I want to talk really specifically about a couple of lessons for me that came from my insight meditation practice that really supported the opening of my creative process. So one, when we gain some facility with clinging and releasing clinging and becoming less attached and less invested, we see how clearly our sense of who we are is shaped by how we relate to other things. What they mean to us, what we think of them. There’s a real back and forth there. When there is less clinging and less investment, we begin to open the space to see how the self is defined through what one is in relationship to. And you also kind of see that that’s the primary way we sense the self. Yeah, without being in relation to other things, there’s not a self that can be found in a very concrete way.
So there’s this link between clinging, craving, what we think of things, how we respond to them, how we judge things, how we compare one to another, and our sense of who we are. Our art is part of us, but it’s also outside of us. It’s something we make, and people can see it, judge it, and evaluate it, yet it’s quite close to us. So the more we identify with our work, the stronger the clinging becomes. When I feel really identified with my work (I am my work; if my work is unlovable then so am I), the art-making experience becomes more heavy, fraught, and narrowed.
And that can start to make the art-making process very rigid. When that happens, there’s not a lot of space to play or be in the murk and confusion. We need to have that space to be confused, to fail, to not know, to be lost, in order to explore freely.
So we get more invested, and that narrows the space of exploration—the stakes are higher. We need our work to say something about us or to do something for us. There are lots of different reasons why we might need that. Yeah, we talked a little bit about demands last time. What are the pressures that are coming onto the work? When those pressures come in, the intensity of the clinging rises up and then the sense of the self becomes more built up, and there’s a kind of back and forth that can come that can really close down the process. You know, why is this helpful to talk about? When we can see something as a process through our practice, through our Buddhist practice, it’s like, you know, it becomes a bit less personal. Everyone has conditioning, and so this is mine. It becomes more manageable to work around it or despite it.
I went to film school. I have a lot of friends still in the film industry. That’s a creative career that has very high stakes in a lot of different ways. There’s a lot of pressure involved; there’s a lot of people who want to be in that industry; and there’s a lot of money involved. A project goes on for years. This kind of stuff, for many, can place a very heavy pressure on the creative process. My sense is that one of the reasons that a full-on creative block happens is that the demands of self-definition through creative endeavor become so big that it just chokes the creative process. There’s no play in it; there’s no space in it. This better be good, this better sell, or who will I be? It can be a process that builds over time and becomes more and more and more narrow. Sometimes it closes completely.
So this kind of work of finding a way to come into the creative process differently is kind of poking at and easing the kinds of narrowing that can build over time. One other thing I’ll say is the skills and capacities we’ve developed as meditators can really serve us in our ability to kind of release where we’re very contracted, where there’s a high degree of clinging and a lot of self-investment in the work itself. Because we have already cultivated these skills of working not just on a level of thought but also including the body, including the emotions, including the senses, all of these things.
The other thing I’m going to bring into this discussion is that the supports for clinging and self-investment—all of these likes or dislikes, demands, and judgments that we make—all come from past conditioning. So in Buddhist terms, conditioning is a really broad term. It includes what happened to you yesterday and what happened to you in your childhood. But it could also include, if it’s part of your worldview, your karma from past lives. It certainly would include the condition of being born into a human body. Yeah, because there are certain things that just come from the body and nervous system we’ve inherited as human beings that we could call part of our conditioning and our tendencies.
So conditioning can be seen very broadly in the Buddhist context. For our exploration, I think it’s helpful to think of conditioning as opinions and judgments about our work that we are constantly picking up and accumulating. Feedback about our art, about what is good art generally, what is wanted, and what is popular. And that is just kind of coming into our being, our system, for years and decades. If we don’t have a means to look at that accumulation of conditioning, it will make our creative space narrower and narrower over time.
If I got a lot of praise for something, I may keep trying to bring back that theme or that way of making something—that color combination, that subject matter for what I’m writing, that kind of mood for my music, whatever it is. What’s the difference between a style and something that is like a kind of prison? There’s no reliable outward way to know, you know. But you can discover for yourself what the differences between those things are. What is a style that’s authentic to you vs. what is something that comes from your conditioning, which is closing something off or deadening something within your process? So again, with this work, at least within the process sessions, it’s like everything is up for grabs. Everything can be questioned. And there’s no inherently right, inherently wrong, or always true about it. But when we are looking in a certain way, over time it becomes obvious what is alive and authentic to us and what we can let go of. We can learn to feel the aliveness in our body, our being, and our hearts. And that sense of aliveness is a trustworthy direction to follow.
Sometimes people will say, “Oh, I keep becoming drawn to work with the same images again and again. Is that bad? Is that a problem? Does that mean I’m not open to new things?” Maybe, maybe not. Maybe that repetition, that recurring motif, is a thread of exploration that is meaningful, deep, and necessary. Something is opening through it, something is calling you, and something is being met through the repetition. That image is what is coming forth from the mystery, and there’s no problem with that.
How do we know what is alive and authentic versus rote repetition? Freeing our creative process is a bit like untangling a knotted skein of string. It’s not usually a matter of simply identifying the problem and yanking—or just cutting something out. It’s more often something like going around the whole ball of it with care and slowly opening from different directions. It’s a process that happens gradually (although, as with insight meditation, there are occasionally sudden, breathtaking breakthroughs). This untangling includes working with the intellect, including the wisdom body and heart’s responses, and the dynamism of the work itself. Over time, softly untangling, making more space… revealing what is essential.