FINDING FLOW

There's a chimp and a wonder wizard within us all. The chimp blocks our creative flow and the wizard weaves the magic. So how do we bypass our chimp to access our wizard?

It doesn’t matter if you work as an artist or an IT technician, at some point life requires everyone to get creative and in these moments, we either rise to the challenge or we freeze. When you hit creative flow, ideas fall out of the sky; your fingers fly across a keyboard like they’ve got a mind of their own; magic happens. When you hit a block, you sit staring a blank page for hours, berating yourself for being so unimaginative or feeling deeply overwhelmed like a kid with stage fright.

The flow state feels awesome so I’ve chased it by trying every practice imaginable. I’ve set myself insane word targets and given myself long breaks. I’ve tried writing in the garden and locked myself in the basement. I’ve woken up early to write and stayed up late. And yet, through all that experimentation, I never found a stable correlation between the things I did and the way I wrote. I might write more words first thing in the morning when I’m fresh from a good night’s sleep but these words aren’t always my best work. Productivity is not the same as creativity.

Then I had a big realisation. It occurred to me that creative flow is less about the ‘doing’ and more about the ‘being.’ What I mean by this is that creative flow originates from a certain state of mind. It either arises from a moment of inspiration or from a moment of suffering.

Meet the Wizard

When we look at an awesome piece of art or become engrossed in a movie created from that flow state, we either join the artist in marvelling at the sheer wonder of this world or we walk with them through their story of suffering. We experience the artist’s world through their eyes and this, in turn, makes us grow as humans.

The reason inspiration and suffering produce good art is because these states come from a higher part of the human soul, the wonder wizard within. This is the part of you that looks up in awe at a star-lit sky or sheds tears over a stranger’s story. It’s the truest part of you that can’t lie; the intuitive part that always knows the answer, the bravest part that doesn’t fear judgment. It’s love… and love is at the heart of all great art.

Even if the subject matter is hatred, we can feel the artist’s quest for love. Even if the subject matter is concrete, we can feel the artist’s quest for beauty (aka love of the world). Even if the subject matter is cheating, we can feel the artist’s quest for truth (aka love of the human spirit). True art pulses with the heartbeat of the higher self. That’s why art moves us so much and feels so enriching to our lives.

Meet the Chimp

When the higher self is in charge it feels amazing. We all love to love. It’s the meaning of life. So don’t we let the higher self rule all the time? To understand this question, we need to delve into the theories of the mind and within about two pages of most psychology books, you will encounter the ego. Millions of words have been written about the ego but in a nutshell, it is the part of our personalities that competes to gain power, wealth and validation and forgets the joy of truth, love and friendship.

To use psychologist and author of The Chimp Paradox, Dr Steve Peters’ analogy, the ego is like a chimp in your mind – it’s only interested in getting to the top of the pack so it can get the best fruit and have sex with the best fellow chimps. Your inner chimp is a great driver of action so he is not your enemy but he often gets in the way of true creativity.

A chimp will lie if he thinks it will make other chimps like him (and thus his work will lack authenticity). A chimp will steal another’s fruit to get ahead (and thus his art will be a recirculation of preexisting ideas instead of being truly imaginative).

In my opinion, the chimp is also responsible for creative blocks. Depending on your personality, there are thousands of ways your chimp can make you freeze. Maybe you’re worried about what other chimps in the pack will think. Maybe you’re putting too much pressure on yourself because you’re desperate to rake in the praise and bananas.

Maybe your chimp’s pushing you too hard to be something you’re not and you’ve exhausted yourself in the process.

Meet the Balance

In her book Big Magic, Liz Gilbert describes how fear can cripple a writer. In these terms, ‘fear’ is just another word for ‘chimp’ and as she says, “Fear is always triggered by creativity because creativity asks you to enter into the realms of uncertain outcomes and fear hates uncertain outcome. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It is however, something to be dealt with.”

So how do you deal with your chimp/fears, embrace the beauty of uncertain outcomes and access your inner wonder wizard? I’ve read a lot of self-help books in this arena and tried a whole load more practices and I’ve slowly realised there’s one (rather unoriginal) thing that helps most people calm the chimp and access the wizard. Meditation.

When you meditate, you make a commitment to rewire your brain. There are thousands of theories about how this works but in my personal experience, meditation is simply a moment in my day to focus solely on shushing the inner chimp and handing the power over to my higher self.

If you train your brain in this manner, at some point, the chimp starts to become less powerful and the higher self takes over. You find you’re less inclined to lie; cheat or screw people over and your decisions come from a more loving place. Of course, you still have the capacity to be a monumental dick but at least you’re trying and being less of a dick than you would have been in the past.

You also approach your art differently. You’re less concerned about what other people think. After all, if you’re really opening your heart and speaking your truth, it doesn’t matter if someone thinks your art is shit. The wholehearted truth does not rely on money, power or accolades. It just is.

So when you hand the reins of your creativity over to your higher self, blocks happen less frequently and when they do arise they’re not a big drama; you just walk away from your work knowing today is not your day.