✨Anti Blocked Artist Club WK 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion
<p>Thank you <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/119390947-rachael-t">Rachael T</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/142902137-jack">Jack</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/284462471-summa">Summa⭐️</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/325041505-sea">Sea</a>, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.</p><p>This week was about compassion and what it looks like to offer it to yourself as an artist. We moved through three essays: <em>Fear</em>, <em>Enthusiasm</em>, and <em>Creative U-Turns</em> & stayed with how compassion helps us remain in relationship with ourselves while navigating fear, creativity, and redirection.</p><p>If you want to go deeper into this week—through more in-depth EFT work, or by exploring the beauty, metaphysics, and neuroscience underlying compassion and fear that material lives in the <strong>After-Party Notes</strong>, along with more intimate reflections from the live session. Those are available to paid subscribers.</p><p><p>The Dark Divines is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my art, consider becoming a paid subscriber.</p></p><p><strong> Fear</strong></p><p>I don’t know if you know this but fear often gets mislabeled as laziness or procrastination, when it way deeper than that. Fear highlights how we try not to feel abandonment, success or failure.</p><p>Instead of turning that fear into proof that something is wrong with us, the we explore learning how to name it and give ourselves more compassion while we move through it. Over time, that makes it possible to make a friend of fear instead of letting it quietly run the show.</p><p>We also talked about how fear can form early, especially for children who are rebellious, curious, artistic, or inclined to ask questions. When those qualities are shut down instead of supported, that suppression can become a foundational source of fear later in life.</p><p>Allowing children to ask questions helps them grow into adults who know when to question authority and when to trust their instincts. For a lot of artists, reclaiming that permission is part of the work.</p><p><strong>Enthusiasm</strong></p><p>This is one of my favorites in the book and a really meaningful part of the session. We talked about what enthusiasm actually means and what it looks like to create from enthusiasm rather than obligation. When you’re creating from that place, the creative journey feels alive instead of heavy.</p><p>Enthusiasm allows creativity to feel nourishing rather than pressured, and we need that. </p><p><strong>Creative U-Turns</strong></p><p>This was more complex, especially when we looked at how creative U-turns actually show up for Black women.</p><p>We talked about literary mothers like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others who were not afforded the luxury of retreating from life to recover creatively. Their U-turns often happened through endurance, responsibility, and community.</p><p>For many of them, creativity became a place to rest, to explore, and to express what they were carrying while continuing forward. That context matters, and it changes how we understand what creative redirection can look like.</p><p><strong>💡 Main Exercise: Clearing the Block</strong></p><p>This week’s main exercise is about getting real with your artist-child about what’s actually in the way, so the work has room to move again. Grab your journal and walk through these five questions without editing yourself.</p><p><strong>1. List your resentments.</strong> Write down any resentment or anger you feel connected to this project. It can be petty, dramatic, old, or brand new. If your artist is irritated, jealous, tired, or holding a grudge about anything tied to this work, put it on the page.</p><p><strong>2. List your fears.</strong> Ask your artist to name every fear it has about this project, the work itself, or anyone involved. Let the fears sound as young and extra as they actually feel. If it feels like a big, scary monster to your artist, it belongs here.</p><p><strong>3. Ask if there’s more.</strong> Check in and ask yourself, “Is that everything?” See if there’s any anger, resistance, or fear you skipped over because it felt silly, small, or inconvenient. If something pops up, write it down too.</p><p><strong>4. Name the payoff.</strong> Ask yourself what you stand to gain by <em>not</em> doing this work. Less pressure, less visibility, fewer expectations, more comfort—whatever comes up, let it be honest. This is where you spot the quiet bargains you’ve been making.</p><p><strong>5. Make your deal.</strong> On a fresh page, write a simple agreement: <em>“Okay, Creative Force, you take care of the quality, I’ll take care of the quantity.”</em> Sign it. Date it. Put it somewhere you can see when you show up to work.</p><p>This little sequence does serious damage to a creative block, because it pulls everything that’s been whispering in the dark into the light where you can actually move with it.</p><p><strong>Tasks for the Week</strong></p><p><strong>1. Morning Pages</strong> Read your Morning Pages. This process is best undertaken with two colored markers, one to highlight insights and another to highlight actions needed. Do not judge your pages or yourself. This is very important.</p><p>Yes, they will be boring. No, I like that part. I think this is really insightful. You probably will find that there are a lot of creative ideas that you can start working on and building toward for your upcoming season of you displaying your art. And you’ll also notice a lot of your growth and a lot of your darkness. Take the time to sit with that. That’s super important.</p><p>Also, take stock. Who have you consistently been complaining about? What have you procrastinated on? What, blessedly, have you allowed yourself to change or accept? Take heart. Many of us notice an alarming tendency toward black and white thinking. Don’t be thrown by this.</p><p>And then acknowledge. The pages have allowed us to vent without self-destruction, to plan without interference, to complain without an audience, to dream without restriction, to know our own minds. Give yourself credit for undertaking them. Give them credit for the change and growth they have fostered.</p><p><strong>2. Visualizing</strong> You have already done the work with naming your goal and identifying True North. The following exercise allows you to fully imagine having the goal accomplished. Please spend time filling it out in rich detail.</p><p>Name your goal. In the present tense, describe yourself doing it in the height of your powers. This is your ideal scene. Read this out loud to yourself. Post this above your work area. Read this out loud daily.</p><p>You can also use my <em>Visualize Your Dream Life</em> meditation, which is always available on my YouTube, to do the same exact thing. For those who may not want to write or are unable to write, that’s another great way to do this.</p><p><strong>3. Priorities</strong> List your creative goals for the year. List your creative goals for the month. Then list your creative goals for the week.</p><p><strong>4. Creative U-Turns</strong> All of us have taken creative U-turns. Name one of yours. Name three more. Name one that just kills you.</p><p>Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for all your failures — failures of nerves, timing, initiative, and device. Write a personal list of affirmations to help you do better in the future.</p><p>Very gently consider whether you need to abandon or let go of any of the ideas you have. Remember that you’re not alone. For this, you can use the Creative Shock Code I broke down in the After-Party notes for Week Seven. That will help you see where you’re at with your ideas and which ones are on pause versus which ones you actually need to dive back into right now.</p><p><strong>🪞 Weekly Check-In</strong></p><p>* How many days this week did you do your Morning Pages? Regarding your U-turns, have you allowed yourself a shift toward compassion, even if it was just one page?Did you do your Artist Date this week? Did you keep the emphasis on fun? What did you do? How did you feel?</p><p>* Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?</p><p>* Were there any issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.</p><p>As we move into Week 10, we’ll be focusing in on <strong>Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection</strong>, and I really want you to take your time with everything we covered so far. Remember you never have to rush through this journey just to say you checked it off. Let it move at the pace your body and your creative life can actually hold.</p><p>If anything came up for you this week, feel free to share in the comments or in the chat. This work deepens when we let it be seen, and you never know who else needs to hear that they’re not alone in it. And if these sessions have been supportive for you, you’re always welcome to invite others to join us live.</p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://lotuslaloba.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">lotuslaloba.substack.com/subscribe</a>
