The Storm and What Lies Beneath It
La tormenta y lo que yace bajo ella
A student shares feelings of creative stuckness, fear around work and money, and the difficulty of trusting the process when self-judgment and a sense of not being good enough arise.
The Storm and What Lies Beneath It
A student shares feelings of creative stuckness, fear around work and money, and the difficulty of trusting the process when self-judgment and a sense of not being good enough arise.
I wanted to share something. You were talking about the sense of not-okayness and resistance today. I feel it mostly around work and money. The busier season of work is passing for me now, and I have a bit more time, but I'm also feeling creatively stuck. I start getting mad and frustrated, and then I notice there's fear behind it. It has to do with work, making money, or my idea of what progress looks like in that area.
I'm not sure there's a question exactly. It's just hard for me to be in that trust when there is fear. Trust the process of going through the fear. Trust that maybe there are times that are less fruitful, that the psyche has to go through different cycles. It has to do with control, I guess. I was feeling like this today, and the sense of not-okayness came up in the meditation too. Sometimes it's also psychological: a sense of not being good enough, of sucking at generating opportunities, of not being resourceful. Those inner judgments come along with it. I guess it's all part of the same thing.
The strategy to deal with what is challenging is like being on a horse and thinking the problem is that you need to be further ahead. So you start whipping the horse, because you think that's going to solve the problem. And the horse is you.
Turning the problem inward
That's what I was saying: if it gets turned into "the problem is me, my personality, my mind, my body, my abilities," it's still the same strategy for addressing that sense of lack or that something is wrong. It's still the belief that it's up to me.
What can happen, and I can describe this as a possibility, is that the situation you're describing (the natural phase in your work where the summer ends and there are fewer shows to perform at) can simply be part of the movement of life for you right now. But the movement in you needs to come not from the sense that something is wrong, something is missing, or something that brings imminent danger.
How negativity obscures opportunity
When movement comes from a different place, the opportunities and possibilities become more clear. The perception of negativity, whether directed at the situation, at yourself, or at your abilities, reinforces that dynamic and makes it harder to see the opportunities. Either you see them but don't think you're capable of getting them, or you feel capable but think there aren't any, or both: "I don't see them, and I'm not capable."
You could look at your own recent experience. You had a shift where you believed that with music you couldn't make money, and then something changed and you started making more money. But it had to do with a shift in the underlying belief. This is similar.
The five-minute test
If you sit for five minutes and the activity there is all this negativity around work, fear, the situation, and money, then that's a really good sign that that activity is not useful. You could call it neurotic. By that, I mean it's nothing for you to listen to, and there will likely be no intelligence in the strategies that are appearing.
In those situations, sit and wait for the storm to pass. Maybe do nothing for a few days. Well, no, because you still need to activate energy into life. But it helps to take moments where you try to see all of that mechanism for what it is: addiction, monkey mind.
Then, when you're moving and acting in life, it becomes maybe a little less convincing. When you're less convinced of its reality, you will act from a deeper place.
Seeing through the activity without withdrawing
But it won't work to just completely withdraw from life and look and look and look. It's important to have a mix. If you can't pause for five minutes without all of that being active, then it's a really strong sign that all of that activity isn't going to be fruitful. It doesn't have to stop for more fruitful activity to happen. What you need is to see that the activity isn't based on reality. The more you see the monkey mind for what it is, the more you'll be able to discern where the opportunities are and what direction is going to be more valuable. Then you test it. You have an idea for an opportunity, and you move energy in that direction.
When you said at first that it's not up to you, can you elaborate?
It has to do with trust and not having control of everything that happens. It's tricky to talk about. It's not up to you, the "you" that is in that storm. But it is up to you, the "you" that is prior to that storm.