Identifying voice & going beyond voice
To expand your creative vision
I don’t think it’s too strange to say we possess different voices inside of us. Right? The loving voice. The fearful voice. The daughter voice. The authoritative voice. The playful voice. The productive voice. The Larry David voice…do you have one of those too? :)
What’s most interesting to me is how these voices are not completely mine. They’re degrees of past experiences, the culture I live in, my parental and ancestral lineage. Fundamentally, we are lineage holders, and we are lineage healers.
And artists are always trying to connect with the loosest voice—the one that’s deeply curious and interested in traveling through elevations of thoughts and feelings that contain “essence” and set the individual voice within the larger human experience.
Voice hunters is what we artists are, I say … hunters of the voice of a sky, a tree, an animal, a character experiencing loss, desire or basic survival … the list goes on.
Going beyond voice
And yet, within the creative process, when an artist is in flow, voice is front and centre, but it also disappears. These two things happen at once (!). You’re deeply present and simultaneously no longer present. Does that make sense?
Wilco’s frontman Jeff Tweedy described it this way in a recent NY Times podcast:
…to be free from worry, unburdened by a sense of self. That’s what I think of as disappearing. I think people do it a lot of different ways that I don’t think are particularly creative or productive, and I would argue maybe not as good for you…But I think it’s kind of incredible when you can do that and somehow be present at the same time, which is what I think happens when you create.
Disappearing happens when an individual enters into flow. Artists and athletes are best known for experiencing this.
In flow, the thing you are doing takes over, and you and it become one.
Allow me to elaborate through the words of the “father of flow” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow state is:
..the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.
His TED Talk, with over 7 million views, is worthwhile viewing, explaining how flow states happen and where they converge with joy and healing.
What seems most fascinating to me is how individuals, after experiencing states of flow, come back to a self and voice that is new, enriched by fresh insights. In the creative process, it is how a vision grows.
Scientists explain the neurobiology of it:
Flow is the product of profound changes in standard brain function. In the state, our brainwaves move from the fast-moving beta wave of normal waking consciousness down to the far slower borderline between alpha and theta waves.
And the database from which we mine thoughts and act expands inside us. The pre-frontal cortex goes quiet. Voices are still, more alive—and like water, become light and able to travel.
We become water—that’s where it all goes for me.
And you? What do you find in flow?
I find flow in painting:)🌊🎨💫