What is Inspiration and How to Get Inspired?
Whenever there is inspiration, which translates as “in spirit,” and enthusiasm, which means “in God,” there is a creative empowerment that goes far beyond what a mere person is capable of.
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
The Oxford English Dictionary sums it up this way; as a noun inspiration is:
the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative; the quality of being inspired, especially when evident in something; a person or thing that inspires; a sudden brilliant, creative, or timely idea; the divine influence believed to have led to the writing of the Bible; the drawing in of breath; inhalation; an act of breathing in; an inhalation
Literally, from the Latin, inspiration means “to breathe into” from the verb inspirare.
So, breath is life and the creative life comes through inspiration. Carl Jung writes about this in his autobiography when he remembers carving wood in the 20s:
Only while I was doing this work did the unconscious supply me with a name. It called the figure Atmavictu - ‘the breath of life.’ It was a further development of that fearful tree of my childhood dream, which was now revealed as the ‘breath of life,’ the creative impulse.
The artist breathes in the inspiration. The “breath of life” then goes into a wood carving, musical instrument or invention or onto the page or canvas.
This kind of talk about inspiration makes some writers and artists want to thump their head off a wall. A lot of the time they see it as anything but a magical process, calling inspiration only part or even irrelevant to the creative process. As William Faulkner once said:
I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.
You can go online and find countless writers, articles and creative people commenting the same way, saying that the creative process is almost mechanical, like a mechanic greasing your car (E.B. White) or an engineer thinking about an engineering problem (Doris Lessing).
So, yes, getting to that inspired point is work. But if it is then that means we can all get there. But couldn’t it be both at the same time, work as well as allowing “spirit” to come into us?
Stendhal says something along the same lines:
Had I mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two hours every day, with or without inspiration. Their advice would have enabled me to benefit from the ten years of my life I totally wasted waiting for inspiration.
So, we need to make time, find space, be consistent, and have the intention to find inspiration by working.
Easier said than done.
Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how frustrating this process can be. Instead of using the word inspiration though, she replaces it with “genius”:
That’s not at all what my creative process is — I’m not the pipeline! I’m a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?
Elizabeth Gilbert
What is the link between Creativity and Inspiration?
Here’s the funny and inspirational Brazilian artist Vik Muniz talking about creativity and how getting shot helped him get to the US. He has a lovely clarity on the distinction between creation and creativity.
Creativity is how we cope with creation, while creation sometimes seems a bit ungraspable or even pointless. Creativity is always meaningful.
Muniz sees what we “see” artistically as creativity and what nature, the world gives us, objects etc. as creation.
Which explains inspiration again, in that it’s something that we “see” spontaneously, differently, when others don’t “see” it all.
The art critic and novelist John Berger talks a lot about ways of seeing in his book of the same name saying the process of seeing
is less spontaneous and natural than we tend to believe.
The book was based on a BBC 2 television series where Berger compares “the stillness and silence of a painting” divorced from the “religiosity” or what “people teach us about art.”
How does coming to La Muse lead to Inspiration and Creativity?
Intention, then space-time.
You bring your idea, your talent and your intention. We give you space-time away from the real world, and a support system to make the most of your stay.
Then, you do the work. You do the work just like you would for your job back home. You give that two hours every day Stendhal talked about, or whatever amount of set hours you want to give every day. You start at nine o’clock every morning like Faulkner, or even earlier in the morning as Auden did, or late at night like Dostoyevesky. You get up at the same time every day as Glibert put it and you “sweat and labor.”
The thing with La Muse though is that you will be doing this “work” with a group of people who have come here for the same purpose, a group of people who understand what you are going through.
As John Cleese says in this video, you have to find a “space” where you can give yourself that “time” to connect with that flow, that genius, that inspiration.
Yes, this space can be created in your home or office, but what about what Cleese calls the “interruptions”: phone calls, ticking things off on lists, racing around all day? If we are talking about a sustained amount of time to really get into your project without interruptions then a retreat is far more productive.
And as Cleese says in another video on creativity if you are interrupted during your “creative state” then you lose the flow of what you were working on. Unless you create what he calls an “oasis of space-time” where there are “boundaries” of “space” and “time” then you can’t tap into creativity.
Ultimately you have to have the right conditions to be able to make the effort to get inspired. Inspiration and genius are in all of us. However, we are not all truly receptive all the time as it takes a huge effort when surrounded by the vicissitudes. It takes courage to be receptive and to create.
La Muse is a space designed to reduce these “interruptions.” Our Quiet Hours and the natural, tranquil setting allow for creative ideas to seed and grow.
Sure, you can optimize those conditions in your own life whether it’s with meditation or a non-negotiable writing routine, but it does help to get a boost, to say the least, by going on a retreat. Just creating those conditions at home can take years. Establishing them in a place like La Muse and then bringing them back home with you would be even better. As opposed to having to fight through your routine to form a creative schedule you can come here and be encouraged by the example of other creative individuals in addition to having no excuses to not do your work.
La Muse has created those conditions for you to step into and the space helps you establish creative momentum which is then easier to maintain back in your own life.
Disconnection, Creativity and Inspiration
In the Orientation materials we give people just before they get to La Muse we talk about how you have to disconnect in order to get connected.
Today we’re so connected to machines, computers, TVs, phones, email, the Internet, the news, other people on Facebook… we hardly have any time to ourselves as individuals. Our attention is always being pulled outward.
Our attention needs to be drawn back in. It is this intention, this connection we are talking about.
Connecting with yourself, with your creative self, is what we believe in. This can be through writing, inventing, crocheting, singing or painting, to name but a few of the creative outlets people have worked on while at La Muse.
We believe being inspired and connected to yourself is one of the most important things there is about being a human. It makes life bearable. As the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said:
Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
Connection, or “flow” as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it in his book of the same name, is the experience every creative person who has ever come to La Muse has talked about in some way or another. Indeed, it was a German writer who donated Csikszentmihalyi’s book to our living library years ago and talked about flow at the Book Break we have in the first week of every retreat.
How, literally, does Inspiration happen at La Muse?
It’s different for everyone, but one thing’s for sure: Inspiration just doesn’t come by hitting some automatic pilot switch in your life. Inspiration isn’t going to come from doing the same rote thing every day for twenty years and then for twenty more.
Look, it is possible to change jobs, or change houses or even change families and still have the same exact life you had before. If YOU don’t change, nothing really changes. You’d still be doing things the same way every day.
Inspiration comes when you give yourself a new outlook. It comes from getting out of the box and thinking creatively as did Glibert and Cleese and every other creative individual before them. And this is generally how it happens:
- You escape your life. Here at La Muse you have no one to answer to but your self.
- Without all those emotional, financial and cultural strings attached, you can actually turn inwards for sustained, suspended periods of time.
- You strike a balance between freedom and structure. You create a schedule that’s not about being confined or about other people’s needs, it’s about YOU. Work for three hours in the morning, then have lunch, then walk or go for a drive, then get together with other residents. Or, maybe sleep all morning, have breakfast at 2 PM, write until 10 PM and then eat. For once, you can follow your own rhythms without any interference from others. But you will give time, attention and consistent intention to your project every day.
- This showing up makes you available to inspiration. It makes you receptive to what it us you need to create. Think about it. If you were told that there existed an angel who bestowed infinite abundance upon all who saw her, and that this angel appeared a few times a year between the hours of 9 AM and noon by the fountain in the square, chances are you would show up until you saw her even if it meant that 200 of your visits to the fountain were spent copy-editing, brainstorming or doodling. You would go and copy-edit every day until that angel appeared.
- So, you settle in. You enjoy the view. You till the soil and pluck some weeds. You talk and gnaw and ponder. And there, in the middle of doing the more mundane aspects of your project, or while you’re out on a long walk (Friedrich Nietzsche got a lot of his book ideas after walking in the woods) or kneading bread or reading someone else’s work, the creative spirit will come to you.
Something else will happen while you’re here. You’ll be more content. So, you’ll return to La Muse yes to further that or some other creative project, but you’ll also come to feel alive, fulfilled, balanced and clear. To feel motivated and energized. To feel like yourself again.
How Do We Know About Inspiration?
We’ve been there.
We are writers. We were working for newspapers and magazines in New York City, good jobs but not that closely resembling the poetry or fiction we’d thought we’d write. Space-time? There was no space to retreat to, no time to write our own stuff or let alone to just breathe on a regular basis. Our jobs were everything.
We were talking, as newlyweds, about our dream version of our life, where we would have time to write and spend time together and raise a family. In our dreaming, we went online to look at real-estate in southern France, which we’d heard was cheap in certain parts. We thought we could buy a small house in the country and go there every year to write and sample a simpler way of living. Hell, it’s not as if we would ever be able to buy a brownstone in Brooklyn.
What we found was a dilapidated manor house in what we call the Cinderella of France, the Languedoc, with its Cathars and Troubadors, a house with 15 rooms at the cost of a storage locker in NYC. We saw this thing online and were filled with the enthusiasm (remember that word from earlier?) of a great find and an inspired idea. What if we bought that house and rented all those rooms out at affordable rates to other creative people like us? What if we created a writers’ and artists’ retreat?!? What if we could run a retreat and write for ourselves, raising a family and having time together?
As is the way when one follows an inspiration, through nearly impossible challenges including lack of money and complicated international paperwork, lack of life-experience and previous home-ownerships, we have managed to follow through on that little seed of inspiration, and watch it become what is now La Muse, a truly fulfilling creative project in and of itself. We let IT carry US.
We had to think out-of-the-box, we had to be flexible and open, and although we had to hunker down and sweat the details, we also had to let go.
It wasn’t easy. This process was filled with a jumble of nuts and bolts, and sometimes disbelief on behalf of other people (thankfully, not our families): “What?!? You can just up and leave and start a what… a writers’ and artists’ retreat? You have to be someone, you have to have backing, you have to have money or status or something behind you…” etc.
In society the idea of being creative and getting inspired is frowned upon, so running a “business” that focuses on exactly that can’t be lucrative. Right? “You’ll never make enough money to support your family with that.” We didn’t blame people for their skepticism. They just didn’t understand. Fortunately these potentially discouraging comments came to us when it was too late for us to be discouraged. We were already locked in. And so, we just had to do it. You see, we weren’t doing it to support a family. We were doing it because we believed in it.
As to the way things are seen and done today: we believe people are educated to stay in the box. Society’s educational system is based on this broken model, that of the mathematical mind created during the utilitarian Industrial Revolution.
Sir Ken Robinson, a world renowned education expert talks wonderfully about this broken model here:
We love this quote in his talk:
life is not linear; it’s organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But, you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college.
We’ve been inspired by so many of the people who’ve been here.
One former Muser, a landscape architect and photographer from the United States, approaches his life like any of the large gardens he creates: He talks about how he turns the dirt over here and spreads compost over there. He trims the hedges on this project and spreads some seeds on that one. He does a little watering over here and weeds a bit over there. Over a period of time, he enjoys watching his projects grow. In this way, different facets of his life are consistently tended to and allowed to take their own shape.
This type of creation is not linear or square. It is inspired. It is out of the box. This is inspiration and creativity. This is La Muse and this can be your life too. Every day is an opportunity to create something. You have more options than you know. You only need to get your head out of the box to see how far you can go and then do it!