Accessing Creative Flow

Why this may be harder for trauma survivors + resources for bringing safety, empowerment, and transformation to your creative practice

I'm sitting with my spine as erect as possible, with my legs crossed. I say to myself that even though my feet are supposed to be on the floor, it's okay that my legs are crossed. I move my palms from my desk to my thighs. Then I put one hand on my heart. Nobody else is doing this, so I return my hand to my thigh. Our guide says to breathe in and hold, hold, hold, then release. I started a beat late, and everyone's exhaling as I'm inhaling. I tell myself it's okay, my experience is mine to have, and we're relaxing... relaxing... relaxing... 

I do a practice called Palming that I learned from Nathan Oxenfeld, Natural Vision Teacher. He combined the Bates Method with yoga and nutrition to heal his vision and ditch his glasses. I'd been following him for a while before attending an in-person workshop with him at New York's Open Center. 

I cup my hands and place both cupped palms over my eyes, forming a seal. I open my eyes to check for complete darkness, then let them gently close. Warmth bathes my eyes, and I experience a total nervous system reset using this easy practice. (Nathan shares many good techniques; highly recommend following him.) (I also wrote about dark immersion as a wellness practice for Discover Magazine Sept/Oct 2023). 

Classical Zen meditation, sitting in stillness for prolonged periods, is like torture for me; I’m fidgety, with bursts of irrepressible energy. This intro to our cowriting session will only last 5 minutes. I release my legs to the floor, and get grounded and centered according to our guide's instructions. When the meditation ends, we open our eyes to see our colleagues' faces on-screen, and share our intention for the session. When I sincerely pause distractions and participate wholeheartedly, this brief meditation is enough to clear the chatter I sat down with. I arrive at our meeting certain I’ll secretly use the time to tackle administrative tasks or client work, but, as Nathan says, "Turning off eyesight turns on insight." Closing my eyes and focusing inward for just five minutes raises the volume of my inner voice. I have passion projects that deserve attention. During the meditation, I decide that the world can wait while I attend to my creative self for the hour.

I'm a regular at Cowriting with Kimberly (free, Tuesdays and Thursdays). The camaraderie and satisfaction of showing up consistently have helped me achieve discipline in my writing practice. My clarity, focus, and output have increased. When the scheduled time arrives, even if I'm traveling or unable to sign in, I have the urge to write. It's a training. Anyone can do it. 

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For about six months, I worked with an art therapist based in India. Among many wonderful, immersive practices that included narrative therapy and art-making to symbolize my family constellation, healing from divorce, and visioning my forever home, she led me in very vivid guided visualizations. The primary theme was fire. Early on, she had me envision a basic campfire; then a protective ring of fire around me. In subsequent sessions, I imagined throwing everything negative into the ring of fire, and being free outside of it. Then the ring of fire morphed into a protective dome. Finally, I envisioned myself encapsulated in a sphere made of fire, but safe and comfortable inside. This took place over a period of weeks.

We can all agree fire is a powerful theme in human experience. At my home, we make campfires in our yard and in our livingroom fireplace. Where we live, winters are harsh. We have to prepare by collecting enough kindling from the surrounding woods during autumn to sustain our fires all season long. I love collecting kindling. For me it is a spiritual, sensual shinrin yoku that connects me through all my senses to the earth, and fulfills my primitive impulse to tend to the hearth. It's also good exercise. I don't go to the gym, but I'm active in the outdoors—my happy place. 

As a workshop facilitator, I weave sense memory practices into my teaching. While I was immersed in these meditations with the art therapist, and building fires on my property, I brought fire into my guided meditations with writing students. What I didn't realize at the time was that one of my students was a burn victim. What I had intended to be a nourishing journey to a virtual campfire was triggering to him. He is a regular attendee and we have good rapport. After a session, he let me know that he'd been triggered because an explosion in a commercial kitchen had burned and scarred him both physically and emotionally. We talked several times to work through the trigger, given that fire is common to encounter throughout the course of life.

Writing is a process of scanning our memory banks and “astral traveling” to distant times and places, fully embodying every character we write. I try to design writing prompts that gently bring students to an adjacent memory, that may, by a spread of activation, awaken memories that dramatically shaped their characters. One example: “Write about your childhood bedroom.” In this case, place or setting is established first—then, what happened there and who was present naturally come to mind. I’d suggest a 45-minute timed writing exercise with this prompt, because you want that spread of activation to occur.  

A sense of safety is crucial, not only in a workshop but in every writing session. How can we slip into a trance state, and write automatically while reliving our memories, when we are not first feeling safe and relaxed? It’s harder for some people to relax. I’m so rarely fully relaxed that when it occurs, I relish it. My desire to plumb the depths of my own psyche overpowers any hesitation. I can get into the flow pretty swiftly with breathwork, meditation, weird vocalizations, and some simple cues that I’ve practiced until they’ve become second nature.

WHY IS IT HARDER FOR A TRAUMA SURVIVOR TO GET INTO THE FLOW STATE?

You could say I’m obsessed with flow. I’ve studied the science of flow, the literature, the practices of highly successful people, and I’ve tracked my own experience of flow. For almost two years, I hosted a weekly Zoom salon called “Windcatchers,” where I interviewed writers, artists, glass blowers, musicians, doctors, chefs, reporters, dancers, athletes, and entrepreneurs about the techniques they use to get into the flow and perform their crafts.  

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When a challenge demands all our focus, especially a physical challenge, we attune to our alignment, coordination, and body sensations. The flow state is characterized by diminished inhibitions, a sense that time is fluid or irrelevant, and a reduced awareness of our surroundings.

Similarly, when a crisis or shock whisks our focus into a tunnel of fear and pain, it can feel like getting sucked into a vortex, as we switch to a mode of automatic functioning from the body rather than the intellect. Time slows down, remembered later as, “everything happening in slow motion.” It really is amazing how we can spend 30 years rehashing 30 seconds or 30 days that changed us as a person.

We can spend 30 years rehashing 30 seconds that changed us as a person.

We know that experience impresses not only our minds but our bodies. Tapping into muscle memory is, for me, more intense than tapping into visual recollections. I still clench my teeth because I had to wear headgear at night with my braces when I was a child. Lying on my side made my lower jaw fall in an uncomfortable way, while my upper jaw was receiving constant pressure from brackets and rubber bands. I had braces from ages 9 to 12. Describing the orthodontist’s office, the sadistic orthodontist Dr. Block, and the sensations of getting plaster impressions or putting wax in my mouth can be a bridge to other memories to write about from this period.

Writing in the flow is akin to entering a trance state. Lisa Cooper Ellison wrote a great post on Jane Friedman’s web site: How to Use Brain Waves to Enhance Your Writing Practice .

Since core symptoms of PTSD include difficulty concentrating and hypervigilance, the trauma survivor could hit stumbling blocks to accessing a fully relaxed state, where the outside world melts away. Entering flow may equate to being in a vulnerable state, like sleeping in the wilderness. Dimensions of flow include heightened arousal and lowered inhibitions. A trauma survivor who is a creative artist might crave this very much; we might know that in the flow state our body and mind function optimally—however, getting there might require dismantling walls of protection that we ourselves erected. The prospect of abandoning one’s hypervigilance may be off-putting to someone with PTSD.

Below, I’m going to quote extensively from a report that explains the physiological psychology that underlies flow. Ellison talked about brainwave states, which are relevant and easy to digest. This is a little more technical, but worth considering.

Go with the flow: A neuroscientific view on being fully engaged 

“Flow is a state of full task absorption, accompanied with a strong drive and low levels of self‐referential thinking.” - Dimitri van der Linden

“When working on a task, people sometimes enter a state that is characterized by being fully engaged, up to the point where they tend to have very low levels of self‐reflection and are hardly conscious of their surroundings.”

“…There is an ongoing discussion on the extent to which flow differs from other mental states such as mindfulness or strong concentration.”

“Flow is accompanied with mood states that are activating and supportive of task engagement and goal‐directed behaviours and mindsets. Examples of such mood states are enjoyment, hope (i.e., expectation of success), energetic drive, and anger. Deactivating mood states, such as stress, fear, and perceived helplessness, on the other hand, tend to inhibit action and may therefore also disrupt subjective and behavioural manifestations of flow.”

“In neuroscience, a distinction is typically made between the nucleus accumbens outer area, the shell (NAcc Shell), versus its inner area, the core (NAcc Core). This is partly related to the functional distinction between liking versus wanting. Liking refers to the level of enjoyment that is experienced when rewards are obtained (e.g., getting food or engaging in pleasurable activities). The NAcc Shell plays a relevant role in this. Wanting, however, refers to the level of craving or energetic drive one has in trying to obtain a certain reward. The NAcc Core predominantly affects the ‘wanting’ as it plays a particularly relevant role in the cognitive processes and motor functions directed at obtaining the reward. In general, wanting relates to the willingness for effort expenditure directed at achieving some desired outcome. The literature also clearly indicates that the NAcc as well as other structures within the dopaminergic systems are involved in weighing the effort it would take to achieve a goal against the level of reward it provides.”

“FLOW PRONENESS”

To alleviate a blockage, we must get to the root cause of the blockage. This principle is applied to personal expression. What could cause an artist’s ideas to freeze up or an entrepreneur’s energy to fizzle?

-trauma

-gaslighting

-insecurity 

-fear of failure, fear of falling short

-avoidance of taboos

-avoidance of controversy or confrontation

-shyness / introversion

-lack of funds, time, energy, or the perception of scarcity of resources

-lack of constellation support (family, friends, coworkers, and employers)

The author of Writing in Flow, Susan K. Perry, says that fear is the antithesis of flow, and listed “A terror of leaping into the abyss of the imagination” as one of the potential blockers of flow.

So, how come desire isn’t enough to fuel us to produce? “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” right? I see any item from the list above as the pebble in one’s shoe, which is small but can cause great discomfort and hesitation. 

One of my favorite teachers, Laraine Herring, writes about risk in Writing Begins with the Breath: “To non writers, personal risk in writing sounds very bizarre. After all, we’re not ice climbing or running the Colorado River in a raft made of three planks. We’re sitting down and moving our hands. Not so much risk there. But the risk of writing is an internal risk. You brave the depths of your own being and then, oh my, bring it back up for commentary by the world. Not the work of wimps.”

“The risk of writing is an internal risk. You brave the depths of your own being and then, oh my, bring it back up for commentary by the world. Not the work of wimps.”

From the report: “Individual differences in the proneness to experience flow are related to higher availability of dopamine D2 receptors in the striatum of which, among others, the nucleus accumbens is a substructure.”

We may start out with neurodivergence that hinders “flow proneness,” or trauma may shape our brain to resist it. However, I notice that the research fails to contemplate the influence that one’s sense of safety has on the willingness to surrender hesitations and relax enough to enter a flow state.

One’s sense of safety influences their willingness to surrender hesitations and relax enough to enter the flow state.

When I’m teaching writing in person or virtually, I set the arena by letting participants know it’s okay to cry, walk around, skip a turn reading, or continue writing beyond the allotted time. Autonomy, writing off-topic, and pauses are supported. I use an array of integrative exercises at the beginning and also throughout each session. Somatic experiences must be introduced to trauma survivors with gentleness and consideration. Deep breathing, touching oneself, focusing on areas of the body, and vocalizing may be triggering in unexpected ways.

In a workshop called Embodied Writing with Sasha Cagan (**coming up again this weekend**), we were promised we’d “get out of our heads and into our bodies.” The opening exercise involved wiggling! We stood up from our desks and wiggled for two minutes. It was actually awesome. I resolved to do this more often. Qi gong uses wiggling, bouncing, and patting the body to free energy, as well.

Next, Sasha guided a relaxation meditation that had us focus on our belly. This was the longest I’d spent focusing on my belly in a while—maybe ever. The messaging was like, “Relax your belly… now relax your belly further… and further.” I carry shame about my belly. I’ve had two kids. It’s flabby. For me, it’s easier to love my whole body than it is to love the individual parts. I commanded all my parts to relax, then relax even more… It felt good to give my least-loved region some attention, breathe into it, and remember that creativity arises from the pelvic bowl. Writings from Tami Lynn Kent, such as the amazing book, Wild Creative, have reinforced this for me.

I used to focus mostly on the throat, because I imagined it as the origin of personal expression—until I deepened my practice to connect expression to the heart (which then passes through the throat), then integrated the solar plexus (the center of will power) and the sacrum (our procreative center) into my writing practice. Years ago, in a private session with shamanic guide Jacqueline Rolandelli, I was guided through a conversation with my organs, and learned that my left ovary (which had undergone a surgery) desired music. So, after that session, I wove more music listening into my life, and music fills my creative well.

Through a conversation with my organs, I learned that my left ovary (which had undergone a surgery) desired music.

For breakthroughs to happen in students or clients, trust in the practitioner and a sense of safety are key. Workshop facilitators must apply skill and compassion when guiding participants toward the deeper recesses of their minds. Warming up, indirect writing prompts, and articulating what supports are available should someone get triggered can bolster success. Just yesterday, Lisa Cooper Ellison did an excellent job of this in a webinar hosted by Jane Friedman called Mastering Trauma Scenes to Improve Your Memoir.

This is all to say, with the right set and setting, someone with trigger proneness can also improve their flow proneness. I love this term, and I hope you will remember it from this post. Safety leads to empowerment leads to transformation.

SAFETY • EMPOWERMENT • TRANSFORMATION