(New Year’s Series #2)
jenny holzer at times square, nyc, 1993
When I was a kid, my older sister would take a lot of pictures of me.
There are stacks of snapshots, full of the orange and brown tones of the era, with me posing in wigs or dancing around the den. She always seemed to have a camera in her hand.
On a vacation in Massachusetts, I remember smiling for a picture.
“Act natural,” she instructed.
“What do you mean?”
“Like you’re just sitting there and I’m not taking a picture of you.”
In both our lives and our creative practice, we seek a state of flow, that natural feeling that my sister tried so hard to elicit in my modeling. And to get there, we’re often advised in those familiar words: to let go, act natural, be more relaxed.
But when we’re told to act natural, or told “not to try” or “to let go,” we often end up feeling… well, a little bit like this photo:
cape code, massachusetts, 1970s
The impulse is understandable — but trying not to try can create its own riddle of frustration.
The Gap Between
In my last post, I wrote about how many of us find our creative practice implicitly tied up in the gap between what actually is and what we think “should be” — whether in what we’re making or how we’re creating.
In this gap between what we wish were true and what we actually encounter, feelings of overwhelm and inadequacy can come rushing in.
And it’s about more than uneasiness or disappointment. In this state, our nervous system is on alert that something is wrong and needs to change. We actually end up in a higher state of tonus and stress response — and even more distant from the flow state we’re craving.
I wish something beautiful were just pouring forth…
I wish I felt more connected to what I’m writing…
This would be easier if I were more disciplined…
When what we’re trying to conjure doesn’t come out the way we expected, it’s easy for impatience to take hold (and discouragement too).
The gap between what we think “should be,” in both our writing and our process, and what we can feel really happening — or not happening — can feel overwhelming. Almost unbridgeable.
No wonder it’s difficult to develop a sustainable creative practice.
Freeing Yourself from the Gap
What if, instead of leaping immediately to what we wish were true, we learned how to work with the body and nervous system to engage with what is actually there?
That’s exactly what we do in Sense Writing.
Through targeted neurosensory writing and movement sequences, we learn to guide the nervous system into a parasympathetic dominant state — a state of engaged and relaxed learning and discovery.
In this state, our rich, subjective landscapes of memory or imagination can gradually start to fill in, revealing themselves to us in sensation, detail, and language, without needing to invent anything.
The gap we work so hard to avoid becomes irrelevant, and we experience a taste of the freedom we were wishing for all along.
In this New Year’s gift, you’ll get to experience how this “freedom from the gap” feels in your own landscapes of body, memory, and imagination.
No posing necessary.
Just click below. All you need is a chair, a notebook, and pen.
