You’re not stuck, you’re just confronting the Void

Pull a rabbit out of that hat, gurl

I hear you, okay, I get it. You feel like you don’t know what to make.

You have a vision—some nebulous vibe, a collection of images and impulses, tugging at your attention—but you’re not quite sure what or how it wants to be yet. Maybe that vision has coagulated into a slightly more stable form—an idea—but you’re not sure how to execute it yet.

You’re probably thinking, “I’m stuck. Blocked. I can’t move forward so there must be something wrong.”

But I humbly submit to you now that you are actually just resisting The Void.

Decentralizing cognition

We’ve been taught that nothing is really real unless we can turn it over in our heads, molest it with our thoughts, subject it to endless analysis. If I can’t think about something, nothing must be happening. This is a devastating misconception because not all processes of creation are mental.

Gestation is an embodied process that takes place in the subterranean spaces of consciousness—the sensational, imaginal, and energetic realms.

The intellectual aspects of the creative process are only the tip of the iceberg. Scents wafting up from what’s cooking below. The thoughts you have about your visions, ideas, and their potential execution are the least important, least impactful, least Erotic part of the creative process. You’re getting obsessed with the big O and trying to skip all the foreplay.

You resist the Void because of the exact quality that lends it fertility—it’s empty. And emptiness is loud.

Creating capacity for sensation

Empty space creates a vacuum. As soon as we approach it, we fill that space.

Sometimes we fill it with thoughts and sometimes we fill it with sensation, images, vague impressions and visions. We tend to feel more comfortable and competent with the former and more threatened by the latter.

This is a consequence of our conditioning.

As a natural result of situations where our agency was inaccessible or our avenues for expressing it were limited, we learn to live on the defensive—constantly waiting for life to happen to us instead of rising to meet it. This is a traumatized worldview, one where novelty is dangerous and we can’t meet the demands of evolving landscapes.

We learn to ignore what is emerging internally to explore or express in favor of reacting to all the external demands placed on us.

Ignoring your inner guidance and emotions breeds chronic dysregulation. So we learn to quell and control sensation rather than openly exploring it. We replace the “bad” (read: unusual, unpredictable, less tolerated) sensations with more acceptable ones using various distractions. In response to the narrow range of input, our nervous system contracts, our window of tolerance dwindles. We develop fairly low capacity for sensation and very little patience for presence.

The less we pay attention to our subtle senses, the more deadened they become. We rock up to the Void and declare it empty without even noticing all the life that is present there.

Instead of adopting an offensive strategy and seeking out the novel, our nervous system shrinks away from it.

This is when we begin to feel stuck—like nothing is happening and we’re just “wasting” time. We can’t feel what is moving internally or we simply don’t trust it.

Creativity requires the capacity for uncertainty

All those sensations, images, and impressions filling the Void? Your thinking brain doesn’t know what their purpose is. He doesn’t know what they’re doing or what process they stem from. He doesn’t know what will happen if they’re allowed to move uninhibited. And he doesn’t trust them.

Can you blame him?

The truth is that you’ve been assaulted by emotions you have no tools to approach your entire life. No one taught you. I can’t speak for all of us, but my parents certainly had no clue, and I have a feeling most of you have been in the dark, too.

When we began to cry as children, our guardians quickly rushed in to soothe or squash those feelings. No one created the space for our emotions to expand and dissipate naturally.

So obviously your mind wants to protect you from them. Of course she’s trying to guard you against potential pain. That’s what your mind does best—compensating for coping deficits and developing pre-programmed responses from past experience.

What your mind needs is a little updating—new experiences that contradict the negative ones. Opportunities to learn that those emotions and sensations are safe. You need to play at the edges of your capacity so that you can gradually grow it.

The Void and You

If you feel like your creative life is at a stand still, you need to stand still.

Welcome to the Void, bb. We’ve been waiting for you.

You don’t have to spend all your time sitting in silence, meditating, being totally still. In fact, you shouldn’t—you gotta vary your strategy a bit.

What I’d rather you do instead is regularly check in with your body and consider what might be bubbling and boiling within you. When you’re washing the dishes, walking the dog, doodling in your hypersigil journal, sitting in traffic, catching up on your knitting, playing with your kid, pondering life, taking a shower, brushing your teeth, saying your affirmations—I want you to get better at remembering to pause and turn the attention back on what is emerging within you.

Notice what you’re feeling internally, what you’re perceiving with your senses, what thoughts are circling your brain, what’s happening in your external environment (remember: your extended Self is a lot bigger than just you). And consider that you are incubating something awesome that isn’t quite ready to meet you yet.

Ask yourself without demand for an answer: What am I creating right now that I don’t even know about?

“That’s it? That’s all you got for me?? REALLY???”

I know, you want to come to my home and murder me right now—I can feel your rage through the screen. Some of my inner teens and 20-somethings are even on your side.

But listen, babe, the more you resist making yourself wrong and looking for problems to fix, the more space you will create for solutions to come find you. The whole reason you’re in this situation is because of your demand to rush and control, your overpowering desire for “results”—anything other than meeting the part of your Self that is asking for your attention RIGHT MEOW.

You have to loosen your grip just a little. If your hands are full in a constant tug-of-war with the thing you think you’re supposed to be doing or experiencing, you can’t catch what the universe is trying to throw you.

I hate to break it to you but this is a time game. When you’re not being present and getting curious about what’s incubating, you’re not even in the game. But if you can start spending even 5 mins at a time opening to the emptiness, you can begin creating a space for that incubation to happen and for something wicked cool to emerge.

And I know you don’t want to hear it but as important as a quick Void sprint is to your overall strategy, longer meditations involving even more emptiness are like your steady-state cardio. Walking, drawing, laundry-folding and other active meditations are great but you need to increase your capacity for total quiet and stillness. The more space you can create and the longer you can sustain that space, the more likely you are to catch a whale of an idea.

But don’t worry too much about that right now. Just practice creating little pockets of space. Graded exposure—slowly increasing the level and duration of emptiness over time—is how you expand your window of tolerance.

If you usually listen to a podcast while cleaning, try turning it off just a few minutes early.

If you normally watch a YouTube video on your lunch break, experiment with listening to an instrumental track or binaural beats.

Make friends with the Void and one day you’ll start to crave it.

If you enjoyed my series on summoning the Godself, you can now grab your own copy to create yourself again and again! After all, embodying the Godself isn’t a one-and-done process—it’s a lifelong commitment to your own evolution.