When waves of sorrow or stress are assailing us, how do we keep ourselves from being pulled under? In this profoundly personal episode, Orna Ross records from the riptides of bereavement—her mother passed a month ago—to show how creatives and creativists can transmute every shade of loss into fuel for richer art, deeper flow and a more expansive life.
Listen in for:
• A live reading of Orna’s unfinished poem “Milky Ways,” written at her mother’s hospital bedside
• The danger of “creative bypassing.” Why busying yourself can actually be avoidance
• Two research-proven practices (self-distanced free-writing and 90/20 dual-process sprints) that lower grief–induced stress by up to 31 percent and turn pain into powerful momentum.
• A preview of Orna's upcoming Go Creative! workshop and how you can bring your own challenges—large or everyday small—to the live Online Open Studio.
Tune in to learn how every wave of loss can become the very swell that lifts your art, deepens your flow, and reveals a horizon more expansive than before. Press play, grab a notebook, and Go Creative!
Listen Here:
Quick-Grab Links
- Free-writing starter guide: https://www.ornaross.com/freewriting
- Go Creative! Workshop & Open Studio (next week): https://www.ornaross.com/gocreative
- Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ornaross
- Find the full show notes and timings here.
Transcript:
Orna: Hello creatives and creativists! And welcome back to the Go Creative Podcast. Today I want to explore how our creativity can transform and transmute loss…. though not necessarily. And to offer you some of the practices that I'm drawing on myself at this time, to help that process along, when we do suffer a loss a grief, a bereavement, or something small, where things haven't worked out as we hoped or we've been let down by somebody. Any kind of loss from small to large… how we can ensure that we actually do use that as an opportunity for growth, for transformation.
And of course to offer you a little poetry and practice as we always do here on the podcast. So this is the last time I'm going to talk about where I find myself right now, which is post or maybe in the middle of bereavement. My mother died last month and I'm in that place where you naturally are when you lose a parent. I did discuss this a little bit in relation to writing and publishing work with Joanna, my friend Joanna Penn
‘ So those of you who are writers might be interested in listening to that on the Self-Publish with ally podcast… But here. I want to be more personal as I am here on the Go Creative podcast always. And to take the creativist lens. So not just thinking as people who apply the creative process to work, but to every aspect of life.
And that's what's unique about this podcast. That's what we're always doing here. So exploring the creative angle, on loss, the transformation of loss in a creative way. The main thing to say, I think before we get started is the creativists don't compartmentalize work, art, love, self-care, all of these things, all run on the same creative process. For me, my work is self-publishing books, running a publishing business, and a nonprofit, the Alliance of Independent Authors. For my mom, it was her garden. That was where her creativity, shone, her home was her palace as well. And for you it's going to be something else.
As creative, we bring the process to everything. We are mindful, we take our time, we understand some of the brain's automatic responses. We're always trying to move from the conventional way of approaching things to a more creative way of approaching things. But we probably each as well have our own thing that is our particular creative offering to the world.
And so as I'm speaking during this podcast, I'd like you to hold that close to your heart as you think about it. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about my particular bereavement and try to help bring you into that to, to, to some degree to share it with you. And then I am going to talk a bit about how we have to be careful with regard to what I call creative by-passing, which is a form of spiritual by-passing.
And then I'm going to offer you some practices that I am finding particularly useful at the moment. So the quickest, I think way as well as the best way to explain some of the very complex feelings I've been having during the period of time when my mother was ill. She has been winding down slowly for the last three years or so but much more intensely in the last year and particularly in the last six months and through that time, yes, some very complicated feelings have been rising. So I've been working on a poem as I always do, to to go deeper.
And I'd like to share that with you first of all…. so it's called Milky Ways and it's set in the hospital room where she died, Milky Ways.
[Poem Part 1, see above]
That's the first half of the poem. And writing it and thinking all these thoughts and engaging in this way is having its effect on me at the moment.
And what I'm trying to do is not shy away from that. To use the writing to go deeper, as you may have picked up from those lines, my mother was an narcissist and I didn't have the language. To understand what that meant for many years, and my father was an alcoholic, I grew up with a complex legacy, and of course you grow up and you realize that your parents are people and that there are reasons why they behave the way they behaved and do the things they do.
And you recognize that as a grown adult and you feel compassion for them and what they have been through. In one part of you. But there remains another part of you that isn't able to do that. And psychologists refer to it as the inner child. Knowing that everything we receive in the first seven years of our lives is handled by our brain in a particular way because the brain hasn't fully developed and is in almost constant theta brain state, we are fully absorbing all those impressions all the time, and we carry them with us. They don't leave us. And our work, in a way, as adults is to not to shy away from those wounds and pains that we have experienced in those early years. But to take them with us, to learn from them, to allow them to be fuel for our growth and fuel for our creativity.
To allow them to take us deeper, to take us higher, to make us bigger, more expansive people and to keep on growing. So they remain with you, but they return again and again to fuel us in different ways and big life milestones like this one that I'm going through at the moment really brings this into your life in a way where you can't ignore it.
And of course as creatives and creativists, we are delighted, and pride ourselves, on the fact that we can transmute pain into something more into art, into books, into whatever our thing may be. And that is wonderful, but it is also not inevitable. I, as a person, I want to, as a creative, I want to grow. I want to go to the next level. I want to write better books and better poetry, and to develop my publishing business, and to grow our non-profit. And I want to deepen my relationships as well with my family and friends. Before my mother's illness took over my life again for a while, I had just moved to a new town, St. Leonards on Sea, and I haven't had time to invest in new friendships and relationships which I have started here.
I'm also inclined to be always too independent, too much of the loner, and a period of grief and bereavement and loss can be an excuse to withdraw. And of course, that might be absolutely the right thing to do as well, depending on your circumstances, but for me, I am very aware in this time of the dangers of creative by-passing. Of using my work, my approach to life, the creative approach, the going creative philosophy, as a way of skipping past this.
So the big danger for me is just throwing myself back into my busy life– my life is intentionally busy– just throwing myself back in there and doing things as I have always done them. My feeling, my deeper feeling is that this needs to be absorbed in a different way, and change needs to happen for me to move to the next level, which is something I was already pondering, and which now this is feeding into.
And these thoughts about creative by-passing, spiritual by-passing were brought home to me when I came back to looking at my big book. I always have a big book project on the go and the one that I was working on when I declared my hiatus and stepped back from everything so I could focus on family, was a book that had taken me by surprise a bit.
I have been writing a long fiction cycle about the poet WB Yeats and the woman he called his muse Maud Gonne and, just as I was preparing the first of the novel series for release, I suddenly was visited by the need to do a nonfiction book around the poetry that he wrote for Gonne.
So bringing his poems for her into one volume and adding her commentary to the poems to show that theirs was not a simple poet- muse relationship where her life was basically fuel for his poetry, but in actual fact, they had a very shared creative collaboration, a very equal creative collaboration ,that is very different to the standard story that is told about them whereby, his un requited, love for her, fed his poetry. It's a lot more complex than that — and that's one of the things that I've wanted to bring out in the novels, and in this nonfiction book that explains the choices I've made in the novels, and explains the poems through my lens, my interpretation, which is very much about how their childhood trauma fed their relationship, fed their creative works, and their political works, and their potent poetical works.
When you look at their lives you realise that they revisited over and again, the same pattern and yes, they both created amazing things, both with regard to Irish independence movement, and he is widely recognized– a Nobel Laureate Nobel Prize for literature, ireland's first, but widely recognized by everyone as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, if not the greatest. Certainly the greatest for me.
But what their lives show us is that art doesn't necessarily heal . It moves you to a certain place, but there are places where it can't reach and they of course did not have the benefit that we have of psychology and science, particularly neuroscience and the understanding it has given us of how the human brain works and particularly how it works around creativity.
So I've been really interested as I've come back into looking at A Crowd of Stars, that nonfiction book, looking at their lives through that lens. And in fact, it has led to a, a whole new pass through the book, in order to fold in these understandings that have come from my own sense of loss and how that connects to Maud Gonne's sense of loss and WB Yeats' sense of loss and what they created and what they continue to create now through me, as I write this book and the fiction sequence as well.
So in terms of this, creative by-passing — each project we do, and almost, if we're really deeply creative as about it, each life moment as it emerges, offers us, invites us to deepen and to grow, to expand and to transform.
But for it to do that, we have to go there. And we have to allow it to teach us. We have to allow it to change us. And as I said, the great temptation for me is to just jump back in. I always feel my conventional mind, my critical mind always feels the pressure to, get the book done, get it out there, get the work going.
But I know that's not right for me right now. I know that I need to slow down. I'm going to take as chill a summer as I can possibly take because I want this milestone to be more meaningful than that. So The second part of the poem touches off that. And let me read that to you now…. the nurse has gone to get the clean sheet, leaving my mother's leg bare exposing her body that has been kept very carefully covered all the time, by sheets, by pajamas, none of us want to see exactly where life has brought her because the end, this end stage of life, is not pretty. Her body is covered in bruises and gone to nothing. She's tiny, absolutely tiny. And so I've been looking out the window and remembering the memories from that first seven years of life, that wounded part, that stays with us into adulthood, but looking at the stars and looking around her room, this is what the poem wants to say about that.
[Poem Part 2, see above]
So…
Fiction and poetry are brilliant ways to contain grief.
These practices now, that I have been using myself over the past while and will continue to use as I go forward in this phase, and that I'm going to offer to you, they draw on the same sorts of things that fiction and poetry draw on but You don't have to be a writer to do these practices, at all. They are suitable for any creativist who wants to create anything, and is feeling a sense of loss. As I said, it could be something really small, doesn't have to be a big deal, but it could be stopping you. And you'll know if it is… if you listened through to the podcast to this episode this far, it's probably something that's happening for you, because we're always suffering small losses and large. Life is loss in a way. We come in and, we lose everything we create. We will lose as we go out and along the way, we will lose lots of things because transforming to the next level means letting go of the previous level. And so it is a beautiful thing. And loss is not something to be fought or, to try and get away from. It's something to be contained and brought into the process.
So these two practices are helping me at the moment. The first one is called: ‘self distance free writing', so I'm not going to explain fully what free writing is. For those of you who may not know how I teach that it's on my ornaross.com/freewriting. You'll find all the instructions there, but essentially it's writing fast, raw, exact and easy. So in this exercise specifically– I free write all the time as a daily practice but this is a different exercise drawing on free writing– the first part, about eight minutes, is the usual raw, first person, fast writing. Just getting down whatever is in there, no topic, just write.
And then: step back, take a breath, read what you have written, take out a scene, something that forms a central scene in what you have written, the most important part of it , and step back from it and look at it. Whatever you have described that's going on for you, whatever you are feeling, whatever has come out in the writing, just take that central scene and just take a few minutes to rewrite it in the third person.
And this though it may sound very vague and ‘what on earth use is that you may be thinking to yourself every practice that I offer you here on the Go Creative! Podcast arises out of research which shows how it helps. And so this is self distancing. Always expressive writing, free writing is hugely valuable and again, if you can look on my website to read more about all of that. But if you don't, haven't gone there. The work of James Pennebaker, and everybody who followed him, on expressive writing is really worth reading, especially if you're experiencing loss, especially if that is a deep loss. Expressive writing is hugely transformative and healing, and so that's great, and we're bringing that in and as I said, I'm always bringing it in because I'm always free writing, but the self distancing part– that was shown in a multi-method study, and a large study, a very new study, to have reduced rumination and the physiological arousal and physiological responses to grief and bereavement by 31%– and it's immediate.
It's the combination of doing the expressive bit and then doing the self distancing bit that is really transformative. So that is one.
And the second practice is they call it ‘dual process oscillation on a 90 20 loop'. This is where you just do a ‘creative sprint', where you think deeply about your loss. And again, using free writing for this is the perfect outlet. The point is you pack as much into that 90 minutes about the loss without stopping to think. So writing is one of the most free and fluid ways to do that– writing by hand. Completely then focused on loss orientation. 90 minutes of that, and then 20 minutes of what they call restoration oriented mastery and I put a list on the show notes of the kinds of things they're talking about. So restorative activities, deliberately restorative. So 90 minutes indulging if you like– expressing, going deep, putting it out there, 20 minutes then in restoration, immediately following. So the two very closely connected.
And this dual process model. Again, various studies on this showing how it really helps again those physical pointers, those physical signs of distress, of anxiety, of pain are lowered by these, this way of approaching it, really very significantly.
Yeah, pick one of those practices and try it and please let me know how it goes and take a look at the show notes where I will have the kind of step-by-step instructions be cause I know it's hard to follow all that when you're just listening to an audio podcast.
So I suppose the overall thing, just before I leave you to say is that loss is raw material for a creative, and conscious creation is like the forge where you mould loss into a life well lived. And in order to do that, you need to really open up to it, to accept it ,and to allow it its place in your life. So next week I want to look specifically about how to feel the flow.
We talk a lot about creative flow on this podcast and in the Go Creative! materials generally. How do you know when you're in flow? How do you cultivate being in flow more often and any other sort of ancillary stuff that arises around feeding flow. That's what I'll be talking about next time.
We will also be back with the Go Creative workshops and open studios for our patrons, our go creative patrons. So if you are interested in bringing your own personal situation, a du jour, whatever you're going through at the moment, creatively, not necessarily on loss, on anything. The open studio on the first Thursday of each month is an online platform for that, and you can find out more about that at ornaross.com/gocreative
If you're interested in attending the workshop, I'll be going a bit deeper into some of the things I've discussed today, and what we'll be discussing next week on the feeling the flow, and integrating loss into flow during that workshop. I'll do a short presentation and then we'll have the Open Studio, where people bring their problems or issues, the whole point of that in-person live session– those who can't attend live can have the replay– the whole point of that is to solve your problems, as they are right now.
A a problem is a creative challenge. Whatever's coming up for you, you bring it along to the workshop, to the open studio, and get moved along to the next level.
So thank you for listening as always, and if the podcast has helped you in any way, a rating or a review wherever you get your podcast, would be greatly appreciated. Until next time, have a great week and don't forget to go creative. Bye-bye.