But that ruse does not last long.

Creatives age. Even by your late twenties if not sooner, the body creaks and falters. The mind's microprocessor slows down. And the physical energy that propels your sheer will and volition gets sapped.  

So you push through your work, knowing that you're not creating at your best but "good enough" and that faking it really well will have to suffice.

What to do?

2. Scenario 2: Sprints and Spurts
I create mostly in sprints. I have my routines that propel my faculties and fingers into flow for, usually, 90-minute periods. At Behance's 99% Conference, Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project confirmed and gave me guidance on this practice. I shape my days accordingly.

Sprints work. Up to a point.

But sprints are more like spurts for some of us. An idea bursts. We get jazzed. We start designing a website or shaping an encaustic or crafting a new speaking series only to feel that burst, well, spurt and spittle out in a matter of days or even minutes.

When I run, something similar happens. Even before I put on my running shoes, my mind envisions beautiful strides with the wind at my back, the farmland or buildings or beach - depending on where I'm at - waving as I pass by.

But then my feet hit the sand or asphalt. My body's jiggling. And ten minutes later, my body's saying, "Okay, that's probably good enough. Let's go get some 88% dark chocolate and celebrate."

But if I can run beyond that spurt, something else happens. My inner body quiets and pays attention to the scenery, and I flow for three, four times that long - which is better-than-good for this middle-aged guy who, before a few months ago, has never desired to run.

How to replicate something similar in the studio? How to propel my mind past the novelty spurt?

3. A Tick, A Lightning Bolt, & an Education in Vitality
About three years ago, I kept mostly to myself a series of blows. That summer, I felt unreasonably blue and lackluster even though everything on the outside seemed to be going swimmingly. Then a tick bit me in the gut. I got Lyme Disease, which not only saps your energy; it also plays all kinds of tricks on your muscles, brain, and mind. Plus, the antibiotics took a toll on my immunity. Three weeks later, lightning struck our house, burned my study, and left us - after water and fire damage - out of our dream home for fifteen months.

For months, while I argued with an unctuous insurance adjuster and supervised an architect, contractor, and a team of sub-contractors and then argued with our mortgage company, my brain and body fired away fight-or-flight adrenaline shots and built up a strong reservoir of acidity. And I also got bit by another tick and contracted Ultra-Lyme. In the middle of it all, we got pregnant and had a baby.  

Even my body-mind knowledge in founding Yoga As Muse Trainings was challenged this time around. But I persisted and learned even more in that time about increasing creative vitality and deepening physical intelligence (Read more about that journey here.).

4. Coax the Elephant
I took stock especially of my emotional body's raging tug on my creative mind. Here's a summary of what I've been tracking.

Descartes did the best he could regarding the body-mind connection given his resources and cultural context in the 1600s.

He describes how the mind influences the body and can even heal the body by regulating our emotions. But he falters when he claims the body has no effect on the mind. None.

Thanks to the work of Timothy Wilson, Antonio Damasio, George Lakoff, and others - and thanks to observing our own experiences - we know otherwise. The body houses emotions and memories and images. It regulates hormones, organ functioning, heart beat, blood oxygenation, and respiration. And guess what? It's constantly influencing the iota of the mind we call awareness.

In fact, unless we have a mechanism for regularly checking in, monitoring, and adjusting how we feel physically and emotionally, the body's storehouse of irrational impulses and feeling states can constantly run the show. And we'll be oblivious to it.

Why? The body's bigger than awareness. Emotions are bigger and more influential than thoughts and willpower alone. All of that fluttering of blood and digestion and DNA dancing "down there" makes up for about 95% of the mind's activity. And our flash light of awareness typically accounts for 5%. But the tricky thing is that 95% of the dark underbelly shapes and influences the other 5%.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt compares what I call the "embodied unconscious" - this 95% on average of the mind's dark activity - to an elephant and the small light of awareness to a rider on the elephant's back.

We don't "control" the elephant. But we do develop a relationship with it. We do find interventions to coax the elephant to work with us and to go where we need it to go.

Consider the example of Haruki Murakami.

4. Get Physical Intelligence
Haruki Murakami is possibly Japan's most celebrated living author. Since he published his first novel in 1979, he's penned over a dozen books and has received numerous awards.

Soon after he virtually stumbled upon becoming a novelist and then devoting himself full force to that endeavor, he realized something:

"The whole process - sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track - requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine." (79)

He needed stamina. So he also has devoted himself to running.

In his memoir-like meditations on running and writing, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami claims three things essential for a writer to flourish (which could be applied to any creative field):

Talent. Focus. Vitality.

If you lack talent, Murakami says, you can make up for it by amping up focus and vitality. He's right mostly. Every study of thriving creatives and of creative intelligence I've reviewed affirms that optimal creativity actually has less to do with talent or genetics than with dedicad know-how, mindset, focus, persistence and the vitality to keep momentum.

5. 4 Conditions to Replenish the Brain Forest & Boost Vitality
Something else more profound happens when you boon your creative vitality regularly and with intention.

Last night I saw neurons fire and wire together. It wasn't in a dream or fantasy or woo-woo meditation.

I've had the good fortune the past few days to have lunch with and listen to brain guru Joe Dispenza. Last night, Joe showed us videos that capture in live time the human brain in action.

Thanks to the research of Fred Gage of the Salk Institute and other neuroscientists, we know now in no uncertain terms what fifteen years ago 9 out of 10 brain scientists would've shunned to admit: We people in the middle can grow new neurons (neurogenesis) and grow new neuronal connections (neuro-plasticity).

In fact, Gary Small of UCLA just wrote a piece at his psychologytoday.com blog Brain Bootcamp that reviews to more recent studies on this subject.