Creative Scarcity: How to Get Through Artist Mental Road Blocks with One Simple Exercise

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Every now and then all artists find themselves in a situation where their creativity suffers from overwork (exhaustion) or artistic mental blocks whatever their source may be. Well, here’s a simple exercise that should resolve any issue you may have where you find your creative spark diminished or non-existent.

In previous articles, I discuss the nature of creativity, the overflow of creativity, as well as the “living album” – a tool or vehicle for presenting one’s artistic creations in a dynamic manner in relationship to one’s growth as a creator over time. As a complement to those articles I thought it would also be useful to discuss the opposite or negative side of the coin of creativity, that is, what can one do when one’s creativity is lowered.

Barring illness, injury, or substance abuse this exercise is not intended to assist those of us who have undergone one of these extreme conditions. In each of these cases, the best remedy will always be rest or a highly successful recovery program of your choosing. But for the remainder of us who seem to have hit a road block to our creativity this exercise may appear simple at first, but I assure you it is easier to read about than it is to do.

Exercise

Instructions: Create 10 – 50 ideas in your creative field and never use them.

That’s it. I know this exercise recommendation seems extremely disappointing, but this exercise has always worked for me and continues to do so to this day. In fact, the album I’m currently working on is the product of this specific exercise. As of this moment, the album is about 70% complete and is approaching its completion very rapidly. Aside from this new collection of music, I have 3 other albums planned for publication over the next 2 to 3 years. And yes, I have this exercise to thank for this level of output and planning.

Explanation

The first objection to this exercise will be the obvious. If I’m undergoing an artistic road block, how can you expect me to come up with 10 – 50 new ideas, I can’t even come up with one. And that’s the first reason you’re probably experiencing a mental road block, you’re setting your target too low for creating an abundance of new ideas or innovations for old ideas.

Try setting a much higher target like several, a dozen, or many more new ideas, concepts, leads, techniques, motifs, etc. to help you come up with that next great project to work on. Besides it’s much easier to find one great idea in a dozen or more ideas you’ve come up with than it is to find one by creating them one at a time, examining them, only to determine that it’s not what you were hoping for.

This is the quickest way I know of to create new concepts and innovate old ideas in high abundance, thereby overcoming your seeming limitations on creative thought. This exercise all by itself helps you to do 4 things:

1. Unjam the free flow of life force in your body and mental processes, so that it’s available for concentrating your creativity on new artistic creations.

2. Overcome musical and artistic “one-it is,” which is an obsessive fixation on a creative concept or musical composition effectively preventing you from producing further creative concepts or innovations.

3. It also teaches you to aim through your targets instead of at them, so that you produce more work in less time and with less effort because your creative process becomes more playful and less pressured, while opening a creative frontier of unexplored ideas for you to discover. New ideas will come to you easier, the more you get into the habit of creating ideas.

4. And finally, it frees you from the illusion of an artistic mental road block. Creative scarcity produced from an artistic mental road block is a symptom of another problem and is not the problem itself. This exercise bypasses the need to deal with the underlying problem on an immediate basis, so that you can continue on your creative path. The underlying problem is primarily psychological or emotional and must be totally resolved in order for you to completely remove the cause of your artistic mental road blocks.

Part B

As a Part B to the exercise given above I’d like to address the possibility that your artistic mental road block can sometimes be the result of creative overwork, overrun, or exhaustion. In this case, planning regularly scheduled vacations or exploring new creative outlets can be another technique for overcoming an artistic mental road block. Where the mental road block is not caused by an unresolved psychological or emotional issue, the resolution may be as easy as recharging one creative “juices” by getting away or exploring new creative avenues for artistic expression. The basic idea behind this approach is that by opening yourself up to a different artistic perspective you can return to your creative medium with a pair of fresh eyes and techniques unlike those commonly found in your field.

I hope you’ll give this exercise a chance and try it out whenever you experience an artistic mental road block to see how it works for you. I have no doubt that you will be greatly benefited by this technique and that your creative work will increase in output and improve in quality. Let me know what happens after you use this exercise for a period of time. I’d love to read about your experiences in the comments section below.

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Related Music:

The Effort of Years

The Time Has Come
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Related Articles:

The Overflow of Creativity: Why Artists Need to Find New Areas to Conquer, New Worlds to Explore 

A Living Album: Why Stereo Thesis Albums Grow and Change Over Time

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P.S. To support Stereo Thesis with a financial donation of your choosing, click here.

Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

Sonic Illusions: Animal and Human Impersonations

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JOIN OUR MAILING LIST and GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler FOR FREE.” To get your FREE full-length album…click here. 

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Here’s an incredible video showing the skill with which goats impersonate humans yelling. I caught wind of this audio while I was driving from the Tim Conway Jr. Show – a local talk radio show in L.A. When I heard this audio I just couldn’t stop laughing. What was worse is that the host and his staff kept playing bits of the audio from this video throughout the show at random moments, like over the traffic reports and during other news segments that were completely unrelated to goats.

Aside from being somewhat creepy, I think you’ll find this audio fascinating and downright hilarious. Although, I wonder if these goats are imitating the yells of their owners when they’re called back to their herds after roaming to pasture, similar to the way a parrot imitates the sounds it hears. Anyhow I suggest watching the video and hearing the audio one time and then playing it again but listening with your eyes closed to imagine the source of the sounds you hear.

I hope you like this video and share your comments below. And don’t forget to subscribe by e-mail to receive future articles, news, and FREE music by Stereo Thesis straight into your inbox.

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Related Music:

Lucky Ducky

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Who's Eating You?

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

A Living Album: Why Stereo Thesis Albums Grow and Change Over Time

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JOIN OUR MAILING LIST and GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler FOR FREE.” To get your FREE full-length album…click here.

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Introduction

I just wanted explain something real quick to everyone following our growth and evolution and that’s the idea of a “living album.” A living album is an album concept – not a concept album – where new music is posted to an album which has already been released as a full length. The main difference between a living album and a CD or an album in mP3 format is that the living album can and often does increase in content or change over time. 

The Living Album: What It Is and Why It’s New

A living album can also be viewed as digital intellectual property similar to a blog where an author posts articles, news, and ideas regularly for his readers in ongoing fashion, the only difference being in the case of the living album the musician or composer posts music regularly instead of reading materials. Today, with the Internet you can visit your favorite band’s website and check out the new music they’re publishing in real time via streaming video or (free/paid) mP3 downloads. Today, you don’t need to wait for a release date. Today, you don’t have to get ripped off when you buy an album where, if you’re lucky, half the tracks are any good. This is how the “living” or “expandable” album came into being. As the CD began to die off, so did the idea of the album. 

In the past, an album was a playable fixed arrangement of songs written, produced, or performed by a musician, composer, or artist. It usually took the form of a vinyl record, cassette tape, CD, and now an mP3 digital file. Today, an album only exists if the artist chooses to create one, but it is no longer his sole creative or productive option. Today the album is only one item in an artist’s product line included among other items such as T-shirts, bumper stickers, CD sampler’s, YouTube videos, DVD’s, live performances, goodwill (Lilith Fair), music festivals (Lollapalooza) and much more. Similarly, the living album frees the artist from cost considerations in regard to the song’s he selects for inclusion on a collection or album – if he so chooses. In other words, the artist can include the content he or she wants on a digital album, DVD, live performance, or studio recording according to their creative specifications. Suffice it to say that gone are the days where an artist must withhold a certain quantity of music because an executive, the marketing department, or the budget wouldn’t allow it.  Today, the artist can make all his work – the good, the bad, and the great work - known to his fans and posterity.

The living album is an “Information Age” concept tied to the birth of the Internet. When music companies ruled the landscape when it came to music publishing, marketing, and distribution “the album” and sometimes, but not always, the artist was the main product. That’s why so much investment went into the album – artwork, studio time, post production, packaging, marketing, distribution, as well as the artist’s image because the music company expected a very high (ROI) return on investment. 

3 Types of Artistic Operation

An individual goes through phases throughout his lifetime where he ponders the universe in which he exists in one or a mixture of 3 ways: linearly, cyclically, or in confusion.

The artist who operates linearly progresses as a creative person by moving from one style or technique to another without returning to a previous stage of development. They are always seeking improvement or something new. This person is most often associated with pioneering exploration. 

In contrast, the creative person who functions on a cyclical basis travels among a set of a few approaches or styles of creativity moving from one to another, but within a narrow range of choices. A pattern may even emerge for the person who operates in a cyclical manner where they relate their work to seasons, weather, times of the day or year, and environments. This person is most readily identifiable by the repeating or reemergence of previous styles or techniques. Both of these creative types are prolific in the breadth and high quality of their work. 

Lastly, the artist or creative type who operates in confusion is often viewed as a scatterbrain or copycat who either imitates techniques or styles which he likes or imitates because it’s what he thinks others like. This individual tends to have a great deal of formal training and shows promising talent, but because they lack direction of purpose they don’t produce work that is uniquely theirs. It’s like a songwriter, musician, or composer who doesn’t have a signature sound, but instead their work sounds like the work of many others in an undifferentiated mass of other artists and composers. They move from one style or technique to another and anyone watching them would see no rhyme or reason to the shifts they make. They neither progress steadily uniting every effort into an alignment of purpose – like the linear type – nor do they produce high quality work using a selected range of styles or techniques that they love or that inspire them to push artistic boundaries. This “creative” type is most readily identifiable with rapid but purposeless change for no reason at all except for maintaining a kind of artistic status quo. 

The Living Album as a Complement to the Nature of Creativity

Now let me address one final consideration in regard to the living album and that is how a common theme runs throughout a portion or period of an artist’s body of work. Remember earlier I mentioned how the old idea of an album is that it is a fixed arrangement of songs in time, but the nature of creating art is such that time cannot constrain creativity. In other words, creativity is unbounded by time, which makes the living album is a very useful tool for the artist and musician. The reason this is important is because the living album can adapt to the artist’s intention toward their work unbounded by time, unlike the way record companies were able to operate before. Because an artist can operate using one or a mixture of 3 approaches, which I mentioned earlier, it requires a dynamic medium to carry the work of an artist in flux. The medium must be dynamic because the artist is. The medium must be able to keep up with the change the artist is going through in real time. The medium must also be easy to delete, easily altered, and expandable. 

The publishing and distribution freedoms the artist and musician can now exercise with a living album are far superior to what was previously known. For example, if as a composer you’ve published an album or CD 5 years ago, but you find yourself writing pieces today that are related to or you feel should be added to the earlier body of work, you now have several options as to what you can do about this situation. You can alter, delete, or expand any part or the album as a whole according to your need as a creator. Going a step further, you can also reissue and re-master the old CD and even make bonus material available for FREE as a digital download, including other bonuses like FREE merchandise or concert tickets to an upcoming tour date. 

My favorite features of the living album, like a blog, are the ability to rapidly update information and to link to one’s own related works. The reason why I like this feature is because it gives the fan the ability to deepen his bond to the artist, allows the artist to open up to his fans, and provides new members with a way to quickly become familiar with the artist he’s just discovered. 

A living album satisfies all of these requirements and much more because the essence of the Internet and information technology is to facilitate “rapid change, communication, and connectedness.” Because of this the most significant contrast a living album has to a traditional album is that it can include additional components with which to connect with an artist and the artist to connect with their audience via blogs, streaming video, social media, on-line articles, and an on-line communities grown around an artist. Now the artist is the brand – front and center – while the music and anything else associated with the artist is part and parcel of an entire product line, which benefits the artist and their love of composing, recording, and performing music. The traditional album and the music companies made these things virtually impossible to create or next to non-existent except in rare cases of superstardom. However, today the Internet and the living album make this available to every artist, musician, composer, and creative type.

Conclusion

In the information age, your vision for your work is king and you are now in full control over the form your vision takes as well as the function it serves. Your creative need is the function and the form is the living album, but looking closer at each of these elements you’ll see that your creative need, the living album, and your vision are all mirror images of each other and that all these things are clones of you and the creative spark within.

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Related Music:

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Related Article:

The Overflow of Creativity: Why Artists Need to Find New Areas to Conquer, New Worlds to Explore 

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

The Fuel of Excellence: How to Drink Your Water – A Musician’s Guide to Handling Thirst for Optimal Hydration

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JOIN OUR MAILING LIST and GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler FOR FREE.” To get your FREE full-length album…click here. 

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“The person who eats fruits, green and succulent vegetables, and avoids condiments and has overcome his drinking habit, will have little cause for drinking at any time and no cause for drinking at meal time or immediately thereafter. Let him not fear that his health will suffer therefrom. I can assure him that it will improve and quickly at that.”

-         Dr. Herbert Shelton

Introduction

As part of talking about proper food combining I thought it would be important to share some insights about proper water intake with you. In this article, I plan to describe to you some of the knowledge and techniques that I now use to achieve optimal hydration. Because the human body is almost entirely made up of water, it’s important to know how to properly hydrate without falling victim to over- or under-saturation. In my experience and in my studies I’ve found it challenging to arrive at just the right balance with water intake and food consumption. In the past I’ve made the all-to-common mistake of drinking water with my meals and suffering with consequences such as heartburn, acid reflux, and indigestion. 
 

As artists, these consequences are difficult to live with especially during performances and when they act as deterrents to focusing our attention to these conditions instead of to our creative efforts. So it’s my hope that this information will help illuminate an essential area of your life and good health – optimal water intake.

Habitual Drinking

So let’s start with the idea of drinking 6 – 8 glasses of water a day. Habitual drinking, like habitual eating, is a bad idea in that if consumption isn’t based on need, then there really isn’t any reason for it. Drinking water or any other hydrating liquid should be dictated according to thirst. Thirst can be defined as the biological or physiological need for water. So in my experience I’ve found it’s best to avoid routine drinking. Water needs vary with the seasons, activity, age, gender, and climate, so there is no sound reason to medically or nutritionally advise anyone to drink any quantity of water without first knowing something about them and their condition. 
 

Experiments with plants have shown that super-saturation of their protoplasm weakens and even kills them. Similarly, when large quantities of water are taken in by man or animal it produces a state not unlike that of alcoholic intoxication. Excessive water drinking weakens the tissues, dilutes essential bodily fluids, decreases the power of the blood to carry oxygen, and lessens the vitality of the cells. 

Ruining Digestion with Water

Excessive water intake also ruins the digestive process by washing away the very enzymatic secretions needed to break down food in the mouth (from mastication and insalivation) and stomach. Often we drink large quantities of water just before or with our meals so that what results from the little secretions that remain are fermentation throughout the digestive tract (gas, heartburn, etc.) and poor nutrition (undigested or unprocessed food). 

Drinking with meals and excessive water drinking are both known to stimulate the appetite, which is caused by an irritation of the stomach and not by true hunger. This creates a vicious cycle where in general a person eats meals that stimulate a false thirst, which they then respond to by drinking large amounts of water or other beverages (that are really foods or poisons). This in turn washes away the very digestive enzymes manufactured by the body for digestion, thereby encouraging fermentation in the intestinal tract, leading to uncomfortable pressure in the abdomen, heartburn, gas, frequent bowels, and other related conditions.

The horror of this cycle to the health of the individual can be further simplified as a cycle of feeding false hunger and false thirst. Eating too many foods that stimulate false thirst, and drinking too much water that leads to a stimulating of the appetite with a false hunger will both rob the artist and creative type of their vital energies, which they desperately need for their work.

Therefore, it’s best to abstain from drinking with your meals and to reduce your water intake to match physiological demand. No matter what is eaten, as long as it’s edible, the glands of the mouth will supply sufficient quantities of digestive fluids if allowed to do so. And as you’ve read drinking water with meals prevents the digestive fluids from doing the work they were designed to do.

How to Drink Your Water

According to the school of Natural Hygiene, the safest rule on water consumption is “drink as little as a thirst demands.” Other than this there is no hard and fast rule for water drinking. Similarly, there is no absolute rule for how much one ought to eat, breathe, sleep, or have sex. So what does this mean and how is this supposed to help you? 

The intent behind this rule is to get you to listen to your body’s need for water. My personal experience with Natural Hygiene and food combining has included the painstaking process of breaking bad eating and drinking habits borne from years of thoughtless and indiscriminate consumption. As many people are habitual overeaters, similarly these same people habitually super saturate themselves by drinking too much water. The main reason why we drink too much water has to do with ignoring our body’s cues for water intake which is dictated by need, as opposed to irritation or false thirst caused by bad foods or bad combinations of food. 

A false thirst is a demand for water that is caused by eating salt, spices, condiments, greasy dishes, concentrated foods, meat, eggs, cheese, and sugar, all of which cause irritations usually deemed to be thirst. A false thirst usually follows a meal whenever the food is salty, greasy, or full of condiments and spices. This thirst should be ignored, allowing the saliva and stomach secretions to do their work on the food in an attempt to minimize the effect these foods have on the stomach lining and intestinal tract.

In addition, to the “rule” given above it is also safe to drink 15 – 20 minutes before meals, only a little 2 – 3 hours after a starch meal, and similarly a small amount 3 – 4 hours after a protein meal. [To learn more about the difference between these 2 types of meals refer to the article “The Fuel of Excellence: A Musician’s Guide to Proper Food Combining and Optimum Nutrition.”] 

5 Personal Recommendations for Optimal Hydration

For all intents and purposes all forms of purified water are preferred over tap water. Tap water can easily be classified as a poison because of all the deadly chemicals and dangerous substances, which are added to it in an effort to make it safe for contact with man and animals. Because of this water filtration is of the highest necessity for the health conscious artist and creator. So whether you prefer particular brands of water or enjoy the trip to your local water dispensary, or if you like the way distilled, Kangen, or high pH water makes you feel, go ahead and use whatever type or brand of water works well for you. The point of this article was not to get you to change the type of water you drink, instead it’s been to help educate you about water intake, maintaining excellent hydration, and balancing these two factors with proper food combining for optimal nutrition.

Now here are a few suggestions to help you control your water consumption for improved digestion and excellent hydration. 

1) The best form of water comes from a diet in which there is an abundant intake of fresh fruits and vegetables. With such an abundant of fresh fruits and vegetables in one’s diet, the need for water is almost non-existent. Ideally, the only drink you should have is pure water. Most other fluids commonly referred to as drinks are either foods or poisons. For example, fruit and vegetable juices are foods, while alcohol and coffee are poisons.

2) In order to avoid drinking too much water, try measuring your water intake in terms of mouthfuls, instead of in ounces, cups, or other arbitrary measurements unrelated to the size of your body. In other words, try to stop focusing on the amount of water you drink and instead focus on your body’s demand for water. Aside from those of us who have medical conditions that require a high fluid intake, a healthy person is in no danger of dehydration from reducing their water consumption as a drinkable water source is never far from sight. 

3) Another way to reduce your intake proper to your activity, age, gender, and climate is to use small cups or glasses. This will encourage you to ingest smaller amounts of water before, after, or in between meals, while slowing your intake at the same time. 

4) And remember the “rule” on timing your water intake. It is safe to drink water 15 – 20 minutes before meals, little more 2 – 3 hours after a starch meal, and some more 3 – 4 hours after a protein meal. Before you are able to precisely time your water consumption, a preliminary step for you might be to start drinking your water before and between your meals, but never during. 

5) Try to avoid meals with foods that are salty, greasy, or full of condiments and spices. If this is not possible, then rinse your mouth out with water soon after such a meal. This will help dissolve the remaining sugar and salt granules and dilute substances such as vinegar, milk solids, corn syrup, artificial colors and sweeteners, chili powder, and powdered cheeses, all of which are common in most familiar snacks and fast foods. Oftentimes a false thirst psychologically tricks us into drinking more water than we need because food additives cause the mouth to dry. 

Conclusion

Apparently, we are a thirsty nation, although it seems there’s nothing on the market that can quench our thirst. It’s no wonder that the beverage industry has experienced its massive growth in recent years. But for most people it’s a mystery why there’s such a huge market for beverage manufacturers to sell to. However, the mystery is easily dispelled when a little research can tell you that in many instances drink makers are also snack manufacturers. No, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, but simply a coincidence that makes dollars and cents for companies that were smart enough to see the relationship between consuming sweet, salty, spicy snacks and the resulting thirst eating such “foods” produces. 

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Related Music:

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Related Articles:

The Fuel of Excellence: A Musician’s Guide to Proper Food Combining and Optimum Nutrition

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/

Yoga Champion, Kasper van den Wijngaard, Demonstrates His Winning Routine

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JOIN OUR MAILING LIST and GET “SONIC WEAPONS: The Official Stereo Thesis Music Sampler FOR FREE.” To get your FREE full-length album…click here. 

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This is a beautiful yoga demonstration highlighting the great utility of a workout without weights or equipment. Obviously, as you’ll see yoga is a physical form of exercise that requires more skill AND effort instead of simply effort. Unlike traditional forms of American exercise, you’ll notice that in yoga many factors come together to make it an ideal form of exercise for artists and creative types. To name a few of these factors you’ll witness Kasper demonstrating highly developed forms of balance, strength, concentration, flexibility, endurance, and breathing.

Another thing you’ll notice about this routine is that it’s independent of all environments. In other words, you can do it in just about any type of weather, requiring so little space to perform the movements, whether indoor or outdoor. In most cases, a 3 or 4 feet circumference around your body will be a sufficient area to exercise in. This is crucial for artists and musicians who often find they have to work in stuffy rooms, sometimes crammed with people, and very limited space to work in. So incorporating an exercise regimen which can embrace these conditions can serve us well to stay physically fit and keep our minds active for the creative process.

Now may I present to you, Bikram Yoga World Champion, Kasper van den Wijngaard.

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Related Music:

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Smart Moves for Musicians: Exercise without Weights - Anytime, Anywhere 

Smart Moves for Musicians: Basic Pilates Mat Exercises - Anytime, Anywhere

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Marc

http://stereothesis.com/