Sustainable creativity require exercise and an at peace mind

I realise it has been a long while since I last posted, largely due to my overwhelming obsession with my own creation The Singing Psychic. As a creative we always have to fall in love with our own ‘art”, otherwise it would not get finished and shipped out of the door. However I am aware with my very busy schedule that I have to keep looking after myself, my health and my normal life. I like encouraging others to make their own work but it has been happening in person and via my twitter  only, I re-post jobs, news and  funding often there.

In years past, I would fall out of doing a run of shows with a complete mess of un-dealt-with life waiting for me. From friends I had put off until after the current creative rush of deadlines were past to life, bills, letters left unopened, even lovers have got left on the sidelines of ‘Sorry I can’t see you til …’

However a sustained life of creativity surely has to be less boom and bust and more of a daily drip feed. I am still a work in progress but unless I have no wiggle room left at all, I also make sure I do some form of exercise and chant each morning before the creative stuff happens. It makes me happier, clearer headed and I am sure more creative.

The daily (well four or five times a week at least) exercise I am now much stricter about, since reading the book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John Ratey which has indeed finally convinced me that my brain is bigger and clearer if I train. I suspected but now I know 😉

I also chant (a form of meditation one could argue, although I also practice the attendant Buddhist philosophy) and again there is lots of evidence that finding time to learn peace and focus in such a practice helps you deal with stress, makes you more creative, courageous and compassionate to oneself and others. Note I say at peace, not peaceful, I am far more at peace with myself as a human being but to say my mind is peaceful is definitely not correct. It jumps around like a kitten, gets excited by odd bits of string and then overtired, it crashes.

Other habits come and go, including ones I want to install such as daily singing practice but these two of exercise and a mind practice never waver. Well they do but I am always focused on getting them back into my life as soon as possible once I have fell off the healthy wagon. Daily exercise and chanting  have become my stillness in what seems like an ever quicker world. I am off to Cannes for the film festival this Wednesday, then taking my Singing Psychic show to Prague Festival Fringe June 1st to 4th as well as Edinburgh Fringe in August. Of course along with all these shows  there is press blurb to write, videos to make, new contacts to email plus I keep having grand ideas that require huge follow through. My forthcoming SONGS OF BREXIT webseries is such a ‘grand’ idea, but making it the very thing I dream it could be is taking longer than I thought. My own self-named ‘statue of David’ is refusing to be carved out of the marble cleanly and seems to have a hump. It will be unveiled but I need to do some pick up shots first Monday plus I need to edit my new SONGS OF PRAGUE mini webseries for the first episode to go out this Tuesday and I also need to film some shots for a mini-trailer idea for my documentary ahead of meetings in Cannes.

However I have hit more deadlines this year, managed to make more things happen (including my Singing Psychic performance at the Brit Awards Official Afterparty at the 02) and let less stuff slip by. I managed to finally re-edit my novel THE RIDE, write a synopsis and sent it off for a competition, I have come up with a further sketch series idea and written a basic pitch and the feature documentary I want to make has now got an outline. The more I train my body and my brain, the more I do the things I chose to carve out my own creative career. I am still far from being truly organised but every little helps.

Link to 2014 post

8 lessons I learnt from the Cannes film festival about being a successful creative

So this post, as a return to some no doubt un-regular blogging on creativity, is a plea for you to look at where you can install exercise and mind calming practices into your lives. Not for it’s own sake but to allow yourself to create. In that vein I am undertaking to keep in touch more so you too get out of your own way and start making more art and getting it shown.

Just think SMALLER BUTT + BIGGER BRAIN = BETTER ART.

Singing Psychic links including her new weekly song forecast is http://www.singingpsychic.tv