Remembering
“Creativity is a force moving through us, and only through practice do we learn how to cooperate with it. The ‘process’ is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised in order to function effortlessly.”
I woke up this morning with a fair bit of nervous energy for my photoshoot later today. I haven’t had a photo shoot for probably a decade and need some new shots for my web page. They were always stressful- when I was an actor - partly because it brought a great deal of uncomfortable self-consciousness into view.
Now that I’m not an actor, I am more and more free of this self consciousness that had begun to plague me. There is such a wonderful freedom in art-making now that the pressure of making money is gone.
However, it took a lot of guided no-pressure art-making for me to be free from my own judgments.
So, this morning I wanted to go back to some of the first readings we did in our Expressive Arts
Therapy training. Shaun McNiff’s writings have shifted my perspective from judgmental to more process oriented. Process over product, one might say. The quote above is from his aptly titled book, Trust the Process.
When I’m nervous, I want to step out of the flow and this appears as staying in bed way to long or not making art or not taking the dog for a walk. It’s a deep down stubborn resistance to flow. Once I get going, though, it invariably feels so much better and I wonder why it took me so long.
“from here… to there” Channeling my nervousness in an activity and remembering it’s all a process. Remembering #flow