You know what needs to happen. The project you dream about having time for. You can feel it waiting… But you can’t make yourself start. Or, maybe you started months ago with fire in your chest and now you’re running on fumes. The spark is gone and you don’t know how to get it back.
You’re not new to this, you know the answers. Discipline. Better habits. Accountability. Maybe you can manage a hot streak but feel worse for having tasted what’s ‘possible’. Perhaps you wonder if other creators struggle like this, what if you’re just not cut out for it?
Stop trying to “work harder” or “be more consistent” or “do the right thing”. You’re looking at it wrong. You’re acting like you’re just a machine.
heavenly wisp (me, 2025)
Procrastination isn’t personal failure—it’s your system telling you that you’re in an unbalanced state. Writer’s block is trying to execute when you need to dream. Mania is vision without grounding. Rumination is reflection without rebound. When you’re stuck in one mode there’s only one outcome: burnout and abandon.
I’ve been thinking about my creative process for a long time. People have told me my rate of output is “hard to fathom”, for me, it’s not about speed. It’s about smoothness. I have reliably increased my creative satisfaction every year without fucking up my life. How? Awareness and patience [1].
Over the years, I’ve noticed I drift through distinct modes. Sometimes I am dreaming vague possibilities. Other times, I am turning over tangled knots, finding words for what I felt. Often I am in pure flow, punctuated by stepping back to see what I’ve actually made. And, when the times comes, sharing my work with the world. Some of these feel better than others, it takes a catalyst to push you over the threshold.
The States
Dreaming/Seeding: The generative space where impossible and possible overlap. Visions emerge without execution pressure. Failure mode: endless dreaming without progression, or rushing to make before proper incubation.
Unpacking the Unknown: Breaking down visions into component parts, developing vocabulary for what you sense, identifying what you don’t know yet. Failure mode: analysis paralysis, or premature certainty about complex territory.
Pure Execution: Flow state of making without judgement. Where the work actually gets done. Failure mode: never entering this state (endless preparation), or tunnel vision (losing the thread of why it matters).
Orientation & Reflection: Stepping back to see what you’ve actually created, integrate learnings, understand how it connects to your broader work. Failure mode: skipping entirely and losing meaning, or getting stuck in endless analysis.
Contact with Reality: Where your work meets the world—sharing, testing, receiving feedback, feeling how it lands. Failure mode: avoiding contact (masturbatory work), or being overwhelmed by external input without internal grounding.
Will this work for you? Maybe. My map doesn’t really matter, what matters is the process that can discover the map… Which is? I told you: awareness and patience.
Productivity culture pushes discipline as the universal cure and speed as the ultimate goal. This discipline-first approach means living in execution-mode forever. Sit down, do the work, ship, repeat. Everything else is weakness to eliminate. This tightens the feedback loop at the expensive of neglecting the bigger picture. Short term over long term.
Forcing everything through execution-brain when you have pattern-matching, somatic knowing, emotional intelligence, spatial reasoning... all sitting idle because you’re too focused on “getting it done”.
True discipline is mastery of meta-cognition. Buddhist traditions understand that it’s all one big metabolic feedback loop. Dreaming and making, vision and craft, internal and external. The false separation is what’s holding you back, it’s a game of perspective.
Spiritual angst is part of the creative struggle. If you feel fragmented it’s because you’re treating yourself like a goal-seeking agent, instead of an organism with natural homeostatic rhythms. When the conditions are right creativity happens on its own [2].
Discipline won’t make you superhuman but integration can make you 100% human, which is more than enough! Most people are running at 20% capacity, routing everything through their linguistic, analytical, egoic mind while the rest of their processing power lays idle.
So what does integration look like? Awareness and patience.
Recognise what “state” you’re in
Notice when that state shifts
Learn your failure modes
Build vocabulary for your own patterns
Trust that your subconscious is on your side [3]
You can’t automate this. You can’t outsource it. You can’t systematise it into an app. The meta-awareness, the state transitions, the map making—that’s not a problem to solve.
It's the work of integration [4].
✌️ Ben
What I’ve been thinking about
[1] Seems I came out of the womb high in alertness and low in awareness / patience.
[2] When a creative practice falls apart it is never just “lack of discipline”, it’s a loss of integration.
[3] It sounds cheesy, but your body and mind really do want what is best for you. If you can demonstrate conscious understanding of and dedication to that cause, you will integrate your psyche. See The Master and his Emissary.
[4] Consider everything at once, notice synergistic relationships between far reaching corners of your experience.