I hope this week finds you enjoying the Spring weather (I was out walking in a thunderstorm yesterday!) and finding more and more ways to invite pleasure into your life. I'm sipping Hibiscus Love tea this morning and thinking about finding pleasure in creativity.
Of all the ways I am exploring pleasure, I realize as I type this that finding pleasure in creativity is both the easiest and hardest for me. I have always been a creative person. I love movement and performance, writing and planning yoga classes. I love to watch other people be creative and to collaborate and get all of that creative energy flowing.
The challenge for me has been in overthinking. I struggle with simply allowing myself to explore and make mistakes along the way. I think that because for a long time, I lived in such a regimented way, it bled over into being creative or not being creative. I had to do it perfectly the first time. I had to succeed and make a career out of it. I had to be the best or there was no point. I also had a deadline in my mind. I really wanted to have a creative career and I felt like if I didn't hit that goal by 30, it was over.
It definitely wasn't, but I acted like it was and let a lot of the things I loved drop out of my life. I felt embarrassed to keep going when it clearly wasn't panning out. Ah, thirty year old Helen. You should have given yourself a break. But I didn't. I was punishing myself for not achieving what I had set out to do in the time I had set out to do it. It sucked the joy out of it, the pleasure.
Sound familiar? This might be resonating with you personally or you might have read the past two newsletters where the same sort of pressure around food and movement sucked the pleasure out of those things for me.
So how do we get it back? The spark, the joy, the pleasure, the sense of freedom and play? I think the simple and annoying answer is that you just allow yourself to do the thing without expectation. Simple, but not easy. And I'm still working on this.
I had stopped myself from performing, writing and playing and hoped that this would eliminate the desire for it. But if anything, it made it worse and I didn't feel quite like myself any more. So just like with movement and food, I started cautiously clawing it all back. I would sign up for beginners classes (not a beginner!) and work as admin for arts organizations so that I was orbiting my passions without taking the risk and inviting the joy of doing them. But it was still a start and the closer I got to those things, the more I yearned to be a part of them.
I've been doing comedy on and off for years, but over the past two years I have dedicated myself to more consistency, weekly rehearsals and playful performances without expectation for perfection. Just fun for us and the audience. I also started a podcast with my friend where we talk about the smutty books we love. I love recording and editing and again, there's no expectation beyond the doing of the thing and it feels so good.
A big one for me that I still struggle with is getting back to writing and performing what I write. I have been touching on it in the past few years, but I always run away when it starts to feel real and consistent, so it comes back to releasing expectations, which I find so very hard!!! Some part of me feels in a rush, like I have to make up for the time that I was in limbo and not allowing myself to do the things I wanted to do. But the more I focus on that, the more expectation I place on it and we go in circles again.
So I'm working on letting go and just exploring. It's not flashy, and that is just fine by me. The more I find myself leaning into these things, the more deeply satisfied I feel. Being creative is an important part of wellness for most people and it can look like so many things. Perhaps you like to play music, cook, plant flowers, play board games, draw, sew, dance or post about your travels on instagram. It's all valid and it's entirely yours. Allow yourself the space to explore without expectation and simply enjoy the moment. It's so simple and it can make such a huge difference in the quality of your life.
As you move through your week, I hope you remember to treat yourself, your passions and your dreams with love, respect and kindness.
Much love,
Helen xo