As Henry Matisse said, creativity takes courage. We will take a closer look at why but first, it’s worth a look at the relationship between courage and fear. Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to gather yourself and continue regardless of your fear.
The creative process is surrounded by fear and when create we step up to the cliff edge. But do we have to summon our courage every time we go to the rockface?
More often than not it is our fear of fear that blocks us, the real thing is rarely as bad as we think it is. But because fear is so fully loaded we turn away from it, leaving us pointing in the wrong direction. We then look to our intellect to rescue us and that takes us away from our creative flow.
There is plenty of advice out there for those who are blocked or held back by the fear around creativity, but most of it either seeks to divert us from our fear or to suppress it. However, if you don’t get to the root of the problem, it will remain there to surface another time. Better to face and understand our fears so that we can free ourselves from them completely and unleash our full creative potential.
Crooked Carrots
There is a basic tension at work in the creative process. Creativity is about breaking the mould, but we are creatures of habit who like the status quo. Breaking free from the past means moving into unknown territory and this makes us feel vulnerable. When we feel vulnerable we are more susceptible to our fears. That’s a vicious circle.
An antidote to this is to reconnect with our relationship with nature. We are part of the creativity of nature. By being true to our nature we can recalibrate our relationship with our creativity and that will give us the power to drive forward.
Imagine planting a carrot seed but treating it solely as a functional process to get food on the table. Alternatively, picture sowing the seed, nurturing it and revering the magical process that delivers us the wonder of nature. Neither approach guarantees a better quality of carrot but the reverence is transformative because it determines the way we engage with the world around us. And our quality of engagement is especially important in the creative process.
The loss of our reverence for nature is well illustrated by the perversity of supermarkets that won’t sell ‘deformed’ carrots because they don’t conform to our expectations of the perfect. This is not a healthy view of nature.
Classrooms
Our view of creativity has suffered at the hands of our education system. We have been educated, to the point of obsession, to deal in absolutes, as if life were a mathematical formula. This same education sees creativity as a destination rather than as a process of engagement. We expect immediate results. We expect perfection. The concept of failure has been taught to us and it ensures we carry around a heavy load.
As a society, we are perverse about creativity. On the one hand, despite its obvious importance, we are taught to look down on it as a lesser subject. On the other hand, we think of it as this illusive gift bestowed upon us. Both point us in the wrong direction. Creativity is within us all and it is fundamental to our nature and therefore happiness. We neglect it at our peril. Like Mother Nature, our nature is to be creative, if we deny that we deny ourselves who we are.
To remedy our fears around the creative process we must reveal our unconscious beliefs about our creativity, programmed into us as children. Was creativity a moment of play before we got back to the serious stuff – get a proper job! Were our creative efforts criticized? Everybody’s relationship with creativity is unique and by understanding it we can free ourselves from it.
We live in a top-down world, where the intellect is seen as king. The intellect serves the ego and the ego doesn’t like the unknown. This is a problem for creativity which by its nature is about moving into unknown territory.
The antidote to our fear of the unknown is to create as a whole, using all the body – the head, the heart and the guts – all in harmony. The reason for this is that the body doesn’t suffer the burden of creativity like the intellect does.
Nature is the greatest creative intelligence we know and humanity is nature’s creativity in action. And like carrots, that creativity comes in all shapes and sizes.
In the classroom, we are taught to think inside of the box but with creativity, we need to think outside of it. Better still is to be aware that it is the intellect that creates the box in the first place and so it is the least effective at thinking itself out of its limitations. The solution is to be like the carrot – part of the whole. The carrot works in perfect harmony with its environment. If we do that we create in harmony with our whole body and this in turn invites us to feel - where there’s no box at all.
Like the carrot, we are perfectly designed by nature. We were not designed to be in our heads the whole time. That came from our classrooms. If we return to nature we return to harmony and that is where we create the best.
Reverence as the key
If we can find a reverence for our creative process as we might for the wonder of nature, we will transcend our fear. To help us have reverence we need only connect to the whole picture. Our classrooms teach us not to do that, like they teach us to treat a carrot as an object amongst objects, each separate. But a carrot considered as a whole is a process sustained by a majestic cycle of nature. Water, minerals, sunlight, oxygen, carbon dioxide. Constantly changing and evolving and very far from the static sanitized produce we see in the supermarket basket.
When in the ground the carrot interacts with its environment: soil, microbes, through roots and leaves. Interacting with insects and animals, with the sun, wind and rain. Seen in that light where does it begin and end? The same goes for our creativity. What do we bring to it, what does it bring to us?
Taking the leap
If we can nurture our creativity as a gardener might lovingly care for his vegetable patch, we might be fortunate enough to notice two things:
Firstly, creativity is an expression of our essence and so when we create we are being truly authentic and that is a coming-home feeling. Without exception, every person I work with reveals within them an affinity for their creativity that is core to their purpose and that is because we are ultimately creativity expressed.
Secondly, creativity allows us to dance intimately with our fears. Fear is such a loaded concept, and we have become so educated against it, that we have forgotten that within every fear is the opportunity to go beyond it and experience our pure potential. Our body, as opposed to our intellect, can move through fear and beyond our story, but to do that we need to learn how to jump off the cliff edge.
Once we have learned to take the leap of faith it becomes a thing of joy and the fears around creativity can melt away.
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