THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Eric Maisel:
We have to often reclaim our imagination, because we’ve been told our whole life long to draw within the lines and know the facts for the tests and not ask those impertinent and curious questions and just do a lot of things that have curtailed our imagination over time.
Announcer:
It’s The Inspiration Place Podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to The Inspiration Place Podcast, an art world insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman:
Hello, my passion maker. This is Miriam Schulman, your curator of inspiration, and you’re listening to episode number 167 of The Inspiration Place Podcast. I am so grateful that you’re here. Your mind is yours to redesign, redecorate, and create. The idea that you are what you think has concerned philosophers from Marcus Aurelius to the Buddha. Today, this age old message is delivered via cognitive behavior therapy and CBT. My guest today goes beyond those techniques by practicing easy to understand visualization exercises.
That way, you can redesign your mind and change not only what you think, but how you think. In this episode, you’ll discover why mental stress goes hand in hand with intelligence and creativity, how to use visualization exercises to change how and what you think, and how you can redesign your mind to increase your activity, reduce your anxiety, or recover from addiction. Today’s guest is the author of more than 50 books on creativity and personal growth, including Redesign Your Mind.
Widely regarded as America’s foremost creativity coach, he’s a retired family therapist and noted leader in the movement own as critical psychology. He writes the Rethinking Mental Health blog for Psychology Today and facilitates Creativity and Deep Writing Workshops around the world. Please welcome back to The Inspiration Place, Eric Maisel. Hello, Eric. Welcome to the show.
Eric Maisel:
Hi, Miriam. It’s great to be back with you. Lovely to see you.
Miriam Schulman:
Last time I had you on, I was working on my book Proposal, and now I am working on the book for HarperCollins. You have been a big part of that success, because one of the things you said to me during our last interview, you said, “Miriam, you have to be more than willing to write a shitty first year draft. You have to be willing to write a shitty first book.” I have gone back to that over and over again during this whole process, because it’s been really challenging actually writing a book.
I thought I was like done once I got the contract. It was like, no, now that the real heavy mind lifting begins, which I think is a really good transition to what we’re talking about today.
Eric Maisel:
Well, your listeners have got to get better at accepting the realities of process. It’s really hard to not want guarantees and have hopes for your work and expect your work to be brilliant. But in fact, only a percentage of the things we do will be any good. Who wants to hear that? But that’s the truth of process.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. I love what you say in the book. We’re going to dig deep into Redesign Your Mind, and I’m going to jump forward a little bit. One analogy you brought up about that, about willing to create the things that aren’t masterpieces, as you were talking about, it was Bach, right? Bach’s Cantatas?
Eric Maisel:
Could be Bach Cantatas. I often used that example. Could be Beethoven’s symphonies. It could be all the things. It could be Bob Dylan’s songs, but probably Bach Cantatas, because there are hundreds of them and maybe half a dozen are wonderful and most are serviceable or ordinary or unmemorable. He’s pretty good. If he’s pretty good and his output is huge, but only a percentage is excellent, we just have to be wise about understanding that we’re going to do a lot of work that we don’t love, a lot of work that’s ordinary.
By the way, we want to stand and behind our ordinary work, because our ordinary work requires our advocacy also. All by way of saying mistakes and messes are coming and we have to be able to tolerate that.
Miriam Schulman:
Right now at The Whitney, there is a Jasper Johns exhibit, and the curators were very intentional about this not being the 20 best Jasper Johns. The ones that we know and love, we know like he has the flag, he has the numbers, he has the matte painting. This exhibit, it takes you through his experiments of how he arrived to each of those things. There was one room I walked in, I was like, “Well, this is the room of failure.”
You could see some of the ideas that he was playing with that helped him arrive at some of those masterpieces, but these were the ones that didn’t work. But from an art history perspective, it was interesting, and it made sense why it was in the museum. It wasn’t just like here’s the best thing.
Eric Maisel:
Of course, it wasn’t the room of failure. We don’t countenance thoughts like that. It was a room of process.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay, thank you. That’s the first thing that I thought when I walked in there. It was like, “Huh, what happened in this room?”
Eric Maisel:
Yeah. Well, let’s get rid of that language.
Miriam Schulman:
Thank you.
Eric Maisel:
We don’t need failure language. We don’t need to pester ourselves. Truth is, that it is process. They really aren’t failures.
Miriam Schulman:
No, they aren’t because what you could see from looking at this is he couldn’t have of gotten to the end point without all those iterations in between.
Eric Maisel:
Yeah. Beethoven’s a good example too. For the nine symphonies, pundits will say 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 are great, and 2, 4, 6, and 8 aren’t. But you can’t do 9 without 8. You can’t do 8 without 7. You just can’t skip over the things that don’t work. It’d be lovely to be able to do that, but that’s not the way process works.
Miriam Schulman:
I wanted to start now back at the beginning, something that you talk about right in the beginning of the book about why mental stress goes hand in hand with intelligence and creativity.
Eric Maisel:
That’s a small subject. First of all, the creative process is making one choice after another, and there’ve been lots of social psychological experiments to show how anxiety producing choosing is. The act of choosing produces anxiety. If the creative process is one choice after another, that means that anxiety has to thread through the process. It just got to be there. We’re not trying to get rid of anxiety as a creative person, but we are trying to manage it because it is going to be there.
Second, some people, who knows why, I think pop out of the womb stubborn and already concerned about issues of life, purpose, and meaning. A lot of people aren’t concerned with those issues. A lot of people have conventional pursuits and aren’t plagued by questions about what makes life meaningful, or what’s my purpose on earth, or any of that. But some percentage, let’s pick a number, 5%, pop out of the womb stubbornly concerned about these issues from the first moment.
They’re going to be bothered by those issues their whole life. They’re going to see through to the void too often. They’re going to have the experience of feeling like excited matter, rather than really mattering too often. They’re going to have that experience too often and they have to shore up those existential holes themselves. Creating, by the way, by itself will not shore up those existential holes.
We know that by historical experience, by looking at creatives who are super productive and still committed suicide. It didn’t stop them from being unhappy getting all of their creative work done. One of my paradigm shifts is the shift from the idea of life purpose to the idea of life purposes, and that we need lots of that are important to us for a life to be full.
We need relationships and activism and service, all the things we could name in addition to living a creative life. Just getting another painting done isn’t quite enough to live a life.
Miriam Schulman:
Eric, you’ve written a lot of books on similar topics, and we’ve had you on the show before for your book Mastering Creative Anxiety or The Daily Practice, which by the way, we want to make sure we link all those in the show notes, which you’ll be able to find the book we’re talking about today and those other books, schulmanart.com/167. Why this book and why now?
Eric Maisel:
The simple answer is it popped into my head. That’s the simple answer. I have a degree in philosophy among other degrees, and so I kind of know the history of how the mind is conceptualized. For instance, they conceptualize the mind as a stage upon which our dramas play themselves out. I have lots of ideas about how the mind could be conceptualized, but one day it just struck me, why not think of it as a room? Because that is kind of how we experience it.
We kind of experience, sometimes at least, that we are going somewhere, and then we are somewhere and we’re inhabiting that space, which I call indwelling, inhabiting that room. It struck me. Well, if you conceptualize it as a room, well, then you could redesign it. You could redecorate it. You could play with it. You could repaint the walls. You could do all kinds of things.
And by doing that, you would be doing something actually profound rather than just wrestling with thoughts, which is what cognitive behavioral therapy teaches, to wrestle with the thoughts. You’d be changing the source of the thoughts, and then you’d have new thoughts and you wouldn’t have to wrestle with them. Just suddenly like that, the idea popped into my head. What if it was a room?
And then I just played with the different kinds of visualizations that would sort of naturally go with the idea of your mind being a room. I’ve always liked visualizations. As probably your viewers or listeners know, the idea of visualization started some decades ago in a hospital in Northern California, where somebody got the idea to invite cancer patients to visualize their healthy cells defeating their cancerous cells.
The history of visualization comes out of the medical model, the mind-body connection model. And even if we don’t know exactly how the mind connects to the body, we just know that it must, that there just must be a connection there. Visualizing has been a powerful tool or technique along with other tools like journaling, what have you, for folks to gain self-awareness and change. The idea of the book is very simple. There is this room and you can visualize it.
You can experience being in it. And when you are there, you can make the changes you need to make so that you can live the life you want to lead.
Miriam Schulman:
As I was reading your book and you’re talking about visualizing your mind as a room, my husband and I have an old farmhouse Upstate New York in the Catskills, and there’s an attic. There’s nothing in the attic, so I thought, “Oh, that’s my room,” except, except there’s a lot of critter invasions in that attic. And that is exactly how I experience actually my mind is that I want to get rid of these negative thoughts and they keep coming back. Just to be specific, we have these like bats.
We have the flying squirrels. We get rid of one set of rodents. The other ecosystem moves in. But that’s how I kept thinking about my mind is that attic up there that I would love to be able to use and put things up there, but I can’t because of these poopy rodent creatures that keep scurrying around.
Eric Maisel:
Exactly. Probably it’s about the second visualization. I think the first visualization has to do with installing windows in your mind room and letting a breeze through and getting rid of a lot of that claustrophobic feeling. So much of what annoys us about our own mind is how we repeat ourselves. We can’t sort of stop thinking the same thoughts over and over again. Installing windows can help with that. Get a breeze blowing through. Blow those thoughts right out the window.
But then the second visualization has to do with exactly what you were speaking to, and that is removing the bed of nails is my version of what you were saying and installing an easy chair. Such an easy idea to just picture, installing an easy chair and living in your mind room on an easy chair instead of on a bed of nails. I think people can get the feeling tone of this instantly, whether they can pull it off over time and really make it a habit to go to their easy chair when they enter their mind room.
That remains to be seen. But it’s easy to conceptualize this. It’s easy to get this. That it would be lovely to get rid of that bed of nails, switch it out for an easy chair. And then as you enter… Let’s just think about entering too. When you enter, flip the lights on, but have the light switch also be a calmness switch. Why not? As you enter, because we often enter anxiously. Not sure we want to face our thoughts or our creative work or what have you, so we enter anxiously.
Well, now when you enter, you can instantly feel calmer by virtue of flipping that calmness switch, and then you can go to your easy chair, and then you can have the experience of being in your easy chair and also being calmer at the same time, which is the way we would like to be.
Miriam Schulman:
Can you give an example or two of people who have used visualization techniques and how they helped them?
Eric Maisel:
Well, I work with lots of creative performing artists, lots of memoir writers. One of the visualizations in the book and that I teach clients is the idea of a speaker’s corner where they can speak their truth. Probably everyone knows… It turns out, I thought that everybody knew this. It turns out some people don’t. But there’s a famous speaker’s corner in Hyde Park. It’s been there for hundreds of years in London, where you could say whatever you wanted without reprisal.
You could badmouth the government and not be arrested. You can have your speaker’s corner in your mind room, a corner of your room, where you can go and tell yourself the truth. It doesn’t mean you necessarily want to tell the world. That’s a different question and that’s about safety. If you’re in a country where they execute reporters, then you’re not clear you want to say things that are dangerous, but at least you want to tell your the truth.
It’s very useful for memoir writers who are often unconsciously on the fence. They’re in two places at once. Boy, do I want to tell my truth? Well, it would be dangerous to tell my truth. They’re in both of those places, which is why they often go back and forth between, should I write a memoir, or should I turn it into a novel? Should I write a memoir, or should do it as nonfiction? This or that, for this reason, that it doesn’t feel safe and they don’t know quite that it isn’t feeling safe.
Again, that’s a long way of saying, if you have a speaker’s corner in your mind, then you know that you have a dedicated place where you can go and undefensively tell yourself the truth, and also start practicing speaking the truth. For clients who have trouble speaking the truth, and that’s like everybody, I advise them to try to say things in sentences that have seven words or fewer just as practice. Because the fewer words we use, the stronger we’re being and the more honest we’re being.
This sounds like, please stop that, or I don’t like that, or don’t come in. That’s what speaking powerfully sounds like. And most people can’t do that. They have to add lots of words to apologize or take the sting out of the thing they’re saying. For some reason, they can’t say something with a strong period at the end. They speak very wishy-washily in the world and also internally. That’s another purpose of this visualization, this speaker’s corner.
This is a place where you can in safety say things strongly in three or four or five or six words and really get out what you’re meaning to say.
Miriam Schulman:
I’m wondering if you would agree that a lot of artists who have strong feelings of empathy for other people have more trouble speaking the truth because they have more compassion for how other people might feel or they don’t want to cause other people distress or pain with their own truth. Would you agree with that?
Eric Maisel:
I would, but I do think that the problem is more fear of reprisal from actually saying the truth than compassion or empathy. I agree that the compassion and empathy is there, but people get criticized in life. They criticize themselves. They don’t find life particularly safe. They may think it’s safe on some level. Well, they think that they can say what they need to say, but public speaking is the world’s number one phobia. We know that it’s just not easy to just speak up.
Say a few things at work or anywhere, not that easy. Plus, and I write in this area too, the area of authoritarian wounding, that is authoritarians in the family. To say a little bit about, the authoritarian personality was examined in the 1950s as an aftermath to World War II. The researchers at the university of California at Berkeley were curious about the following thing, who were Hitler’s followers? Not who was Hitler, but why did so many Germans follow him? Who were they?
They did a lot of research on that, and the authoritarian personality literature has been about politics and social issues mostly. I’ve done some primary research in a different place, and that’s authoritarians in the family, what it’s like to grow up with a bullying father or mother or grandfather or sibling or what have you. Pundits who write in this area, there are no real statistics, but pundits who write in this area believe that as much as 25% of the population is authoritarian.
I think our current politics maybe speaks to that. Well, if you grew up with an authoritarian parent or sibling or grandparent, it’s not going to feel very safe to speak. Either you’ll be silent, or you’ll couch what you have to say in ways you’ve learned don’t get reprisals. So that’s just a long answer to, is it compassion or is it fear? Both, but more fear I think.
Miriam Schulman:
I agree with you. It’s not compassion, is that they can imagine what the other person is going to think and they don’t want that judgment.
Eric Maisel:
Or that pushback, or the consequences.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah.
Eric Maisel:
Let’s say you’re an artist whose husband is just retired and now he’s wandering around the house and he keeps wandering into your studio. It’s hard to say, “Do not come in from 7:00 AM to noon. Let’s have lunch together, but do not come in from 7:00 AM.” The fear is that there’ll be real consequences, that there’ll be a blow up, or that maybe the divorce that should have been long coming, you’ve now brought it forward by two years, or what have you. There are real consequences to speaking up.
I’m not saying whatever you learn in your speaker’s corner, immediately put it out in the world, because that’s a different process. You to decide on your safety needs and what’s safe to say. It’s one thing to say it inside, and that’s vital. It’s another thing to say it outside, and that’s a calculation.
Miriam Schulman:
A lot of us experience the spouses wandering into our studios during COVID when they weren’t in the office anymore. I had Zoom college going on in the house as well. The whole family was here for quite some time.
By the way, I wanted to make sure you knew about my free masterclass, How to Sell More Art. During this free masterclass, you’ll learn why your success isn’t measured by your social media following and what’s really going to move the new when it comes to sales and how to ditch unnecessary social media platforms to get more of your studio time back.
You’ll learn the five P’s of profiting from your art and inspiring stories of artists who have built a sustainable income selling their art. You’ll want to see how they did it. To choose your show time, go to schulmanart.com/sellmoreart.
What sorts of issues do your visualization techniques do a good job of addressing?
Eric Maisel:
Well, I would say every single one. Let’s just tackle them in some order. First of all, the thing nowadays always called depression, we have to spend a lot of time talking about why I don’t think it ought to be called depression, but be that as it may. The thing called depression can be handled actually very nicely by this mechanism, by this tactic, by simply visualizing your walls of brighter color. Just repainting, because they’re dingy gray for everybody. Those walls in everybody’s mind room are dingy gray.
It’s sort of soot over and maybe fully black. Let’s get a nice Navajo white or something going there and just repaint them. Or if you like wallpaper, put up some cheerful wallpaper or even some interesting wallpaper that takes you to a different place, that takes you to the Renaissance or to Provence or someplace. Very simple idea of repainting or putting up wallpaper to help with the thing typically called depression.
To help with the thing typically called anxiety, well, there’s calmness switch when you first enter the room, but I think another lovely one is to imagine, picture a chest of drawers in which you put lots of things. There can be beautiful things in there and your life purpose China and the hats you wear for the different roles that you’re performing in life. Lots of things. But you can also have a snow globe collection, because I think the activity of shaking a snow globe and then feeling the snow settle really helps with anxiety.
It helps you feel like you are settling. As long as it takes for the snow to settle, you can have the experience of sitting in your easy chair settling as the snow settles. And then being more settled, you can get on with your work. Whatever the issue is, if it’s addiction, you can have your recovery practice translate into some mind room work. I think it’s fun to imagine what the connection might be. If this is the thing that’s bothering me, how could I change my mind room to make that better or easier?
And then just being a creative imaginative person, playing with that idea. By the way, just as parentheses, I’m granting that the folks who are listening are imaginative. But in fact, that’s not a given. We have to often reclaim our imagination, because we’ve been told our whole life long to draw within the lines and know the facts for the test and not ask those impertinent and curious questions and just do a lot of things that have curtailed our imagination over time.
A lot of grownups have to figure out how to be imaginative again. They have to get permission for themselves to do what any kid can do. Any kid can take a salmon over here and a skyscraper over there and make a salmon shape skyscraper. Just do it and have fun. We want to keep the salmon over there and keep the skyscraper over there. We want to keep things where they, so to speak, belong. That’s what we’ve been trained to do.
We have to remember how to put a skyscraper and a salmon back together, and that’s called innovation, and that’s also imagination. And as a creative person, we want those things for ourselves.
Miriam Schulman:
What about really serious challenges such as bipolar or severe trauma? Would this help with that?
Eric Maisel:
It will help with that. And now we’re in the territory that I write in and that I spend a lot of time in, and that’s the areas of critical psychology and critical psychiatry. I don’t believe that there are mental disorders as defined by the mental disorder established by the mental health services. This is a long story, but the main thing is to, if you can, let go of these labels. Begin by not calling yourself bipolar or clinically depressed or ADHD or ODD or all of these labels.
Let go of the label. Experiences are true. You’re having certain experiences. You’re having certain thoughts. You’re having certain behaviors. I’m certainly not arguing that you’re not having the experiences, but adding the label doesn’t help and typically will lead you down the road of chemicals called medication. They’re not medication, because if you don’t have an illness, they’re just chemicals with powerful effects. And parenthetically, you might want that effect.
If you’re severely depressed and suicidal, you may want what an antidepressant can do, just as you might want what any chemical can do when you need that chemical. But this is all by way of saying step one of the process of getting a grip on your mind, which is the Buddhist phrase or redesigning your mind. Step one is to stop believing that you have a mental disorder that you can’t concentrate or that all of these things that people have now bought into, let go of the labels and start fresh as you enter your mind room without the burden of these labels.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s beautiful. All right, Eric. I want to make sure everybody knows that you can get Eric’s book Redesign Your Mind: The Breakthrough Program for Real Cognitive Change. We have linked that in the show notes, schulmanart.com/167, as well as all the places where you can find Eric. Do you have any upcoming workshops though that you want to share with us, because I know you do a lot of writers workshops or creativity workshops?
Eric Maisel:
I do three month Get Your Book Written workshops that start every three months. This one started October, November, December. The next one there would be January if you’re interested in some help with a support group and a class. I train creativity coaches three times a year, every February, June, and September.
If you might be interested in the revenue stream, if you’re an artist and you might be interested on the revenue stream that creativity coaching might provide for you, come take a look at that. All of that’s at my site, ericmaisel.com.
Miriam Schulman:
Right. Beautiful. We’ve included links to all those places in the show notes, schulmanart.com/167. Don’t forget to check out my free masterclass, How to Sell More Art and Escape the Social Media Grind. Go to schulmanart.com/sellmoreart. Alrighty, Eric, do you have any last words for my listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Eric Maisel:
I think the main thing I’d want to lead folks with is the idea about the book just before this one, The Power of Daily Practice. The idea that it’s really important to get to your work every day. I mean, every day, because every creative person knows if you skip three, four, five days, then months and years seem to vanish. We lose huge chunks of time the second we’re not in touch with our work for a few days.
My takeaway would be try to get to your work every day if it’s only for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Keeping that kind of contact is vital.
Miriam Schulman:
I love that. Thank you so much for being with me here today. And my friend, make sure you hit the follow button or the plus sign if it’s Apple Podcast and your podcast app. If you’re feeling extra generous, please leave a review. It helps others find the show. All right, my friend, thank you so much for being with me here today. I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Stay inspired.
Announcer:
Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place Podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram @schulmanart, and of course, on schulmanart.com.
Subscribe & Review in iTunes
Are you subscribed to my podcast? If you’re not, I want to encourage you to do that today. I don’t want you to miss an episode. I’m adding a bunch of bonus episodes to the mix and if you’re not subscribed there’s a good chance you’ll miss out on those. Click here to subscribe in iTunes!
Now if you’re feeling extra loving, I would be really grateful if you left me a review over on iTunes, too. Those reviews help other people find my podcast and they’re also fun for me to go in and read. Just click here to review, select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” and let me know what your favorite part of the podcast is. Thank you!