Spring 2022 Newsletter

Creativity, mindfulness, and the beauty of a life well-lived

The Sweet Spot of Being

When Martin Aylward was a teenager growing up in England, he became obsessed with what he calls “the miracle of being human.” But he couldn’t find anyone in his community, not even the local priest, who could help him understand what he was going through. So, at age 19, he took off and moved to India, where he spent several years studying with Hindu sage Sukhanta Giri Babaji on how to achieve, as he puts it, “a totally free human existence—free of reactivity, free of fear, free of pettiness.”

I caught up recently with Martin, now a prominent meditation teacher based in France, to talk with him about his new book, Awake Where You Are. What followed was a wide-ranging interview on the key role embodied awareness plays in stimulating creativity and living a fully liberated life. “Whether it’s creativity or sports or meditation,” he says, “there’s a kind of sweet spot of being, having your attention really focused and steady, but also really relaxed and open. Those things, for most people, tend to be in opposite places….But if you watch Roger Federer playing tennis or John Coltrane playing jazz, that’s the quality you see. And what it looks like is what we usually call freedom.”

One of the best ways to break through creative blocks, he adds, is to embrace the fear: “I have a friend who’s a writer and her line on writing is to go fear-wards. Go toward that which we habitually ignore or deny or get distracted from. That has great parallels in meditation, right? If something feels too painful or overwhelming, you can’t work with it. You need to give careful attention to something that isn’t so overwhelming. But, increasingly, you learn to touch into and make room for that which you’ve hitherto been afraid to push against. Going fear-wards is what’s healing.”

Guillaume Caron

“Freedom of being is the absence of anxiety about imperfection,” says Aylward (teaching in New York).

Listen to the interview here:

For more on Martin and his book, go to martinaylward.com

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At 95, Brooks is still a master of falling-down funny.

In my interview with filmmaker Mel Brooks, he riffs on his “magical” childhood in Brooklyn, his groundbreaking approach to comedy, and his secret for lifelong creativity.

Q: How would you define your style of comedy?

A: “It’s people comedy. It’s not made up. It comes from everyday life, from what we all know about living and dying. I gave up the Henny Youngman school of comedy very early in life. You know, “My wife said, ‘You never take me anywhere anymore. So I took her to the kitchen’ ” jokes don’t make it. It has to come out of human endeavor, and then it works.”

New event! The Sit/Smile/Create virtual workshop on May 21

Learn More

Jenn Ackerman

Erdrich at her bookstore in Minneapolis.

Saved by the Novel

Last year, I had a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Louise Erdrich on her new best-selling novel, The Sentence, a comical ghost story about a white woman—and Native American wannabe—who comes back from the grave to haunt a bookstore in Minneapolis. In this interview, she reflects on how Ojibwe wisdom has influenced her work, why her fiction has become more daring as she gets older, and how writing has saved her life. “It happens every time I begin to write something,” she says. “Partway through my new book, I thought, I don’t want anything to happen to me. Not because of how it would affect my children but because of the main character, Tookie. I wanted to know what she was going to say and how the story would end.”

How to Be an Artist

A major retrospective of Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell’s paintings recently opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This exhibition, which was co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, calls to mind Alexxa Gotthardt’s illuminating piece in Artsy on the artist’s evocative, feeling-based approach to creativity. “When I am working, I am only aware of the canvas and what it tells me to do,” said Mitchell. “I am certainly not aware of myself. Painting is a way of forgetting oneself.” For more about the show, go to: https://artbma.org/exhibition/joan-mitchell

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

Chicago, a painting inspired by Mitchell’s birthplace, captures the raw emotional power of her early work.

Robert Freson

Mitchell in her studio near Paris, 1983.