How to balance your creative nervous system ?

This whole process is about practising a sense of ease: comfort, pleasure, and rest.

In the beginning, some nervous systems will be highly activated, caught in fight, flight, or freeze, with a lot of overwhelm and anxiety. So what you might experience as rest and digest may initially feel like simply sleeping a lot.

I might be guiding you through something and you find yourself drifting off. That’s the first layer. Your body is learning how to rest. You actually have to build your capacity for rest that isn’t sleep.

And you do that by allowing yourself to sleep first. Let the body rest as much as it needs to until you begin to find a balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems: between fight, flight, and freeze, and rest and digest.

As the system begins to balance, fight, flight, and freeze can start to transform into curiosity, adventure, exploration, and an openness to the unknown.

You’ll notice that I ask questions like, “What did you discover?” or “What am I doing?” I’m challenging the conditioning and patterns around “I did it right” and “I did it wrong.”

We’re so accustomed to judging our work as good or bad. But binary judgements about your own artistry are like telling a four-year-old that their painting is good or bad, right or wrong.

A four-year-old will hopefully look at you and say, “What are you talking about? It’s mine.”

There is conditioning we have to work through in the beginning. That’s why we have this phase where we include everything.

The character doesn’t think they’re doing it right. The character doesn’t feel like they’re enough. We include all of that.

That is craft in the beginning: learning to hold all of those experiences until we build a robust sense of our own artistry.

Ultimately, you are responsible for building a system that suits you. You are responsible for getting to know your own creative system and understanding what it needs.

If it needs to get up in the morning and go for a walk, then let it do that. If it needs to get up and spend an hour looking out the window, writing in a journal with a nice cup of coffee, then do that.

You need to discover what your system needs. That’s your responsibility.

Part of this process is supporting you in figuring that out.

What does your mind, body, and spirit need?

Think of it as a little fractal of your day. What kinds of relationships nourish you?

What are the collectives and groups you’re part of?

What is your relationship with the natural world? That needs to be at the centre of your day.

And what is your relationship to something bigger than you?

This is the serious work. Seriously.

What I’m asking you to do is challenge your own concept of how you work, and the quality with which you approach your creative practice.

I want you to value rest. I want you to value comfort. I want you to value ease.

Your system may scream and rage against that, because it’s not what many of us have been taught to do.

We’ve been taught to push, to hustle, to strive.

But I promise you, this is more powerful. It is a humble, steadfast practice—one that requires responsibility, curiosity, and commitment.

Like any relationship, you have to keep showing up. If you don’t show up to a relationship, you’re not going to have a relationship.

And you show up regardless of how you feel.

It’s a little like showing up here every week, no matter how you feel.

The practice is in continuing to show up, continuing to practise, and allowing whatever you feel to be part of that process.

You’re not ignoring how you feel. You’re not leaving it at the door.

It’s here, present with you, and we’re working with it.