Do You Have Creative Peace?

I sure didn't. Not until these last couple years.

The honest truth is that for the majority of my adult life (more than 30 years) I was positively relentless in my quest to bring all my creative dreams and visions to fruition and "make it big", and my own personal peace was of no real importance to me.

I took endless risks and accepted zero excuses from myself. If there was an area of weakness or a block, I just pushed myself harder and would take a class, get a certain kind of on-the-job training, hire a coach, or whatever it took to power my way through it. 

And although I did enjoy my creativity on occasion. like when it was flowing, or for those brief moments when I reached some kind of completion, if I’m honest I spent most of my time (and therefore life) in a state of restlessness, and frustration about where I wasn’t yet.

I was constantly telling myself that if I could just get myself to this place where I was seen enough, and paid enough for my storytelling. A place where writing and creating was my only job. A place where I had all the time in the world to do it. That then I would find this elusive state of creative peace I had always been searching for.

Of course the joke of it is, I can now see I was chasing something I was never going to be able to catch no matter how much money or accolades I might have managed to rack up (because its an inside job - something you be, not do).

And that even if I did manage to pin down this elusive sense of peace, I wouldn’t know what to do with it when I got it, because, at the time, I was pretty sure my creative engine ran on angst. Therefore some part of me was genuinely afraid that peace might cause me to lose my creative edge?

But thankfully burnout, and the Covid shut down, knocked me off of my never ending treadmill long enough to wake me up from this nonsense. I saw that I simply couldn’t keep going the way I was going because, as I heard a TV show runner once say, "I was being beaten to death by my own dream" and it needed to stop.

I no longer felt any love for what I was doing (which was my own fault) because my approach had stripped all the joy from it. And so what the beginning of change looked like for me, was consciously deciding to "quit Hollywood."

I'm not going to lie. There was a grieving process.

All that effort I had put in. All those abandoned projects. Not to mention a loss of a certain kind of identity. I felt a bit lost for awhile. But I made it my new priority to create a sense of stability in my life, building a business (at an intentionally saner pace), and writing curriculum for others writers (something I had never done before but absolutely adored being in service of) and allowed myself to be okay with the idea that I may never entertain writing my fictitious comedies ever again.

And after 6 years of this brand of actively detangling and de-conditioning myself from the never ending spin cycle I had put myself on, and giving myself full permission to pull away from outside expectations. To telling myself over and over again that I was enough, NOW, I can tell you that my creative engine, in fact, does NOT run on angst. It ran despite it, but oh how it sings when it's run on the high powered fuel of peace. 

I am now in a place where 90% of the time I find my joy inside the daily process itself. The brand of success I now pursue is this ever increasing ability to allow the creative to come through me and see where it leads, unimpeded, without trying to control so much. And of course, ironically (or not so) it is bearing way more fruit.

At first it was hard to get there. The engine was still gunked up (and traumatized - lol) and that internal resistance that had been there all along, and had kept me running before, was still there.

The internal judge that incessantly told me to hurry up, you better prove yourself, you don't have time for this, "who are you kidding". It was all still there, but my relationship to that voice had changed. I wasn't buying it anymore. And the less I bought into it, the more it quieted down. And the more it quieted down, the more I could hear my true creative voice, the one capable of flow. And the more I could hear that voice, BOOM! My creativity exploded.

Not only has my writing gotten dramatically better and less tortured (and yes I am back to writing comedy when I feel like it), but I’m also painting and learning to play the piano for the first time. And most importantly I am enjoying all of it. Even when I suck. Even in all its "unfinished-ness".

I’m also making more money than I ever did before. My community has expanded because I can be present to them and their value. And while I still feel the creative pressure that always builds when working on any creative projects - it doesn’t drive me crazy and make me want to hurry up and finish just to finish.

An additional unexpected side effect is that I’m able to handle the chaos of this world better as well. I still rail against its injustices (its just the type of human that I am) but given that I’m so filled up on the inside, it feels easier to see what is really "mine to do" about it all and not let my frustration deplete me, throw me off track or cause me to spin my wheels in useless directions. I feel rooted. 

I’ve come to believe creative peace is essential for all creatives who want to develop a strong connection to their true voice and therefore do their greatest most fulfilling work. And so that is what I am going to focus on teaching this year. Knowing that once they've got that part - the rest is details.

There will be more information coming soon about this class I am going to teach next year "The Path to Creative Peace".

Unlike in the past, it will be an easily accessible and low cost class, open to anyone that needs it (beginner or professional). And there will be options for quietly doing it yourself, or joining us inside the community. Whatever your creative heart might be needing now.

So if this is you, and you could use a year of taking yourself off the treadmill in order to find your own unique version of creative peace, then be on the look out, or shoot me a response here to get on the list of interest.

And in the meantime, if you'd like some helping putting a pin in this year...

Meaning some help to really take stock of what you accomplished this past year, and what you'd like to consciously let go of and not to bring into the new year (which is always such a great step in the direction of creative peace) then come join Kelly and I and our Humans on The Verge community for our annual Gather The Gifts 1/2 day virtual retreat. It will be this coming Saturday Dec. 20th (10 am - 2pm PST / 1pm - 5 p,m EST) and it's just $29. You can sign up by clicking HERE

Once signed up you'll get the prompts to start your prep right away.