What Feels Natural Might Be Stunting Your Creativity || By Phannie Krentzman
We’ve all heard of the comfort zone, but how does that play out when it comes to creating and listening to our bodies? There’s a difference between what feels natural and what comes naturally, and when it comes to creating, what feels natural might be limiting what you’re capable of. Oftentimes, when something feels natural it feels comfortable. There is an ease to it, you feel at home in it and no internal alarm bells are ringing. What comes naturally will create ease, but it doesn’t always feel easy. There’s an important distinction to make between when you are creating from your unbridled potential and when you are creating within the confines of what maintains your sense of safety.
Let’s take this to the nervous system. Your nervous system is a relational activation system, patterned through past experiences with the sole purpose of keeping you safe—maintaining your survival. You might be surprised to find out that your nervous system doesn’t actually take what is happening objectively into account, it filters what is happening through an expectation of what will happen based on past experiences. It needs to react quickly so it filters out information that has yet to be categorized by its survival priorities. This can block some vital and useful information when you’re working on expanding or healing yourself. Now with awareness, presence and practice you can “override” this reflexive reaction, because who you are is not just your nervous system. You are a whole being, inclusive of your bodymind and spirit. Your nervous system only has as much power in your experience as you give it.
And our culture loves to give it power. When it comes to truly creating, your awareness, your inherent connection to what you love will provide you with what’s necessary to create that thing. It will give you the necessary action steps to bring that Vision that lives in your heart out into the world around you. These direct and obvious steps are often in direct conflict with your comfort zone. It may feel extremely unnatural to collaborate with that colleague who seems a little too outspoken to you. Or, it could feel very confronting and unsafe to be honest and vulnerable about your authentic experience in respect to what it is you’re creating. You may really be asked to stretch what you believe in or what you’re capable of, to follow the obvious steps that your Truth is guiding you to take towards creating that thing. And that’s why staying with what feels natural or being defined by what feels natural could be preventing you from making your next or first, greatest creation.
I, for instance, am a new mother and the idea of caring for someone, feeding them from my body, having them share my body for 10 months and then being responsible for them essentially until they’re two decades older, or until I’m dead, felt very unnatural to me. It felt so unnatural to me that I had convinced myself that I didn’t really want to have a child and I didn’t really see the point of it. I knew though, deeper down in my heart, that it was true for me. Working with my resistance and continuing to choose to create a family, a new human, was indeed challenging, but rewarding beyond my wildest imagination. And boy, does it continue to transform and expand who I am and who I am becoming.
The best starting point for working with the discomfort, the feeling of something being very unnatural is to notice it. Notice what it brings up within you, notice what you’re assuming about yourself and the project or desire. Notice what it makes you feel, and be curious if it’s just your nervous system letting you know that this landscape has yet to be mapped, so better to just not explore it. Because most often, our resistance, or our fear, isn’t based in what’s happening now, but what has been experienced before.
About the Author: Phannie has a long career of being a movement artist, movement and embodiment educator and creator. During her career as a professional dancer, studio owner, and company founder, she spent her time uncovering what is true and real in this world. Originally used as tools to create content for performances with strong messaging about the human experience, she created the embodiment teachings and methodology of the Radical Love Movement.
Phannie has dedicated her life to authentic expression and understanding how consciousness works. She now has alchemical structure to support others in discovery and application of their authentic selves expressed through the body.
