Freewriting Towards Resistance
tl;dr: In moments of real danger, fear narrows our vision and locks us up. Creativity is a practice of unclenching. And it is what keeps resistance adaptive, human, and alive.
A couple of things before we start, here’s a note with some links for support from friends living in Minneapolis.
Also! Big BIG shout out to Bad Bunny who is taking home to Puerto Rico the Grammy Award for best album for DeBí TiRaR MáS FOToS, the first Spanish-language album to win the top honor. In his own words here. And my own writing on this artistic phenomenon: What is Bad Bunny Doing?
YES! Me and Tuesday will be in Puerto Rico for the Super Bowl Halftime Show, and of course, The Patriots!
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming:
Freewriting Towards Resistance
This is one of those times when I write and say: you gotta read someone else’s post!
Check out Oliver Burkeman’s The Freewriting Way of Life. It’s a short one. And I am going to connect it to resistance. And to the burning question before us:
What to do now that we are here?
Here. At the precipice.
As democracy comes apart at the seams.
First, let me share two things:
I.
I’ve been freewriting for many, many years. I started about 20 years ago. I know when I started freewriting because it was during a devastating period of grief that I brought upon myself. You’ll find many inkblot stains of tears in those pages.
When I welcome participants into one of my offerings, something like the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop, or one of my Coaching Intensives, I ask them to freewrite their morning pages for a couple of weeks in preparation for the engagement (h/t Julia Cameron and The Artist’s Way.)
II.
We just wrapped up BOOST Your Practice. The four-week ritual that we do together twice a year, in January and September. It’s a shared commitment to the essential practices that align mind, body, and spirit with the Creative Life Force that brings the universe itself into being. For one month, we support one another in waking early, meditating, moving our bodies, eating well, and, most importantly, devoting at least 45 minutes each day to a creative endeavor.
Teams check in daily. The community huddles for 15 minutes each morning, and for an hour once per week.
This month, it has been impossible to come together without a heightened sense of awareness about what is happening politically. So much of what we feared just a year ago seems to be unfolding faster than many of us imagined.
So we have to ask ourselves, why are we doing this?
Does it make any sense to focus on these practices while Minneapolis burns?
The answer is of course YES.
Yes now, more than ever.
NOT instead of other forms of action.
But in service of all forms of right-action.
I’m not talking about creativity as self-expression here, but as a human capacity we need in moments of real danger.
Our creativity defines our very incarnation.
This Creative Life Force that births and animates all of the universes is manifest as you and unfolds through you.
To align with this Creative Life Force is the most purposeful, meaningful and generative thing you can do with your life.
When Burkeman speaks of the freewriting way of life, he is pointing us in the same direction. He is using freewriting as both practice and metaphor. It is a process that unlocks us from the myopia that naturally arises when we are in a state of fear.
We might be scared that our creative work will not be appreciated. That we will feel exposed and rejected.
Or we might be terrified that escalating violence and the collapse of democratic norms will take us to those dark places of despair that humanity seems to return to again and again.
Honestly, and embarrassingly, I spend too many of my days scared that I will never quite figure out how to consistently do the things I know are good for me. The meditation. The exercise. The eating well. The organizing of my work. The stewardship of my money. As if doing these imperfectly somehow disqualifies me from my own life.
At very different scales, the pattern is the same.
Whether we’re talking about the small, self-centered dramas of our neuroses or our very real concern for society and the planet, what we are dealing with is fear.
And fear leads to clenching, to tightening, to contraction. This in itself is not a bad thing. Oftentimes the best move for survival is to bunker down and barricade. But it is not easy to outlast a state of siege. At some point we have to get creative if we are going to survive. And creativity is the opposite of fear. It calls for an opening up. It demands a state of relaxed attention. This shift in posture widens our scope, and yields a state of agility and adaptability.
The freewriting way of life is a process of unclenching in the midst of anxiety. It is a way to loosen the grip of fear.
Practice it on a journal. Three pages at a time. Even if you are not trying to be a writer. Let your hand tell you what’s In your heart. Invite your uncensored Self to reveal a deeper truth.
Practice with the awareness that by opening the channel here, with this simple but courageous process, you are opening the channel for creativity itself.
We are running out of options. The already imperfect tools of democracy might actually become completely useless. Voided by the autocrats and billionaires with the judges and the guns.
This is the time to get creative.
One Path, Two Tracks
Most of you have heard me speak of “one path, two tracks.” We are aiming for a way of being together at the intersection of love and freedom. Worthy stewards of our living earth. That is the path.
One track is the track of immediacy. The track of resistance, of barricade, of pushing back. The process of wielding the tools and strategies we already have in order to do our best to stem the tide. This is a matter of survival.
The other track is the track of the longview. The one that holds an unshakeable faith in the wisdom of the ages. The one that is about remembering the songs, the rituals and the stories that we conjured and passed down for those who survived apocalypse after apocalypse. This is the ancient way of the animist. And the unending posture of forward facing remembering. This is where the old ways that refuse to die flow into the creative expression of the ever new unfolding of this thing that we call life.
The freewriting way of life is an approach to both paths, because both demand the sort of unclenched posture that allows the Creative Life Force to flow through us in ways that we simply cannot come up with when we are moving from a clenched state of fear, contraction and control, of desperately looking for someone who seems to know exactly what to do.
Here’s what this looks like when you strip it down to first principles:
It is a lived philosophy: writing continuously without editing mirrors a way of moving through life without over-controlling it.
Clenching is a desire for control, and it backfires: The impulse to plan perfectly, avoid mess, and guarantee outcomes leads to paralysis, sterility, and diminished aliveness.
The core move is “unclenching:” relaxing in the midst of anxiety and uncertainty, rather than tightening up in an attempt to feel safe or in control.
Letting go produces better results than forcing control: In freewriting, surrendering control reliably leads to more ideas, insight, creativity, and forward motion. This is the very outcome control is trying (and failing) to achieve.
Unclenching is not passivity: It’s not laziness or collapse. It’s “getting out of the way” so action, intelligence, and creativity can flow through the whole self, not just the controlling ego.
Creation is a process of growing and unfolding, not of top-down design: Like gardening, meaningful work (and life outcomes) emerge through participation and care, not from rigid intellectual planning.
The principle applies far beyond writing:
Personal change: act first, adjust later
Difficult conversations: show up honestly without scripting
Parenting: cultivate conditions, don’t design outcomes
Social crisis: embody values now instead of waiting for total understanding
We are already “freewriting” our lives: Even strict planners are improvising moment by moment. Control is largely an illusion.
Unclenching aligns with reality: Since uncertainty is unavoidable, relaxing into it produces greater agency, aliveness, and a real sense of engagement with life.
To close, let me be as clear as I can possibly be. None of what I’m saying is meant to soften or minimize the reality we are facing. I, like yourself, know that shit got real. We are in direct confrontation with an authoritarian state that cares not for democracy at home and has become an agent of chaos in an already unstable world abroad.
There are things we know how to do. I shared some links to points of expertise a few weeks ago: In Face of Escalating Violence.
To walk one path and two tracks is to rely on the best of what we have learned through generations of resistance.
It is smart to do what we know works.
And we also need to try new things.
In order to get creative, we have to find a way to unclench. Right here, in the midst of the anxiety and fear of it all, we unclench. We practice allowing something that is much bigger than fear to find and express its way through us.
We unclench and we allow ourselves to create in free, messy, not fully controllable, absolutely necessary ways.
*Last year, we immediately followed BOOST Your Practice with a four-week virtual Imperfection Retreat, we based it on Oliver Burkeman’s excellent book: Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts