Today’s Territory:
4 Actions Against Creative Fears

Why fears and doubts arise as you create.
What to do about it.

or:

TIGERSandMAMMALSandFEARS, oh my!

First, realize that every stable person has fears.
You are not unique, and your fears are not unique.
You are unique in other ways, but not this one. This is a good thing.

So I bet I know some of what you feel when you are fearful:
you feel like you’ll explode from panic, your head will fly off, your heart will stop, all 6 billion people on the planet think you are pathetic, you were stupid to try, people are just being nice to you, the lion is behind you about to pounce, you are paralyzed and will never paint again, dance again, compose again, should I go on?

Everyone gets this way from time to time.
Creative people are willing to notice it more.
We want to notice everything and fear is part of the Everything. Right?

The truth is that you are fine. Your fears are protective mechanisms keeping you safe. Fears are your brain’s way of saying ‘look out for the sabertoothed tiger!’

But like the sabertoothed tiger, many of the things that our every-helpful brains protect us from don’t exist anymore. If they ever did.

We forget often that we are a sentient species, for better or worse. Sentient means ‘the ability to feel or perceive subjectively’. And humans are self-aware.

The combination means that we feel and perceive, and then we think about what we feel and perceive.

Notice something? If the feeling wasn’t real, and we start feeling it more so we can be thinking about it, we make our response to the feeling real, and get trapped trying to figure it out, and it was not real to begin with!

The last sabertooth tiger died ten thousand years ago.

We do not need to fear them.

But you are a large mammal descended from the small mammals who did fear the tiger and ran away. So the programming has stuck.

Many of our fears are similar to this.

They are programs that are in our minds and that will get triggered, but that serve no good use anymore.

However, at one point we owed our existence to taking them seriously. Even now, when we feel these reactions, we often believe we have to take them seriously.

We don’t.

Then we have feelings and thoughts about how we feel, and there we are again, stuck. Feeling and thinking. Oops.

Action Number One:

KNOW WHEN THE FEAR IS FALSE.

Start by checking your actual reality.

Look all around.

Nope, no sabertooth tigers.

Also no art teacher from second grade still there, telling you you are using the wrong color. No older sibling laughing at you because he was into being a brat. No bully on the school bus stealing your flute and ruining your music.

You are now a grown-up, tall, strong, successfully adult. Act your age!

Turn and look at the fear closely, do not fear the fear. Examine it.

As you master this, you’ll be able to feel when the fear program turns on in your psyche. You can practice: watch it run its tape and then end. Do not engage. Turn away.

These old programs are actually quite short and simple.

What gives them power is not any complexity or truth of their own but our willingness to buy into them, give them our beliefs, and be lead by the nose by lies.

Ha. You want that? I sure don’t.

The easiest way to recognize this is to pause for a moment. Small mammals run away and then check to see what they are running from. We have big analytical minds, so when we turn to look and don’t see anything but the fear we assume we should deeply investigate the feeling of fear. And then we re-stimulate it.

Action Number Two:

KNOW THAT YOUR CREATIVITY CAN FEEL AND MASTER FEAR.

Creative people love to create.

Create means to bring the non-existent into existence.

We are at the edge of the known and the unknown all the time. That is where the non-existent arises.

The biggest fear a small mammal has is of the unknown. Think of a cat: she slows down, explores, is cautious, looks all around, checks things out. She is using her fear to guide her next few steps. Then she has new information, and relaxes into enjoying the new experience.

We are wired to do the same thing.
But fear is a developmental stage of the creative process.

The better I am doing my job of adventuring on the edge of the unknown and bringing new things back, the more I will be aware of the feeling of fear.  My goal is to recognize what it is telling me about where I am and what my options are.

We can use and master fear as a tool for knowledge and development.

Action Number Three:

KNOW THAT YOU WILL KEEP FEELING THE FEAR ANYWAY

Fears in creativity are directly related to what we have already accomplished and to our expectations for ourselves.

The more we have created in our lives, the bigger the selection of elements our fears can use when triggered. And concurrently the more we want to continue to create something new, the more time we spend in the realm of the unknown, and the more often we feel that fear.

This still does not mean they are real. There probably is not a sabertooth tiger about to tell you that your new paintings suck. But there may be a neighbor who wished he’d let himself paint, who will tell you your paintings suck because of his own grief. So what? It still isn’t true for you.

Fear tells us how far we have come, how much we have accomplished, how much we have already mastered, and how courageous and brilliant we are to be moving in this direction.

Or as my friend Charlie says ‘the greater is our accomplishments, the more subtly nuanced is our self-doubt’.

Thus as we mature in our abilities, and expand our vocabularies, we develop new phrases for our fears. We call them self-doubt, existential angst, second-guessing. These are all words for fear arising. We usually pick the phrases that – unfortunately – have the most ability to paralyze us, like the eyes of the sabertooth tiger glinting yellow in the firelight. eeek! Doubt. Anxiety. Nervousness.

Action Number Four:

AND TRANSMUTE THE FEAR TO EXCITEMENT

We are on the edge of the unknown, and see something glinting. Glinting makes the mammal in us very nervous. But it is just glinting.

What if what is glinting is your own light? The preciousness of what you, uniquely, are here to create?

Artists, scientists, mystics, and other humans- the fact is we want to see into the unknown. We feel the fear and head into it anyway because everything else ahead is even bigger: the gold of creative action is in the action.

It is very exciting on the edge of what’s known.

One last thought: a few weeks ago I had a question to you all on my Facebook page:

“what is the opposite of fear?”

Your answers included
Faith
Contentment
Courage
Hope
God
Wisdom
Love

To me, these all express how we feel being in the presence of the unknown, and knowing who and what we are. We already have what we need to stay grounded in whatever happens.

Excitement, fear and love. Sounds like creativity to me.

I ain’t been et yet, you?

Until next time,
all my best for your creative adventuring-

Tory

ps- you’ll notice these blog posts are a bit less frequent because I am writing my next book, and very excited. Should be out by the end of June!
Oh, and the image is a one-of-a-kind postage stamp brooch of mine from 1989, the Tlingit Shaman. Scary guy, for chasing away demons and sabertooth tigers.

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