Overcoming Creative Blocks

I always think of a creative block as an emotional block, indicating that there is something I do not want to feel. If you are feeling blocked creatively, consider that what stands between you and your joyful creativity is unacknowledged emotional pain.

Many of us hold layers of emotional pain that we have not consciously met yet. There is no shame in this. It is our human condition. 

Some of us, sensitive in our souls and empathic towards others, can recall no obvious trauma when we were children to pinpoint why we suffer so much. Yet, mysteriously, as adults, we feel unnameable angst, depression, grief, fear and anger as we navigate through daily life.

Blocked Emotions = Blocked Creativity

Unprocessed emotions often arise in day-to-day life, seeking to be accepted, loved, and embraced, but it is easy to ignore the signals. Any time you catch yourself holding your breath, for example, you are repressing an emotion. Every time you feel any tightness in your body, you are clamping down on an emotion that could be felt and moved through.

Before you become a free and joyful creator, you will have to learn how to allow your creative blocks to take you in the emotional healing direction they want you to go. Your creative blocks always ask for the inclusion of your repressed emotions.

Not running away from your painful emotions is a courageous act. Emotional pain comes from the unloved places within you.

As an adult, you cannot expect that others will love you in ways that you do not love yourself. Turning toward your painful feelings with love and curiosity fosters a free life of creativity. To invite up repressed emotions to be loved frees up new energy and provides the portal into a creative intelligence that you may not have accessed since childhood.

Clearing Emotions From Childhood

Until we integrate all the emotions that we could not process in when we were younger, we will walk around like little children in big adult bodies.

Many of us rarely examine the childhood beliefs that shape the way we filter our perceptions of the world. We tend to hold onto the beliefs that were instilled in us when we were young.

As children, we emotionally imprint upon our parents' emotional patterning. Born open, like a sponge, we take on the heaviness of our caregiver's emotional world.  Spiritual teacher Michael Brown explains how our inner child lives inside our adult body:

"Experientially, it is in the first seven years, any and all uncomfortable experiences arising from our entry into the conditional world are imprinted into and affect the condition of our emotional body. Our emotional body is therefore where the record of these occurrences is kept."

Children literally soak up the "emotional-pain-soup" around them. I recall one instance, many years ago, when I noticed a striking correlation between my own emotionality and my daughter's.

My four-year-old daughter was bathing in our old claw-foot tub. I was sitting on the sofa in the living room nearby. The house was silent, and suddenly I felt piercing loneliness in my heart. At the exact moment, my daughter cried out, "Mommy! My heart is falling out of my chest with loneliness!"

And, it should be noted, that trying to pin our uncomfortable feelings on a specific trauma from childhood, or searching for a childhood story of abuse to explain our emotional pain, is often too simplistic. We suffer ancestrally for all of those who have come before us. We inherit the pain from those in our family who did not know how to process their own emotional pain. 

Strong Presence to Emotional Pain

Unprocessed emotional pain can feel overpowering. Emotional pain can sometimes feel so big that it feels difficult to think, create, function, work, or relate to other people. In such discomfort, it might be easy to believe that you have to get rid of your pain by blaming others for it instead of enlarging your loving presence to it.

As you move through your emotional pain with love, your creativity will flow much more freely.  You can do your self-loving work by feeling your emotional pain with awareness, touching it lightly at first, and taking breaks when it feels too unbearable. As you grow stronger in self-love with your kind inner attention, the pain passes through your being at a faster rate, until one day, it will be gone.