Healing the Intellectual v. Creative rift: My Interview on the Stepping Off Now Podcast with Kendra Patterson

Annie and Kendra in 2012!!!

I had the great honor of being interviewed by long-time friend (and lifeline) Kendra Patterson. The episode posted this morning. In the conversation, we discussed my creative practice, the ways that I prepare to enter a flow state, my teaching philosophy, whether my practices are “creative” or “spiritual,” how I (don’t) identify with labels like writer or creative, and the current state of our institutions and concepts.

Listening back to the episode, I realized how the conversation itself had been a part of my own healing process. Since my early twenties, when I entered graduate school, I have had a tenuous relationship with intellectualism. While I was drawn to the depth that I thought the academy would offer, I found that most of my companions on the route were approaching but not really diving into the human experience. They were striving to produce something “in genre,” that is, largely following templates that dictated what knowledge would look like. I often found their questions uninteresting, the answers they offered obvious or convenient and guided by a pretentious concern for methodology with too little concern for substance.

Meanwhile, among the poets, David Whyte was calling me to ask beautiful questions:

“John [O’Donohue] used to talk about how you shaped a more beautiful mind and that it’s an actual discipline, no matter what circumstances you’re in. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. The ability to ask beautiful questions, often, in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. You don’t have to do anything about it. You just have to keep asking, and before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.”

[The real “beautiful question” is if Ann Wainscott can write a blog post without citing David Whyte…]

The way I reacted to this tension was to build two different lives, one academic, the other poetic, romantic, sustaining. The conflict is reflected in my Twitter bio: “mystic masquerading as political scientist; not fooling anyone.” The point is that I started to bifurcate - divide my life into two spheres. It was a survival mechanism. I bracketed my respect for the mystery of life, relegated it to my writing or flower-arranging practice, re-fashioned my interest in how religion shapes meaning-making systems into a historical institutionalist analysis of Moroccan counter-terror policies [come on, you’ve got to admit that was impressive LOL], soothed my spirit with On Being podcasts and skinny-dipping in the poetry of the mystics, and did fieldwork in breathtaking places like Morocco or Senegal, interviewing bureaucrats and intellectuals with one eye on the respondent and the other on the brilliant bougainvillea growing over the wall of the nearby garden.

It wasn’t sustainable. But it worked for a season.

Lately, working my way through Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, it became harder and harder to maintain this separation. Her damning critique of what she calls “The Ivory Power,” broke me and buoyed me, for naming the undeniably catastrophic impact many “creativity” programs have had on young artists. I wonder how many young writers’ motivation I have destroyed, by being too critical in my response, too strict with unnecessary conventions, too caught up in my own questions to recognize the beauty in theirs.

I will confess that these spheres are still so separate that I was even surprised when Kendra began to ask me about my teaching, as if that is irrelevant to my own creative practice. Something about the way she wove the two together "moved me back and forth into the change,” as Rilke says - in my life poem. It was fun, even, reflecting on what I am doing in the classroom, how I have tried to redeem my own disappointing educational experiences, what it looks like when a class “works,” who is doing the creating in a classroom, etc. The conversation helped me to recognize how for many years the classroom was my creative outlet.

There was a relevant angle of my experience that wasn’t fully captured by this conversation though, that readers of this blog will immediately recognize. Because the topic of the conversation was creativity, it was not clear how many of my practices play a dual purpose - processing grief and facilitating flow. Kendra is right to point out that I have a lot of practices. I’ve been in an experimental state for a long-time, about three years now, and most of the practices that we discuss were actually embraced not to facilitate a writing practice, but to help me get out of bed in the morning. And if I had to chose, I’d say that the majority of my practices are primarily grief-related, not for the purposes of creativity. But I don’t have to chose; they can serve both purposes.

My point is that intense periods of mourning or transition require more grounding practices than stable periods. Personally, I am coming to a place of greater stability now. I know many of my current practices are probably no longer necessary, but I am going to let the new normal arise organically, in its own time, rather than force some sort of transition prematurely. The connections between grief and creativity are myriad, already well-documented and explored by others, but I do suspect that the healing potential of participation in “the flow” is over-looked, and under-valued by most of us. Here’s to hoping that Kendra and I record a second conversation some day, digging into the beautiful questions at the frontier of grief and creativity.

Inner body bright

Last week my yoga teacher started using the phrase, “Inner body bright.” She said the first time her own teacher used this phrase, something clicked. Up until that point, her yoga practice had been purely physical, but once she heard this phrase, she became aware of her energetic body. She could feel her own prana.

I’ve been aware of my own energetic body for about a decade. I first started to feel it in sivasana, this is the pose at the end of a yoga class, corpse pose, where you lie on the floor as if dead. I would feel the energy, bright from the yoga class, pulsing in my fingertips. At first, I thought it was blood circulation, but the longer I lay there, the clearer it became that it was not the physical body. For the body would calm, and the energy remained bright.

In the midst of a yoga class, the instruction “inner body bright” means to use the bandhas. The bandhas are energy locks—like a lock in a dam, not a lock with a key. A brilliant overview of the bandhas and their role in achieving illuminated self-awareness is available here. The pelvic floor is one such lock (mula bandha) and the lower abdomen another (uddiyana bandha). These are the ones that I typically remember to use in practice. In fact, I had a teacher in Gainesville who would yell at me from across the room “Less uddiyana bandha, Ann!” With time, I realized that I had started to contract my abdomen all of the time. I think it might be because I am short, and when I have to reach for things I am always leaning up against things. Or maybe it is how fitted women’s clothes are. I don’t know the reason. But for years I contracted the belly unnecessarily. Yoga helps us to become aware of such unhealthy patterns. Meditation also helps; while in yoga we firm the stomach, in meditation we cultivate a soft belly, to have full access to our body’s wisdom. Finally, the third bandha is in the throat – jalandhara bandha. Despite my almost obsessive relationship with my throat energetically, I haven’t really experimented much with this bandha.

Lately I have been tuning in to the energetic body a lot during my meditations. I have come to trust it for direction and wisdom. Starting in the fall of 2018, I used to meditate often on a situation that I was in, and I would often experience a bright light. This felt like it was coming more from the bliss body, than the energetic body (yoga recognizes five bodies…). More recently, though, I feel direction coming to me from my energetic body. 

I ask my body regularly what to do about various complicated situations. If you would like a guided meditation to help with this, I recommend this one. Sometimes when I consider one of my options, everything in me contracts and my energy goes flat. The body, physical and energetic, says “No.” When I meditate on other paths of action, sometimes everything in me brightens. Energy goes to my mouth and circles my lips, there is a fullness that feels like nourishment. My interior world opens up. My mind is driven by curiosity and delight, not by obligation or fear. I have new ideas, I write better, I get a whim of something to do for someone else. I am seated in the Self. I have access to the flow. I hear a “yes.”

Usually, whatever I hear in meditation is confirmed externally. I am in a situation now that often causes me to lose heart. At those times, external signs tend to increase. A few nights ago I was having one of the low energy days, and I took my puppy Riley for a walk in the pitch black. Halfway around the block, I heard geese. I started looking for them in the cloudy sky, not sure if I would get a glimpse or not. Light from below was reflecting off of the clouds, and there, high in the sky, a flock of geese unlike any I have ever seen, black against grey clouds. We have all seen large flocks of fifty or one hundred geese flying together. But this was other-worldly, hundreds and hundreds of geese, a flock so large it filled the entire sky, flying directly above me. It was still in the famous V-shaped pattern, but there were so many of them that the shape filled out and looked more like a triangle. I have never seen anything so majestic in my life. I stood still, looking up at the night sky. Even Riley knew not to pull on the leash; she sat quietly. I could still hear them at the end of the walk, as we approached the house. Experiences like these don’t really have content; they don’t tell you what to do. But they strengthen the will to keep going, and remind you that you are supported by something or someone.

My advice to readers is this: Be wise, and be very alert. Be certain you are on the right path. Open yourself to what you are hearing. If you feel confirmed, then continue on the path you have chosen. But if your heart is divided or your energy flat, make space and time to open to the wisdom of the body. Sit with every emotion regardless of how complicated or inconvenient it is.  

Whatever you do, move in such a way that your inner body is bright, and your vitality is evident for all to see. Then you know that you are on the right path.