“I am very curious about how, after 50 years on the job, Bruce Springsteen still finds inspiration for his songwriting. He answers not as a rock star but as a member of a tribe, the humble representative of anyone who makes art for a living.

‘You have your antennae out,’ he says. ‘You’re just walking through the world and you’re picking up these signals of emotions and spirit and history and events, today’s events and past remembrances. These things you divine from the air are all intangible elements: spirit, emotion, history. These are the tools of the songwriter’s trade before he even picks up the pen.’

‘People who are very attuned to that atmosphere usually end up being artists of some sort. Because they’re so attuned to it, they have a desire to record it. If that desire to record it is strong enough, you learn a language to do so. Whether it’s paintings, films, songs, poetry…

‘My antenna is picking up so much information, I need to find a way to disperse it. So, I needed to learn a language that does that. And the languages of art, film, records, whatever you want to call it—all those languages do that. And you get to pass it on to your listeners or fans. That’s how it begins.’” (“Bruce Springsteen” by Robert Love, in AARP—The Magazine,
October/November, 2020, p. 35)

“I have come to believe that creativity is our true nature, that blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming of a flower at the end of a slender green stem… What you are doing is creating pathways in your consciousness through which the creative forces can operate. Once you agree to clearing these pathways, your creativity emerges…creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing you must invent…
I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me. I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb. I simply wrote. No negotiations. Good, bad? None of my business. I wasn’t doing it. By resigning as the self-conscious author, I wrote freely…Get out of the way. Let it work through you. Accumulate pages, not judgments.” (Julia Cameron, The Artists Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, pp. xiii-xv)

As a psychotherapist, I am often sitting with patients who are unhappy with their working lives. They experience boredom and meaninglessness in their jobs. Some patients specifically seek out psychotherapy because they are stressed out and depleted by their work. They find their work repetitive and routine, and lacking in challenge and creativity. I have frequently said to such patients, “One of the challenges of adult life is to keep redesigning our work lives so that they bring us sufficient challenge.”

One of the books that I have recommended to probably hundreds of patients over the years is Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The flow state is the experience we have when we are so engaged in an activity that we are not aware that time is passing. The preconditions for the flow experience are that the activity is sufficiently complex and also that it engages a sufficiently large amount of our ability. Csikszentmihalyi states that we need to spend as much of our day as possible engaged in flow activities. If we are unable to do this, he writes, then “psychic entropy” sets in, and we feel bored, lethargic, and even depressed.

In describing the flow state, Csikszentmihalyi states, “The self becomes more differentiated as a result of flow because overcoming a challenge inevitably leaves a person feeling more capable, more skilled…After each episode of flow a person becomes more of a unique individual, less predictable, possessed of rarer skills…people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing…we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person to a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities.” (pp. 41, 53, & 74)

Part of what makes the practice of psychotherapy creative and satisfying is that therapists, as they sit with patients, are able to draw upon insights gleaned from not only professional literature but also fiction, art, poetry, music, and film. For example, I might be talking with a patient who is struggling with an unsatisfying professional life as a result of following parental edicts about what line of work s/he should be engaged in. I might share with this patient the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver:

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world moves on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
(New and Selected Poems, p. 110)

Often, I am talking with patients who find much of their lives to be unsatisfying and unfulfilling. They long for a new direction and are unsure how to proceed. They worry about making mistakes. I might share with such patients from Sheldon Kopp’s wise book about psychotherapy, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. Kopp writes, “All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data.” (p. 166)

I also might share with such patients some words from Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

“But when one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one’s own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee—not for a single moment—that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer—at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.”
(p. 297)

“The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.” (p. 318)

“Nevertheless, it may be that for sufficient reasons a man feels he must set out on his own feet along the road to wider realms. It may be that is all the garbs, shapes, forms, modes, and manners of life offered to him he does not find what is peculiarly necessary for him. He will go alone and be his own company.” (p. 343)

In my psychotherapy work I draw extensively from the work of the Boston psychotherapist, Terrence Real. I have written reviews of all four of his books, which are now on my website. Part of what I find so compelling about Real’s writings is that he frequently draws upon literature and poetry to illustrate his premises. I describe his first book, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, as the best self-help book ever written for men. He shares the poem “Healing,” by D.H. Lawrence, to illustrate the profound dilemmas that men in our patriarchal culture face:

“I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistakes, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.” (pp. 226-227)

Often, I am sitting in my office with men in their 20’s and 30’s who are unhappy with their working lives. Sometimes they are working unfulfilling jobs, and are afraid to leave these jobs. Frequently I will share some words from the famous writer James Michener, in his article “Go Waste, Young Man.” Michener writes, “I wrote nothing until I was forty. This tardy beginning, one might say this delinquency, stemmed from the fact that I had spent a good deal of my early time knocking around this country and Europe, trying to find out what I believed in, what values were large enough to enlist my sympathies during what I sensed would be a long and confused life.”

“I believe that you have till age thirty-five to decide finally on what you are going to do, and that any exploration you pursue in the process will in the end turn out to have been worthwhile. Indeed, it may well be the year that observers describe as ‘wasted’ that will prove to have been the most productive of those insight which will keep you going. The trip to Egypt. The two years spent working as a runner for a bank. The spell you spent on the newspaper in Idaho. Your apprenticeship at a trade. These are the ways in which a young man ought to spend his life…the ways of waste that lead to true intelligence.”

Many of the patients with whom I work have lifelong struggles with self-esteem. In helping them begin to address their “inner critic” voices, I share with them the words of Buddhist psychologist Tara Brach, in her book Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha:

“As a friend of mine put it, ‘Feeling that something is wrong with me is the invisible and toxic gas I am always breathing.’ When we experience our lives through this lens of personal insufficiency, we are imprisoned in what I call the trance of unworthiness. Trapped in this trance, we are unable to perceive the truth of who we really are.

A meditation student at a retreat I was teaching told me about an experience that brought home to her the tragedy of living in trance. Marilyn had spent many hours sitting at the bedside of her dying mother—reading to her, meditating next to her late at night, holding her hand and telling her over and over that she loved her. Most of the time Marilyn’s mother remained unconscious, her breath labored and erratic. One morning before dawn, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked clearly and intently at her daughter. ‘You know,’ she whispered softly, ‘all my life I thought something was wrong with me.’ Shaking her head slightly, as if to say, ‘What a waste,’ she closed her eyes and drifted back into a coma. Several hours later she passed away.

We don’t have to wait until we are on our deathbed to realize what a waste of our precious lives it is to carry the belief that something is wrong with us. Yet because our habits of feeling insufficient are so strong, awakening from the trance involves not only inner resolve, but also an active training of the heart and mind.” (p. 3)

Terrence Real, who is quoted above, takes a tremendously helpful stance on the distinction between “healthy self-esteem” and the “performance-based self-esteem” upon which most men depend. In I Don’t Want to Talk About It, Real writes, “Healthy self-esteem is essentially internal. It is the capacity to cherish oneself in the face of one’s own imperfections, not because of what one has or what one does.” (p. 44)…What we offer boys in our culture is highly conditional, performance-based esteem, not an essential sense of worth that comes from within. One cannot earn healthy self-esteem. One has it. Performance-based esteem augments an insufficient, internal sense of worth by the measuring of one’s accomplishments against those of others and coming out on top.” (p. 182)

I will conclude this article on utilizing art and creativity with words from Terrence Real’s third book, The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work. Real writes about his own personal journey and about how we all need to utilize our creative gifts:

Real shares about his own journey: “As a young adult I was plagued with writer’s blocks, self-defeating behaviors, oscillations between feeling gifted and cursed, grand and worthless. I began what turned out to be years of healing work; I became a therapist myself. I was doing all right, but I felt I had more in me to give and no idea how to bring it out into the world. But I was healthy enough to ask for help. Over the years several wise and wonderful people have mentored me, and every one of them gave me his or her version of the same advice. Call it grace, call it power, intuition, inspiration, the sweet spot, or the flow state—call it anything you like. But whatever it is that flows through you in that wonderful state, don’t call it yours. Don’t take credit for it. Don’t act as if you own it. And don’t shrink away from it, either, from its scale or its power.” (p. 277)

Real elaborates on his approach to abundance: “The way to step into the full abundance of your own power, your unique gifts and talents, is by neither owning nor disowning them, but by doing your work and cooperating. Inspiration will never serve you. You serve it. Realizing fully the talents, the gifts, that lie at the core of who you are at your best, allowing yourself to be as big as you are, means cherishing the abundance inside you. In order to flourish, stay out of its way and do whatever you need to do to become a worthy vessel. As you grow healthier and more skilled, your relationship to your own unique form of abundance may be the last, the most difficult, of your relationships to straighten out.” (p. 278)

Real adds, “The metaphor that works best or me is art. You do your work on your end. You put in hour after hour of practicing your instrument. You repeat the same drills hundreds of times. And then, on a good night, in the middle of a concert somewhere, inspiration appears. You no longer play well; you play brilliantly. Should you be proud? Hell yes. Proud of your part in the collaboration, proud of the skill you’ve earned, and even proud of the gift that spoke through your fingers. And you must be grateful. The most important way to cherish your own talents and gifts is simply to use them.” (p. 278)

Real concludes his book: “Wherever you are, in whatever form you choose, you must give back to the world. You must use your gifts—including whatever you get from relationship practice—to contribute to something beyond yourself: a cause, a child, a neighborhood. This isn’t out of altruism or enlightened self-interest. You won’t grow if you don’t have the daring to let go and give what you’ve got to the world. Do it now. Do it badly. But get going…As you get less tangled up in old struggles, old miseries, opportunities will naturally present themselves to you, opportunities to stand up for something, be of help to someone, or bring something beautiful into the world. Take them.” (p. 279)