While washing the morning dishes, I listened and learned from these two wondrous creatives. Simple. Succinct. Practical. Advice delivered through the lens of authenticity and vulnerability with such warm, forgiving vocal orchestration - made me believe all good things are possible. Staying true to oneself, one’s own creative voice in a world full of manufactured manipulations can be tricky and tiring. However, after listening to this podcast, I feel hopeful. Thank you Suleika Jaouad and Yung Pueblo for guiding us via this Substack community to be patient with finding our own creative expressions. Our own voice. And how to stay true to it when outside pressures or outside distractions are constantly trying to lure us away from our personal intent.
In my experience, writing has been therapeutic and it's why I started my substack "Find Meaning in Adversity" and writing my memoirs after a particularly difficult set back. It always helps to know others feel the same way and it helps me to connect with other humans. I write to encourage and support others who are going through a difficult time.
"instead of numbing something painful, creativity was a way of engaging with that pain". Thank you for this, Suleika. A beautiful conversation. This is the wisdom I was waiting to embrace at a point in my writing (and creative) journey where I'm starting to understand its role in my healing (rewilding) journey.
I’m not a writer, but that’s not the common thread of isolation journals necessarily. I came because of the common thread of my granddaughter’s own journey with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and stem cell transplant and the generous, descriptive sharing of that life experience described in Life Interrupted. All you have to be is human to enjoy all the offerings, all the sharing and all the light!
I have already listened to this gorgeous conversation twice as I walked my neighborhood and over the Butte nearby, on a path lined with tall grass and wildflowers. I felt myself smiling and nodding and saying thank you again and again. Creativity has always been a healing modality for me via acting, journaling, writing, parenting, and well, simply living this life. Thank you for your beautiful vulnerability and willingness to share your stories. These are the kinds of conversations that inspire me and the kinds of stories I love to tell.
This was the first podcast I listened to on Substack. I could feel the intense emotions in your voice...a vulnerable shake in your voice that was so raw and beautiful. I just joined this community and am inspired by how much hope it brings to humanity.
It was so refreshing to listen to two people who are strong enough to share their vulnerability and healing with one another and to we listeners. I have always believed that allowing ourselves to be vulnerable with others is the key to true connection between human beings. Vulnerability and staying true to ourselves is a gift we give to ourselves and to others. Thank you, Suleika and Diego, for sharing your time together with us. It was beautiful.
I loved this conversation. Two beautiful people having a inspiring conversation about creativity from a 'pure' standpoint. Trying to produce work without thought of it becoming a 'side hustle' or commercially viable is incredibly hard in an era of metrics. Plus, this is not to say one does not want one's writing to be seen by an audience, but it is a tightrope not to become captured by an audience and remain stubbornly authentic.
We want to share our vision, and it is so rewarding when it is well received, but that is not the main point of the work. It is an aspect of oneself. Protecting one's unique voice against warping influences can be very difficult. Thanks for your insights!
“It was after I did my third silent 10-day meditation course, I felt this stream of creativity just open up.”
I believe you have described creative destruction, the first step needed to move forward past trauma.
Suleika:
“Instead of numbing something painful, creativity was a way of engaging with that pain and, in engaging with it and examining it, perhaps even having the opportunity to alchemize it into something interesting or useful or maybe even beautiful.”
“... engaging with that pain and, in engaging with it and examining it ...”
This statement gets to the core of why I engage with high level “classical” music, particularly Romantic and late Romantic period music.
Music communicates directly to emotional experiences without the intervention of words.
When I am playing a particularly painful piece, Rachmaninoff’s Elegy or Chopin’s Nocturne in C# Minor, I am profoundly affected by the direct contact with grief as expressed in these pieces. By playing them, however, I am creating grief. Grief is not some distant uncontrollable outside force acting to hurt me, it is part of me. I am grief. Grief is who I am at that moment. I am driving this particular emotion, particularly with repeated practice which is needed to fully master high art music.
So while I am in this odd little bubble of emotion generation I have a chance to understand grief from a detached perspective. The various aspects of grief are being pointed out to me. The various ways in which grief manifest and then evolve become apparent to me. The mechanisms of grief are no longer muddled, fierce, and foreign but become clear over time as the necessary crucible of fire, the state of creative destruction, that is necessary before new growth can occur.
When these emotional patterns becomes clear, one can see that life itself is a series of emotional destructions followed by opportunities for growth. Childhood is a prime example of ongoing emotional destructions and growth or, in the case of some people who become stuck and mired down during this phase of life, damaged by their childhood experience.
For me, playing sophisticated high art music provides a way to examine emotional experiences in context with my life. Listening to high art music can be helpful as well, particularly if you are intimately familiar with it, but directly participating in performing this music, developing your own nuances and interpretations, brings this music to life as a personal experience, a personal experience that can teach many lessons that would not be available to me otherwise.
Side note: All music has some level of direct emotional impact.
Hard driving rock music, for instance is great for stimulating adrenaline and testosterone release, very useful in certain contexts like construction work.
Maudlin music, for instance Country Western music, is great at evoking a kind of sentimental yearning for simpler times - limited number of themes to choose from: girlfriend walks away, dog dies, etc., heartbreak of various and sundry kind.
If all we listen to is hard rock, popular commercial music, rap, country music, etc., we are presented with a very limited pallet of emotional options, thus shaping us with very limited emotional growth patterns.
Most people do not recognize the influence of their own emotional backgrounds that they surround themselves with, thus reinforcing their own emotional limits.
For those who are embedded in their own music, offering some other mechanism outside their life experience is almost never received well. It can generate reactions ranging from stunned silence to fierce denial or ridicule. Thus keeping people safe within their own emotional contexts.
But as you are both aware, life offers us opportunities to experience pain, struggle, fear, and grief. For the rare few among us, these are the opportunities that can lead to personal growth if we are open to it.
"Death always feels like a plot twist, and yet it is the one thing that is an absolute certainty." Good reminder.
While washing the morning dishes, I listened and learned from these two wondrous creatives. Simple. Succinct. Practical. Advice delivered through the lens of authenticity and vulnerability with such warm, forgiving vocal orchestration - made me believe all good things are possible. Staying true to oneself, one’s own creative voice in a world full of manufactured manipulations can be tricky and tiring. However, after listening to this podcast, I feel hopeful. Thank you Suleika Jaouad and Yung Pueblo for guiding us via this Substack community to be patient with finding our own creative expressions. Our own voice. And how to stay true to it when outside pressures or outside distractions are constantly trying to lure us away from our personal intent.
In my experience, writing has been therapeutic and it's why I started my substack "Find Meaning in Adversity" and writing my memoirs after a particularly difficult set back. It always helps to know others feel the same way and it helps me to connect with other humans. I write to encourage and support others who are going through a difficult time.
So powerful!
Bare - from the heart
Through the marrow
Down to the core...
Thank you!💜📝📖✒️🖋🖌
"instead of numbing something painful, creativity was a way of engaging with that pain". Thank you for this, Suleika. A beautiful conversation. This is the wisdom I was waiting to embrace at a point in my writing (and creative) journey where I'm starting to understand its role in my healing (rewilding) journey.
I’m not a writer, but that’s not the common thread of isolation journals necessarily. I came because of the common thread of my granddaughter’s own journey with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and stem cell transplant and the generous, descriptive sharing of that life experience described in Life Interrupted. All you have to be is human to enjoy all the offerings, all the sharing and all the light!
Right down to the corpuscles....that's how deep this conversation went!
Ohhhhh thank you for this. I drew and took pretty notes of the wisdom here. Love to both of these artists, thinkers and living people.
I love both their words! Thanks for having them share these amazing thoughts! ✌🏻
I have already listened to this gorgeous conversation twice as I walked my neighborhood and over the Butte nearby, on a path lined with tall grass and wildflowers. I felt myself smiling and nodding and saying thank you again and again. Creativity has always been a healing modality for me via acting, journaling, writing, parenting, and well, simply living this life. Thank you for your beautiful vulnerability and willingness to share your stories. These are the kinds of conversations that inspire me and the kinds of stories I love to tell.
This was the first podcast I listened to on Substack. I could feel the intense emotions in your voice...a vulnerable shake in your voice that was so raw and beautiful. I just joined this community and am inspired by how much hope it brings to humanity.
You both made me happy 😃 with a smart, insightful conversation
It was so refreshing to listen to two people who are strong enough to share their vulnerability and healing with one another and to we listeners. I have always believed that allowing ourselves to be vulnerable with others is the key to true connection between human beings. Vulnerability and staying true to ourselves is a gift we give to ourselves and to others. Thank you, Suleika and Diego, for sharing your time together with us. It was beautiful.
I loved this conversation. Two beautiful people having a inspiring conversation about creativity from a 'pure' standpoint. Trying to produce work without thought of it becoming a 'side hustle' or commercially viable is incredibly hard in an era of metrics. Plus, this is not to say one does not want one's writing to be seen by an audience, but it is a tightrope not to become captured by an audience and remain stubbornly authentic.
We want to share our vision, and it is so rewarding when it is well received, but that is not the main point of the work. It is an aspect of oneself. Protecting one's unique voice against warping influences can be very difficult. Thanks for your insights!
This conversation was so compelling in its honesty. So refreshingly honest. Thank you.
Diego:
“It was after I did my third silent 10-day meditation course, I felt this stream of creativity just open up.”
I believe you have described creative destruction, the first step needed to move forward past trauma.
Suleika:
“Instead of numbing something painful, creativity was a way of engaging with that pain and, in engaging with it and examining it, perhaps even having the opportunity to alchemize it into something interesting or useful or maybe even beautiful.”
“... engaging with that pain and, in engaging with it and examining it ...”
This statement gets to the core of why I engage with high level “classical” music, particularly Romantic and late Romantic period music.
Music communicates directly to emotional experiences without the intervention of words.
When I am playing a particularly painful piece, Rachmaninoff’s Elegy or Chopin’s Nocturne in C# Minor, I am profoundly affected by the direct contact with grief as expressed in these pieces. By playing them, however, I am creating grief. Grief is not some distant uncontrollable outside force acting to hurt me, it is part of me. I am grief. Grief is who I am at that moment. I am driving this particular emotion, particularly with repeated practice which is needed to fully master high art music.
So while I am in this odd little bubble of emotion generation I have a chance to understand grief from a detached perspective. The various aspects of grief are being pointed out to me. The various ways in which grief manifest and then evolve become apparent to me. The mechanisms of grief are no longer muddled, fierce, and foreign but become clear over time as the necessary crucible of fire, the state of creative destruction, that is necessary before new growth can occur.
When these emotional patterns becomes clear, one can see that life itself is a series of emotional destructions followed by opportunities for growth. Childhood is a prime example of ongoing emotional destructions and growth or, in the case of some people who become stuck and mired down during this phase of life, damaged by their childhood experience.
For me, playing sophisticated high art music provides a way to examine emotional experiences in context with my life. Listening to high art music can be helpful as well, particularly if you are intimately familiar with it, but directly participating in performing this music, developing your own nuances and interpretations, brings this music to life as a personal experience, a personal experience that can teach many lessons that would not be available to me otherwise.
Side note: All music has some level of direct emotional impact.
Hard driving rock music, for instance is great for stimulating adrenaline and testosterone release, very useful in certain contexts like construction work.
Maudlin music, for instance Country Western music, is great at evoking a kind of sentimental yearning for simpler times - limited number of themes to choose from: girlfriend walks away, dog dies, etc., heartbreak of various and sundry kind.
If all we listen to is hard rock, popular commercial music, rap, country music, etc., we are presented with a very limited pallet of emotional options, thus shaping us with very limited emotional growth patterns.
Most people do not recognize the influence of their own emotional backgrounds that they surround themselves with, thus reinforcing their own emotional limits.
For those who are embedded in their own music, offering some other mechanism outside their life experience is almost never received well. It can generate reactions ranging from stunned silence to fierce denial or ridicule. Thus keeping people safe within their own emotional contexts.
But as you are both aware, life offers us opportunities to experience pain, struggle, fear, and grief. For the rare few among us, these are the opportunities that can lead to personal growth if we are open to it.