There’s a saying that when the student is ready the teacher will come. And for me the teacher came Sunday morning. Richard and Carol King host a salon on the spiritual creative life every month in Pasadena and yesterday I went for the first time. The speaker was Thomas E. Backer, PhD, a psychology professor whose topic was “Shielding the Flame: The Psychology of Creativity”. There were fifty or more people (artists, writers, architects, painters, actors, etc.) in the King’s beautiful house in Pasadena, and this incredibly modest and brilliant man spoke to us about stress and creativity – how to manage our stress, create the best environment for our creativity, commit to our creativity, and how to deal with the blocks. (He told a story about an artist friend who couldn’t paint, but then one day simply dipped her brush into some paint, flung it on the canvas and had to deal with it.)
The basic thing we need for our creative life is pretty much what our mothers told us to do, he said. We need to take care of ourselves physically and psychologically. We need to do at least thirty minutes a day of physical exercise, we need good nutrition, we need sleep and we need relaxation.

Also: when we’re in toxic situations, with people or places, we need to walk away. We need to figure out the best environment to nurture our creativity; both physical and social. We need to be part of a creative community.

We all know this but we need to hear it again and again.