Why don't Whirling Dervishes fall down?

How to find creative stability

I have two important things to say before I get to today’s writing.

First, hello and welcome and thank you to all the new subscribers who have arrived in recent days. I appreciate you putting some of your valuable time my way. And a big thank you also to all of you (existing and new readers) who have been leaving such positive comments or sending me emails. They really encourage me and confirm that I am doing the right thing in the right place.

Secondly, I am going to be adding extra material to my Substack schedule and have now turned on paid subscriptions. But don’t worry - I will still be writing completely free essays for you too.

I have spent a long time deciding how to do this and the essay below goes into some of the thought processes of sorting out in my mind how I wanted the practice of writing a Substack to be for me. After all, the whole point of second half of life creativity is that we get to make the life as well as the object.

I have many many ideas for features and topics to give you. However, I have also learned that variety and freedom are very important aspects of my second-half-of-life practice. They contribute to my own well-being and make me a better writer for you. I want this Substack to remain the absolute joy that it is for me so that I can write positive, deeply felt and thought pieces from that place. I have therefore fought (and won!) the internal battle against the temptation to revert to first-half-of-life behaviour and overload myself with a rigid, overambitous writing schedule that would turn this wonderful place into a drudge. I want to create an ecosystem that allows me to show up for you out of generosity not obligation. I also need a plan which gives flexibility to accommodate the volunteering and family care responsibilities which are a feature of this time in my life.

Paid subscribers will therefore also now get monthly:

• A regular monthly essay at the start of the month in my usual style which will also be a deep dive into a topic relevant to my own creative path and that of my coaching clients. Each essay will be stand-alone, but for 2024 each one will be inspired by a cultural festival happening that month. (I have been having great fun researching some I had never heard of and taking a slant look at a few that are more familiar!) The essay below is a free sample of what you will get as a paid subscriber. The essay will include extra reading recommendations or links to the research I did to facilitate independent deeper diving.

• A chat for paid subscribers allowing you to respond to the topic, ask me any questions, and to discuss it with other subscribers. (Starting with the January essay.)

• Ad hoc extra thank you - gift material. This will be irregularly scheduled (who doesn’t like surprises?!) and may well take the form of additional essays or even short fiction, occasional coaching exercises or journalling prompts or recommendation lists, backstage passes into my art studio - anything I feel moved to share with you that I think will help you be creative yourself.

• The opportunity for sneak previews of book writing and the chance to be on my advanced review team when the time comes.

• The knowledge that you are encouraging and facilitating my writing life and helping others also get access to more of it.

I have also set up gift subscriptions so if you have a creative friend you want to treat over the holiday period you can gift them something I hope will be useful and entertaining for a whole year.

Plus, as a reward for your support as an early reader of this Substack, I am offering a 15% discount off yearly subscriptions until January 10th 2024.

I know not everyone has extra disposable income and I value all my readers whether you take up this offer or not. Money is only one form of energy and support in the form of comments and shares, mentions in notes and restacks are equally valuable to me.

However, if you can, taking out a paid subscription will enable the start of a ripple effect. It will boost my confidence no end. It will also give me disposable income to pay for the books, subscriptions and editorial help I use in my writing here and elsewhere. Both of those will hopefully result in me doing a good job as I try to inspire and support other creators to go and do their own best work. It will also enable me to put money into the creative economy by paying other writers for their work (including more paid subscriptions here) and it will boost the profits of the two indie bookshops I love the most (and which both have fantastic names):

Mr B”s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath (where my name is on the ceiling and I was their first writer in residence!)

Verey Books - The Ullswater bookshop for Curious Minds, in Pooley Bridge, the village where I go to sit by the lake, think and be at peace.

That’s a lot of power for one pound!

(Admittedly, that’s currently just a tiny smidgen more than one US$ a week, but I once went to a Buckingham Palace garden party at the personal invitation of HM Queen Elizabeth II, so it does sort of make you only one step removed from UK Royalty….🤣)

Interiors of Mr B’s (Bath) and Verey’s books (Pooley Bridge).

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So all that said, let’s get on with being creative together…!

Paris in November

The dull wet of November in Paris has been alleviated by the twinkling of a Christmas market in The Tuileries. Standing across the Rue de Rivoli in the doorway of Galligani’s bookshop with its safe polished wooden shelves and grounding heavyweight biographies I can see a fairground ride rising over the wrought iron railings of the park. It is a giant pendulum in which people are imprisoned in seats on both ends. These chairs make three-hundred-and-sixty-degree rotations mid-air, first one way then the other way, even as the illuminated pendulum whips itself around faster and faster on an entirely different arc. Screams carry across traffic noise and far up in the sky dangling legs kick at the sky, uselessly scrabbling for purchase as the riders are spun and rotated. It makes me dizzy just looking at it.

Dizzy is not my kind of fun. Being out of control is not my kind of fun. Yet both of these were very familiar feelings in the early stages of leaving my first career to start again in the creative world. It was not an inner ear disturbance kind of dizziness, not a being utterly dependent on the operator to stop the ride kind of out of control. Rather I have spent more time than was pleasant spinning around trying to find my focus. Too many days trying to find a way of working, a way of being which made me stable, a particular direction that gave me equilibrium.

I swung from one possibility to another. Some remain as tempting talk for another day (A creative writing Ph.D. maybe? No! An architecture degree!). Some I delved into in detail (A masters level training in psychosynthesis coaching), and some I folded into everyday life (Painting between occupational health visits and writing at the kitchen counter).

I was aware that I had a myriad of skills accumulated over decades in varying roles. Solicitor, barrister, Judge, art quilter, painter, freelance journalist, book author, self-publisher, coach, adult education co-ordinator, mindfulness teacher, Board member, baker, golfer (ok, hacker around golf course-er) carer, unpaid travel agent… When I had a paid career one set of skills dominated and was elevated as the more important. That meant me placing my feet firmly in that world and the rest of my options fitted in the spare time around it. Until I burned out, the foundation fell away and I began to swing in mid-air.

Not only did I have to figure out which of the existing skills I wanted to transfer to something new, I had all the new possibilities in front of me. I could do anything I wanted and the choice was bewildering. I turned from one to the other moving too fast to stay still with one thing before another shiny opportunity presented itself. There were many things I could do, all worthy things, each individually meritorious, together far too much. I became dizzy with the choice, losing a sense of equilibrium. Even when I focused just on a Substack the possibility of what to write and all the features I could add made me dizzy with delight and indecision. Which is how I came to be interested in Whirling Dervishes.

Photo by Wolrider YURTSEVEN on Pexels

The Konya Whirling Dervish ceremony

In December the ten-day Whirling Dervish festival takes place in Konya, Turkey, culminating in the anniversary of the poet Rumi’s death. At its heart, the Sema ritual is an expression of Sufi Islam but the dance form has become a tourist attraction and an influence on dancers in the West.

There is much to learn from this ritual. Any artist or musician will be interested in the beautiful curves and rhythms of their skirts as they twirl and scientists have studied them to learn more about the Coriolis effect that forms them. (That’s the same force that relates to the earth’s turning and weather patterns.) There is a rich spiritual intention behind the practice, which is intended to allow participants to experience the unity of all things. It can teach us how to prepare for the inevitability of death: one dervish explained that the associated costume is about “preparation for life after death. The whirler takes off the dirty black clothes of worldly life and puts on the bright (mostly white) clothes of eternal life to get ready to fly.” And of course, the link to the world-view of Rumi, famed for his message of love, has much to explore in itself.

The burning question I had however was: Why don’t they fall down? They can whirl and turn for an hour at a time. Why don’t they get dizzy and topple over?

It turned out there are several reasons. None of them made me want to appropriate this practice, but they all made me reflect on my creativity-related psychological dizziness and do more reading to find how I might use the principles as a prompt or springboard to think about how to approach my creative choices.

Combatting creative dizziness

1. They begin their dance slowly.

   I knew from my previous career that I could do whatever I did well. However, I confused transferring skills with transferring levels of achievement. I assumed I also had to transfer levels of pressurised output when in fact my creative life needs to be founded on a slow, thoughtful approach. I was spinning around trying to grasp every possible expression of my creativity at the same time. And yet I didn’t know which one to pick. I twirled like a child in a sweet store grabbing and stuffing myself with bits of everything and ultimately feeling sick and undernourished.

   Eventually, I stopped everything. I chose one thing to make foundational (this Substack) and started to focus on that slowly, with a very easy schedule, adding what felt right one thing at a time, embedding it into a regular practice before considering the next thing. Finally, I feel I am finding my centre of gravity. Unsurprisingly, now I am not moving so fast my internal vision is blurred, I can see that I am coming back to what I wanted to do as a small child.

2. They adopt a position of connection between the divine and others.

   When they dance, their right arms are above the body, palms facing upward, whereas their left hands face downward. This symbolizes that what they get from God’s grace and blessing, they pass on to the world. The texts and rituals I use to gain a connection to the divine are likely different to yours and I have no desire to suggest you should adopt either those or the ones of Sufi Islam. I know many of you connect with mythology but not religion or that you find your spiritual roots in nature. All these are paths to the same thing and the fact we use different terminology is immaterial.

   However, I think it is a universal truth that we feel more balanced when we act as a conduit. Believing that we alone as the sole source of our creativity makes us arrogant and unable to give the gift of vulnerability. We run the risk of stagnating due to a closed heart. Opening up to the Universe as a source of creation bigger than ourselves imbues our making with universality. It taps us into an eternal, ineffable stream of renewable creative energy.

   On the other hand, focusing only on what we receive from the Muse, the Universe, the Divine (insert your word of preference here) and not reaching out with generosity to others makes us isolated. If we do not pass on what we are gifted, we deny ourselves an earthing connection. The energy fizzes around in us but does not go anywhere, does not have an impact beyond us.

   We need both - to open up to the creative source beyond us and to connect with others for whom that energy is ultimately meant. This means our budgeted creative time needs to be divided equally between our own spiritual and imaginative refreshment and our service to others. Interestingly, recent psychological research confirms that psychological balance ( defined as the ability to react to the change that comes a lot with the second half of life) is in part dependent on a one-to-one ratio between self-care and looking after others.

   To grow this Substack into the impactful tool I want it to be for you I also have to safeguard time for myself not just for writing but for experiencing and then processing the gift that is life.

3. They move whilst only looking at one thing.

   As they whirl, the Dervishes gaze at their thumb with a half-focused vision. Yoga aficionados will be familiar with using a drishti gaze point to maintain balance in tree or eagle pose. What struck me here, however, is that the gaze point was something internal to them.

   If we want to balance in a static position, looking outside ourselves at a spot on the floor or the door frame will do the trick. For movement with balance, however, we need to focus on something integral to us, inseparable from who we are.

   It’s not easy to find exactly what that is. My experience over the last three years since I retired from my first career is that it can take time to nail it down. Indeed, it should take time because it’s not like you just accidentally stumble across it in the supermarket somewhere between the squash and the curry paste. It is a result of two symbiotic processes. First, you put yourself in many different potential situations and roles, trying things on one by one. This is an active stage of reinvention. It’s active play acting, dipping into a dress-up box, seeing what fits, what feels good. Then there is the still, quiet reflection time of looking at yourself in this new guise as if in a mirror and asking: do I see a pretender or do I see myself reflected back?

   I had to look in a lot of directions and try a lot of things before I found a perfect reflection. Like the funny mirrors at the Christmas Fair some of the reflections looked quite like me but not quite right. To give one small example, for me, words like business, career, job, position, entrepreneur, and retirement, didn’t sit quite right. I stuck my toes in all of them until I found a phrase that felt right for what I wish to build, here and generally: Impact-focused practice. Now I can use that as a drishti point. It doesn't matter if other people understand that phrase or interpret it the same way. The important thing is it is a reference to something meaningful to and integral to me.

4. They equip themselves well.

   It turns out those symmetrically sewn skirts the Dervishes wear are important. They are called tennure. They are worn in pairs and both skirts open during the whirling. In ways I don’t understand, the centrifugal forces somehow reduce the possibility of shaking. They have the added benefit of acting as a cooling fan.

   I have learned to give myself cooling time. To enjoy the sparky heat of a new idea but also to let it fade a little to embers before blowing more life into it. It allows me to test that idea, to consider my true capacity, to measure it against my dhrishti point and to gain good counsel on it from my great friend and accountability partner. My decision for what a paid membership here looks like has been refined by this process, by not acting in the high heat flames of first enthusiasm but tempering it gently to ensure it fits with who I am now, not who I used to be or even who I wish I was.

5. They prepare their body.

   Whirling Dervishes avoid overeating and avoid food which increases stomach acid. They perform the sena ceremony while neither hungry nor satiated. Ok, so this is where I say: do what they do and not what I say. I’ve been in France for a month and everything you’ve read from me in that time has been written on a diet of cheese, duck confit, crepes, and buttery breakfast pastries. I cannot stop before satiation. I have no platform from which to preach on this point!

   But I will say that before we left home, at a time when the dizziness was at its worst, swimming was a great help. As long as I went when the pool was quiet and not noisy with after-work rugby players who wanted to splash and shout. That meant going in normal working hours. Oh, the guilt! I got over it. Thinking time is part of creativity and a healthy body is too. Do two at the same time and you get to sit in the jacuzzi in the time you saved. Girl maths!

6. They adopt mindsets that lower blood pressure

   The whirling ritual is not just physical but involves a whole practice around opening up that is thought to lower blood pressure. On a physical level that also helps limit vertigo. Meditation is my go-to for that. I few months ago I attended a five-day silent mediation retreat with HaMakom. It was a time when I worked through many panicky feelings (some there for very good reason, some because I needlessly invented things to panic about) and came away more focused and with greater peace.

   Here on Substack, we are starting to see a proliferation of posts and seminars that tell you what you should do to succeed on Substack. I can very easily feel I started too late, don’t work hard enough, and don’t have enough to say. I can practically feel the systolic numbers climbing. Part of my new impact-focused practice is bringing myself repeatedly back to remembrance that it is the practice of creativity itself that brings me into a flow state. I need to tell myself that I have enough and am enough without dashing after a bandwagon to jump on, that it only takes one comment from a reader saying I helped them or my words resonated with them to flood me with joy. All of that mental practice brings me back from the edge of dizziness to stability.

7. Repeated practice changes them to be better at what they do.

   Medical evidence shows that repeated whirling alters the bodies of dancers making them less liable to vertigo. The same occurs with meditation, as it alters the brains of practitioners ( in a good way!).

   I learned I couldn’t just leave one way of being and one way of working and become totally different, even though I already had a little bit of my future life folded into my past one. I have to practice. Dervishes train for 1000 days away from their families to do what they do. Can you expect to start on day one and rock it? Um no. Is that painfully humbling? Oh yes.

   That's why the word practice is so important to me. Yes, it’s about the sense of a professional attitude to the work I can do in and for the world rather than establishing a profit-and-growth-focused business. But it’s also about the repetition, the life built from small repeated movements towards a clear purpose. It’s about how creativity builds from small movements just as a whirling dance of an hour is stitched together from thousands of rotations lasting only seconds each. It’s about its impact on my well-being, my presence, my relationships, my experience of this ‘one wild and precious life’ as well as the hope that I might impact others.

We will leave Paris shortly and return to the UK to a different lifestyle and physical environment. But my practice of creativity can remain the same because it’s an attitude, a world view, a constant returning to centre.

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For you to ponder:

• What messages from the media you read or the people you talk to make you feel unstable? What do you need to reject to regain your internal sense of equilibrium?

• Do you have the balance right between carving out time for yourself and time for others? How close to a one-to-one ratio are you?

• What small thing would you like to build into your own creativity practice that would give you a sense of seeing yourself again? That could be something entirely for yourself or it could be a step out into the world. It could be something tiny like planting some herbs or setting aside twenty minutes a day to read a fairytale or practice the piano it could be sallying forth with a big new art project. What is it that will meet the calling from inside you that has not been answered for so long?

Finally, Another thank you to all of you who bother to read this and give me an invitation into your inbox because that is a part of what gives me my stability these days. This is not just my Substack - it is ours and together we create a dance together. I’m still learning the steps but I hope you will take up my invitation to join me.

Shalom,

Helen.