August 2023
I think we all know what this feels like. You’re sitting in front on your computer, canvas, with your instrument – and nothing happens. Your mind is a blank. You’re thinking, what am I going to write, paint, play? I should think of something soon. Nothing comes. You hop in your car and drive down to the shops, hoping for inspiration. Nothing arises. Perhaps I should go for a walk…
Still, a blank screen, still wondering.
A friend of mine, a writer, has a strategy for getting writing happening. He begins by writing about sitting in front of his computer, with a mug of coffee nearby, the position of his chair, the views through the window: wind in the trees, transient clouds, a twitter of bird song, the reflections in puddles after the last rain, and so forth. As he writes of what is around him, other ideas arise and soon he is in the midst of writing the poem, the story, the essay that he originally was attempting to start.
A painter friend of mine, instead of attempting to seriously compose the best painting ever, recalls a dream and paints that. Or paints a dot on the page and elaborates images arriving from the dot. Joan Miro, the Spanish painter, did this. He was motivated to do so by the writings of Freud. He allowed emergent images to arise from his unconscious and to play with the images.
Academic thesis writers often feel stuck. Some are filled with such fear (often it’s a fear of failure) that their writing just doesn’t happen. I heard a lot of such stories from my fellow doctoral students when I was writing my PhD thesis years ago. People felt unable to produce anything original, and years and years and years went by with nothing to show for it. The way I got around this was to play with the ideas and to include, in amongst the serious stuff, playful word images. I even included such an idea in the title of my dissertation: Catching the Ball: Constructing the Reciprocity of Embodiment.
Musicians can feel blocked too and all the trying to create more than just following notes on the page just doesn’t work. The famous cellist Paul Tortelier, suggested sitting in a darkened room with your eyes shut and just allowing yourself to muck around with sound and see what arises. This works, as I’ve found.
Thinking more about the musical mind. Some neuroscientists scanned the brains of jazz musicians by placing them in an MRI machine while they engaged in musical improvisation. The researchers found that during improvisation, activity significantly decreased in a brain region known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This region is typically active when we’re actively focusing on a specific task, and may work by helping us to inhibit distracting information. While this is beneficial if you’re filling in a tax return, it may actually harm creative thinking by masking the brain’s ability to form spontaneous ideas and connections. By reducing activity in the prefrontal cortex, the musicians were able to freely come up with musical ideas on the spot.
Activating more of your brain than just the part involved in focussed thought, liberates you to be able to play with ideas and images and sounds in familiar and novel ways. Play is the key. Research is finding that play creates new synaptic connections (the connecting points between neurons) in the brain much faster that deliberate and focused learning. Play is iterative, fun, emotionally meaningful, and it enhances one’s skills.
I like working with creative people; I like participating in their creative liberation. Psychotherapy, and especially hypnotherapy are very good ways to undo creative blocks. Essentially hypnotherapy is the art of playing with ways of thinking and experiencing those thoughts, through enhanced awareness. It could be said that hypnotherapy creates a playground where renewed creative juices flow wonderfully. Remember, that though I’m now living in Western Australia I continue to work with clients online and if you happen to be in Perth, give me a call, please.
