The first premise of this course, and for me, it’s really important to underline this, is that I’m positing that it’s really helpful to have a space in your creative life that is only about exploration. That is just about play; that is just about poking at the walls of where you’re constrained and seeing what can open. I feel there’s a strong value to that.
I feel the same way about having a formal meditative practice, on the cushion. In meditation, we have a place where we’re really free to play with perspectives that allow us to move beyond the fixated ideas we have about who we are, what this life is, and what’s possible. That’s really how I see formal meditation practice—a kind of lab for exploring, puncturing, and releasing our fixations and habits of perceiving. Just as I feel it’s essential to our dharma practice to have time to meditate really deeply and really freely in order to expand what is possible within our lives, I also feel it’s extremely helpful to have some time to explore creatively, which is separate from our “regular” creative time. Some space or context in which the primary concern is caring for how it feels to create vs. what we make. When we have some time spent working that way, we become able to open and reveal aspects of our creative process that have been hidden, constrained, or blocked. When we are continually focused on what we are making or trying to make, it’s very hard to get a sense of what is blocked within our process.
What is revealed through this kind of creative process work (the blocks, the challenges, the strengths we have) is gonna look so different from person to person, and I would hope it’s that way, yeah? The terrain we are applying these approaches to will necessarily be different—how we’ve worked in the past, what our strengths are, and what we care about. So I’m not teaching a specific way to make art. No specific method, no specific projects. Instead, I’m sharing what I hope are helpful suggestions that encourage us to do things differently than how we do them habitually. You could also call them rules or instructions. Like meditative instructions, they may tend to reveal some ways we are blocked, blinded, habituated. Like meditative instructions, they aren’t necessarily rules to live by. They are tools that can help reveal how we are blocked or closed down.
So it’s important for me to kind of underline that it is so helpful to have times when we are really free to play, explore—to kind of go for broke and really challenge our habits. We can trust that our own being is going to take what is good from the exploration and leave the rest behind. But if we don’t go beyond our habits and conditioning, we can’t see them, and so we will be constrained by them.
I have no interest in saying what’s the right, pure, best way to make art, to craft, or express yourself creatively. I think of these process sessions as tools to reveal some new possibilities within the ways you’re already called to work. Sometimes, in this context of “spiritual” art making, I’ve gotten a sense that there was some judgment around art made for sale, or fine art vs. commercial art vs. hobby. I’m actually not interested in those kinds of distinctions. You can make art that you never show anyone, which brings dimension and meaning to your life, and that’s what serves you and suits you. That’s wonderful. If you’re a professional artist whose livelihood is dependent on your creative output and that’s how you want to live and that’s meaningful for you, I hope that these kinds of tools will like serve the freedom within the conditions you choose to work within. It’s all good to me.
The “creative process sessions” are what I’ve come up with for this course to hold a place and time that is separate and protected to allow a fullness of creative exploration. They seemed to be helpful last time—maybe not for everybody, but for many people. A chance to use certain rules and instructions that may encourage you to do things differently than you might habitually do. It is almost impossible, in both insight meditation and creative process work, to see where we are stuck until we move way beyond that place. I have a note here, something about the idea of “the art of overshooting.” Like, that’s really how I see meditative practice on the cushion. It’s really going for broke, well beyond our habits or what we think is “okay” or good. A place to create that is really separate, really protected, and really playful and pure, where there is nothing to lose.