I just finished reading “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. I LOVED this book. An amazing account of Elizabeth’s search for her inner, Higher Self through an Odyssey from Italy to India to Bali. She travels through her own fear and confusion in the aftermath of a divorce, and tries focusing on learning Italian, then meditating for months in an Ashram, then re-connecting with her social side in Indonesia… it’s fabulous, witty and but most of all, heart-felt and brutally honest. Laying her soul bare, the result is over 7 million copies in print and apparently everyone feeling sorry for her as it was soooo good, how can she possibly top it?!
[ted id=453]Are we scared of our own success? How do you reconcile the process of creating art work (I include more than the visual arts in this category) with being a mere human being, with our particular anxieties, self-doubt and fear? How much do we get in our own way? How do we go on?
Thinking it through here, after listening to Elizabeth’s TED talk, I think for some while now, (since I finished my MA and found out I was pregnant), so actually, a long while (!), blogging (writing) and being creative with my wonderful artist children have replaced the amazing, exciting and demanding connecting-to-source work I used to do in my studio. I’m scared of the studio now, after so long out of it, though I long to go there, to be in that space again – how can I ever get back into that space? I mean the spiritual one, the elusive one, that I only glimpsed for an instance after years and years of hard work, late nights and dirty nails. Scared that I’ll discover that I’ll have to start at the bottom of the hill again, that I won’t just be able to flounce in and pick up where I left off, I flirt with my studio practice like I flirt with my yoga practice – it’s all in my head as best intentions, I rearrange the materials and dust of my yoga mat every week or so, but I never DO the practice, so weeks later I’m in the same fearful spot, no painting done and no difference physically either.
So those are my dragons, my demons, my blocks. What am I doing about them?
- Meditating – 20 mins a day – a minor accomplishment in itself.
- Journaling – not quite a sketchbook yet, but all going in the right direction – pouring out my thoughts, catching my ideas before they flit away, and quieting my mind.
- Coaching – in two weeks’ time I’m doing the ‘Taming Your Dragons’ course with Aina Egeberg, a transformational coach I met during my training as a life coach in the UK earlier this year.
But I know what I need to do. As they say in Monty Python’s Holy Grail frequently: ‘Get on with it!!’
What about you? How have you or do you get through or around or over your blocks?
Please share your stories and experiences in the comments below!