What no-one tells you about 'showing up'

Jane Pike, and why the Nike approach may not always be the best solution

Show up.

You’ve got to show up.

At the very least, you have to show up.

I see this expression everywhere at the moment. Pretty much any discussion of creative process, there it is.

Well, sure, I think we can all agree that if you don’t bring yourself to the paper, or the instrument, that creative thing that you really want to do is not going to happen.

But why on earth would you not do that thing that you want to do so much?

Theories and frames are everywhere: inner critic, comparing yourself others, thinking you’re no good, imposter syndrome, etc. If this affects you, you’ve probably asked yourself, where does all that stuff come from, why is it here? It’s highly likely you’ve answered that question for yourself after examining the attitudes of your parents, the preferences of your school teachers, your past experience of classes. But does that mean that now you’re free to get on and do that thing that you really want to do?

The constant exhortation, in a variety of creative contexts, to ‘show up’, suggests not. The next level of advice is, often, you must discipline yourself. You must get up earlier, you must stop watching so much TV, you must ban scrolling on your phone. You can also sign up to commit to a little creative something every day, you can enrol here to find a lovely supportive community, you can download this app which will solve all your problems.

In the creative community I was involved in for many years there was a serious and magical thing called ‘the daily practice’. This was a commitment to ‘show up’, but a subtle and potentially fecund one. You were not told to just start, or to go straight to the thing that you wanted to do. There were all sorts of suggestions - given to you by the teacher if you wanted - for how to get out of whatever state of resistance or reluctance you were in first; using music, words and movement. It seemed to be a very powerful approach for many of the mainly actors, performers and musicians who made up the shifting configurations of that collective.

But sometimes, quite often, actually, you would hear someone say, ‘I know I should do my daily practice, but…’ A regular topic of conversation was the mysterious barriers that so often seemed to crop up even when very committed, professional artists attempted this form of regular showing up.

I was very new to full-time artistic practice when I joined that collective. My circumstances were different from most of the performers there, who were mainly fully-trained, working artists who’d been doing it for years. I was fresh from a twenty year interregnum, trying to find my artistic feet, fully confused most of the time.

I did it. I showed up for my daily practice for years, and I learned many things from doing it. It was never a mark-making practice for me - always movement, sound, voice, music. And through that, many things were revealed that then filtered through in some way to my visual art.

But despite all of this, doing workshops and practices with that collective for seven years, and focussing full-time on my art for many more years after that, there was still some kind of uncomfortable disconnect within my system. Something was still gumming up the me that so wanted to make art, that had always wanted to make art, that was now making art, and I felt it every day.

An unresolved, horrible sensation that told me that something was wrong. Something was painful, stuck, rigid; despite regular dancing and movement practices, lots of breaks, warm-ups and all the rest of it. I had to step over this thing, which I came to think of as my ‘sleeping policeman¹’, every single day that I walked into my studio. I was doing what I had wanted to do my whole life, and I was tense, on edge.

This lasted for years, until, after a number of unrelated but stressful life events, I eventually just threw the whole thing in and said, enough already. I stopped painting and started writing. And writing could not have been more different. No stress, no push, no uncomfortable feeling. No yearning, no goal, no agenda. No doing, in fact, only receiving. I set up a new set of conditions, and something different arose, of its own accord.

The writing was easy because there was nothing riding on it. I had no identity as a writer; and writing for me had no history of neglect or longing (I had done it a lot in my previous job). Painting was the opposite, and the fact that it was so obviously painful, and yet still so insistent, was an ongoing mystery.

Until I came across Jane Pike’s essay, ‘The way you move is the way you make’.

I’d been thinking about the link between stress, the nervous system, and making art for many years, but I’d never seen anyone writing about these two things together. Near the beginning of the essay she says:

If we really want to understand our creative experience — the things that work, the things that hinder, the things that are sublime — then we need to understand the ground our creative shoots are rooted in.

Which, as it happens, is the body.

Before we dance with the emotions of creating; before we even tinker with a creative state of mind, we need to understand creativity as a system of movement.

This was new.

As I read on she began to introduce the basic ideas of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and I thought, yeah, ok, done a bunch of courses on that…. until I realised that she had simplified what I had assumed was the current polyvagal mishmash into two very simple ideas: a survival nervous system, and a creative nervous system.

The way you move is rooted in either of these two systems, she said, and all writing, drawing, painting and making are movement.

I thought this was going to be the model I knew, the one which underpins much current trauma therapy and talk, but this isn’t that. Jane’s work is based not on polyvagal theory but on many years of working under a specialist in biomechanics, Alicia Fajardo. In this work, ideas such as fight/flight etc are not seen as individual feeling states, but as objectively observable changes in the physical body.

The fight/flight nervous system is basically a series of structural templates (fight, flight, freeze etc) that the body moves through to maximise capacity for force and acceleration. Each have certain behavioural tendencies that become observable if someone is chronically in that state.

Jane Pike, email communication

Jane’s been working for years with this approach in the context of helping people become more confident horse riders, and has recently been creating a structure of ideas that bring together her understanding of the nervous system and her studies and experience of creative practice.

The core question seemed to be, which of these two systems (survival nervous system or creative nervous system), do you tend to make your work from; and why?

The primary influence is the learning state you were in when you began the practice. A sympathetic learning pattern usually forms when early conditions were built around rote learning and repetition — where there was only one acceptable pathway and it led to a single, expected outcome. In those environments, the body learns that action is something to “get right,” not something to explore.

Conversely, the creative nervous system develops through play-based learning. That doesn’t mean there was no outcome or intention, but the route to get there remained open. You might have had a starting point and a desired end point, but your brain and body were free to figure out how they wanted to organise themselves along the way.

And then to the nub of it - how do these two different orientations manifest in actual behaviours and experiences of making things? I’m just going to paste her whole paragraph here.

So, What’s the Consequence of Creating From Each System?

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Remember, the survival nervous system is a system of reflex. Its entire function revolves around maximising your powers of force (fight), acceleration (flight), or hoarding/conservation (collapse).

If our creative patterns are rooted in this system, we are likely to find that:

• We are intensely outcome-driven, and may find ourselves getting tunnel-focused or “needing to get it right”

• We create rigid structures or pathways for ourselves

• We create with a “fix and conquer” energy and a harsh inner critic

• We feel the need to control the environment to feel ready to create

• The creative process feels exhausting, pressured, cramped or adversarial

• We embody urgency and pressure, or cycle into perfectionism, avoidance, self-doubt or collapse

We can absolutely be efficient and productive in this mode, but it has consequences, physically and emotionally, for our enjoyment, sustainability and longevity.

I’ve also wondered to myself if this, in part, is where the suffering artist trope comes from. That we may have built art education models based on outcome obsession and critique-based learning that fix us into a linear process and create closed-circuit survival loops. Not all the time, of course but, well… enough.

Conversely, operating from our parasympathetic, or creative nervous system, we are more likely to be:

• Curiosity-driven, with easier access to imagination

• Flexible and varied in the routes we take to achieve outcomes

• Able to match our energy to the circumstance

• Creatively collaborative in our outlook

• Naturally inclined to build sustainable practices over time

• Intelligent in how we use energy

• Able to see mistakes as interesting rather than catastrophic

• Lost in the process (in a good way)

And it’s important to remember: this is not a conversation about control or calm.

It’s a conversation about capacity and vitality.

When I read the description of creating from the survival nervous system, it felt like the story of my life. It wasn’t a perfect fit. There was no rote learning and repetition in my early conditions, but there was an acceptable pathway (you will show yourself to be exceptional), and there was a single, expected outcome (you will be recognised as brilliant, and the failures of our own lives will be redeemed).

‘Getting it right’ was never about a set of external criteria, in the sense that my reaction to the above was, you can all fuck off, I ain’t playing your game (and that includes you, art institutions). I wasn’t trying to please any authority figures, as I absented myself from all such things at the age of 18.

‘Getting it right’ for me became a search for something I could never fully define. A longed-for resolution between myself and the deepest currents of the world, which would be alchemised by pigment, canvas and line. I knew it was possible, I felt it in my bones; that a human being could create something which lifted everything out of the mud and shone.

I wasn’t trying to ‘get it right’ but boy did I want to get to the place where I could make that thing.

My rigid structure became ‘showing up’ relentlessly. An iron determination that, after so many partial starts, I was now not going to let anything stop me. This is what I had survived all the rest for - to finally make this thing happen.

‘Fix and conquer’ seemed to describe my approach perfectly. Policeman in my path? Have some TNT. Feeling pressured, stressed? So what’s new? At least this is now all for a proper purpose.

It wasn’t exactly that nothing was ever good enough. I had lots of periods where things gained momentum and for a while I would be fascinated and pleased by the unexpected things that emerged. But there was this strange feeling that all of it was just a warm-up, that I was nowhere near ‘there’ yet. The most important thing was to just keep going, even though over the years I began to realise that it often did feel ‘exhausting, pressured, cramped or adversarial’.

When I first read Jane’s essay I thought, ‘Oh my god. Bingo! This whole damn thing is a pathology, glad I got over all that and don’t have to do it any more.’ Now, however, some months later, I’m finding that I want to go back a little and look at some of the things that appeared.

Maybe it wasn’t a pathology at all. Maybe I just didn’t know how to firewall my response to the world, or maybe the volume of that response got turned up sometimes so deafeningly loud because it had been shouting into the wind for so many years.

Perhaps some of the work that arrived deserves a bit more than just being rushed past on my way to the next new thing.

If you’re not familiar with the Nike sports shoe ad referred to in my title, the motto was ‘Just do it’.

all images by Tamsin Haggis

1. A sleeping policeman here in the UK refers to a speed bump in the road