A year ago on January 1, I embarked on a year-long journey to embrace and enhance my creative practice using the book A Year of Living Consciously by psychotherapist Gay Hendricks as my model, and to blog my thoughts and results.
What is this?
Conscious Living is Hendricks’ approach to healing negative thinking, living and communicating authentically and with integrity, and being fully present for every moment of our lives. Its principles are based on full honesty about your feelings and your choices, and center responsibility and accountability. Rather than approaching life with a list of grievances, Conscious Living says we are responsible for what we create and that we have the power to change. The bedrock tenet is the embrace of reality, not fiction or wishful thinking or finger-pointing.
Through the year, I practiced applying the lessons and exercises in A Year of Living Consciously in my life and wrote about how these precepts influenced my creativity and how they were useful in my writing.
Yes, this was a crutch to help me keep my commitment to blogging. It worked for Julie Powell.
Why Conscious Writing?
I like Hendricks’ approach for accepting reality and truths, even when they make me uncomfortable. I appreciate that he acknowledges that our negative thinking and behaviors may have been learned from sources outside ourselves, while also saying that the responsibility for our outcomes rests on our own shoulders. The Blame Game may be temporarily satisfying, but it’s not fulfilling. Conscious Writing shifts the focus from what you wish to what you choose and do. It’s not for whiners.
How does this apply to creativity?
The goal of Conscious Living is to help readers live in the present by letting go of past baggage and avoiding worry about a future that may never arrive. Applying these lessons to my creative work has helped me drop a lot of the learned negativity surrounding my writing and to cease caring about what the future holds for whatever I create.
Being present in the moment and making conscious choices about how I spend my time are also important to my creative practice. Over the last year, I’ve given myself permission to drop activities that weren’t meaningful to me or that distracted from my important projects. I read fewer writing blogs and listen to fewer podcasts. Learning is still important to me, but so is putting that knowledge into action. I also spend way less time doom-scrolling social media or binging television. I’m keeping all my books, but I Marie Kondo’d my emotional dead weight.
Also, I believe that self-knowledge and the ability to ask and answer tough questions is vital for my creative work. To create interesting characters, a writer must know something about how people work and the path to that wisdom is knowing ourselves. While many of the exercises in A Year of Living Consciously are meditative, a number of them ask the reader to examine motivations and ways of thinking. I’ve pulled a lot of good character bits and twists from the work, and have gained a different understanding of some of the people in my novel-in-progress.
And finally, taking responsibility for my own happiness puts me in a better frame of mind to create. I’m in a better mood when I leave my job. I spend way less time fretting about having enough time to write and more time enjoying the time I set aside. I worry less about what anyone else will think about my work and way more time loving the process and the journey. I’ve stopped counting words and started focusing on being creatively present in the moment I’m working. I consider my time successful if I write 3 pages or 3 paragraphs.
Simultaneously, I’m more present in the work itself. Instead of fixating on the number of words I’ve added to a document, I work to ensure the right words are going in. I already feel like my writing has improved, because I expend more energy on telling the story rather than tracking productivity. The story has become something I enter, not something I have to construct. It’s a mindset shift and difficult to explain, but it feels right. It’s not easy, but I’m learning to focus on what’s before me.
This year, I’ll probably refer back to the book from time to time when I need a refresher, but I won’t use it to provide structure for the blog. I made my commitment for 2023 and I reached the end of the line. Time for a new thing.