hope that you'll take small steps in the
right direction to welcome your creativity back to you, because
we need your creativity during this time more than ever.
Thank you for listening. I'll see you back next week
on the Write Your Story podcast.
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