Inner Life
How to create through embracing feelings
Artists engage in their best work when they can embrace their current state of mind and heart. This directly affects their ability to produce work that they are satisfied with. This does not necessarily mean the artist must feel good to produce their best work, but rather they must be able to allow their emotional experience into the depths of their heart and mind, and not resist it as it makes itself known through the natural beckoning that exists with deep emotional experiences. The repetitive, incessant, rhythmic, and reverberative nature of our thoughts, particularly when there are reinforced by our emotions, can be an opportunity for us to accept and inhabit our deepest self, or it can become the world’s most unfortunate and inopportune distraction. This is because the dawn of the ego usually comes when we least expect it. It always seems like bad timing. Its never about a subject that’s not important to you, and its never charged with an emotion that you’d want to feel all the time. Most people would not want to endure this intense inquiry that an artist engages in, and it’s obvious why most of us become conditioned to turn away from this side of ourselves: life is simpler and more predictable.
The ego overrides our common sense precisely when we feel the least equipped to deal with it. Isn’t it a funny game that we’re playing with ourselves, where we work ourselves to the bone, and then old problems return as if they were never solved? It’s hard to discern whether this situation is the ultimate test of courage and strength, or a signal from the body that you are losing mental acuity, and that you many suffer in the quality of your work if you decide to persist in your emotionally-charged creative folly. In situations where creativity suffers due to a reactive inner life, it may be time to take a step back from the work and consider how an artist can enter their next session without something in their life beckoning them.
I suppose the younger artist tends to receive these moments as a challenge, a monumental feat to surmount, and a runaway train of frenetic energy loosely following the initial intent of the artist. The seasoned artist understands when he is misled by his emotions, or the current landscape of his inner life. They understand that the hum of soft focus is far more enjoyable and fruitful than the dynamic burn of our self-energy, which tends to only bring us good outcomes in short bursts.
Many ideas come from our identity and its premeditated responses, without appropriate consideration to the joyous ideas that we find when we inhabit a space of non-attachment. Non attachment is not to be confused with detachment. Non attachment is the process of engaging with something without forcing a particular outcome. Whereas detachment is abstaining from deep engagement with something in order to avoid both possibilities of favorable and unfavorable outcomes; its denying the ‘game’ altogether in order to avoid having to deal with ups and downs. This mentality also forces a separation between the person and their external world, whereby they are unable to interact with their environment as an extension of themselves. They feel that they are the observer behind their eyes, and everything on the outside is a foreign object, so their ability to relate to their environment, including other people, never truly becomes seamless.
A detached person would give up the possibility of romance altogether to reach a state of reliable equilibrium within themselves. While this might be a wise method to keep an even keel and not let anything overtake your executive function, it is a barrier to growth in the long run because the detached person is not allowing their relationship with their emotions to evolve. In the short term, of course, you are experiencing fewer emotional spikes, which allows one to contemplate clearly. But contemplation is second to our intuitive responses of the moment, so we must train that as well.
When we relinquish our ability to make choices simply to keep our inner life more stable, we don’t train the intuitive response—the part of ourselves that is navigating the world. Our intuitive intelligence and our ability to engage in deep contemplation are meant to work harmoniously. But without allowing oneself to take actions, and make decisions, one cannot hone a true intuitive response. Experience enhances contemplation, and then the depth of the enhanced contemplation is fodder for the next iteration of our intuitive action. When our actions are curtailed due to self-consciousness and self-censorship, we cannot experience the emotional residual that allows our contemplative practice to truly simmer into the foundations of our future choices.
Practice generating ideas through a part of yourself that is unattached, because that part of you hasn’t reflexively made up your mind. Reflexively making up your mind is a result of premeditated responses based on one’s own identity. Rather than concluding based on the particular situation at hand, the tendency is to think through the lens of one’s previous beliefs and decisions. But this only results in iterations of ideas that we have already thought of.
To occupy the spirit of unattachment is in essence, the spirit of Zen. To listen to one’s own likes and dislikes, and to consider them valuable but not gospel. To have firmly decided who you are is to have decided who you will become. It is a self-imposed frozen time capsule of destiny. To think it must be this way, and that it must not, could not, and shan’t be any other way. That is the trap of the human ego. To drag the baggage of the past into the present moment, and to populate the moment with reflections of who you’ve been, just so you’re not rattled each day when you realize every moment we are experiencing is the same moment.
We have preferences to keep reinforcing the part of ourselves that we cherish. It’s a simplification mechanism to keep us from having to think and feel too deeply. As if that is a weakness or something to dread. If we reframe this situation, having an opportunity to feel our way through a new moment, is a gift. What a wonderful delight that we can have something anomalous enter our life that can disrupt our patterns and systems, the ones we so often covet.
Sometimes it is valuable to stick with a certain theme, or pattern, and remain consistent in one’s intention. But this shouldn’t last an entire decade, or lifetime. Our life is supposed to be dynamic, requiring us to think on our toes and pivot when necessary. Maintaining the same approach for too long will not yield the greatest outcomes indefinitely. The fruitful outcomes are a result of allowing dynamic change, and fully engaging with the changes that take place. This is the spirit of Zen.
Zen is often misconceived as a passive and detached method of navigating life, with a balanced emotional life. A path of least resistance. Go with the flow. The balanced state that people think is the focus of studying Zen, is really just a part of a larger process that we call Zen; the practice of recognizing the fluctuations in our inner life and addressing them accordingly. This is the true nature of the Zen student. One cannot strive for a permanently balanced emotional life, run-down-hill attitude. The person who strives for this is the least likely to get it. This is merely a result of effectively addressing emotional cues, signals and imbalances.
In our result-oriented nature as Westerners, it is no surprise that the focus of Zen Buddhism became the state that we typically associate with monks—a state of equanimity. We only seem to glorify the result of the process of Zen, but not the underlying principles or narrative. Since we do not, in mainstream society, hold in high regard the actions and attitudes that result in these balanced, feelgood, and even euphoric states, we are left to chase an outcome rather than acknowledging the entire process behind the scenes of the outcome. These actions and attitudes are the true foundation of Zen, and we need to have them in place to establish a consistently satisfying and nourishing creative process.
Dancing with fate, allowing twists and turns, and welcoming the energetics that flow your way as a result; that is the spirit of Zen. It is not to chase euphoric states, or higher states of consciousness through biomodulation. These states may enhance our willingness to submit to a Zen way of being, but their constituent parts, without proper integration, are not aspects of Zen.