Self protection is about discovering the toxic patterns that block your creativity, and how to protect yourself against it. In other words: how can you protect yourself against yourself? In order to be kind to ourselves, we have to be hard against the toxic patterns.
Imagine that creativity is all around us, like leaves in the fall, available to every one. We just have to bend and pick it up. And often we just don’t want to bend, we want that creative bursts to fly in our hands. We use every excuse we can so we don’t bend to pick up creativity. All these excuses are the toxic patterns we have to fight.
Food, Work and Sex are great things to enjoy, though they also can become toxic to you. It starts, when you abuse them to run away from yourself, from your creativity. Eating is about control. In order to gain control about your creativity – which can’t be controlled! – you might start to starve yourself, or to overeat.
Workaholism is one of the toxic patterns, it’s an addiction. And like all addictions, it blocks our creativity. And we often turn to addictions in the desire to block our creativity. Creativity is something that happens to you, you can’t control the outcome. And at times, that might appear pretty scary. So we turn to one of the best ways to block creativity, that is addictions. We think that our fears, uncertainties, insecurities are blocked too, but that’s an illusion. And how more fearful, uncertain and insecure we feel, how more we try to find the solution in the addiction. We feel victimized and don’t dare to regain leadership about ourselves. A vicious circle. The five aspects of success are a great support to get out of this vicious circle!
And than there are droughts in the live of every artist. We fear it, and think that we will never be creative again, we want to give up. In those times it’s important to go on, to continue writing every morning, to keep practicing our skills. And soon creativity will come back again.
Did you know, that we have to protect ourselves from fame too? Fame is not the same as success. It’s the myth that once you are ‘there’, every problem will be solved. It’s the myth that if you aren’t ‘there’ now, you will never get there and can better quit right now. It’s looking at the results instead of the work. As artist, you create for creations sake, and not to become famous. If you start creating in order to become famous, you might be able to repeat what you’ve done before, but the creative spark is missing. That’s a problem many already famous people have.
Competition is also a well know toxic habit. We compare ourselves with other artists, and try to compete with them. When competing, we only take a very limited amount of criteria in the competition, and there are always people who are better, faster, stronger, ahead of where we want to go. “As artists, we cannot afford to think about who is getting ahead of us and how they don’t deserve it. The desire to be better than can choke off the simple desire to be.” (Julia Cameron)
The best way of self protection is to return to our self, to create for creation sake, to be, to concentrate on the road itself, not the destination. Have fun with it!