You're bored with yourself, bestie

Featuring a guided meditation for the paid subscribers <3

I talk a lot about “absorbing into your inner world” because when you’re totally consumed by the way your external experience resonates internally, you don’t have to “get inspired” to make art. You’ve got something better.

You’ve got curiosity.

For most of my life, I’ve hopped from one creative medium to another, anxious to explore what each new venue had to offer. From acting to software engineering, poetry to prose. Singing, drawing, collage, photography, jewelry making, sculpting, painting, gymnastics, embroidery, crochet, musical instruments—you name it, I’ve done it. I even once learned a totally new style of knitting that requires holding your hands in a way that is notoriously awkward to retrain because it promised to make me faster and…I just can’t fuckin’ help myself!

Why? Because I don’t have to think about having ideas when I’m discovering something totally new.

I don’t have to maintain anything. I don’t have to rediscover the originating spark of my desire over and over again. I don’t have to dig through my own cave spaces to find the magick I’ve misplaced.

That’s not to say I never return to anything. I’ve kept a lot of these going throughout the years; rotating from one to the next when I need something new to fertilize my system. But that’s the piece I’ve always been aware of—I need to chase the new and novel. I need to be in constant contact with my curiosity in order to make art. And if I’ve become disconnected from it, I need to find some way to bring it back.

Becoming obsessed with your Self

I, like many others and despite being what many have reflected back to me as an “interesting person,” have a draining tendency to become bored with myself.

My silly little ego likes to impose on my positively riveting inner life and say, “that’s it! That’s all there is! There’s nothing else to conquer, we’ve seen it all! Let’s pack it up and go home!” A part of me likes to glance at the still waters of my unconscious and contort its little face in disgust. “How boring,” she says with a sneer. And then she turns on what my parents used to lovingly call the “idiot box.” (That’s the TV, for those of you not raised by elder boomers.)

And god bless her, no wonder she feels that way. She was raised to believe that just about anything is more interesting and worthy of her attention than what’s “in here.” No, school—painstakingly preparing her for a capitalist labor landscape—taught her that she should be doing more productive things.

“If you’re going to make art, you gotta make it,” they said. “Don’t just waste time thinking about it!”

“Play? Experimentation? Contemplation? Sounds like ‘procrastination’ to me!”

All this focus on productivity and “doing” didn’t really leave a lot of time for exploring and being—two of the most critical components of developing your Genius. But if you think I’m about to tell you to stop working and stay still, you’ve got another thing coming. Being creatively active is important—just like moving your body every day. You just need to adjust your approach.

You need to thrust your hands into the soil of your Self and start excavating.

Loosening up

One of the worst offenders of stifling creative practices everywhere is self-seriousness. But wait! Hold that shame spiral! It’s not your fault!

Remember what we said about school and the capitalist labor landscape?? You’ve been primed to produce your entire life. So of course you’re making art an overly serious task. Of course you think you need to earn being an artist by making the most mind-blowingly awesome work that will be deemed a certified hit by some important art authority!

It is unfortunate but true that many of us have adapted to constant criticism, rejection, and forced hierarchy by trying to control our surroundings so we never have to feel that way again. We develop perfectionistic tendencies as a cope.

And what an effective cope it is! It’s gotten you here, hasn’t it?

You may not have won your school talent show or graduated valedictorian or gotten the super prestigious job you might have been after but I’m sure chasing perfection has successfully saved you some heartache in your time—or at least appeared to work for those around you—otherwise you wouldn’t be employing it as a strategy.

The solution to perfectionism is not to judge the parts of you who internalized it as a necessary prerequisite to love and approval and safety.

The solution is to hold the hands of those parts that feel reliant on it while you embark on a totally new journey together.

The solution is to relate to those parts of Self that are scared to try something new.

But you do need to try something new. It just might require a series of baby steps. I spent about 6 concentrated years on the project of releasing perfectionism. Have I totally relinquished it? HAHAHAHAHAHA! No. I still regularly find myself avoiding the art I desperately want to make because I can’t guarantee it will be “good enough.” But somewhere around year 4, something snapped for me. I mean it literally broke.

The misery I felt taking my art practice so goddamn seriously, suppressing my own emotions because I didn’t think they were worthy of being turned into art or because I feared I couldn’t honor them in the way I wanted to, took me so far away from my Self that I barely felt like a person anymore.

My curiosity was dead in the water. I didn’t know why anyone should care about me or my art or anything I was doing. I didn’t even know why I should care about me. But I was desperate for someone to tell me!

What happened is I began to notice, over and over again so as to drill it into my sameness-seeking nervous system, that my coping mechanism was no longer helping me cope. It had outlived its usefulness.

I wandered for another year and a half in that desert, taking on tiny experiments in caring about my Self and my art and then running for cover all over again. Until finally, a year ago, I decided I was ready to make the ultimate commitment to this project to find out once and for all if I could reprogram my brain and let go of perfectionism.

That’s when I started my apprenticeship and later my hypersigil notebooks. That’s when I began showing up every single day to face the discomfort caused by making art for fun just to see what happens—the way a child makes art.

I learned to run into the wall of fear and hesitation and gather my own gold.

Excavating some gold

So, you know how I said you need to be chasing the new and novel? Well, that can be a trap of its own. That’s when your ego starts saying the same toxic shit that mine did. And that shit…is a lie.

You know why some artists explore the same genres, paint the same shapes and colors, reconstruct past themes over and over again? It’s because they discover something new every time. It’s because the energy they bring to these motifs colors their experience of them. It’s because their willingness to engage deeply even with what they think they’ve already seen reveals new textures with every turn of the microscope. It’s because, as physics teaches us, observation changes what is observed.

Think about that next time you think you have no original ideas, no new inspiration to discover.

Think about that next time you think you’re boring and you have no business making art.

Think about that next time you’re about to prematurely disconnect from yourself.

If you really want to discover your own Genius, the first thing you have to do is talk back to that voice in your head that says you aren’t worth spending time with. You need to combat that incessantly overstimulated part of you that pounds its fists against your brain-table and shouts, “more! New! Better!”

This is why the most common exercise you’re going to hear me recommend besides scribbling some weird shapes, textures, and lines on paper is intuitive movement. (You’re already tired of hearing about it, I know it.)

Because you need to turn off your brain for awhile. You need to get out of your head and into your body—that’s where your best ideas live. If you can learn to be curious about the sensations and shapes that want to carve themselves into your physical form, you can develop the spaciousness in your nervous system to notice all kinds of other interesting things you’re used to ignoring.

By getting out of your head and into your body, you can bypass your brain’s poorly trained attentional filter.

Once you become skilled at this, it will be so much easier to show up and write your stream of consciousness, scribble-sketch whatever weird shapes you feel in your body, and channel directly from your Genius.

You’ll probably also find it a lot easier to meditate and spend longer periods of time in contemplation.

If intuitive movement still feels a little bit intimidating (what do I do with my hands??), worry not! I’ve got a guided meditation for you today to help you explore your inner realms and get back to your primal instincts.

Re-igniting your curiosity meditation