If you want to know how to be more creative, you have to learn how to surrender to your creativity.
“One of the things you’ll hear people say, when they tell me they wish they
could draw, is, ‘I see it in my head, but I can’t get it onto the page.’
And then I have to remind them that what they’re seeing in their head
is not a drawing. Drawing is something that has to come out of your body.”
—Lynda Barry
Surging loss-of-control panic and alarm rang throughout my brain, urging me to stop. I remembered the coaching from the morning meditation on how to surrender into your heart in the midst of gripping fear and took a breath. I focused on the energy of my heart and let my ankles wobble. I signaled I was ready.
“Surrender now!” the group holding the net below yelled up at me.
Down, down, down I went—a free fall steeped in trust. When my back hit the net, I exhaled, startled by the level of emotion rising in my chest.
“Stay there, Susie,” my coach guided from above on the platform. “Feel that feeling in your body. Feel and remember in your chest, your hips, your legs, and arms. Feel and remember what surrender feels like.”
I locked in on the feeling for a minute or two and then climbed out of the net to applause. I had done it.
As I stood, helping to hold the net with others, I returned to focus on my heart and tried calling back up that sensation of surrender. I could do it!
I blinked away tears mightily at that point, as I knew I now had a gift that I could reopen anytime, anywhere for the rest of my life, regardless of the situation or level of challenge.
Surrender is sweet. Delicious, in fact. And there are no descriptors I can provide to convey what it truly feels like. It’s one of those sensations you have to experience firsthand in your own body.
I thought I knew surrender. After all, I’ve been meditating for years now. Isn’t that what I’ve been doing?
Well, yes, in a sense—from the comfort of a chair or sofa. In quiet, with my eyes closed. But surrender in the midst of profound fear, while in motion? This was a new universe of peace in my heart.
The only way for me to learn how to truly surrender was to feel the feeling in my body. Not by trying to know it intellectually or analytically.
I didn’t know at the time that learning how to surrender would also teach me how to be more creative.
For us to know something anew, to discover something novel, and/or to connect with and create from our depths, getting beyond our analytical minds is job one. Don’t get me wrong, I love my powerful, strategic mind! It has unraveled many a thorny situation, solved endless problems, negotiated and advocated for clients, and contributed mightily to my success.
But in order for me to create from new vision, plumb the leagues of possibilities, I need to transcend that part of me and let my body take the wheel.
How to be More Creative in Entrepreneurship
As entrepreneurs, we are well accustomed to using our noggins to achieve. And, for the most part, we are quite good at doing so. When we find ourselves at the end of ideas, solutions, innovation, and finding our way in unfamiliar waters, we can choose to lose our minds and lean into our bodies.
Like trying to understand how to surrender, we can only know how to be more creative and how to create from our bodies by experiencing it. So, let’s give it a whirl!
Take out a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. Have a look at the elephant below. You are going to sketch this beauty.
I wish I could be a fly on the wall of your brain right now, eavesdropping in on all those blurts from your critical, analytical mind. Just for fun, write a few of those juicy comments down. Mine would be something like these:
1) “What? You’re kidding. You cannot draw that trunk.”
2) “Muscles? Ears? Nope.”
3) “Riiiiight. You’ll for sure nail how to draw those legs.”
Notice how the mind loves to label according to what it knows and bob around in a sea of compare and despair? How limited you feel as a result? How defeated you are before you even get started?
Anxiety is shutting off the lights, one by one.
Guess what? We are not going to draw that elephant. Instead, we are going to draw this elephant:
Aaaaah. Now that’s a little better. A bit of oxygen returned to the room, no? A tiny bit of possibility?
Let’s focus only on connecting lines and curves. Keeping your eye on the image, let your pencil make marks on your page, moving from one part of the image to the next. Line, small curve, long curve, slope, dash here, dash there.
By drawing from an upside-down image, our censoring brain takes a nice little nap. It is no longer analyzing. Criticizing. Labeling. It’s letting the co-pilot part of our brain do the heavy lifting.
Notice what is happening in your body. Can you lock in on that feeling? Stay in the net for a minute after you land. Remember that sensation.
When you are finished, flip your image over and have a look. Well done! Do a dance around your desk! You have crossed over the chasm and have learned how to quiet the mind.
By surrendering into no mind, we can touch the ethereal and the illusive. We can reside in the realm of Magic, Creation, Joy, Wonder, and Seeing with New Eyes. We can discover how to be more creative.
