The Orphic egg of stuckness

I've got a little ritual to help you bust that creative block

Creative blocks often operate like devil’s snare; the more you struggle to get free, the harder you get squeezed, and the more stuck you become.

Within every creative block, there is a lesson to be learned, a part of Self to be met, a paradigm to be shifted, or an egg being incubated.

All you need to do to get out of it is be still. Stop and listen—then listen harder. Turn your Self on its head, string yourself up by the ankle, and allow the light of consciousness that is constantly escaping through your crown to be directed back downward, into your own underworld.

Alright, that’s the post, everyone can go home now!

Kidding! Kidding! Damn, everybody relax we’re obviously gonna talk about it.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself, “why am I stuck in a creative block?” and then turned around to bury my head in the sands of the dreaded phone apps or TV programs.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve responded to a creative block by drowning myself in the quicksand of endless books, courses, and practices to get myself unstuck, only succeeding in sinking myself deeper.

You know why none of these approaches worked? Because they were burying me in excessive amounts of information and stimuli instead of helping me process the backlog of unintegrated data I’d been constantly consuming as a living, feeling, chronically online 21st century person. Because they were leading me further away from myself instead of deeper into my Self.

Because instead of honoring the Orphic egg of stuckness, incubating it like precious cargo, clearing space for its unfolding, and allowing it to hatch in its own time…

I was constantly in a tug-of-war trying to wrest my physical, mental, emotional, and energetic resources back from it so I could get on with making the things my ego wants to make.

Even when I was meditating.
Even when I was journaling.
Even when I was trying to relax and play and be in my creative process without expectation.

(The worst expectations are the ones you try to pretend aren’t there, buried under conscious awareness and poisoning the well.)

What is the Orphic egg of stuckness?

The Orphic egg (AKA the cosmic egg, the world egg, etc.) is an ancient origin myth. The egg contains all the primordial components to birth our entire world as we have come to know it. And while the ‘what’ and ‘how’ differs across cultures and traditions, the essence is the same:

One egg,
containing tons of energy and raw materials,
bursting at the seams with a desire to be born—
to create worlds.

One thing I love about the Orphic egg is that it is often depicted with a great serpent coiled around it—which can be linked to the concept of Kundalini fire and lifeforce energy, but is usually connected to the goddess Ananke (Necessity) with the egg itself represented by Chronos (Time).

The Orphic egg creates an entire world. But only as a result of Necessity and a whole lot of Time.

Ya get it? Your creative block is an Orphic egg!

In essence, all of creativity can be thought of as an Orphic egg. Your limitations are not something to be removed in an act of Divine intervention or force of Will, they’re the Saturnine restrictions of Time and Necessity that create the very pressure and agitation needed to form the creative pearl.

Mediating pressure is an important aspect of the creative process. Too much crushes creativity and our ability to generate solutions and too little fails to catalyze us into action.

That’s why nervous system and emotional regulation tools are so important to creative people, they help us to work proactively with pressure.

But the fact remains that pressure is not a bug, it’s a feature.

And currently, all that pressure is bearing down on you and making you feel really stuck.

So how do you get out of it?

Hatching the egg

In order to release all that creative goodness that lies dormant in the egg, we first have to fertilize it, and then we have to subject it to the light of conscious awareness to incubate it.

The fertilization process is something that has more than likely already happened while you weren’t even aware. Some key piece of inspiration is working its way through your creative channel right now that means to jail break you from this prison of creative blockage. So here’s how you should proceed:

1. Recognize that the process is already happening on a subconscious level, away from the prying eyes of your conscious mind.

2. Resist excessive interference with that process. (Don’t let the forced consciousness of the thinking mind overheat and break the egg.)

3. Create a fluid and flexible container for that inspiration to float to the surface in case it needs to be directed or modified by conscious thought processes.

4. Distract the conscious mind (WITHOUT further stimulating yourself or burying this seed of inspiration) so your intuitive, unconscious processing can do its work.

The first 2 parts should be relatively self-explanatory. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Don’t overthink it, don’t overprocess it, don’t try to force or fix anything. Just relax and enjoy the pleasant anticipation of the moment when the final puzzle piece falls into place. It’s the closest thing to an orgasm we can experience intellectually and this first part is the foreplay. Enjoy it, damn you!

The third bullet is the part that you probably need assistance with.

Just like I was saying in this here post,

A container can be a thesis statement, a specific nature spot or corner café, a general subject or a question, a magickal intention. A container is simply a physical or metaphysical environment that helps you organize your sensational, emotional, intellectual, and energetic contents.

It can also be the hammock on your back porch that overlooks a lush suburban garden or a thriving urban metropolis when you sit down with the intention to allow life (and your subconscious response to that life) to rise to meet you.

It can even be an astral space—a non-physical location found exploring your inner world or pulled from a memory.

I’ve already set up an enchanted astral laboratory if you want some help establishing a creative incubation chamber. Read more here.

I try to get most of my clients to think of your intention as a container. Think of it as casting a spell on your inner parts and creative channel. We’ll talk more about this in the ritual below. For now, let’s talk about the last part of this equation: distracting the conscious mind.

Now, you don’t want to do anything that requires a lot of brain power because the idea is to redirect cognitive resources away from our very energetically draining conscious thinking processes and toward our much more sustainable unconscious processing mechanisms.

You’re basically going to put yourself in a state of self-hypnosis.

My favorite way to do this is by sitting out in nature, losing myself in the hypnotic motions of tree branches in the breeze, the goings-on of the bugs, birds, and other critters, and the formations of the clouds.

I particularly prefer this method because it helps me draw upon the nature spirits and the natural world in general as an ‘extended mind’—allowing me to think outside my brain in both concrete, literal ways as well as subtle, energetic ways. It might surprise you to hear that much of our processing occurs extra-cognitively and sometimes doesn’t even involve neurons at all, but that’s science, baby!

But you don’t need to do anything special to enter a hypnotic state. Mindless tasks like folding clothes, washing dishes, driving somewhere you could navigate to in your sleep, wandering in and out of shops and museums, all of these things are fantastic for distracting the thinking brain.

Pull your head out of the clutter and into the clouds

That orphic egg is an explosion of creativity waiting to happen—it’s chock-full of stored up energy and information, it’s an entire world waiting to be co-created with you.

But it might require that you try some things you’ve never tried and develop some skills you might not have even known you had.

This is a frequently neglected aspect of creative practice: energetics.

Do you know how to relate to energy without intellectualizing it?

Do you know how to observe how energy manifests in the body as a sensation, emotion, or abstract vision?

Do you know how to move that energy? Do you know how to work with the centrifuge, compost heap, and distillation machine of the creative channel in order to ferment, transmute, and extract that energy as a concrete idea or expression?

If you answered ‘no’ or ‘wtf’ to any of these questions, you might want to check out my latest course, The Magickal Art of High Strangeness. You can read the Handbook here (along with some of my other books and rituals) for $11/mo.

But just for today, I’ve got a blindingly simple and super powerful little ritual here to help you incubate that Orphic egg you’re storing:

Ritual: Incubating the Orphic egg of stuckness

This ritual can be performed as a standalone meditation, before engaging in some light, undirected creative play, going on a walk, taking a bath, or prior to some other hypnotic activity. Make sure you take at least 15 mins to be mindfully present with yourself after attempting this ritual and give your body time to digest before feeding it more stimulation.