Five ways to spark inspiration when you’re stuck at home

We are all living different lives right now due to COVID-19. We are trying to adjust to the new normal. There are ups and downs. Some days, I feel like I’ve cracked the code on this stay-at-home life, and other days, everything feels like it’s falling apart and I don’t know why. I have to remind myself – this is not normal life! 

I’ve been keeping myself to a pretty strict routine, scheduling my work/meals/exercise for each day, perhaps to make up for lack of external schedules that I am used to. It had been going well, but the past week I found myself feeling drained and uninspired. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but I was taken aback. With all the extra time alone, more time to do what I want, shouldn’t I be overflowing with ideas? Technically my days are more spacious now, but somehow, they aren’t feeling that way. 

I realized that back in “regular” life, I actually got more breaks in my work. “In-between” activities seemed to fit themselves in more naturally. For example, time spent in my car always gave me space to ponder new ideas, listen to music or a podcast, and find inspiration as I watched the scenery pass by. Or I would find myself with an extra ten minutes before a doctor’s appointment, and might wander into a bookstore I’d never been in before. I would meet a friend for dinner, and the conversation would lead me down a new path. I’d taken these things for granted, and not realized how being stuck at home would limit my usual ways of receiving inspiration. 

It’s hitting me that I cannot simply be focused and creative eight hours a day (and I highly doubt anyone can). We need to, as Julia Cameron calls it in The Artist’s Way, “fill the well.” We need to purposefully engage in activities that spark our imagination or just give us space to dream. And the secret of this lies in that unscheduled, low-pressure, in-between time. This week I decided to put some effort into finding ways to nurture inspiration while stuck at home. Here are some things that worked. 

1. Engage in artist-brain activities

I swear by Julia Cameron’s book/course The Artist’s Way, so that was the first place I turned for guidance. Cameron talks about the mindset we need to get into to find inspiration: 

“The artist brain cannot be reached–or triggered–effectively by words alone. The artist brain is the sensory brain: sight and sound, smell and taste, touch.” 

Bingo! One of the reasons I’ve been feeling uninspired lately is because my sensory input has been limited to the boundaries of my house, instead of the much bigger world it is used to. But there are many “artist-brain” activities that you can do at home. Cooking and cleaning are two that Cameron recommends. “When I have a screenwriting student stuck at the midpoint of act two, I ask them to please go do their household mending,” Cameron writes.

I was talking to a friend recently who was lamenting about not being able to focus on some creative work she was hoping to do in the past couple weeks. “But my kitchen is sparkling, and all the seeds are planted in my garden!” she shared. This just might be a perfect place to be. I often find that I need to take care of simple household tasks before I can focus on creative projects. We tend to label this as procrastination, but maybe it’s actually more productive than we think. Maybe it’s just what we need to get the creative juices flowing. 

So instead of seeing these as separate from my creative work, I’m giving myself more permission to engage in these activities. And lo and behold, yesterday after spending an hour making hummus from scratch, I found myself thinking about my current music project in a new light. I have been feeling disconnected from my purpose around my next album that I’m in the process of recording. But I had a new idea for a small project that got me excited, and spent the next three hours recording in my bedroom/home studio. I was reminded what it felt like when I was fourteen and would stay up late into the night recording my songs, because that inspiration and excitement was so strong. I was happy to connect to that feeling for even a moment – and I couldn’t get there by forcing it. I had to come at it sideways by grinding some garbanzo beans. 

See if you can find an artist-brain activity you enjoy, and notice if it sparks something. “Any regular, repetitive action primes the well,” Cameron writes. And if it doesn’t work? At the very least you’ll have a clean kitchen and something to spread on your toast. 

2. Take yourself on an at-home artist date

Another staple tool of The Artist’s Way is the Artist Date. Cameron describes this as “a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your inner artist.” The idea is to take your inner artist-child on a date, with no pressure or expectations to create anything. It’s just about exploring. In the past, some artist dates I’ve loved have been going to a botanical garden, doing a Japanese tea ceremony, taking the subway to a new neighborhood and letting myself get a little lost… but none of these things are possible right now. So what would an at-home Artist Date look like?

It’s been an unusually rainy week here in Los Angeles, and the other morning I was listening to the heavy rain and fantasizing about going to a museum. It’s one of my favorite things to do on a rainy day. There is something so dreamy about being inside, looking at the bright strokes of impressionism or modern art on a cold grey day. Since all the museums are closed due to COVID-19, I decided I would do a virtual museum trip. I gave myself permission to take the morning off from my usual work, made myself a cup of chai, and sat in my little office where the big windows allow me a good view of the rain coming down. 

I went to the LACMA website and was happy to find they were offering plenty of free online materials. As I let myself get lost in a series of short documentaries about different visual artists, I tried to let myself maintain that wandering focus I find myself in when I’m at a museum. I’m not the person who tries to see every little thing, but I like to absorb the atmosphere and go where I’m naturally drawn (which always includes a stop at the museum cafe to read a book or write in my journal). As I watched the LACMA videos, I let my gaze drift out at the rain, a squirrel climbing a tree outside my window, palm trees blowing in the wind. I jotted down some notes in my journal of interesting phrases some of the artists said. I doodled. Most importantly, I let myself stay in this space for an hour, with no thought of work or productivity. It was lovely. 

I didn’t think much about what I’d seen at the “museum,” but the next day when I went to do my songwriting, I found some of the images coming back to me. Phrases I’d jotted down about light, painting and photography reformed themselves into my lyrics. It wasn’t a conscious decision to write about what I’d seen, instead I was just happy to find that I had successfully “filled the well.” When I went to create, there were some interesting ideas and images lingering in the back of my mind, ready to express themselves through song. 

Think about an artist date you would love to take, and then see if you can recreate it at home. Do you imagine sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Paris? Make yourself a croissant and a cup of coffee, play some french music and let yourself daydream. Look up your favorite museum and see what they’re offering online. Give yourself an hour to go down a rabbithole and follow an interest you wouldn’t usually give yourself time to explore. The important thing is for it to be relaxing and not too focused!

3. Schedule unscheduled time

I was talking to a friend and mentor about both the joys and challenges of being an artist stuck at home, and he told me that he has to schedule in time to do nothing, just like he schedules work, meetings, etc. He happens to be stuck in a small apartment in NYC with his wife and young daughter, so he is definitely not going to get that free time to dream/write/mull things over if he doesn’t schedule it in. On the other hand, I’m alone in my house in LA most of the day, and yet I still find myself exhausted by the end of the day and like I had no downtime. 

When scheduling your unscheduled time, you may or may not have a goal in mind. You may use it for an Artist Date or an artist-brain activity like cooking or crocheting, or you might end up doing nothing at all. The key is stop thinking that these pockets of time are just going to magically appear, and to actually write it in your schedule. 

Give yourself permission not to know what the time will be used for. I find I have trouble explaining to my husband why I need time alone if I don’t have a specific thing I’m doing. I don’t alway know what I want to do, sometimes I just want the freedom to putter around a bit. If you live alone, this might be easier, but if you live with family, do whatever it takes to schedule in some free time that’s just for you.

4. Spice up your routine

A quick word about springtime from an Ayurvedic perspective: in spring, the qualities are heavy, wet and dense. The rain outside my window this week is a perfect reflection of that. If we don’t engage in practices that balance out these qualities, we will tend to start feeling heavy, lethargic or depressed in the spring. Usually, spring is my favorite time to take a road trip, because it gets me out of my routine and counteracts that heavy feeling. Being at home though, we are all more susceptible to falling into the traps or feeling dull, tired and uninspired. 

Ayurveda offers many suggestions about how to stay balanced in springtime. These are a few I’ve been working on (they’re simple to explain, but much harder to get yourself to actually do!)

• Wake up earlier. Wake up before sunrise if you can. When we wake up while it’s still dark, the air is actually more energizing – and creative! Early mornings are a wonderful time to do a spiritual practice or a writing practice. Though it seems counterintuitive, the harder it is for you to drag yourself out of bed, the more you might benefit from rising earlier. 
• Sweat every day. Exercise is always important, but spring is the most important time to get some heavy exercise in. I’ve been getting creative with my at-home workouts, lifting weights, doing yoga, and having lots of impromptu dance parties. Studies have shown exercise to aid in depression, and I know it makes a huge difference to my mindset and focus. 
• Spice your food. Play with incorporating some fun spices into your cooking, like curry powder, cinnamon, cayenne, or cumin. Make fresh ginger tea to sip throughout the day. Revamp your spice cabinet. This will help keep your digestion strong, and with good digestion comes a sharper and more inspired mind! 

Taking care of our bodies is essential if we want to be creating anything, so give these a try and see if it boosts your inspiration a bit.  

5. Understand the difference between resistance and exhaustion

The last thing I want you to get from this blog is that you should be using this time to take up watercolor painting, learn to make sourdough bread, write the next great American novel, read every book on your shelf etc., etc., etc. Now is a time to be gentle with ourselves, and lower our expectations. What I’m wishing for you is a bit of creative inspiration, because inspiration is truly the best medicine in hard times. That you could lose yourself for an hour doing something you love — that is my greatest wish for you. 

You are the one living your life and you know what self-care looks like for you. If you’ve been pushing yourself extremely hard, you may just need to crash and not use this time to do anything creative whatsoever. I find that if I’m at the point of total exhaustion, any creative work I attempt will only make me frustrated and angry. That’s when I turn on Netflix, put a frozen dinner in the microwave, and say I’ll try again another day. 

But there is a different quality to being exhausted and to resisting for some other reason. It can be hard to distinguish the difference, and it requires paying attention to your body. If I’m in that lazy, dull space where I can’t get off the couch, I usually know I’m resisting something. Maybe I’m afraid of not doing a good enough job, I don’t want to face my perfectionism, or I just don’t know what my next move looks like and I’m dreading facing the blank page. If this is the case for you, I would suggest trying one of the activities above to coax a little inspiration back into your home. It doesn’t have to be big and it doesn’t have to look like anything in particular. But when you feel that spark you will recognize it, and you’ll be so glad that it’s back. 

I hope you have some fun trying these techniques, and let me know how you’re staying focused and creative these days!