Transcript: Episode 20

Hey friend, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

This month I want to talk about a particular, writerly angle on the idea of holding space or creating a container – specifically, how we might go about holding space for our own creativity, and what kind of space or container might encourage sustained growth and discovery in our writing.

But before I get into defining and exploring that topic, I’m going to sort of set the stage by sharing a bit about where I’ve been with making this podcast. Because the reason I was drawn to thinking about how to hold space for our creative work is that I haven’t been holding my own space particularly skillfully for a little while now. And this is partly due to a conflict between two different styles of creating a container for my work.

When I first started this podcast, I was also in the middle of rebranding my editing business. And when you’re doing any kind of branding for either a business or a creative project, you’re creating a type of container for that work. Sometimes literally – in my case, I had to switch up my website platform, and that of course required building a new site to serve as the container for my work online. (So, a sort of virtual actual container.) And I was trying to find a bright side to that by taking the opportunity to rethink how I wanted to present myself and my work to the world, including the new pod.

During my website-building adventures, I came across a branding system based on storytelling archetypes, complete with a snazzy quiz to reveal your own primary and secondary archetypes!!! So of course I took this quiz and used some of the system, because I am an absolute sucker for anything involving archetypes.

Anyway, my primary brand archetype, according to this system, was ~the magician~ (insert sparkle emojis and mystical jazz fingers). And this was pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear as a theme or structure for my brand container, because see above re: being a sucker for archetypes and myth and semi-mysterious symbolism.

However, one of the core tenants of branding oneself as ~a magician~ is apparently that you’re not supposed to reveal too much about what’s behind the curtain, logistically speaking. This month I am definitely pulling back the curtain, possibly more than I ideally should – which is maybe already apparent by the way I just showed my cards by talking about how I’ve tried to approach marketing my work. But I decided to bring up marketing as a type of container because it relates directly to the tension that I have frankly been struggling with over the past few months: the tension between creative work as a gift and creative work as a product.

I talked about my own understanding of creative work as a gift last year in episode 12, appropriately called Your Writing is a Gift. And if you missed that one or if you’re just more in the mood for unadulterated sparkle emoji, ~magician~ vibes today, then by all means give it a listen. To very briefly sum up the core of the idea, though: When we practice the craft of storytelling, we’re giving ourselves the gift of being fully alive, of acting on what moves us as we move through the world. And we’re also bestowing a gift back into the world, to move and enliven others in turn.

This magic of the creative gift is one of the main ideals I’m trying to nurture with this podcast, for myself and for those who listen (which is partly why that branding archetype quiz felt so right-on-the-nose back when I was first figuring out how to present this podcast to an audience). And part of bestowing a creation that you hope might act as a gift is figuring out how people are going to find your gift. Or in this case, figuring out how to market a podcast.

I’m going to fully pull back the curtain here and say that I have not been very adept at marketing this podcast. I have been having consistent logistical trouble when it comes to helping people find this particular little gift box amongst all the other boxes. And maybe that’s going to make me seem less professional or less like someone worth listening to – but this is why I’m an editor and a writing coach and not a marketing coach.

That’s not actually what I’m talking about today, though. What I’m really talking about is the effect that this logistical difficulty has been having lately on my experience of creating the pod – an experience that I think is just one snapshot of a place creatives often travel through as we craft our gifts in this late-stage capitalist landscape.

Each time I’ve worked on a major marketing project for the pod and it hasn’t yielded measurable audience growth, it’s made this work feel a little less like a gift, and more like a product I don’t know how to sell. And what’s most frustrating about this is that I really don’t want to be feeling that way. That feeling doesn’t align with what I believe about the magic of the gift. I mean, something doesn’t stop being a worthy gift simply because it hasn’t yet reached any particular number of downloads per episode.

I’ve received the gifts that have come out of my creative process with this work. And I really hope that you receive something in turn whenever you share this space with me by listening. I really do believe that when you create a narrative container through any kind of storytelling, you create a pathway for the gift.

But it’s still so very easy for “creating a container” to slip into “creating a package” – for gift to become product. And when that happens, your sense of crafting something you’re moved to share can get replaced by a sense of chasing something you’re driven to attain, some measure of validity that’s being withheld until you figure out how to get the right kind of attention.

And let me say that I know we all live in the real and present world, and our creative work lives right there with us. Shaping artistic expression into a marketable product is a valid and sometimes necessary part of creative practice: You shape your project idea to fit the parameters of the grant application; you seek out advice from book agents on how to write a novel that will be easier to query; you share content online in ways that might build your audience.

It’s not that these choices are bad or uncreative, in and of themselves. It’s more that it takes a lot of mental and emotional work to keep these choices aligned with the part of you that wants or needs to generate stories and art in the first place. It takes work to hold fast to the visions of the storyteller once the evaluations of the salesperson come into play – to keep your compass attuned to your vision, even as you make practical decisions on what path to take getting there.

Last month I talked about one way of thinking about that work we do to keep ourselves attuned to our creative gift: the idea of dream carrying. I think another way of talking about that work is through the concept of holding space – maintaining a container for our creative practices that stays a true pathway for the gift.

The phrase “holding space” is definitely a little buzzy and fuzzy, so I’ll explain what I mean by it in this context. The classic example of “holding space” or “making a container” is a therapy session, or any sort of counseling experience with a skilled practitioner. The space or container is defined by the parameters the counselor lays out for the session, and it’s also created through their empathetic, nonjudgmental attention and presence.

That protective but open space then allows the client or the seeker to reach a deeper level of emotional expression and discovery than they might be able to on their own, outside the container. And one of the things a skilled therapist or spiritual guide might teach you is how to hold that kind of container for yourself.

So in a writing context, “holding space” for ourselves means following practices that establish and maintain a protective-but-open, nonjudgmental space that allows us to access deep creative expression.

I’ve been thinking about one possible formula for holding creative space. This formula is by no means a firm and packaged deal that I am one hundred percent committed to – it’s more like a very basic recipe I’m constantly playing with in new iterations, some underlying staples to build on depending on what produce is in the metaphorical fridge.

This recipe for space has three core ingredients: constraints, compassion, and curiosity.

Despite my ever-present alliteration, the word “constraints” doesn’t really feel like it quite matches the other two. It’s certainly less immediately appealing. And I thought about using a cuddlier word – but ultimately, constraints is the clearest way to convey something that I think sometimes gets lost with the more friendly and frequently used word “container.”

To fully hold space for yourself, and for your creative self… you have to stay there, in the space. And sometimes that feels constraining. Sometimes it feels like holding yourself back from dashing out into a wider space where everything is actually happening, and if you stay here you might miss something important.

Sometimes the space you’re holding feels empty, and the space around your container feels so full of things that are probably really important to look at and compare yourself against, right now, before everybody possibly moves on without you. Things that are important to make a public statement about. Things that are important to drop everything to research just in case they turn out to be the one missing piece in the puzzle of creating your truest, best self. Things that are important to consume and worry about and enjoy and reject and chase.

It’s deeply easy to chase things right out of your container without even feeling like you’ve taken a conscious step. Or at least, it certainly happens to me all the time – especially in the context I mentioned earlier, when a practical goal like marketing a creative project is consistently pulling my attention to something that’s adjacent to but not actually part of my creative craft.

And sometimes the thing I’m chasing is, ironically enough, the “right container.” How will I know I’m in the right container, if I’ve found the one true recipe for creative expression, if I don’t leap frenetically from one to another like a psycho-spiritual self-improvement Goldilocks, taking little dissatisfied bites from everybody else’s bowl but never making a full meal of my own – all in the name of learning to hold my space?

(Okay, I promise I’m done with the cooking metaphor now, I can feel that it’s entering twee territory.)

There’s a somatic exercise I’ve come across from a few different sources that I really like, and I realized while working on this episode that I think this exercise gives an embodied expression to what it might feel like to actually stay within a container. (I was only able to remember for sure one of the sources where I learned it, which was from therapist Carmen Spagnola as part of her online community, the Numinous Network – so I’ve linked that in the show notes.)

This practice can be done tangibly with others, or you can experience it within your imagination. If you’re up for it, I’m inviting you to experience this exercise with me now – or you can just listen and maybe take yourself through it later if you like the way it sounds.

First, I’m going to describe how to physically initiate the practice. Then we’ll take a few quiet moments to drop in, and then I’ll actually talk you through the experience. If you can, sit or stand now in a position that will allow you to feel your feet on the floor. And you can close your eyes if that’s comfortable, but feel free to leave them open for the whole exercise if you want.

To start, you’re going bring your awareness in to become a bit more conscious of your body, and to make even just one small change to release a point of tension from whatever you’re experiencing physically. You might drop your shoulders and let your chest and breath expand. You might gently stretch your neck and turn your head from side to side. You can have a big yawn. You can even put on or take off your sweatshirt or scratch a spot that itches – any shift that creates a physical release of tension.

And when you feel that release, try to really immerse yourself in it – yawn super big and make a noise, let your outbreath really extend and slow, take note of the relief and calm that opens up when you tuck away the itchy tag.

I’m going to take a few quiet breaths here to do that with you.

[3 breaths]

As you open up to the release of tension, imagine that you’re in a space where you feel safe, either a real place or somewhere that just exists in your mind. Imagine that there’s someone nearby you trust, not right there next to you but close by – either someone you know and trust in real life or someone you know and trust in your inner life.

In front of you is something making the front of your body feel warm: a campfire, a cozy radiator, an oven baking something really good. You don’t necessarily have to see it or define it – just feel that it’s there. Feel that warmth spreading on the front of your chest… and then, notice that your back feels a little cold in comparison. Not unpleasant, but just a contrast to that warmth on your chest, like the feeling of cool evening air on your shoulders.

Now, your trusted companion approaches you and drapes a soft blanket over your shoulders. Feel that chill shift into a warmth that matches the warmth on your chest, like being wrapped in a container of warmth. Feel the gentle weight of the blanket and the drape of it protecting and holding you.

Your trusted companion now asks you if you’re comfortable with being touched right now – and you don’t have to say yes. You can just stay with the feeling of the gentle weight on your shoulders. But if you give them the go-ahead, your companion now places their hands on the tops of your feet, just holding them against the ground with a light, warm pressure. Feel the loving warmth of their hands spreading into your feet, down through to the soles of your feet, right where they touch the earth.

Now your companion lifts their hands away, and if you want you can give them some gesture of thanks as you start to take your leave. Bring yourself slowly back to your physical surroundings – wiggle your toes, shrug your shoulders, flex your fingers. But as you shift out of this exercise, let yourself carry with you some of that grounding warmth and weight that you felt in your body.

And if you didn’t feel much, that’s genuinely okay – this is an exercise and a practice, not a test or a barometer. Whatever and however you felt or didn’t feel is absolutely fine; it’s just what came through this time, in the context of whatever you’re experiencing today.

I wanted to share this exercise as part of the episode because it’s a physical illustration of what I think are two equally vital aspects of holding space:

To hold space is to offer supportive presence, to wrap in safe witnessing and compassionate attention. And to hold space is also to hold in place, to constrain the instinct to move and strive, to chase what’s outside the container instead of being within it.

That instinct to chase can come out of a lot of perfectly normal but maladaptive motivations – avoidance, self-rejection, anxiety. But I think it also comes out of one of the most adaptive and most admirable motivations of the storyteller – the desire to fully experience the world. We don’t want to turn away. We don’t want to miss anything.

The trick, though, is that practicing the constraint required to hold yourself in your creative space is maybe one of the best ways to actually make sure you don’t miss anything. It’s the only way to deeply experience and express what’s right here, inside the container where your creativity is happening.

And the reality is that no container is an impermeable fortress, no matter how firmly held. Your container isn’t isolated, and it’s not even immobile. It’s more like a fast and sound boat under the open sky, carrying you on the waves of the world, keeping you present and alive for the voyage.

So, going back to that formula for holding space that I’ve been playing with, the formula of constraint, compassion, and curiosity – how can that actually be applied, in a practical sense? To drill into this a bit, I’m going to look at a writing practice that has had a bit of a moment online this spring and summer, and that illustrates why I’m proposing these three elements as core ingredients of holding creative space.

For the past few months, I’ve been seeing a lot of writers and creatives referencing the practice of doing morning pages. This is maybe most well-known as part of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s classic book and system for unlocking creativity. I follow a couple different Substack newsletters that hosted Artist’s Way groups recently, and I also follow another Substack that recently put out a post about how everybody’s doing The Artist’s Way on Substack. It’s officially gone meta, in the non-Facebook sense of the word.

Anyway, the idea of doing a sort of brain dump of writing at the start of the day is not actually just an Artist’s Way thing, and since I’ve never worked through that system myself, I’m going to be talking about the practice in a more general sense.

(Although, I do currently have a copy of The Artist’s Way, and I’ve been genuinely debating whether to work through it, but as I’m saying this I suspect this might be another example of chasing something that’s currently flashy and that I’m afraid of missing out on…)

The non-branded overview of a morning pages practice is that you commit to writing every day first thing after you get up, but not writing in the sense of working on a current project. You either fill a certain number of pages or write for a certain number of minutes, in an automatic writing style, just putting whatever pops into your head onto the page.

One approach to this exercise is that the content of the pages is pretty much irrelevant, and it’s more about clearing creative space in your brain – the goal is what it allows you to discover in other parts of your practice. But in other versions of the exercise, you’re aiming to write until a hidden idea or inspiration or bit of wisdom emerges, from your own subconscious or from a spiritual source.

This practice is a perfect example of using a constraint to establish a container; it’s a consistent, simple practice that requires you to show up and do a specified activity, with very clear parameters. But I think whether or not this practice is truly holding creative space will depend on how you respond to the constraint – whether you implement it with the kind of empathetic, nonjudgemental yet focused attention you’d get from a trustworthy counselor.

The nonjudgemental bit is crucial to turning a container into a truly generative creative space. But at the same time, you do also have to pay attention to what emerges – whether that’s literally by examining the content of your morning pages, or just by paying attention to the experience itself.

I’ve got a theory that the people who become devoted to writing morning pages are the people who find that this practice hones their nonjudgemental yet focused attention – thereby essentially training them to hold creative space for themselves. On the other hand, the people who hate morning pages or just permanently drift away from doing them are the people who find that either the nonjudgmental bit or the focused bit just doesn’t click within that particular set of constraints.

Even though I haven’t done The Artist’s Way, I have tried a morning pages practice before, and I just couldn’t get the nonjudgemental part of the recipe. For starters, I’m naturally slow to boot up in the morning, and so adding even a quick morning pages practice into the mix meant I was constantly running late. Like, all the time. Which obviously doesn’t encourage a nonjudgemental state of mind. And I was often also unable to let the brain dump truly be a brain dump – I always had one internal eye judgmentally fixed on the goal of producing some kernel of wisdom or insight that had to be both utterly unexpected and deeply moving, every single morning. Which again, not the point of the thing.

So in my case, morning pages is a practice that has only two of the components necessary for holding creative space: it’s got the constraint and the curiosity, but very much not the compassion.

However, in a previous episode I mentioned a practice that I’ve had a lot more success with, and on the surface it actually sounds fairly similar. I will sometimes give myself the assignment of writing something new every day for three weeks or so. It can be as short or as long as I like, it can be any form or genre or style I like, it can be as corny as I like, and it very much does not have to be in the morning. And as a sort of bonus goal, I try to write until something surprising emerges – a weird turn of phrase, an unexpected action or character trait, whatever.

This is different from morning pages for me in a couple small but crucial ways. It’s a much more short term container; morning pages is almost always billed as a practice you should be taking up for the literal rest of your days. And even though I do look for the element of surprise during my writing sprints, I’m not necessarily looking for deep creative or spiritual insight and inspiration. The definition of surprise is a lot less precious.

With these changes, I find that my little daily writing sprints can meet all three of the elements of the formula – there’s a constraint, there’s curiosity, and there’s also space for me to have compassion for myself. So the practice works to help train me to hold my creative space, in a way that morning pages hasn’t (at least not so far – I’m not swearing off ever trying them again).

In comparing my experience with these two practices, I think I’ve sort of reverse-engineered an approach that could be used to make practical changes to what I actually do in my creative life – and I’m about to share it because I think you can probably use it too.

When you’ve identified that something’s not working, try considering that practice through the lens of the constraints + curiosity + compassion formula. Take a look at how the core elements of the practice break down into these three ingredients, and see if any of the three might be missing (either in the parameters of the practice itself, or in the way you’re experiencing those parameters). And once you’ve figured that out, then see if there’s a way you can adjust or reimagine the practice to ensure that all three parts of the formula are present.

In the example of morning pages – I abandoned that practice many months before I hit on the idea of my little writing sprints practice. But in hindsight, if I’d had this formula to apply to figure out why the morning pages weren’t working for me, I might have been able to come up with a version that did work at lot quicker.

This is the approach I’m going to be taking over the coming weeks to help bring my marketing work for this podcast more in line with the kind of space I want to be holding here. I’m going to be sifting through everything I’ve been trying so far to find the pieces that can be refitted into an approach that feels less in conflict with treating my creative work as a gift.

After all, there’s no point trying a hold a container you’re not able to stay in – and there’s also no point staying in a container that doesn’t offer you empathy or discovery. But if you can be a wise counselor for yourself, and look for the place where constraint, curiosity, and compassion can all co-exist – I think that’s how you can find the sweet spot for your work (and hold yourself there).

If you’ve listened all the way to the end of the episode and enjoyed it, then I think you might also be interested in what I get up to on my monthly newsletter. Every month I send out a tip or a resource that serves as a companion for the latest episode – nothing too time-consuming, just a quick way to actually put the topic of the pod into practice.

If you’re not yet part of the newsletter circle, just scroll down in the show notes to find the link to join and get in on all subscriber content. And as a welcome gift, you’ll also get access to the Creative Rescue Kit, a special set of three tools to help anxious writers (like myself) get out of the drafting doom spiral and back to actually writing your stories. And if you enjoyed the somatic exercise in today’s episode, then I think this kit is an especially good fit for you.

The kit includes a quick guided audio practice to break anxiety blocks during writing sessions. You’ll also get two other tools to help you shift your creative anxiety for the long term, so you can do more writing and less spiraling.

Access to all that is at the link that says “Join the newsletter.”

Thanks for sharing this container with me today – I’m wishing you many creative containers filled with just the right proportion of constraint, compassion, and curiosity. And as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.