What’s the path of least resistance?

Simply said, it’s a way of living that contains more flow and ease, and, you guessed it, less resistance. This means less upstream movement, less struggle, and less feeling blocked, ultimately leading to a more enjoyable and less stressful experience of life.

Here are some perspectives to keep in mind to allow for greater life flow:

1. Follow What Feels Good

Pay attention to what brings you joy, lights you up, and speaks to your heart. Then follow it.

Participate in and surround yourself with what fills you up. Spend time with people who make you feel good. Create environments where you live, work, or spend time that cultivate good vibes and inspiration. Do your best to hang around people and places that promote positive feelings.

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2. Let the Doing Take Care of Itself

Stop. Trying. To. Fix. It.

Who wants something that’s broken? Generally, nobody. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that in our emotional lives when something is not showing up or has “gone wrong” in our perspective, we tend to naturally go into fix-it mode. Many different circumstances can motivate us to step up and take action toward mending a situation. Perhaps someone is not acting as we would like, or we aren’t where we think we should be in life. These are thoughts that may trigger us toward action and fixing because, after all, we’re wired to avoid being uncomfortable.

Sometimes, trying to fix something is the action that creates resistance and blocks us from what we want.

Establishing a more positive relationship with the discomfort of the unknown can reduce a lot of struggle and anxious feelings. An important perspective switch is accepting that discomfort is a part of the path and necessary to evolve and grow in life. No discomfort, no growth. When a situation causes discomfort, chances are it’s also creating an opportunity to grow and change for the better.

Sometimes, trying to fix something is the action that creates resistance and blocks us from what we want. The more we tune into the organic ebbs and flows of life and pay attention to what is working for a situation, the more we may be able to handle trying circumstances with grace and greater ease. It can feel counterintuitive to back off and allow a situation to unfold. However, backing off and letting go is often the precise action an experience calls for.

3. Live Choice by Choice

Avoid looking too far into the future or dwelling on the past. Often when we focus too far ahead, the symptom we experience is anxiety. Alternatively, when we dwell on or get stuck in the past, the symptom we experience is often depression.

A solid reference point in finding and maintaining a healthy balance is to work toward enjoying the present moment, which is here now. Learning to value and be in the moment can open the door to contentment both now and in the future.

So live for today. Live for what’s going on now. It’s here, now, where we can find more peace within. And that peace may be what naturally leads us toward what we want down the road … with less resistance and way more flow.

Editor’s note: This article is the 15th in an A-Z series on issues related to creative blocks. This month we explore how openness to experience makes space for creativity.

Personality psychologists have identified five dimensions, referred to as the “Big Five,” to roughly describe human personality traits. These dimensions are extroversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, and neuroticism. In particular, the openness to experience trait is associated with increased creativity and creative achievement. According to personality and creativity researchers, the sensation-seeking drive underlying people with this trait enables them to create more associations between stimuli, to be more self-reflective, and to have a higher interest in acquiring new experiences. As a result, these cognitive and behavioral processes are associated with higher levels of creativity.

So, how can artists and creative individuals use this personality dimension to their advantage in order to maximize creativity? How can being open to experience help one overcome creative blocks? And what if someone is naturally less inclined to exhibit this personality trait?

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Though personality traits tend to be mostly stable throughout one’s lifespan—making it difficult to simply “become” more extroverted or conscientious, for example—our behaviors are more malleable with some focus and persistence. Even if you naturally have more conservative and rigid thinking patterns, you can develop and maintain certain openness-to-experience habits that can maximize potential for creative growth.

1. Use your imagination: Even if it’s not something that comes up spontaneously for you, you may want to devote 10 to 20 minutes a day to letting your imagination to run wild. This might look something like playing fantasy-based games, brainstorming ideas for short stories, and having a no-filters approach to thinking about future possibilities.
2. Expose yourself to other artists’ work: One of the characteristics of those who score high on the openness-to-experience measure is the involvement in aesthetically triggering experiences and the appreciation of artistic events. Accepting invitations to art galleries and plays or even going for a walk in nature may stimulate your perceptions and increase your aesthetic sensitivity.
3. Switch your routine around: It may be comforting to follow a predictable schedule, commute, diet, and after-work routine, but it can limit your sense of receptiveness to new experiences. In order to benefit from the creativity that is correlated with this personality trait, you may want to incorporate an adventurous spirit in your day-to-day life. Adding variety in daily choices may help bring out the openness-to-experience side of your personality.
4. Engage your intellect and cognitions: A thirst for knowledge and an interest in new information may come more naturally to some than to others. However, a conscious effort to read up on new ideas, pay attention to sensory experiences, learn a new language, and pick up new skills can stimulate the active process of openness to new experiences.

It’s not easy to change basic personality traits. Some might argue it is impossible. However, it is possible to implement behaviors consistent with some personality characteristics, such as openness to experience, especially when they are shown to predict higher creativity.

References:

1. John, O. P. (1990). The “Big Five” factor taxonomy: Dimensions of personality in the natural language and in questionnaires. In L. Pervin (Ed.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research(pp. 66-100). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
2. Kaufman, S. B. (2013, November 25). Openness to Experience and Creative Achievement. Scientific American. Retrieved from http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/openness-to-experience-and-creative-achievement/

We all have things and ideas and ventures that we turn over in our minds, sometimes on paper, maybe with other people who share our inconsistent commitments—projects that, even in their incompleteness, still have some hold on us. Our interest and our thoughts keep circling back to that place. We come back to them again and again, and we work on them in fits and starts. Unrealized projects we have yet to find the space or time to help become something concrete in our lives.

My unrealized projects are the fragments I have been writing for years about my mother. The Book (probably an overly optimistic way of seeing it, but we’ll go with that for now), or A Thousand Illegible Scribbles (I have the title, at least), that keeps flipping me on the back of the head, insisting that I pay attention. For almost a decade, my mom has struggled with a mental health condition. I’m still not sure what it is. It’s easier to describe symptoms than state a diagnosis. She cycles through the day between extreme emotional states—through anger and frustration, through sadness and a deep, deep stasis. She doesn’t think she has a head. She stares in the mirror to locate herself, brushes her hair ritualistically. She struggles with self-care; the shower hurts. She knows that I’m her daughter, but no longer cares for me as one. Her script has been unchanged for years: “I’m a bit nervous.” “I just worry about my sleep.” “I was a good mum, wasn’t I?”

[fat_widget_right]To gather the fragments of the book, my own unrealized (or maybe unrealizable) project, I decided to sit down with Amber Cady for an Office Hour on Unfinished Business. This was part of the program that day at Storefront Institute, a cultural and learning organization I recently launched with Kate Griffin in the San Francisco Bay Area. Amber is both a practicing artist and therapist, a combination that drew me to her (my own background is in contemporary art curation). She brings together the high-level ideological language of the art world with the empathy, compassion, and openness of the wellness industries. She’s my unicorn.

Amber’s Office Hour, then, sat between these two seemingly opposing but actually quite complementary worlds: she had designed a session that would take on a creative project that is loved and obsessed over, but that we don’t actually work on or don’t work on enough to actually make happen. Amber’s Office Hours would try to help us figure out why that particular project—that artwork or business, that blog or zine— keeps mattering, why it keeps insisting on space in our lives. She’d bring to our creative endeavors an emotional life and give them validity.

I started writing A Thousand Illegible Scribbles four years ago. It started with an article that was published in The Independent newspaper in the UK. There was a story that my mother couldn’t tell herself, but I could. And through telling it, I thought that I could do more for her, and others like her.

Would you put your mental health story, or that of your family, down on the page? Do you talk about it? Do you share your anxiety, depression, break-downs?

I’ve dealt with my mother’s struggles in various ways: spending time at home. Spending time away. Seeking out people to help her, to help my dad who is home with her, to help me. I have researched and discussed her condition. I have planned and argued with and for her. And I have written (in bursts), since I realized the condition that began the year I got engaged, like my marriage, had the promise of a life-long commitment.

I now have 40,000 words, pages and pages of fragments. I sit down and write when there’s no outlet for what I feel about her condition, or when she’s having a bad episode and I’m back in the UK living alongside her every day, or when we have any interaction that throws me back with her and less in California, where I now live.

“I suggested a walk. Mom asked to feed the ducks at Marbury Park. She’d collected scraps of bread which, it turned out, meant dad had pulled together almost a whole fresh sliced loaf. She didn’t notice. Too cold outside for us in April, we walked straight from the car park to the lake. She broke off the bread in handfuls, almost like pulling out hair, and chucked it at the ducks. Bits so big they should have choked. Ten seconds to tear through a loaf, then back to the car.”

Having done my own time on the couch, I know the structure of weekly therapy, but my Office Hour with Amber was different. The orientation of the session, its focus on unfinished business, meant that I had a clear, definable framework in which to work. Though going into it, I had thought that we’d talk about words on the page, about how to get the book going, about how the pieces I write occasionally can come together into a coherent whole. Plotting and planning its progress, making it take shape, setting goals. But this was therapy-of-sorts, and we lingered in that space of the emotional content that makes up the book.

Over the course of an hour, as we sat in the cozy booth at Makeshift Society where these sessions were held, Amber took me through four different ways of thinking about the project. We covered the strengths that the book represented for me and with that, the daily build that would support it, the obstacles for working on its daily pages, the allies and supportive forces to fortify progress, and the self-care necessary for keeping it a reality. Amber talked with me about how our creative projects are not just carefully contained goals, but real relationships, with all the complexity and messiness that those entail. Especially this one.

Talking with Amber, that’s where I got—this project is so much more than building chapters and momentum. It’s a deeply meaningful and emotional project that is about connection. Connection with my mother and the family I left behind.

“Mom paces. Dad was 40 minutes late for coffee, but we were together in a nice café, with warm drinks and each other’s company. Not so bad, but she slipped off her chair and shuffled from side to side, looking around for dad, though when he appeared she didn’t see him.”

But Amber also helped me realize the reason that this book languishes in that “unfinished business” category. She helped me identify the huge emotional roadblock, the one that would and does keep me away from the book: the threat of conflict. As much as it touches on urgency and meaning, the book also touches on points of contention and denial. It’s about connection, but holds the promise of its opposite: disconnecting me from those I care about.

When you talk about mental health, you very quickly enter the language of stigma; when you talk about mental health in your own family, you very quickly get to your own family’s biases and fears around the subject. To write to this subject means opening up our lives in ways that are terrifying and complicated to those involved, to admit to a problem that we don’t want to identify. I see writing as the invitation to connect, as an opening to a conversation, and I believe that we need to talk about the reality of mental health in our society.

But writing can end relationships too. As soon as I write a sentence, any sentence, there’s the possibility that the conversation I want to have around my mother’s situation may end in silence. Family members may shut down and turn away, or accuse me of airing our dirty laundry in public, acting on motivations that have more to do with fame and money than impact and value.

“By day three she is angry. She’s already at the breakfast table when I come down for a shower. She wears a ridiculous fluffy peach sweater that accentuates her size and attracts my baby daughter’s curiosity. She says nothing. No acknowledgement of the new baby, no acknowledgment of her old daughter. No good morning. Dad makes slightly burnt bacon butties. He asks Mom again and again if she wants one. Always ‘no.’ Her rice crispies are already stuck to her sweater. ‘No.’ I put the baby down for a nap, then hear ‘No,’ louder this time. My husband shuffles our son out of the house. I hear them chatting. More ‘No’s. Voices starting to rise.”

The book, even just lingering in the idea stage, contains the power dynamics in my family, the lingering shock of losing people I have loved, the pain that confrontation can bring. I’ve been framing the project as a way of making meaning from an awful situation, of researching and thinking and processing ways beyond how we currently think about mental health. Done in the right way, it may help my mum, my family, me, and others like her. But received wrongly, it might go the other way.

We are all touched by mental health issues. We know that now. We know that one in four people lives with mental health issues. We know someone who has a mental health condition. We’re starting to learn that we need to take care of our psychological well-being as much as our physical selves. We’re increasingly comfortable going to therapy or seeking help when we’re in crisis. What we’re less able to do is tell our stories or share our experiences or stand out as that someone who is, in fact, struggling. We’re not there yet. My mum is not there yet. My family isn’t. Maybe I’m not, either.

So this is what we do: we hide her away, we deal with it in private, hoping the neighbors don’t call the police with another outburst, that the local coffee shop doesn’t get tired of her rants and ask her to leave, that people don’t continue to turn away from our family, to give up on us. And we don’t get the help we need because we mistrust, we’re afraid, and we don’t talk about it, don’t know how to, and actually don’t want to.

That’s the real reason for the book—the belief that we need to tell our stories, to ourselves and each other, to make sense of our mental health. We need to talk about what preventative care looks like, what we do when someone “gets sick,” and resources for how to care for someone with a mental health condition. But it’s also a threat. Would you put your mental health story, or that of your family, down on the page? Do you talk about it? Do you share your anxiety, depression, break-downs?

Yeah, that’s where I am, too. Right in that space of knowing that to reach out is necessary, but to do so, in the words of my mother tongue, is bloody terrifying. That fear can silence us, even when we need those words on the page more than anything. That’s not just my unfinished business—it’s ours.

Claire Fitzsimmons is the Founder and Co-Director of Storefront Institute, a co-learning space based in San Francisco’s Bay Area that delivers discussion-based public programs facilitated by innovative practitioners – writers, artists, designers, teachers, and thinkers. Our programs provide the practical, social, and intellectual connections to open up new perspectives that help us better navigate our lives. Claire is a curator who has worked internationally and has spent more than a decade as an exhibition-maker and explorer of ideas and cultural practice.

“Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” – Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving

Self-Nurture through Self-Mirroring

Finding a way to emotionally take care of ourselves when we are alone is an individual process of self-discovery. One way to truthfully see ourselves is through collage therapy. Collage therapy is a simple form of art therapy that does not require drawing or painting. It can help you see your inner life in a fresh way. We all project personal meaning onto everything we see. If we are having trouble verbalizing what we are feeling, we can mirror our emotions through spontaneous collage.

Choosing imagery spontaneously, and then seeing what feelings and ideas arise, can incite new understanding about what you unconsciously believe about yourself and how you feel about your life. Whenever you feel strong feelings that you do not fully understand, take a few moments to spontaneously choose some imagery from an old magazine. Cut out and glue your pictures down without much thought. Then take a few minutes to contemplate what you have chosen.

The Loneliness of Individuation

As we learn to express ourselves more authentically, our particularity asserts itself into our life, and we may begin to feel misunderstood by those around us. Many years ago, I put together a spontaneous collage about loneliness when I was discovering my true life path. At the time, I was discovering new strengths and gifts inside of myself and I excitedly tried to share my newly discovered authenticity with the people in my life. But few at the time seemed to understand what I was going through. I was mistakenly looking outside of myself to be mirrored for my inner truths.

I was not yet devoted to mirroring myself to myself. I was still looking for validation from the outside. I was still looking for other people to help me feel good about myself. Sitting alone with ourselves is not always easy. Difficult emotions that we do not want to feel tend to come into our awareness when we are quiet and alone. We can mistake these uncomfortable feelings as loneliness instead of seeing the emotional awareness that is trying to rise. It is during such times of emotional discomfort that is becomes easy to fall into unhealthy distractions. Thinking we are lonely, we may want to spend time with people in ways that are not healthy or meaningful to divert our attention away from what feels emotionally uncomfortable inside.

Instead of spending time in ways that are merely distracting us from what we feel, we could turn towards our inner strength and creativity during our alone time instead. Being alone is a fruitful time to tend to our emotions in order to understand how we feel on a more truthful level. When we start to see our deeper thoughts and feelings more carefully—in the outer projection of our collage—we realize that we have a distinctiveness that wants to reveal itself. We consider that we may never be able to rely on other people to know the total depths of who we are, but we can choose to know ourselves profoundly. When we realize that we need to do our own inner work, without insisting on validation from others, we may begin to feel lonely.

Strength in Loneliness

As we become more authentically expressive and self-examining of all our feelings, we might find that some of the relationships we have been hiding in no longer support our fullest self-expression. Some people do not leave unhealthy relationships because they fear loneliness more that they fear abuse. If we have felt abandoned, shunned, or ignored for expressing our true feelings as children, the loneliness of true self-expression can be a primal place of fear. The genuine loneliness of authenticity can feel piercing to the core when we have received little validation for how we felt in the past.

Our authentic self-expression can feel like it is the exact place where we have not been loved in the past, yet it is this very place where we need to learn how to love ourselves. As we progressively delve into our uniqueness, however, we grow to understand that we can find self-love and emotional strength in the aloneness of our unique personhood. As we become more honest about expressing the truth of our feelings, the fear of not being loved and accepted can intensify at first. But it is in our most alone places, when we are willing to stay in supportive witness to our arising truths, that we can find the love we crave.

Emotional Self-Connection Heals Loneliness

It is our own emotional self-connection that heals loneliness. We can be surrounded by people, but if we are not authentically expressing who we are, we will feel lonely. When we feel authentically connected to ourselves, we feel connected with others. When we begin to know who we truly are, we can reach out for help in ways that are healing instead of hindering to our emotional growth. We can start to build a support system that can help us further develop into our unique strengths in the world.

We can extend ourselves in healthy ways towards genuine friendships with people on similar life paths. When we are in touch with our deeper truths we will start to gravitate towards people who nurture their own unique personhood and who respect our individuality. As we come to know how to soothe our painful feelings without demanding that other people do it for us, we deepen into a self-nurturance that is kind and mature. We can choose to become deeply present to our emotional life. As we tend to our own emotional needs, we discover the warmth and abiding friendship of the true self.

There are many different paths one can take to healing through Expressive Arts Therapy. Let’s begin by looking at a major component of this process, which is allowing the creative process to begin.

Releasing the Creative Spirit
Our healing journey is made possible by opening to our creative process. We invite flow again. We say, “Ah there you are, I’ve missed you.” When flow is permitted, we open a channel to buried treasures just beneath the surface of our unconscious yearning. We wonder why we waited so long to let go to our creative spirit. Perhaps we were bound by obligations, commitments, stress, and mundane efforts to keep our status quo. Whatever the reason, we find some comfort in releasing to our creative process again. Not all releasing requires that you pick up a paint brush, write a poem, or perform a yoga pose. And process isn’t just for painters, dancers, or musicians; it is blessed upon everyone in unique and interesting ways. I often find wandering in a gourmet kitchen store or letting my mind relax while sipping tea on a park bench to be useful when in need of some flow. You may prefer a brisk walk, baking a cake, or perusing a secondhand store as adequate letting-go activities. It is the releasing to yourself that is beneficial. It is the simple act of saying, “I matter enough” to allow myself this moment of time to release to what wants to come through me. Find what works for you, and don’t be afraid to try something new. There are jewels awaiting you when releasing to the unknown.

Decentering
We instantly know the feeling of decentering when we’ve hit it. It may come across as a silly fit of giggling or a playful rousing of exuberant combustive energy while forgetting the worries of the day. Decentering lies at the heart of Expressive Arts Therapy. It is letting go to the “imaginal reality through play, art-making or ritual” (Knill, 2005). It’s as if time has passed and we have forgotten, at least for a moment, the demands of the day and have awakened to the essence of ourselves by dropping into our senses. It is here that we notice and say to ourselves, “I’ve forgotten you.” Here, we release our creative spirit, welcome ourselves back home, and find missing parts of ourselves again. We get there not by way of doing, tasking, or driving, but by way of letting go to our deepest self—the playful unconditional child. We step away from ourselves as we know ourselves to be—lawyer, chef, accountant, candlestick maker—and release to the part of ourselves that doesn’t know, doesn’t plan, and doesn’t perceive what is going to happen next. This is the essence of decentering. Here, Expressive Arts Therapy may act as a vessel, assisting in bridging the gap between this tension of restriction and the releasing to flow.

Aligning With the Soul
Once we have been able to decenter from the outside work and into ourselves, the opportunity arises to align with the soul—the spiritual or nonmaterial aspect of ourselves. This alignment breathes new life into our expression by recalling a weightless way of being that we may have been missing. When we align with the soul, we say, “I remember you.” The lost part of our true being settles in to the wanting, needing, and arising of forgotten passions that our soul has longed for. Here, utilizing expressive arts, we might play with wild abandon, release to dance, stomp our feet, shake a tambourine, and howl at the moon. We remember our essence and it feels good. Whirling about, we thrust into our forgotten freedom and free our soul to experience again. We drop our roles, egos, and worries and rest into the place that we know satisfies us the most. When we allow this to happen, new information arises that we were not privy to before. Our insatiable longing is satisfied for a moment. At last, we have come home again.

Integration
Integration is a gathering and trying on of the bits and pieces we discover as we align with the soul. We have an opportunity to reflect, bring together, reinvent, and make ourselves new again. We can discard worn out habits, shed old beliefs, and remove residual roles of the past. We embark on meaning-making and try on this new information. Reflecting, we might take moments to journal our thoughts and ask ourselves, “What just happened—what does this mean?” Here, our process becomes one of answers and questions. Like trying on new shoes, we wonder, how does this fit?

Whether it is an instant “aha” or a deep look at a lifestyle change, we ponder the new information and attempt to assimilate it through our senses. Although not an expressive arts requirement, we might create a collage of images to bring together a clearer picture, write a lyric to express our feelings, or choreograph a narrative dance piece. Whatever comes to us, this is where we try on “Is this me; am I you?” The ego and spirit join hands and ultimately decide the usefulness of the new information. This process, throughout our lifetime, returns again and again.

Reference
Knill, P., Levine, E. G., Levine, S. K. (2005). Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward a Therapeutic Aesthetics. London, UK: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

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The Benefits of Expressive Arts Therapy
Creativity as Innovation Combined with Utility (And How it Works in Counseling)
Active Mood States Encourage Creativity