Episode 28: Jaws of the Crocodile

Feb 14, 2017

In this episode, Stewart shows you how to use the Jaws of the Crocodile to take a bite out of your resistance to the creative process.

An excerpt from Jaws of the Crocodile . . .

In my early days as a facilitator of process painting, I took it upon myself to try to alleviate the inevitable discontent that people felt in the creative process and whatever form that discontent took, whether it was disappointment, or boredom, or irritation, or a sense of contraction. Then of course there would be the inevitable projection of those feelings onto the painting: dislike and hopelessness and a sense of other people doing better. I believed that it would be better for a person to be in a creative flow and to be unattached to the result, and to be a happy camper as they were painting. My preference was for them to be unbothered and I took that on as a facilitator.

I thought it was my job to bring a person from discontent to creative freedom. And of course, that’s a lot of work! I was exhausting myself and it didn’t really help, of course, because on one hand it was disrespectful to assume that a person should be other than where they are; that’s really invalidating. The person is already invalidating their experience; they’re perhaps feeling contracted and judgmental; they want out; they want to be other than where they are. That’s already the ground of their experience, and for the facilitator then to come in and support that perception is further invalidation.

That’s really not an effective path for working with someone as a facilitator. But understanding this is a pretty big deal and it took me many years to really come around to acknowledging and respecting the inevitable discontent that arises in the creative process. It’s not something you get out of, it is actually something to get into. It is not something to reject and try to diminish. On the contrary, it has arisen spontaneously, it has intelligence behind it, and it is something that needs to be respected. It is something that needs to be explored.

Listen to learn more!

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