Allowing Creativity to Have Her Way with Me

Releasing the fears that bind to embrace total creative freedom

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Living in a Creative Prison

Do you hold yourself back creatively?

After finishing my first book, I’ve been terrified of beginning again. The project was so huge—nearly seven years of my life spent in the all-consuming state of creative obsession. How could I willingly choose to lose myself again like that?

When I began The Heretic, I had no idea what I was getting into. I had never written anything of that scope. Never obsessed about characters. Never stayed up all night to get a scene right. Never bought a plane ticket and spent weeks away from my husband for research… and more research… and more research. How can I—in good conscious—allow anything like that to take over my life again?

I worry that I won’t be available for my family… that I’ll miss my daughter growing up because I can’t look up from the page. I worry that I literally won’t find the time. That my natural creativity will guide me to start things I can’t finish. I worry that even if I do push everything aside and find the time, I won’t be as good as I was before because my attention is split, running after a two year-old and cooking dinner every night.

Perhaps most of all, I worry that if I give myself over to creativity, I’ll be stopped mid-book by the money I need for the research. Or worse, I’ll bankrupt my family—as I nearly did with the last book—my creative sensibility naturally prioritizing travel and research above food and clothes.

I’ve been stuck in a grey space, knowing the sequel is in me somewhere but unwilling to let it out. Instead, I allow myself creative expression here on Substack, but I dread the day I am truly, deeply called to more.

Releasing the Fears that Bind Me

Winding through farmers’ fields as I trace the river on the twenty-minute drive to town from our house in the country, I listen to audiobooks.

A new one just found me—The Genius Zone by Gay Hendricks. His insights in The Big Leap and Conscious Luck have been life-changing, so when the recommendation popped up on my Audible, it was a no-brainer.

Driving through the Ottawa River Valley, past the glacier-cut Gatineau Hills in the height of summer, everything is thick with life. No timidity here, the plants and wildlife are tenacious… harried… eager to drink up every last moment of warmth before the winter snows come again. Gay Hendricks’ practiced voice—still strong, but fading with age—plays through the speakers of my little green hatchback.

He’s talking about fears stored in the body. I have those.

Photo by Ansh Minchekar on Unsplash

Like the good student I always am in spiritual matters, I try on the exercises while I’m driving. It’s uncomfortable at first—allowing my fear to be exactly as it is and relaxing around it. Even now, reflecting and writing this, I find more hidden fears—my arms tense… my belly goes rigid.

I don’t know exactly what the fears are until I breathe and release each panicked muscle. Then the thoughts come flooding in.

Time, money, and ability are the three themes on repeat.

MY TIME FEAR SAYS: I don’t want my life to be taken over like it was before. I don’t want to spend twelve hours a day writing. I don’t want to look up seven years from now and wonder where I’ve been.

MY MONEY FEAR SAYS: I’m not successful enough to set everything aside to write. I’m barely paying the bills as it is, and I can’t afford to do less client work and dedicate more time to writing. How will I ever afford the travel and research the sequel requires? I simply don’t have it.

MY ABILITY FEAR SAYS: The Heretic blew people out of the water, but now the expectations are so high! Sir Henry is dead. Can I do this without him? How could I possibly create a work like the last one. Why did I ever write such an ambitious book?

All day yesterday, I allowed these fears to simply be as they are—to find space in my body and mind. I focused especially on the body where my muscles have been tensed (perhaps for years) to try to control them. Gay Hendricks talked me through examples of others who had walked this path before, and I felt in my own body where the lessons he shared applied to my own fears… my own locked genius.

I could feel the way I’d held myself in check. For years, I stopped myself from allowing the full flow of whatever creative force was longing to move through me.

What would happen if I trusted my own creativity?

Embracing Creative Freedom

This morning I started writing a new book… but not the book everyone wants me to write.

I found myself rising early before the world wakes to set my pen to a non-fiction book about reclaiming humanity’s magical birthright. It was an idea I outlined ages ago… before my fear of beginning again took over.

What a sweet and deeply nourishing experience! Listening to the crows call through the forest, everything else still—as if holding its breath—I allowed myself to write what I wanted.

The forest is still and quiet first thing in the morning—a beautiful time to write.

I don’t know what will become of it—when or if I’ll finish it—but creeping downstairs first thing in the morning to remember stories from my university days studying consciousness was a revelation.

It was one of those rare moments of which Mary Oliver said: “You only have to let the soft animal of my body to love what it loves.”

The Path toward magic all ways lies through uncharted waters, where the predictable structures and routines that hold daily life together fall away.

The creative path is the same—it does not follow the same rules as the ordinary world. It does not require the same unconscious attention to repetition, but instead asks us to be fully alive in our skins. To bring all of ourselves.

There is a nervous tingle just under the surface as I write this. I have pulled over on the side of the road after dropping my daughter off at daycare. I’m expected home any minute to work on the renovation project I’ve taken the week off to complete.

Yet I must admit to myself that there is no way to take time off from my real work—writing, living deeply, exploring the magic of being human.

Giving myself over to inspiration—to creativity—means being willing to late… to be inconvenienced… to appear strange or unbalanced (sometimes even unhinged)… to not know where I am going… to keep going anyway… to be utterly and totally open to whatever’s coming through… to let go again and again, even when it frightens me.

It means fielding angry messages from fans who wish I would just get on with the sequel already and it means not having dinner on the table when everyone’s hungry. It means not knowing what will happen and choosing it anyway.

I am lucky to know this Path well. I have made this Choice a thousand times over and again.

“It is not a Choice we make once . . . but a thousand times over and again.”
—The Heretic

To do it with impending deadlines, in-laws staying over, an ever-growing audience watching is no different really from that first, terrifying time I let myself go out on a creative limb.

I don’t know whether this post is an invitation for you to embrace your own fears and allow yourself to open to your own blocked creativity… or simply a pep-talk for me. Maybe both. Maybe neither. The creative life doesn’t care what use it’s put to—as long as we create whatever’s coming through.

So here it is, Blank Page, another love note to you, that says exactly what you needed to hear. If anybody else is listening, may you be blessed to experience the sheer terror and unadulterated exhilaration of giving yourself over to the wild arms of creativity.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

—Mary Oliver

If you’re interested in checking out the The Genius Zone by Gay Hendricks, it’s a quick little read (or listen). And if you haven’t yet had the opportunity to have your life changed by The Big Leap, I highly recommend it!

Blessings and HUGE gratitude to all my paid subscribers for making this creative space possible. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your contribution to my work, to my life, and to this beautiful, burgeoning community. I appreciate you more than I can say.