“My creativity, passion and energy is so weighed down that I can’t start anything, how do I overcome this?”
I am a recovering perfectionist and even writing this article brings ups elements of creative suppression due to overthinking and hyper self-criticism. Sometimes I don’t even see it that way but as an overwhelming amount of choices and possibilities at once and the burden of responsibility to get something “right” is all on my shoulders.
When your passion starts to feel heavy, there are various amounts of negativity, pain and/or fear in the flow of your energy.
I can see the apparent purpose for the tool of criticism. It has roots in care, carefulness, precision, and attention to detail. Yet it sprouts from this place that what exists is not good enough and that there is this real process of enhancement.
In the act of creation there are most certainly phases of development. This is not the area in which I’m talking about the hindrance and use of criticism is being used. Yet it does get confusing when we feel like the one responsible for the “flow” of conditions to our expectations and standards for goodness and rightness.
Where I’m talking about that this criticism becomes quite apparent is in the personal development sector. I’m not going to lie the betterment of the self can feel intoxicating once you taste the wisdom highs of insights, integrations, realizations, and embodiment you just want more and more. Yet the more intense the passion, the more possibilities for the deeper pain of not feeling like enough, of feeling inadequate to run the show not only keeping you stuck, but keeping you glued to the old beliefs that served a purpose in the past.
The same goes for artists and someone’s artistry. There is something so satisfying about the ascension towards this ideal of a perfect masterpiece that one may know or not know is impossible. In the very journey between the oscillations of feelings, emotions, personalities and experiences there is a subtle craft of mastery that we each have the choice to participate in once we are awakened to the greater illusions of reality.
I can remember back in my life where I didn’t even know what passion was in me, just what I saw in the sports entertainment I loved. As I started to even ask myself those new questions I would finally feel the huge weights I was carrying that kept my creative possibilities dormant. But what are these greater doubts when you peel back the skin to reveal the mechanics of passion?
Can it all be drawn down to a simple relationship between Love and Fear? I get resistance when I try it on because there is something called (artistic) “sensibilities” that make the overthinking, the skepticism, the good/bad, the right/wrong identities so integral, almost to a degree of concern and survival, that they are all necessary to the structure of our reality but also in the creation of “good art”.
So maybe things can be as simple as Love or Fear, but I think when creativity is concerned we bring online a new radar of sensitivity that we must expand our awareness into. That is Positivity vs Negativity and Pleasure vs Pain. Now it can be argued that Negativity and Pain are aspects of Fear yet from my position there is a more nuanced perspective that allows us complete vision of our power. The human mind is merely a tool and there is something deeper I feel we are after than the simple awareness that what we are avoiding, resisting or otherwise feel burdened by is just fear. The more we honor our complexity, the more finely tuned our precision becomes with the alignment to our soul.
This is exactly why I depart from fear as the only explanation for the burdens on our passion. It is power.
We are afraid of the responsibility that comes from our power. We are not afraid of the fear, but in the hesitation to start or claim our power there is an extra energy that produces heightened responsibility in our imagination which traverses an interesting line between necessity, concern, and legitimacy. In fact it makes a lot of sense that these hurdles would be presented. I feel it as an overwhelming amount of data from the law of cause and effect. It creates an unknown and the resistance to action is like this stop gap asking ourselves are we truly ready for what this new creation will inspire, even the things we cannot see, even in the overwhelming power it conveys.
Everything about our evolved survival instincts was about guaranteeing the survival of our body, our household, and our tribe. These tools have been heightened so much we are able to literally project future possibilities based on past evidence with such pristine detail, we forget how much of a redundancy these safety precautions actually are.
When I started to tap into this field, I would observe how full my mind would get before I would be called into action, or before I needed to accomplish something. My work took on deeper levels to where I’m not even sure what kept me going or what I was really after. It became less and less about where I was getting in time but in the moment. The closer I got to the truth the more free in my moment I would feel.
Nothing will ever be good enough for your inner critic, skeptic, cynic, pessimist, neurotic and hyper-critical judge. Within these personality archetypes are the beliefs and metaphors that contribute to the burden weighing down your creativity. But the more you understand this from a place of self-awareness the more positive light you can shine to see them as wonderful assets for your life.
They are the swords that help you discern the highest truth, standards, and vision for your reality. They are tools, when wielded with love, that help you influence energy, build your ideas and transform people. They are your power in darker forms that previously were conditioned to be negative and bad for you to use because they seemingly conflict with an aspect of your ideal yet naive idea of the golden rule.
Whether it’s the ability to share at your fullest volume expression, the medicine you are meant to give to others or the brilliant ideas you want to bring to life it all has to commence from your decision to START.