Enjoy the Silence

To reboot your creative energy

Live Your Opus is a transformative perspective, process and approach that you can bring to your life, work or business. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter and upgrade to access invitations to live online sessions with Janine, conversations with special guests, private community discussion threads, and more. Thanks and see you inside!

I missed my publishing deadline last week; my creativity was focused on another critical area, and I couldn’t stretch it here. This weekend, I have time, but I’m struggling to write. Thoughts flow through my mind; there’s no shortage of ideas. In fact, it’s the opposite: I’ve got too many. That’s because so many incredible experiences have already happened in these first three weeks of the year–new clients, new partnerships, and a new program launched, to name a few; I’m high on the energy of life! And with Davos in swing this week, my future-of-work-loving self has been consuming and considering whatever wise or unwise discussions emerged and those that didn’t emerge at all. 

To top it all off, last week, I learned that I am a 2024 LinkedIn Top Voice, a prestigious program that I’m grateful to have been selected for. So now, there’s a ‘vague external pressure to write, isn’t there?’ someone asked me. No, there isn’t. I write because I want to connect and share with others who are trying their damnedest to buck the system and live life on their own terms, and I love the process of creating. 

Even as I write this—which, when I first wrote it by hand, was simply a journal entry—I wonder whether this is what I might publish. Perhaps this week’s article is about what to do when it’s hard to create. When you’ve had an incredibly generative few weeks like I have or you’ve tapped your divine creative source so often, you need a holiday. 

So, this morning, as the topics and headlines swirl through my head and several different first drafts sit in my Google Drive, ready for final editing, and my publishing deadline nears as Miles Davis plays, I find myself in need of a pause. 

Rather than adding aimlessly to the cacophony of noise coming at all of us from our phones and digital devices and all of the words here on Substack, maybe I should stay silent today.

But it’s just occurred to me: something must be resonating if you’ve read this far. Are you, like me, looking to awaken your creative source? Or, would you also like to cancel the noise of our modern world? Or did you simply think this essay might take a turn and land on a topic after all?

Perhaps you’re right.  And perhaps I should tackle all three questions.

When the world is too noisy for me, and I feel a creative block in my business or my writing, I go inward. 

I go inward to quiet the world and reconnect to myself and the source. I go inward to still my mind through passive and active meditations and morning pages like these.

If you’d told me four years ago that I’d write those sentences and engage in these practices, I’d have ignored you completely. But that was a different me, and now, these practices, among others, sustain me in achieving in healthy ways.

As Julia Cameron suggests in her new book, Living the Artist’s Way, I use the page to ask for guidance.

You try it.

Sitting somewhere quiet and cozy, write in your own way:

Here is what I want:

Here is what I hope:

Here is what I dream:

Here is what I dare:¹

Ask the question and write what you hear, what the universe whispers (or shouts) at you.

Tap into your source and the source of universal energy, which Julia refers to as 'a force that opens up to us when we ask it to.’²

She didn’t talk much about ‘divine intervention’ in her first book, The Artist’s Way, which has been a source of ongoing inspiration for me, supporting me as I recovered from burnout several years ago, launched businesses for the first time, and started writing again.

Perhaps it was the fact that I first read the book while studying mindfulness and meditation and looking for answers throughout my life, but I’ve always interpreted morning pages as a way to connect not just to my creative source but to the energy of the universe. 

Writing them settles my mind and helps me tap into and open to a deeper level of consciousness and possibility.  

Journal aside, sitting on my yoga and meditation platform with the sky stretching across the hills ahead, I close my eyes and listen. (Although sometimes it’s harder to do when I have company on the platform.)

Birds chirp and sing, but, to me, the world goes silent. 

If I’m in active meditation, like I was this morning, I open my mind and envision myself in action, engaging in the activities I wrote about above: what I want, what I hope, what I dream, and what I dare. (My latest favourite meditation is Joe Dispenza’s Reconditioning the Body to a New Mind, which a friend recently shared with me.)

The ideas and thoughts stop swirling around. My creative blocks are clear. New pathways and solutions open and give way to clarity. Aaaah, now I feel much better.

So perhaps next week or the week after, I’ll tell you why the women who are leaving the workforce in droves are pioneers, or about the life-changing impact of my recent trip to India or the reason you should think in decades.  

Maybe someday, I’ll tell you what I really think of the Davos dialogue on the future of work or about the incredible women I’ve just welcomed to Project Opus, a new learning experience I’ve just launched.

But, for today, before I decide not to publish at all, I’m sharing my morning pages and meditation with you and hope there’s a nugget of wisdom here that may catalyse your clarity and creativity. If nothing else, we’ve sat together to enjoy the silence.

1. As narrated by Julia Cameron in her recent interview with Guy Kawasaki on his Remarkable People podcast.

2. Ibid.