On ... Combinatory Play; How Creativity Guides Our Journey Back to Self

How engaging in one creative pursuit just for the love of it, has created more space and possibility for the creative pursuits that have more at stake.

Aged 8, playing the guitar at a school concert.

I was going to start with an apology for my lack of presence here. I started a Substack with the intention of writing about things that fill me up - in the hope that it inspires you to do more of what fills you up - but I got so overwhelmed with the wheel of life that constantly pulls me away from my writing, that, for my sanity and balance, I had to step away. I was going to apologise, but I won’t. We ease and flow into the parts of our lives that feel good when we’re able to, and the nature of life is such that it sometimes pulls us away. The very act of apologising for it or creating anxiety over what we’re not doing, only creates resistance to coming back to it when the time is right. And you’ll know the time is right because the pull is such that you can’t not do it, and nothing else matters. So, dear reader, I shan’t be apologising. I will, however, say that I felt the natural pull to write this piece and return to my writing in a way that feels organic, which is why I’m here, and I know from experience that that energy is going to yield far more valuable and powerful strings of words than when I’m forcing it through exhaustion and duty.

I’m here for the very reason that I have found the most beautiful way to return to my creativity, and I wanted to share that with you, to hopefully inspire a return to Self for you. Because the Self, I’ve realised, emerges when we are ensconced in our deepest, most authentic creative and playful nature, and, at the ripe old age of 41, that is where I now find myself.

When I started my journey of healing from disability, it was all about the doing and the graft; spreadsheets of supplements and meal plans and products I needed and schedules to stick to. It seems to me now, over 2 decades later, that I’ve done a complete 360, but I return to the starting point with intention, which is what makes it so potent.

Wellness to me at this stage is a loosening - not a disconnection from the things that are important to maintain my remission, but an invitation to soften into what truly Is; what truly makes me feel ALIVE. Rather than the “doing” that often feels like drumming nails into a wall with a hammer, the “wellness” I now craft and experience feels more like the soft currents of water rippling along a calm lake. Flow. (As a double Pisces, any positive imagery usually involves water.)

These past couple of months I even found myself moving slightly away from my spiritual practice (not by conscious choice but simply by just doing what felt natural) and grounding into the human experience - potentially the most “spiritual” thing we can do, being that (in my belief) we chose to incarnate here to learn from and evolve as a result of the human experience. I’ve been rooting into the experience deeply; into joy, into the sensory experiences of physical pleasure, even into the lived reality of what emotional pain feels like in the body. And being able to be an observer of all of it - as opposed to letting it happen “to me” - has been a profound spiritual invocation … all when I “slacked” with my “spiritual practice”!

And all of it has led me back to one essential truth of the human experience; that despite modern life constantly forcing us into a tug-of-war against it, what remains the most vital, profound and necessary way to be fully alive, is creativity.

I get to “create” within my work: podcast episodes, social media posts, course content etc., but it’s not the same. Writing is my joy, the thing I always want to be doing when life has me doing everything else. It’s a different kind of creation.

But because I’m writing a book, it comes with an attachment to an outcome - PUBLICATION! - which, as anyone who writes will know, is no easy feat. I’ll leave out of this Substack my back-and-forth journey with literary agents and where I’m at with it all, because it isn’t the point of this, but it’s important to understand the weight of having an attachment to an outcome.

That very notion drags us right out of the creative pursuit being for the love of creating (and, in this case, servitude), and into something more self-serving and anxiety-inducing. In short, it creates a void between me and creativity, because it stops being about the passion that was always Divinely-driven, something that had no weight to it, just a pull towards it that for so long had no explanation.

Albert Einstein coined the term Combinatory Play: the act of engaging in a playful or creative activity - especially one unrelated to your main area of focus - in order to stimulate the subconscious mind and generate new ideas, solutions, or inspiration. It’s the mixing, combining, and rearranging of different concepts, experiences, or disciplines in a way that often leads to unexpected breakthroughs.

In other words, stop the creative thing that you’re doing that has so much at stake (even if you love it), and choose another creative pursuit and engage in it simply for the love of it. By doing so, we open up new creative channels in the brain that allow for deeper flow into the thing that does have higher stakes, when you return to it.

When I was a child, I was a fairly talented guitarist. I started at the age of 7 and, much to my parents’ surprise, had quite a gift for it. My teacher quickly put me into concerts with much older students and I would be asked to play in school assemblies. I very quickly learnt to read music and play by ear, never looking down at the guitar when I played, just reading the music and feeling into it. When I was 13, my parents could no longer afford the lessons, but assumed I knew enough to just carry on. I did. But I was too distracted with being in remission and looking normal for the first time in my life, that I spent my time instead working on “being normal”, starving myself, and making boys like me. I completely dropped the guitar.

Fast-forward 4 years to when I was in performing arts school studying musical theatre, realising that I did, in fact have a very good ear for music and there might be something with music in my future. After some encouragement by my musical theatre teacher (who ended up being a bit of a perve, but that’s another story for another time), I picked up the guitar, only to realise as a result of trying to contort my wrist around it, that I now had arthritis in my hands. And this was the beginning of my descent into severe disability, where I had to give up my place at university where I was going to further my performing and directing studies, as well as all other plans for a normal future. I didn’t pick up the guitar again.

I believe the experience created an energetic block around the idea of music being a part of my life in a bigger way than simply listening to it. If you don’t play an instrument, how can you call yourself a musician? To this day, I’ve never even considered the notion of referring to myself as that. But as I’ve been digging and delving and opening up this area of my life, it’s been almost revelatory: I always had it in me to be a musician. When I’m listening to music, I’ll make sure everyone I’m around can hear the rise of the bass, the drums bringing everything to a peak, I’ll make everyone stop everything to hear the power of the crescendo as everything comes together. I drive my husband mad with explaining why the Broadway version of a song from a specific musical isn’t as powerful as the West End one, or why you can hear the “sound” that tells you it’s an Andrew Lloyd-Webber piece, or the “sound” that initiated Hip Hop coming through a certain song on the radio. The list goes on. I am never not listening to music, and I hear music in a way that musicians do.

But I missed any chance at becoming a musician, so I didn’t consider the idea.

And then, as I fell head-first into a deep energetic death - the kind I experience every few years when my Higher Self is forcing me to see things I’m not recognising, things I need to shed (occupational hazard of the spiritual path and being on a shamanic apprenticeship for nearly 5 years - you don’t get the luxury of ignoring signs and halting growth. It slaps you in the face until you listen) - I realised that I needed to bring music back in. In fact, what I was being slapped in the face with, was music. I had to bring music back in.

When I turned 40 last year I had a few things on my bucket list: re-learn French (in which I used to be fluent), learn to sew on the sewing machine my mum bought me for my 40th, take an art class, and take piano lessons. What did I start with? French. The least creative of them all, and I gave up because it filled me up not even a bit.

And then, seeing my passion when I spoke about it, a friend encouraged me to start the piano lessons and in that moment it was as if everything I didn’t even know I had been waiting for, happened. I felt alive, even before I started the lessons.

I’m now a month into my piano lessons with the most gorgeous teacher called Danielle whose vivacious energy just affirms that it all fell into place exactly how and when it was meant to, and it’s giving me more joy than anything I’ve done in a long time. I am practicing every single day, multiple times, despite on paper “not having any time”.

And to bring it full-circle back to Combinatory Play, my writing is flowing and time seems to have expanded (as it does when we do) to allow me to do more of it, both for my book and here, just for fun, as it were.

So, all this just to remind you, dear reader, that your creativity does not need explanations, it does not need to serve a purpose, come at a specific time, reap any rewards or have any particular outcome. All it needs to do is fill your soul in some way.

Some might say Einstein was a clever bloke, perhaps someone worth listening to, and I believe in this case he was spot-on.

Do the creative thing you want to. Allow it to make you feel how playing the piano, writing and dipping baked goods into coffee make me feel.

Wishing you a week filled with joy and enchantment,
Lauren