Aphantasia for me is improvisation. It requires being in a state of flow. All that you absorb and learn is in in your body. When you stop trying to force what doesn’t exist, a vision in your mind’s eye, the ideas, images, and words begin to flow onto the page. The more it releases onto the page, the more it adjusts, grows, changes, and allows the muse to lead.
Stopping to think, pausing to correct spelling errors, or getting interrupted, block the flow, faltering the improvisation of idea flowing through my body, from mind to arm to hand and fingers holding a pen which translates thoughts into form.
In tai chi, when you reach this state of flow, you are no longer worried about direction, the proper moves or even the next move. You are one with the forms and the dance comes up from the earth, moves through your feet, processes in your dan tian (Sacral and Root) and is expressed with your hands. Your body flows with the energy of the earth.
Tai chi means infinity.1 Qi means energy. All things are energy and in between all things energy flows.
The forms of tai chi are stories we tell through the movements. They can be learned through telling your own storytelling of the movements to help you learn the forms. As you deepen your relationship to each movement, the stories fall away, your focus is deep and the world disappears. You ebb and flow with the continuous movement, your breath falls in sync with each step, each reach and contraction of your arms. Energy builds between the spaces of your body creating an electrical tingling charge. You become one with the dance of the earth. You aren’t sure if you missed a step or made the move. It doesn’t matter in that moment as you are completely present. Past and future disappear.
Writing and drawing with aphantasia is this same letting go and trusting in the flow and improvisation. An idea arrives from the earth or the heavens and you allow it to flow through you, through your head and gut, into your arms and out of your hands onto the paper. You trust that you can release it. You know that you can fix it, revise it, improve upon it later.
It’s not aphantasia that holds me back (In many ways I think it sets me free), but the fears developed from repeated criticisms, from seeing/believing that humans are supposed to be filled with natural talent or see visions in their mind. In reality it takes practice, daily practice to build a bank of skills that can then flow as if they existed in your body all along.
Those with natural talent are rare.2 It may seem easy for them, but I’m guessing they have their own challenges. Maybe if they don’t have challenges it isn’t because they are a prodigy, but because those around them noticed their ability and supported them to continue. Maybe no one ever told them their dreams were impossible. Maybe no one told them to stick to it even when the wanted to rest or try different things. (That is a story for someone other than me to tell.)
I paused my journal writing to absorb the new day. A Haiku appeared unformed and messy.
pastel dawn
silhouetted birds begin to fly
dew stillness.
I play with the energy and space between the words and ideas:
soft pastel dawning
birds fly silhouetted
dew stillness.
And more play:
Soft pastel dawning
bird silhouettes fly though
frosted dew stillness
And the adjustments become smaller more detailed:
Soft pastel dawning
bird silhouettes draw lines through . . .
Until:
Soft pastel dawning
bird silhouettes paint lines though
frosted dew stillness.
creating my 15 syllable phenological memory of this morning.
Ideas, like this post, the above poem, art, and other thoughts written in my journal, seem to flow out of me as I read Free Play.3
There are no visions in my head. The flow can easily be halted by interruptions. I often want to escape to a cabin in the woods or a place by the ocean, or anywhere alone. At the same time, I know too that when I visit new places, I want to explore, experience, and gather new images, ideas, stories and experiences to be prepared for the muse.
This is the balancing act of being creative.
I think the only thing truly aphantasic about my experience is that it all happens without imagery appearing in my mind.
How do you experience creative flow?
What holds you back?
Have you taken the aphantasia test? Where are you on the scale?
How do you think/feel your ability or inability to visualize in your mind’s eye effects your creativity and imagination?
I began playing at Tai Chi in the fall of 2019. It was a practice that I added to my restorative yoga class in my work to heal my body from the fibromyalgia that was and sometimes still does, cause me pain and slows me down. By the time the pandemic shut everything down, we had learned the first half of a form. I kept up the practice on my own and loved to move through the form on my deck with the birds, squirrels and the breeze. It was almost a year later, that I went back to class. By then, they had been learning the next part of the form and I picked it up pretty quickly. As I continued to play, learn and practice, I decided to become an instructor and in May of this year, I received my certification to teach Tai Chi for Arthritis from Dr. Paul Lam’s Teaching Tai Chi for Health master trainer Ralph Dehner.
Re:Thinking Podcast with Adam Grant
Come to Maui, we'll play in the ethers, the darkness, and dance under the stars. I can help you learn how to move the pain out of your body to let more peace, joy, and vitality in.
You describe Tai Chi so beautifully. I've always wanted to learn it. When I'm writing, I see the scene like a movie in my head. People's expressions, their actions, what's around them and how they interact with it, etc. And you're right. Stopping to edit dams the flow, but the left side of my brain keeps trying to take over. Oddly, when I'm drawing I don't get the same amount of visualization, just a general idea of where I want it to end up.