Ama: how to clear writer’s block the Ayurvedic way

If you’ve ever attempted to write anything, you’ve probably experienced writer’s block at some point. I’m having it right now actually, but I’m going to get through it… And in this piece I’m going to show you how I do it. I was recently listening to an interview with one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Phoebe Bridgers, on the podcast Song Exploder. Host Hrishikesh Hirway asks Phoebe if she’s ever experienced writer’s block. Phoebe laughs before replying, “Yes, I feel like I experience it 100 percent of the time.” Even the most prolific and gifted artists among us seem to suffer from this dreaded syndrome. 

Where do these blocks come from? Is it just an inherent part of being human? To help answer this, I want to introduce you to the Ayurvedic concept of ama. Ama is the buildup of “toxic sludge” in our bodies that leads to stagnation, inflammation, and physical blocks. It’s seen as the single greatest threat to our health, because so many diseases start with the accumulation of ama. What causes this toxic sludge to form? Basically, when you are not able to digest what you are taking into your body. Poor food choices and a weak digestive fire will eventually result in ama. 

What does this have to do with writer’s block? Here’s the kicker. Ama is not only physical; you can also have mental and emotional ama! Ayurvedic practitioner Dr. Lad writes, “Ama can be created in the mind due to mental stress, negative thinking, repressed emotions and mental fatigue.” Experience those things much in your everyday life? Mmmhmm, me too. 

Before you start freaking out that there is toxic sludge in your brain causing you to have writer’s block, I want to propose that this is more of a metaphor. Ayurveda offers great, simple practices for clearing the body of ama, and I believe that clearing the physical body can absolutely begin to shift things on emotional/mental/creative levels as well. I wrote a whole blog post about physical cleansing practices to support creativity. 

But, today’s piece is not about cleansing on a physical level. Rather, I want to take the concept of ama and abstract it a little bit. What does “creative ama” look like? Where does it come from? What practices can we engage in to address it directly? And if we get rid of it, could we get rid of writer’s block? 

Basically, I think we can classify creative ama as all the things that get in the way of us being creative. I bet you could sit down right now and come up with a long list. It could be a lack of perceived time, a lack of focus, lack of inspiration, fear of putting your work into the world, fear of failure, low self-esteem, a strong desire to binge that new Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit instead… You get the idea. At the root of all these things though, I suspect there are some old thought patterns that have perhaps been habitating in your brain, trying to keep you from creating, for a very long time. 

In the first chapter of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron shares an exercise that involves listing past enemies of your creativity. This would include anyone who made you feel unworthy of being an artist as a child (or anytime in your life), the unsupportive teacher who told you to give up drawing, the parent who shut down your singing voice, etc. Cameron writes, “It is always necessary to acknowledge creative injuries and grieve them. Otherwise they become creative scar tissue and block your growth.” 

I see this as akin to digestion. Last week I wrote about how we can apply Ayurvedic digestion tips to our creative process. In that piece I touched on the importance of properly digesting all life experiences (emotions, sensory stimulus), not just food. What happens if we have experiences from many years in the past that we have not digested? An ama nightmare, that’s what! If you don’t find a way to digest those experiences, that ama is going to keep showing up as blocks, one way or another. The “creative enemies” exercise can be a good start to digesting some of these old experiences, especially if you feel that you’re carrying a lot of resentment, disappointment or hurt surrounding your creativity. 

If hashing out old traumas isn’t really your thing, there are certainly other options. Much of the work I do in my Ayurvedic coaching is about helping people spend more time in parasympathetic nervous system activation. The parasympathetic is the “rest and digest” state, as opposed to the sympathetic “fight or flight” state. While a fluctuation between both is healthy, most of us tend to spend far more time than necessary in the sympathetic state. Remember what Dr. Lad said about “mental stress, negative thinking, repressed emotions and mental fatigue” creating ama? All these things are a result of an overactive sympathetic nervous system. When our body is constantly in high alert mode, primed for perceived threats, we accumulate mental stress, can’t properly digest our emotions, and therefore accumulate mental ama. 

A simple way to bring yourself into the parasympathetic state is by engaging any of your five senses. When you focus fully on something you are hearing, seeing, touching, etc, your body begins to receive signals of safety. Rarely are we actually in a life-threatening situation — most of our stress response comes from our minds, and the fact that our bodies can’t tell the difference between real and perceived danger. When we can bring ourselves into the present moment through our senses, we see that there is nothing to fear. That’s when our parasympathetic state switches on. 

The more time we spend in the parasympathetic nervous system, the more we will be able to digest that mental and emotional ama from past experiences. All that is to say, you might not have to do something as pointed as writing a letter to those enemies of your creativity. Simply spending more time in a relaxed state can start to clear that negativity on its own. The mind and body are so closely connected; practices like yoga, meditation, and somatic bodywork can also help to clear mental and emotional ama. 

I want to talk for a moment about the flipside of getting obsessed with all these healing practices. Stephen Pressfield puts it bluntly The War of Art when he asks, “What are we trying to heal, anyway?” Although he seems to have a bias against “cultures of healing” that I certainly don’t share, I think there is some truth in what he says: “The concept in all these environments seems to be that one needs to complete his healing before he is ready to do his work.” (I can just imagine Pressfield rolling his eyes at this article and the idea of “creative ama…) But if you are using your need to heal past traumas or clear toxins as an excuse to put off creating what you are longing to create, perhaps that’s something to investigate. 

Pressfield urges us to remember, “the part of us that we imagine needs healing is not the part we create from; that part is far deeper and stronger.” This reminds me of my ayurvedic teacher Katie Silcox who often says (and I’m paraphrasing here), “There is a part of you that is already healed. A part of you that doesn’t need any herbs, oils or mantras. A part of you that has always been whole and complete.” I like the idea of creating from that part of myself. 

Of course, I would like to propose that both things can be true. I think your creativity can and will benefit from the other work you do to heal, but I don’t think you should let healing be an excuse to put your creative work on hold. Write your novel and do your meditation. Learn piano and clean up your diet. Start your business and massage your body with oil. This is pretty much my whole philosophy with She Who Flows. (For more on body oil massage, see pretty much any of my other blog posts…) 

Stephen Pressfield’s whole approach to overcoming creative blocks is understanding and overcoming “resistance.” There’s a certain point where this becomes pretty much a battle of mind over matter. Once you’ve worked through all your past traumas around your creativity, learned how to reduce stress, and connected to your highest self, you’re still going to have to sit down and look at the proverbial blank page. You’re still going to have to write that first word. 

Ama thrives when you’re stuck in a rut of unhealthy habits. Not only that, but the more ama you have, the harder it may be to change these habits. So there’s definitely something to be said for just putting your foot down (or putting your butt down in your chair) and breaking the patterns of resistance by getting to work. Pressfield calls this “turning pro” — the moment when you stop waiting around for inspiration to strike and commit that you are going to show up to your work every day, no matter how you feel. 

So can clearing creative ama get rid of writer’s block for good? I’m not sure. For one thing, I think it is a lot to expect that we can ever clear all of our mental, emotional and creative ama. But I do think the practices mentioned above can greatly reduce the amount of creative ama we carry, which can drastically change how we respond to writer’s block. 

For example: I started this article by telling you that I was experiencing writer’s block. It’s true. That was about two hours ago. Now, I’m not feeling blocked at all. I used to respond to writer’s block differently. I thought about starting a blog for years, and even had a few pieces saved to my Google Drive that I would look at from time to time, but decided weren’t good enough to share. Starting a new blog is like facing a really big blank canvas. You’re terrified to put down the first stroke, to make that first statement; you are terrified to commit. 

But one day I wrote the first post. And then I decided I would commit to writing one every week, and that’s what I’ve done for the past nine months now. I do it whether or not I feel inspired, whether or not anyone reads it, whether or not I have writer’s block. So when I sat down today and was faced with writer’s block, it wasn’t as scary as it used to be. I knew it wouldn’t get the best of me. I knew that I would get through it, by typing one imperfect sentence after the other. I knew that in a few hours I would have a finished piece to post, just as I do every week. 

So maybe writer’s block will be with you 100 percent of the time. But I know you’ll be able to find your way through it, under it, or around it, one way or another. I know, because there is a part of you that is free of ama, that doesn’t need any healing — just as there is that part in me. That part of us is longing to be remembered, longing to create.