Overcoming Creativity Blocks

Most creatives want to get better at overcoming creativity blocks. This has been another week bursting with creative energy. After living in Wilmington, NC for a year now, I’ve made a firm commitment to continue to stay here, to be here full-time, to create a life and community here.

It really is true what they say about how when you make decisions that are resonant with your heart, things align to support you. I’ve spent the week clearing clutter from my home, rearranging a few things to warm up my home, deciding on new art work to hang and change out some of the old, and generally clearing from my life that which isn’t an absolute yes.  

As I’ve cleared out the old, the new has begun to move in, bringing calm clarity. I continue to clarify a sense of direction, both in my work as a psychotherapist and my work as a writer and photographer. As I’ve sat with many possibilities this week, images of collage continue to weave through my explorations.  

I’ve connected with artist friends to explore possibilities and have now created several backgrounds for the collages. I’m really excited about how some of these are turning out, and I’ll continue to create more of them. But for now, I’ve including an image of one of them above. At first, I imagined scanning some of the sacred objects that I find along the shoreline and using those on the backgrounds, and I’ll continue to explore that a bit more, because I seem to be attached to that idea. But as I loosen the grip of that attachment, I’ve made room for other ideas to emerge as well.  

The themes that I keep coming back to again and again this week, in my explorations of both my clinical work and my creative work, are what I know, what I don’t know, what I value, and what I feel passionate about. The list includes commitment, clarity, creativity, spirituality, presence, mindfulness, nature, peace, wellness, freedom, generosity, warmth, and loving-kindness. Of course, it’s always exciting when the boundaries here become blurred and concepts from my work with people find expression in my art, and that has begun to happen this week. Since I was a young girl, I’ve been fascinated by how language inspires a visual image and how a visual image inspires and informs language.  

Of course, I’m also encountering what every creative person encounters—the stuck places, self-doubt, frustration, the stone walls of creativity blocks. But this week I’m using photography and writing to deeply investigate those creativity blocks, too. I’m noticing that there’s a different quality to the stone walls this week related to the collage.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of my struggles in 8^th grade algebra class. Up until that point, I had been a straight A student who excelled in perfectionism. But in 8^th Grade algebra, I hit a stone wall. My brain literally couldn’t comprehend it. My brain thinks in abstracts, visual images, associations, and analysis. Put numbers in it, and it goes all whonky. So I did what every perfectionist would do in that situation—I avoided it. I simply left school early and didn’t go to algebra class, which, of course, only added to my inability to comprehend the lesson on the next day that I decided to show up.

Avoidant strategies seem to consistently have the effect of only making things worse.   Anyway, unlike the strategy of avoiding the algebra class, I’m not avoiding this stone wall that I’m encountering with the collage work. I’m being present with it, inviting it closer, and investigating it. As a result, new images are arriving in my imagination, images of algebraic equations and language combined, layered on the backgrounds that I love creating. As with anything in art and life, I don’t really know where this is going, but I’m deeply immersing myself in the process, I’m learning a lot about art, life, my clinical work, and my creative process, and I’m committed to seeing this through until it feels finished.  

What stuck places or stone walls are you encountering in your life or art, creativity blocks or other types of blocks? Try taking the time to investigate the walls through your mindful journaling practice. Feel their texture, their temperature. Be still, and sit down beside them. Draw them, photograph, them, paint them. Listen, and they will begin to speak to you in words or images. What can you create with what you hear and see?