Openness

Last week I taught my creativity course at UCL for 87 first-year students.

Each morning I gave them a creativity exercise as a warmup and team-building activity.

And each morning the reaction was the same.

As soon as I finished describing the activity there was...silence.

Inertia.

A little bit of a "do I have to" vibe. (They are still teenagers after all).

But inevitably, two minutes later, the room was buzzing. Laughter. Energy. Engagement. Enjoyment. Creativity working its magic.

One of the exercises I designed is to come up with a print ad for bananas in just 15 minutes.

I've been reflecting on that pause. That moment when we decide how we're going to respond to the unexpected invitation. Are we going to lean in and give it a go? Or lean back and check out?

Personality psychologists would look at this moment through the lens of Openness to Experience, one of the "Big 5" personality traits, and one of the factors research findings have most closely associated with creativity.

Openness to Experience consists of 6 facets which are highly correlated.

In order to be creative, it is essential that we stay open to new possibilities. But that's easier said than done. I'm someone who prides themselves on being open-minded. And still, there are many moments when I struggle to stay open.

When my nervous system is triggered into fight/flight/freeze or when I'm laser focused on achieving a specific goal, my perception and cognition narrows dramatically and I can collapse into binary black-or-white thinking.

There's the part of me that thinks I already know it all. That I know best. The part that craves certainty, superiority or self-righteousness. A compulsion to rush to “cognitive closure” rather than rest in ambiguity. The fear of the unknown. Fear of judgement. Or fear of anything, really. Or simply status quo bias.

It can feel like a miracle any of us manage to stay open at all.



I've found three things that help me stay connected to my inherent openness.



First, understanding what openness means and what it doesn't mean. Being open-minded doesn't mean we need to descend into the morass of moral relativism, abandoning all hope of discerning right from wrong or truth from lies. I found V for Vendetta creator, Alan Moore's advice to writers incredibly helpful. He said we must have strong beliefs--a clear moral, political and aesthetic worldview. AND, it must be flexible. With empathy for those whose viewpoints differ, realizing that if we were brought up in their circumstances, we would likely have the same opinions. We should have a strong point of view, and also remain open to evolving it based on new information.



Second, actively seeking inspiring instances of openness. Recently, I came across one of the most exceptional examples of open-mindedness I have ever seen. In this 10-minute video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares his moving story of how he “got out of Zionism” and became an advocate for collective liberation.

At 20 he was studying in Jerusalem at an all-male religious nationalist seminary. He heard about a program where a Palestinian man would come to share his experience with the students and he decided to attend.

He was shocked by the man's story.

After the session Shlomo thought, "Why did no one tell me about this?" He went up to the Palestinian man to ask for "More, tell me more." When the man invited Shlomo to come to Ramallah, his "first thought was, 'If I go, you will kill me', because that was the way I was conditioned. Growing up, for me, Palestinians were terrorists. There was no possibility that a Palestinian was human."

But then he heard "a second voice", "a deep ancestral voice, and to this day I'm amazed at myself that I was able to challenge all of my conditioning with the second voice. A deeper voice. A deeper knowing. And that voice immediately said, 'Well, you've been told your whole life that this person was gonna kill you and that this person was a terrorist and he wasn't human. And he's standing right in front of you and he's the exact opposite of those things.'" Shlomo agreed to come to Ramallah. On his journey he witnessed first-hand the humiliation Palestinians undergo every day. He was harassed by IDF soldiers at a checkpoint along with the Palestinians. And he heard the stories of Palestinians in their own words. The experience transformed him into an advocate to "free Palestine for all people, everyone on the land".

He is not the only one. There are so many brave souls who are courageously questioning the dehumanizing narrative they were sold.

I find their stories so inspiring and humbling. I would love to think that if I were raised in their situations I would do the same, but the honest answer is I can never be sure. But I can let their stories inspire me to interrogate my assumptions. To challenge the status quo. To question authority. To listen to the deep ancestral voice that says we are all equally human. To say yes to new experiences that give me a chance to connect to people who have different backgrounds, and to stay curious about their stories. To have the audacity to imagine a future others deem impossible.



The third thing that helps me stay open is a mantra. I can't remember how I first came across it. But I treat it like a talisman. Something I keep in my pocket to touch in troubling times.

"I am willing to see things differently."

That's it.

Someone posts a comment that enrages me. "I'm willing to see things differently."

My perfect plan for a client workshop goes out the window. "I'm willing to see things differently."

I receive what feels like devastating feedback on a creative project. "I'm willing to see things differently."

It's like a wedge that keeps the door open just a crack, when otherwise I'd slam it shut. But that crack is often all that's needed to allow in the sliver of light that illuminates a fresh perspective and a new way forward.



Whatever our baseline level of Openness to Experience, there are so many things that can open us up or shut us down. Learning how to stay open is an essential practice for preserving access to our creativity.

I'm curious, what helps you stay open?

Liberation

One of the greatest creativity killers is that voice inside our heads some call the inner critic. We might also call it the inner tyrant, oppressor or despot. The voice that says “who do you think you are”, “you’re too old”, "don't waste your time", “everyone will laugh at you”, "you're nothing". Its goal is to keep us safe by keeping us small, inside the box, uncontroversial and under control.

A few months back I wrote a post about ways to befriend this voice.

But recent world events have me rethinking how I want to relate to this inner entity. Or perhaps there are multiple entities that require different approaches depending on how willing they are to share power equitably. 

My primary spiritual practice is shadow work. Noticing what offends me in the outer world and finding where a version of that same dynamic lives within me. Then doing the often painstaking yet ultimately joyful work to detangle, dismantle, transform and integrate it. By engaging in this process, I’m freeing myself from the frustration of fragmentation and moving towards wholeness and liberation.

So when I see oppression continuing to play out every day in the news, I look within and see where oppression has a home in me. While I’m not intentionally starving millions of people or systematically imprisoning and torturingchildren, I have to acknowledge there is a part of me that is willing to bulldoze any opposition to achieve its agenda, a part that wants to hurt others 10x the amountthey have hurt me, a part that thinks that coercion and control is the only way to safety.

I’m going to call this voice the colonized mind.

The colonial mindset has the following worldview. There’s one right way. I know what it is because I'm superior. My superiority gives me the right to impose this one right way on others by whatever means necessary, without regard for their preferences let alone their wellbeing. The colonized mind internalizes this voice as the belief that we should prioritize the things others have told us are important over the indigenous desires and wisdom of our heart/body/soul/higher mind. The colonized mind is in an "I-it" relationship with the other which it sees as inhuman and therefore fair game for exploitation. 

How does this connect to creativity?

The colonized mind sees creativity as inherently dangerous because you can't predict it or control it. 

The liberated mind sees creativity as an essential source of safety, resilience and thriving in a complex, volatile and unpredictable world.

The colonized mind tells me my creative output needs to conform to some specific external standard, otherwise it is invalid.

The liberated mind says creativity is my birthright and there's a wide range of equally valid ways to be creative.

The colonized mind treats creativity like an inanimate natural resource to be discovered and exploited. 

The liberated mind is committed to cultivating a meaningful "I-thou" relationship with creativity based on mutuality and reciprocity.

The colonized mind believes that the only way creativity will cooperate is coercion.

The liberated mind trusts that if I keep showing up for my creativity, my creativity will keep showing up for me.

The colonised mind thinks it knows best and there’s no need to consult with creativity for its opinion.

The liberated mind knows that creativity holds its own deep well of wisdom and that I ignore it at my own peril.

How can we make this shift from colonized mind to liberated mind? 

Three moves.

First, we need to divest our identity. We need to understand the colonized mind as a separate thing, "study its playbook" as Jaiya John says, so we can become sensitized to its strategies. Because this inner oppressor, the colonized mind, comes from our conditioning and from our culture, it will never disappear completely. But we can recognise it as "not me". "Yes, that dynamic is in me, but it's not who I am or who I want to be". The less we identify with it and the more we see it as an externally-imposed ideology, the less legitimacy, attention and energy we will give it and it will start taking up less and less space as a result.

Second, we need to root down into a deeper identity and commit to acting with integrity. If I claim to value love, justice, truth and freedom, I need to bring my actions into alignment with those values. Not just externally, but internally. Yes, it's important to do the work in the outer world. Donate. Speak out. Add our voices to the choir of hundreds of millions calling for re-humanization, protection of innocents and dignity and freedom for all people. But I believe it's equally important to let the catastrophic abuses of power and ongoing oppression catalyze a renewed commitment to demilitarizing our inner lives. In recent weeks my tolerance for inner oppression has evaporated. I have no desire to play that game anymore. To paraphrase Parker Palmer, in Let Your Life Speak, I refuse to conspire in my own diminishment any longer.

“Where do people find the courage to live divided no more when they know they will be punished for it? The answer I have seen in the lives of people like Rosa Parks is simple: these people have transformed the notion of punishment itself. They have come to understand that no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment. ”
— Parker Palmer

Third, tend your garden. We need to remain vigilant for any signs of the colonized mind creeping back and uproot it like a weed. 

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.”
— Wendell Phillips

But we don't need to do it with an energy of violence or anger. It can simply come from neutral discernment. "Ah, this little plant is not in the highest good of what I'm trying to grow in this patch of earth. No thank you. Goodbye." 

While the hold the colonized mind has on me is much less than it used to be, I still notice those moments of clenching in my body, the feeling of pressure that comes when I'm trying to force something, including writing this post. I was trying to finish it yesterday and realized I was forcing it. So I stopped. I let go of any attachment to sharing anything this week and went to sleep. This is my continuous practice of noticing the contraction and unclenching. Of stepping back into an "I-thou" relationship with my creativity. If it doesn't want to move in a certain direction I stop and listen with an open mind. Willing to see things differently. 

I slept on it and in the morning I saw Jaiya John's quote and it felt like the missing piece that clarified what this post wanted to be. And so here it is. 


May you liberate your creativity from any remnants of inner tyranny. 

May the dignity and integrity of your creativity be inviolate in your inner landscape. 

May your creativity enjoy the full right to self-determination and flourish with its newfound freedom.


I'll leave you with some lyrics from this beautiful song:

It's been a long, long time 

Since I've known the taste of freedom 

And those clinging vines 

That had me bound, well I don't need them 

I've been like a captured eagle 

You know an eagle's born to fly 

Now that I have won my freedom 

Like an eagle I am eager for the sky

Soul

A few weeks ago I did a two-part post highlighting six dimensions of the healing power of creativity. But recently I realized I left out the most important one. 

Creativity connects us to our soul. Our vital essence. 

In a 2016 conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert, Brene Brown said something that has stayed with me ever since:

If you’d asked me five years ago what creativity means to me, I would have said, 'Ha. That’s cute. That’s fun. I don’t really do a lot of A-R-T because I’ve got a J-O-B. So you go grab your paintbrush and your scrapbooking, but I’ve got to get shit done.'  But if you would ask me now, though, I would say that creativity is the way I share my soul with the world and without it I am not okay.

I've been thinking a lot about how to make sense of the atrocities we've been witnessing, and I've come to the conclusion that the root cause is that we've become desensitized to the suffering of others. And I believe this desensitized state is only possible when we've become, to some degree, cut off from soul. 

Our society and its systems do not make it easy to live a soul-infused life. How often have you heard someone describe their work as "soul-crushing", "soulless" or "soul-destroying"?

A moment from Pixar's film Soul: "You can't crush a soul here. That's what life on Earth is for."

Storyteller Michael Meade, in his book Awakening the Soul, describes how the modern world suffers from a collective loss of soul: 

When life becomes severely polarised, when people become more opposed than they need to be, it is the connective energy and unifying presence of the soul that has gone missing. Meaningful solutions to deeply penetrating and broad-reaching problems require the kind of imaginative vision and innovative invention that can only be found in the depths of the human soul. If there is no change at the level of soul, there can be no meaningful change at the level of the world.

In shamanic traditions there is a concept called soul loss. Therapist Sandra Ingerman writes in Soul Retrieval that, when we experience trauma, a part of our soul "separates from us in order to survive the experience by escaping the full impact of the pain." (A process modern psychologists call dissociation). Soul loss can leave us feeling incomplete, estranged, deadened, fragmented, depleted and alienated. But I don't think we necessarily need to find a shaman to conduct a soul retrieval journey (although if you're at all curious I recommend it). 

I believe that all you need to do to re-soul yourself is commit to living a creative life. Commit to showing up for your creativity, so your creativity can show up for you. Living a creative life doesn't mean quitting your job to become a professional artist or some other grand gesture. It can start with singing in the shower. Doodling during meetings. Five minutes a day of curating inspiration on Pinterest or Instagram. Fifteen minutes of free-writing or another form of self-expression. By making space for creativity, we're making space for soul.

This belief is born of my own experience.

A decade ago I was living in Dubai, working 80-hour weeks and spending more nights in hotels than at home. While I liked my colleagues and clients, there wasn't much space for soul to show up. 

With one exception. 

During that time I was working on a creative writing project. I didn't have much time or energy for actual writing, but I found pockets of time for "prewriting". I kept a notebook of ideas and would daydream about my characters and their stories. Having a creative side project felt like a lifeline. It kept me sane. It helped me stay a whole person. 

Fast-forward a few years and I'm bawling my eyes out as John Spillane sings 'I'm Gonna Set You Free' at the closing ceremony of a small storytelling festival on an island off the southern coast of Ireland.

The weekend had been so soul-infused it felt like a spiritual homecoming, my prodigal soul returned. An intergenerational gathering in pristine nature. On land where the language of uncolonised ancestors is still the mother tongue. So much goodness and beauty and truth and laughter and song. And of course, story.

A painting I have in my home of Cape Clear Island titled "Red Sails Return".

Since that day I have worked to craft a life for myself that I can call soul-infused, with creativity as the core. And I take these dark times as a catalyst to reaffirm my commitment to seeking out and co-creating soul-centred spaces where we can stay sensitized to the suffering of others no matter how different from us they may seem and we can tap into the "imaginative vision and innovative invention that can only be found in the depths of the human soul".

The medicine of myth

It used to be that we, as humans, were born, lived and died embedded in an amniotic sac of stories. These stories gave meaning to existence and carried the wisdom of countless generations to guide us through dark and difficult times. With the shift from communal to individualistic values, we've lost this sacred collective container. But I believe we can, each of us, set about the work of re-storying ourselves. Curating our own idiosyncratic anthology of myths, legends and fairy tales to act as soul medicine in times of suffering.

As I write this, more than 130 precious children are being killed every day by bombs, bullets, starvation and dehydration. A rate that far outpaces any other conflict in recent memory. These horrors continue largely unchecked while many world "leaders" stand by and watch, or worse, actively try to justify the unjustifiable.

How are we to make sense of a world in which something like this is possible? What are we meant to do with all this rage and grief and despair?

I found great solace in this recent episode of the Living Myth podcast by storyteller extraordinaire Michael Meade. He turns to the Greek myths of the Furies, those "primordial spirits of vengeance and retribution that rise from the Underworld when people violate the rules of nature, when innocent blood is wrongfully spilled on the earth, and when age-old feuds are provoked." The Furies torment humans, driving them mad, and making the land toxic and unliveable. For Meade, these myths "remain important because they depict the transformation of a society rooted in blood feuds and endless revenge into one shaped by a deeper sense of justice aimed at balance and peace rather than retribution." They show us that the shift from war and oppression to peace and justice is possible.

Detail of Orestes Pursued by the Furies by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1862)

The Furies feature prominently in the story of Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Agamemnon kills his daughter (Orestes' sister) to appease the gods and obtain an auspicious start the Trojan War. Upon Agamemnon's return from the war, Clytemnestra kills her husband out of revenge for their daughter's death. Orestes, deeply torn, ultimately murders his mother to avenge his father.

Then the Furies rise from the Underworld and pursue him relentlessly across the earth. Eventually, he seeks refuge from Athena, goddess of war and wisdom. Athena must use all the arts of persuasion to convince the Furies to pause their punishment and let Orestes be judged by a jury of his peers.

When the 12-person jury becomes split as to Orestes' guilt, Athena casts the deciding vote. She rules in favour of acquittal. It's the only way to break the cycle and open up new possibilities. The only path to build a world beyond that governed by the brutality of the Furies, where one act of vengeance begets another and another throughout generations.

So what did Athena do with the Furies?

Did she destroy them? No.

Did she punish them? No.

Did she exile them? No.

Instead, she did something radical. She gave them a place in her temple.

She assigned them a new role as protectors of the innocent and sustainers of justice. She transformed the raw rage of the Furies and channeled it into something noble. To mark this transformation the three Furies gained new names. No longer Alecto (anger), Megaera (jealous rage), and Tisiphone (vengeful retaliation), they became the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones.

This myth acts as a treasure map of sorts, helping us to find a deeper sense of self and a connection to the sacredness of life. An identification with all of humanity that transcends tribal feuds. Moore observes that the fact that the human jury can't decide Orestes' fate shows that we must access something deeper than logic or reason or emotion to break the deadlock. We must access the deeper wisdom of Athena "that brings a kind of of healing and forgiveness that alone can ease the hearts of victims, while also opening the hearts of perpetrators of violence to the possibilities of healing and finding their own path to forgiveness."

I always thought it was strange that Athena was the goddess of war as well as wisdom. But in these tragic times it has become glaringly clear to me that it is in wartime that we most desperately need to draw on the deep well of wisdom. For it is only wisdom that can contain the primal destructive rage of the Furies that stirs in us when we witness the suffering of innocents.

I'm incredibly inspired by those who are family of the hostages, or who were hostages themselves, who are holding on to their own humanity by holding onto the humanity of those on the other side. Truly they are showing us all how to tap into the wisdom of Athena and transform the Furies from blood thirsty demons to fierce protectors of innocent life.

For me, I am letting this myth do its work on my psyche. I am cultivating a deeper awareness of when the Furies arise within me and committing to an ongoing practice of repurposing that energy so it is only expressed in the service of shared humanity with a sense of the sacredness of life. May it be so.

Creative hibernation

If we haven't used an aspect of our creativity in a long time, we can fear it may have abandoned us. Or atrophied. We might imagine that it feels angry or resentful at being neglected for so long. We might fear it is lost forever.

In my experience your creativity never leaves you. If you haven't seen it in a while, it's probably just hibernating. Curled up in a cozy cave waiting for the season to change. For the conditions to ripen so it can venture out and get back to foraging and frolicking.

Flaming June by Frederic Leighton

In preparation for designing a 1:1 creativity retreat I led this week, I looked back on the notebooks from different creativity workshops I've taken to see if I wanted to adapt/"steal" any exercises. In the process, I stumbled across something I wrote as part of a poetry workshop a few years ago and it still resonates powerfully for me, so I thought I'd share it:

Here we have a poetess awakening from hibernation.

Like a fairytale princess cursed into a deep decades-long slumber.

No harm came to her. She grew only more beautiful, more fully into form.

Do not grieve.

For what you may not know is she was dreaming the whole time.

Her imagination kept her company.

Like a grandmother spider spinning the most intricate tapestries of light.

Webs of stories sparkling and singing.

So this sleeping beauty has not wasted away, not withered.

Rather, she rested in perfect patience, knowing her sleep is temporary.

It's end draws near.

In this sleep-induced silence, her voice grew down into the dark of the body.

The roots of her voice grew below the line of sight.

So all the preparations have been laid.

As deep as the root system is spread in the ground, so high and wide and broad the branches will stretch to the sky.

The roots are ready to rise.

I did not write it in poem format. It was a stream of consciousness exercise across a few journal pages. But writing it here, it feels like it wants to take the shape of a poem.

It was in that poetry workshop, with the gorgeous and gifted Sukina Pilgrim, that I wrote my first poem in 20 years. Two decades of my life. A poem I wrote when I was 15 was badly received and I subconsciously scratched poetry off the menu of options for creative outlets. It was only at 35, in the pandemic, that I saw someone on instagram recommend this workshop and I got that tingle of intuition I've learned to follow.

I don't write poetry regularly. But it's back on the menu of options. It's out of hibernation.

I've been riding waves of intense emotions about the horrors happening in Palestine and in the middle of the night a few weeks ago my thoughts condensed into a poem. I wrote it down. I shared it. I felt very seen. One person left a comment that hurt. But I handled my emotions and responded from my wise self. It felt really really good to speak my truth and to have poetry as a means to do so.



Is there an aspect of your creativity you've lost touch with? What's one thing you could do to create the conditions to help it gently awaken from hibernation?

Connecting to your creativity ancestors

This time of year many cultures pause to honor their ancestors. The ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which marks the end of harvest and the beginning of winter, is considered a time when the veil between worlds of the living and the dead becomes thin.

Samhain by Tijana Lukovic

All Saints Day and All Souls Day are observed in many Catholic countries including Portugal, Spain and Hungary. And, of course, many in Mexico celebrate Día de los Muertos.

An image from Pixar's Coco showing the family's altar to their ancestors

I think this concept of connecting with our ancestors holds some wisdom for how we can cultivate our creativity.

While popular culture idolizes originality, the truth is that creativity doesn't occur in a vacuum. The myth of the lone genius is just that, a myth. Researchers now acknowledge that a wide array of influences contribute to the creative process.

Artists and scientists have also emphasized the importance of imitation and inspiration in the creative process. Oliver Sacks observed that "imitation and mastery of form or skills must come before major creativity." Mark Twain noted that,

All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources ... When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his.

So just as our biological ancestors contributed to shaping our physical DNA, we can consider all those "creativity ancestors" who have shaped our creative DNA. Shaped how we see the world. Shaped what inspires us. Shaped our sense of what's possible. Shaped our aesthetic sense and appreciation for specific forms of beauty.

So why not take a moment and reflect on who've been the biggest sources of creative inspiration for you. How does it feel when you call these people to mind?

I'd like to propose three ways we can work with our creativity ancestors to support and strengthen our creativity.

  1. Flesh out the family tree. My mom is really into genealogy and has found some pretty fascinating stories about our ancestors during her research. We can do the same with our creativity ancestors by looking up the people who inspired the people who inspire us. The last few weeks I've been slowly perusing this book over breakfast. I picked up the Children's Book of Art from our local library and it's been an easy and enjoyable way to start my day. I appreciated how, on the pages where they profile an individual artist, they explicitly call out a few of their "influences". By tracing back your lineage you can discover new sources of inspiration and new resources to draw on in your own creative work. It also helps humanize people we may have put on a pedestal by realizing they had their own idols. You might even make a creativity family tree to see all your creativity ancestors in one place.

2. Express gratitude. An important part of connecting with our biological ancestors is acknowledging that we would not exist without their efforts and sacrifices. We can similarly practice gratitude for the people in the lineage of our creative work. Why not write a letter to someone whose creativity has shaped your own creative journey telling them how much it impacted you. If the person lived centuries ago you can keep the letter in your journal. But if the person is still living, consider finding a way to send it their way. Maybe it's not a letter in snail mail (although I suppose why not), but it could be a DM on Instagram or a heartfelt podcast or book review.

3. Design a ritual. You might come up with a special prayer or invocation that you say each time you sit down to your creative work. Or perhaps you might find an object of clothing or piece of jewellery that reminds you of a specific creativity ancestor and wear it when you create. It might be a special bookshelf with books written by or about your creativity ancestors and you might adopt a practice of opening a book to a random page and reading a sentence or two when you feel creatively stuck. Or you may want to create an altar with objects that represent your creativity ancestors. Check out these "secular saint" candles for inspiration.

I think one of the reasons we get creatively stuck is because we get too much in our own heads. We paralyse ourselves with too much pressure, thinking we have to handle it all on our own. But by connecting to our creativity ancestors we need never feel alone. Rather we can locate ourselves in a long lineage of other humans who shared our passions, craft or questions. We can remember we're not simply small separate selves, but we're always in every moment standing on "the shoulders of giants".

The healing power of creativity (part 2)

As the horror of war continues to terrorize millions of innocent people in Palestine and Israel, I've been thinking about what creativity can contribute in the face of so much suffering. Last week, in part 1, I looked at these three ways:

  1. Creativity can help us feel our feelings

  2. Creativity can be a source of comfort

  3. Creativity can be a form of nonviolent resistance

This week I'm adding three more ways creativity can be a source of support in troubled times.

4. Creativity can help us bridge the empathy divide. Many spiritual traditions point to a sense of separation as the source of all suffering. Violence is only possible when we see ourselves as separate from others and believe that we can harm them without also harming ourselves. With echo chambers, growing polarization, and the spread of misinformation it feels like we're farther away from each other than ever. The fabric of society fraying at the seams.

But creativity has a way of stitching us back together, of bridging the empathy divide.

That art and drama and music and storytelling can build empathy is well documented. Historically, books like Uncle Tom's Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird, despite their limitations, helped white readers experience empathy for Black people in America. The Diary of Anne Frank helped millions of people empathize with the horrors of the Holocaust. I remember in school reading Zlata's Diary, which documents a girl's experience under siege in Sarajevo, and having my eyes and heart opened to a part of the world I'd previously known nothing about.

Vedran Smailović, the "Cellist of Sarajevo" played Albinoni's "Adagio in G Minor" for 22 days in the ruins of a Sarajevo market to honor 22 people killed while waiting for food there

Nathan Thrall's new book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a timely example in this tradition. It tells the story of a Palestinian man searching for his son in the wake of a tragic bus accident, "looking at the numerous and horrifying iniquities that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank are forced to endure". The Guardian review says the book "brims over with just the sort of compassion and understanding that is needed at a time like this...[and] looks at the Israel/Palestine conflict with unflinching clarity and quiet anger, but above all, with nuance." Unfortunately, many events related to the launch of this important book have been cancelled in recent weeks.

The Hands Up Project works with students in Gaza . In 2021 five girls won a playwriting competition and came to London to perform their play. They described it as a chance "to show the world that the dreams of Gazan girls are similar to the dreams of girls who live in normal conditions".

What's one book/film/song/play/image that has helped open your mind and heart to the suffering of others, to feel connected to people living very different lives? Or perhaps to feel less alone in your own suffering?

5. Creativity can be a source of meaning. Viktor Frankl suffered the worst atrocities humans can inflict on each other in Nazi concentration camps. Yet, in his beautiful book Man's Search for Meaning, he affirms that even under the most tragic circumstances, we can still choose to find meaning through contribution, connection and courage. When we can't change the situation causing our suffering, we can at least choose what we make out of that suffering. As art therapist Shaun McNiff observes:

"Art heals by accepting the pain and doing something with it."

Research on post-traumatic growth shows that creativity can play an important role in turning tragedy into triumph. Frida Kahlo lived with chronic pain and had more than 30 operations in her life. Rather than give up her art, she used her art to try to transform her pain into something meaningful.

“The pain. The pain of heartbreak, the pain of sickness, the pain of betrayal. I take this pain, I express this pain, and I change it into something positive and beautiful. In these paintings, I am free of my suffering.”

The Wounded Deer by Frida Kahlo

She even found a way to paint from her bed. She wrote, "I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”

Yousef Al-Ajarma was born in a refugee camp near Bethlehem and grew up in such abject poverty that he has no memory of having even a single toy as a child. At 6 years old he started working in the vegetable market 4-8pm every day to help buy food for his family. As a teenager he spent two years in an Israeli prison.

During that two years the only thing that helped me to survive and overcome my suffering was using my imagination and making art. I carved stones and olive pits to make art pieces out of them. I also used to write poems as a way of expressing my feelings and emotions. I used to make picture frames from empty toothpaste tubes and then draw and write on them. All of this helped me to survive and to feel that my life had meaning.

He went on to earn a PhD in Expressive Therapies with a scholarship from the Ford Foundation and now helps others to use creativity to give meaning to their suffering. Yousef and other art therapists help people make sense of what happened to them, to externalize it and work with it. While we can't erase the event as part of our story, with creativity we can make sure it isn't the end of the story.

What's one book/film/song/play/image that has helped you make sense of something difficult you were going through?

6. Creativity can show us another way is possible. It's so easy to get dragged down into despair when faced with so much suffering. But despair only serves to sustain the status quo. Perhaps the biggest gift of creativity is helping us to imagine an alternative to the way things are. To envision a future of peace and prosperity for all.

When the amazing Ursula Le Guin received the National Book Award, she said she shared the award with all "writers of the imagination" who had long watched awards "go to the so-called realists". She continued:

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.

It's important the spectators of suffering maintain enough hope in a better future that we keep actively engaged in bringing it into being. But it's perhaps even more important that people, especially children, trapped in tragic circumstances be able to find refuge in imaginary worlds. Writer Rebecca Solnit reflects:

The books of my childhood were bricks, not for throwing but for building. I piled the books around me for protection and withdrew inside their battlements, building a tower in which I escaped my unhappy circumstances. There I lived for many years, in love with books, taking refuge in books.

Art by Liniers for Rebecca Solnit’s letter from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader

Holocaust survivor (and Neil Gaiman's cousin) Helen Fagin shares a powerful story about the healing power of story. In the Nazi ghetto, education was forbidden. But she started a clandestine school anyway. She quickly realized that rather than Latin or math, what the children needed "wasn’t dry information but hope, the kind that comes from being transported into a dream-world of possibility." So one day she told them the story of Gone With the Wind. "For that magical hour, we had escaped into a world not of murder but of manners and hospitality. All the children’s faces had grown animated with new vitality." When the class was over a green-eyed girl told her: “Thank you so very much for this journey into another world. Could we please do it again, soon?” Things got worse in the ghetto and only 4 of her 22 students survived, including the green-eyed girl. Many years later, when they met up in New York, the green-eyed girl introduced Helen to her husband as “the source of my hopes and my dreams in times of total deprivation and dehumanization.”

Malak Mattar is an inspiring young artist from Gaza. She does not gloss over the suffering in any way, and yet her images affirm beauty and hope.

“I will portray the beauty of where I grew up, despite the destruction and the erasure, wars and loss"

Last Night in Gaza by Malak Mattar

Painted during a series of attacks in Gaza in 2021, this painting shows a woman sleeping with images of the sunbird, the national bird of Palestine, and a symbol of hope. The sunbird migrates from the beaches of Gaza to the forests and mountains of the West Bank unconstrained by segregation walls and military checkpoints. If Malak can hold onto hope, so can I.

What's one book/film/song/play/image that has helped you to hold onto hope in dark times?

Writing this 2-part post has helped me feel more resourced as I bear witness to the ongoing atrocities in Gaza and a renewed commitment to creativity.

I want to acknowledge that the Middle East is not the only place of intense human suffering at the moment. It just so happens that my husband and daughter are Palestinian and my in-laws live in Palestine so this conflict fills my field of vision. But it's important we not forget that millions of people are facing inhuman conditions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Myanmar... I take solace in the fact that we are getting less violent as a species. That places that were recently war-torn like Ireland and the Balkans now know peace.

And if creativity has taught me anything, it's that even if we can't see the solution right now, we can have faith that our collective creativity will carry us into a brighter future.

The healing power of creativity (part 1)

Saturday evening I sat around a fire at my daughter's nursery and sang a song for peace. Jack Durtnall taught us the song, a traditional peace blessing that had only that week been given a melody by his friend. A forest school instructor, she was inspired when a group of children spontaneously recited the poem as they planted four white pines as a gesture of peace.

I was surprised at the flood of emotions singing the song brought up in me. I wept. I thought I was the only one. I wasn't. After singing it through a few times he invited us to record it so we could remember the song:

t's got me thinking about the healing power of creativity.

In the face of so much suffering creativity can feel...pointless. But I think there's actually a lot that

I’ve come up with 6 ways that creativity can support us when we’re suffering. (I'll cover 3 today and 3 next week.)

1. Creativity can help us feel our feelings. We’re pretty emotionally stunted as a society. Most of us have very little space where we have permission and support to feel uncomfortable feelings. But feelings are meant to give us important information about what matters to us, inspire action, and then flow out of us. Like water, when the natural flow is obstructed, stagnation becomes a breeding ground for dis-ease. I often advise coaching clients who are trying to connect with their emotions to "let art do its job". Let it make you feel something. If I need a good cry I know watching Little Women (1994) or Sense and Sensibility (1995) will do the trick. While experiencing the creations of others can be incredibly moving, we take the healing power of creativity to the next level when we engage in expressing ourselves creatively.

“Darling, you feel heavy because you are too full of the truth. Open your mouth more. Let the truth exist somewhere other than inside your body.” ~Della Hicks-Wilson

Sama’ Abdulhadi, a techno DJ, said in a BBC documentary, “The only way that Palestinians are still gonna survive is that they let out all the anger. Otherwise they’re gonna go crazy.” That insight emerged from her own experience. In another interview, she said, “Techno saved me, because I was an angry person…It became this healthy ritual for me that, whenever I was angry, I just danced to techno, because it let it all out.”

For Rafeef Ziadah, spoken word is her creative outlet of choice:

What's an emotion you may have been suppressing? How might you express it creatively?

2. Creativity can be a source of comfort. Creativity can also be calming. Research shows that being around beauty can lower cortisol and alleviate stress. Engaging in the arts can lower anxiety. They can also help distract us from pain. When I need comfort sometimes I listen to Bob Dylan's Shelter From the Storm or the Wailin' Jennys Light of a Clear Blue Morning and I feel better in a matter of minutes. When a friend was experiencing chronic pain in her prolonged recovery from a tragic accident it was Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes that helped her make it through.

Comedy is a powerful creative outlet that can bring lightness to suffering in a very healing way. Suad Amiry, an architect-turned-writer-by-accident, has a hilarious TEDx Talk (if you're short on time, start from 10min in) where she talks about her comic memoir of surviving 42 days of military lockdown...with her mother in law. Amer Zahr, "on a mission to heal through humor", founded the annual Palestine Comedy Festival. He said, "Laughter is therapy. We need to show the world that Palestinians love to laugh, we love life, we love art." Other Palestinian comedians like, Aron Kader and Mo Amer manage to make a whole range of tragic realities somehow seem hilarious.

Again, while we can turn to the creativity of others for comfort, we can equally engage in creative activities with the intention of seeking comfort. Many people find solace in cooking, baking, knitting, sewing, weaving, woodworking, pottery, photography, dancing, drawing, and painting. Even something as simple as doodling can help alleviate anxiety.

What's one comforting creative activity that you could try (again)?

3. Creativity can be a form of nonviolent resistance. Creative expression can be a means to highlight suffering that might otherwise go unnoticed. Picasso put a spotlight on the atrocities perpetrated by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War when they bombed Guernica in 1937.

Pablo Picasso (1937), Guernica

Protest songs can galvanize a movement like Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, inspire positive change like Mavin Gaye's What's Going On, or immortalize an event like U2's Bloody Sunday.

Almost 70 years later, Banksy made protest art on the segregation wall in Palestine. While Banksy was creating the piece, “The Israeli security forces did shoot in the air threateningly and there were quite a few guns pointed at him.” However, Banksy questioned, “How illegal is it to vandalize a wall if the wall itself has been deemed unlawful by the International Court of Justice?”

Banksy (2005) Wall and Piece

For Dareen Tatour it's not with a can of spray paint but a pen and paper that she engages in nonviolent resistance, to shine a light on the suffering of her people, "to be a voice for those who have no voice." In an interview she reflected, "Writing political and resistance poetry in Palestine is tantamount to documenting what is happening to us because of the occupation." As punishment for her poetry, the Israelis sentenced her to spend more than two years in prison and under house arrest.

Banksy famously said:

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

What's a cause that you care about? What's a creative way you could highlight the suffering or make fun of the absurdity of the situation?

Check out these funny protest signs for inspiration (I particularly appreciated #1, #6, #13 and #30).

Creativity and power

This week my heart is breaking at the suffering of so many innocent people in Palestine and Israel. I’m grateful for all the messages checking on my in-laws in Palestine. They're fine. For now.

The only way that I've found to witness atrocities without collapsing in despair is shadow work. While I can't do anything about the violence directly, I can do my part to make the world a more peaceful place by turning within to see where I might be acting out similar patterns of violence. As the alchemists (and Jung) say, "As above, so below".

For example, I notice my inner perfectionist sees my flaws and human fallibility as an existential threat to my safety and survival, and so feels justified in its harsh approach. While I'm not depriving 2.2 million people of electricity, food, water and fuel, the truth is my perfectionist is trying to starve into submission my vulnerability by withholding energy, attention, validation and compassion. That's where I can do the healing work that will build more inner peace.

So when I read the news, rather than get caught up in the us vs. them stories, I can let the pain of Palestinians and Israelis awaken me to--and take responsibility for--the suffering inside of me I may not have acknowledged before.

Also, I can have compassion for myself (and even for the aggressors on both sides of the conflict) because, as a species, we're imprisoned in a paradigm of power that is as pervasive as it is pernicious.

For the longest time, I treated power as a dirty word. As a child, there were moments when I felt disempowered. The pain of those interactions is seared into my soul. I never wanted to do that to someone else so I decided I wanted no part of power, thank you very much.

But, of course, we all have power. We don’t get to opt out of having it. In fact, if we don't use it consciously, it will only leak out in shadow forms like manipulation, passivity, gossip and withholding.

But is there another way to own our power without disempowering others?

By connecting with my creativity and through my PhD research I discovered a new way of thinking about and relating to power. 

So what is the old dominant story and what is the new emerging story?

Old paradigm: Power = power over

The “power over” story has several components:

  1. Power is about control of external resources. Land. Water. Minerals. Animals. Humans. Money. Guns. Budget. Headcount. Promotions. Decision-making authority or access to decision-makers. Status. Prestige. Awards. Friends. Attention. Likes. Views. Approval.

  2. Power is scarce. There is not enough to go around. The more you have, the less I have. So life becomes a zero sum game. A game with winners and losers. Victims and villains.

  3. The only way to avoid being a victim is to accumulate as many resources as we can. We've all experienced painful moments of someone abusing their power over us. And we're determined never to be victimized again, no matter what. So we hoard more and more and more, just to be sure.

  4. The point of power is to achieve comfort and convenience for ourselves and to prevent others from taking our power away. We use our power to exert control over the disempowered, to extract value from their resources and crush any resistance before it becomes a real threat.

We see this power dynamic play out at every level. Geopolitically, it’s the root of feudalism, colonialism, slavery, crony capitalism, fascism and patriarchy. In toxic organizations, we see leaders extracting every ounce of life energy from employees before spitting them out as burnt out shells of themselves. We see it in authoritative parenting which is convinced children need to be coerced into compliance if they are to be made into productive members of society. And we see it internally, in the tyrannical attitude of the inner slave master cracking the whip to force us to do something our soul rejects because we "should". So much unnecessary suffering!

This paradigm is a recipe for extreme power imbalances. Why do we tolerate such insane inequality? I think it’s partly because we believe the greater the gap between our power and “their” power, the safer we are. But the opposite is true. 

If your comfort comes at the cost of someone else’s suffering, the seeds of resistance are already sown. We see this cycle play out again and again throughout history. And we see it playing out today on the news. The only path to enduring peace is mutual empowerment, where the dignity of all people (and parts of our psyche) is sacrosanct.

I believe this old story is starting to crack. The suffering it causes is being brought out of shadow and into the headlines. We're also becoming increasingly aware of the cost of the "civil wars" within our own minds, highlighted in World Mental Health Day this past week.

So what is the alternative way of relating to power?

Emerging paradigm: Power = empowerment

In my research, I asked people what it meant to them to "feel creative". They said creativity is aliveness, freedom, autonomy. Pride at making something out of nothing. An expanded sense of self-efficacy, surprising themselves by what they could make. They described feeling resilient, trusting their creativity would help them come up with solutions no matter what problems arose.

Empowerment. (What academics call "psychological empowerment").

The "power as empowerment" paradigm has several components (as I see it):

  1. Power is about cultivating inner resources. Creativity is an inner resource. So are self-compassion, emotional intelligence, self-regulation, a growth mindset, love, joy, spirituality, grit, gratitude, wisdom. Our ability to respond to life’s challenges is 100% different depending on whether we have access to these inner resources or not.

  2. Inner resources are abundant. Not only are inner resources not zero sum, they are essentially unlimited. The more creativity I have says nothing about how much creativity you can have. If anything, creativity is contagious. The more I cultivate my creativity the more chance there is that I might encourage you to do the same, so it actually becomes a virtuous cycle. Amazing! As Dr. Maya Angelou said:

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

3. The point of power is to solve problems and empower others. When we exercise our creativity, we and others feel inspired, uplifted, enriched and expansive. We may also feel challenged and confronted, but that experience is typically in the service of our growth and evolution, i.e., the expansion of our capacity and increase in personal power. 

This "empowerment" paradigm is helping me experience a form of power that does not come at anyone else's expense. A form of power that is a win-win. And I notice that when I’m tapped into my own sense of empowerment, when I feel an abundance of inner resources, I’m less likely to need to exert power over others. I’m less likely to require others to be small for me to be big, or feel safe. 

From a place of empowerment, with access to my inner resources, I'm better positioned to wield the external resources I have--my voice, my money, my time-- to take action towards positive change without falling into the power over narrative.

I feel increasingly confident that creativity can point us to a new more generative story about what power can look like and what it is for. 

These ideas are very much evolving so I welcome any thoughts and reflections either in the comments or in direct messages.

PS - For more check out:

Noticing

Every day for the past week I’ve been trying out a new practice given to me as “homework” by my writing workshop instructor. It’s simple.

Notice 5 things.

Sitting at a local cafe I noticed a constellation of shining dewdrops…

…a weather-worn plate on a bench honoring a loved one, and a surprising lamppost-turned-birdfeeder hiding amongst the bushes (can you spot it?). 

I’m surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. So it’s got me wondering…

Why does the simple act of noticing feel so nice?

The psychologist in me says because it’s rare. Our brains are efficient. They have to be. Brains, typically only 2% of our body weight, consume, on average, 20% of our energy.

So often we’re operating on autopilot. Rather than do the hard work of constantly noticing everything, our brains create simulations of predictable environments (and people). This means we’re often interacting with a simulation rather than with reality. I don’t really notice the cutlery in the drawer every time I open it. I simply reach for where I know the forks always are. It’s efficient but it’s also dull.

Alternatively, we can get so focused on one thing that we tune out all irrelevant information, a phenomenon psychologists call inattentional blindness. In a classic experiment participants were asked to count the number of times a basketball was passed in a video. They were typically so focused on the task that they literally didn’t see a person in a gorilla suit walk across the basketball court.

In a real life variation on this, the Washington Post decided to run an experiment to see if “in a banal setting at an inconvenient time" would people notice exceptional beauty? Grammy-winning violinist Joshua Bell, used to playing to standing-room-only audiences in venues that charge upwards of $100 for a decent seat, stood in a DC Metro station during rush hour and played masterpieces like Bach’s Chaconne on a Stradivari worth $3.5 million. 

(Why not listen to Joshua Bell's Chaconne while you read on:)

In his 45 minutes of playing, 1,097 people passed by. How many people stopped to listen for even a minute?

Seven. 

That means 99% of people were too busy or distracted or disinterested to stop for just a minute to listen to one of the world’s best musicians play some of humanity’s greatest music on one of the most iconic instruments of all time. 

Describing this phenomenon of being ignored, the article’s author, Pulitzer Prize winning Gene Weingarten remarked: 

The fiddler’s movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he’s not really there. A ghost. Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

But we aren’t born that way. He notes there were no observable demographic differences about the people who noticed the violinist and those who did not. Except for one. 

Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

I try really hard to support my daughter’s noticing (and thus her attention span!). But I have to admit in Paris last weekend I scooted her past a street musician. She wanted to stop to listen and the music was lovely, but we didn’t have any change to offer him so I thought it would be rude to listen without offering something in exchange. But in retrospect, perhaps if we had given him the gift of an attentive and appreciative audience for a few minutes, he may not have begrudged us the lack of a few euros... 

I keep this story of the violinist in the DC Metro as a cautionary tale. I aspire to a life where I have the level of noticing to be stopped in my tracks by beauty and the level of spaciousness where I can always afford at least a minute to stop and take it in. 

And so I feel committed to continue this practice of noticing. 

So far I've identified three main benefits:

  1. Noticing puts me in the present. In order to notice I need to condense myself down from the cloud of abstraction where I spend most of my time. It is only by coming into my body that I can access the senses that give me access to noticing. Noticing is always grounded in the present moment and rooted in a particular place.  

  2. Noticing helps me access appreciation. We are trained in school and work to experience life with an evaluative lens. While I'm a big fan of critical thinking, life gets pretty dull pretty quickly when we get stuck in the stance of the critic. When I try to notice 5 things, my awareness automatically alights on something beautiful or interesting. My habitual problem-seeking mode puts me at war with reality and is a recipe for chronic dissatisfaction. Balancing it out by also taking time to appreciate tiny wonders helps me befriend life as it is, giving me more energy to tackle the problems that genuinely need addressing and more openness to the possibility that there might not be a problem to solve.

  3. Noticing idiosyncrasy inspires creativity. The essence of creativity is novelty. We talk a lot about how novelty comes from creative thinking, brainstorming, making connections between seemingly disparate ideas. But novelty is also found in uniqueness, in the idiosyncrasy of everyday objects or moments or places or people. Remember, in the whole world no two leaves are exactly the same. It is the uniqueness of a person that makes them a muse to an artist. The uniqueness of a piece of stone that inspires the sculptor. The uniqueness of a landscape that inspires the architect.

Are you feeling inspired to join me in the act of noticing? Are there other benefits you enjoy from the practice of noticing?