To become prolific, you have to become process driven

The one secret most creatives miss.

In the art world, we often talk about being process-driven rather than product-driven. But many of us (past Gray, raise your hand!!!) spend years slumped in front of clean desks, dissociating into blank pages like they’re the literal fuckin’ abyss, too paralyzed to pick up a pen, wondering how to enjoy the process.

And the unfortunate truth is that y’all gotta learn how to play. You have to treat the act of making bad art like a devotional offering to the version of you that loves getting lost in experimentation!

Okay, article over, everybody go home.

Nah, I’m just kidding, let’s talk about it.

The best way to learn how to play is to set up controlled experiments that help you to push through that paralysis and just do something—get marks on paper, get words on page, do now, think later. You literally just need to get moving.

And that pen-gripping hand is not going to move until you tell it that we aren’t here to make ‘art’ today.

Your idea of ‘art’ holds so much conditioned baggage and expectation and self-serious nonsense that you absolutely cannot live up to it on your best day. You can’t even look it in the eye. You need to sneak in the back door and make ‘art’ by accident, the way God intended—after many, many personal embarrassments and abject failures.

You need to detach your ego and your self-worth from these failures by realizing that everyone has them, everyone makes them, everyone farts and shits and bleeds on their brand new white jeans because they forgot to check their period tracker.

Before an experiment can succeed, it must first fail.

You’re not an artist, you’re an alchemist

Those alchemists of old didn’t turn spiritual lead into gold on their first try, now did they? That’s why they call it the Great Work, because it usually takes a whole ass lifetime to achieve. Same goes for all the scientists who invented influenza vaccines and the engineers that created locomotives.

They hatched plans, those plans failed, they analyzed what went wrong and mined the experience for every possible useful piece of data, and they went and failed again. And then they failed about 5,000 more times before a successful product/process emerged glorious and phoenix-like from the ashes of all that failure.

Baby, sweetie, darling, you need to learn something from the sciences: in order for an experiment to succeed, it must first fail.

I present to you, The Scientific Process of Art™:

• You create a hypothesis: “I think if I take this tree branch and dip it in paint and smear it all over this canvas, it might look cool.”

• Then you run an experiment: paint swishing noises, wincing expressions, grunts of discomfort, momentary satisfaction followed by abject horror followed by simmering disappointment

• You appraise the results: “Oh not like that.”

• You analyze the disaster: “These marks look too uniformly wide and blobby. I might as well have used a sponge roller.”

• You construct a new hypothesis: “This branch…it doesn’t branch right. The leaves are…too densely packed or somethin’…back to the drawing board. Maybe if I pluck a couple of these leaves out, it’ll leave more space between the marks for interesting lines and textures.”

• You repeat the experiment: tentative hand motions, scraping noises, slack jaw of deep concentration, sigh of relief, confident hand motions, full body relaxation, neural sparks flying

• You appraise the results: “Yes.”

• You form a conclusion: “Art feels right to me when it has a lot of variety and texture and novel shapes. Next time, I’m going to try several different branches and twigs, maybe even a pointy rock or two.”

• A big smile creeps across your face, “back to the drawing board!”

One thing you might notice about this entire process is that it hinges on your ability to be patient, stay with yourself, and treat discomfort and dissonance as neutral information. But that information doesn’t feel neutral because you’ve been taught to treat failure as an assessment of your own self-worth.

If you weren’t looking to your art to tell you that you are enough, you wouldn’t panic so hard when it doesn’t feel satisfying to you. You would also focus less on how the art looks and instead, how it feels to make it.

But here’s the kicker: That belief that art is only valuable when it’s reflecting back your own worthiness is a value. And we don’t change our values simply by deciding to change them.

We change our values by road testing them to see if they’re actually serving us—to see if the value has value.

So now you need to run an entirely new experiment. Based on a new hypothesis: “I think, if I practice connecting with the joy and satisfaction in the creative process, I can start making a lot more and a lot better art. Maybe, if I create a space where those old feelings and wounds blocking me from this joy and satisfaction can arise, I’ll be able to allow them to move. Maybe I can transmute these feelings into inherent worthiness.”

So you go back to the drawing board. You try all sorts of art and experiments.

If you normally draw with pen or pencil and find yourself overly focused on precision, you might try a medium that provides more opposition and requires more collaboration—like fluid media.

If you normally write prose and find yourself getting caught up in the details of your work, you might try writing poetry—feeling into your gut instinct and writing down random words and phrases in one long paragraph, totally erasing the details.

Instead of precariously balancing those fears and compulsions like an egg on a spoon hanging out of your mouth, furiously and all-consumingly staring at the inner critic, trying not to disturb them while all the raw inspiration of your life and world blurs into mush in your periphery, you run headlong into the discomfort and allow yourself to slow down and be fully present with what comes up.

You finally face yourself.

You finally face your Self.

Creating the right container

Whether you spend a lot of time struggling to come up with ideas, or you feel like you’re overflowing with ideas but none of them are “the right one,” the antidote to your situation is creating a structure to support you.

You need a container.

A container can be a thesis statement, a specific nature spot or corner café, a general subject or a question, a magickal intention. A container is simply a physical or metaphysical environment that helps you organize your sensational, emotional, intellectual, and energetic contents.

A container can be your creative vision and it can also be the thing that births your creative vision.

Here, let me give you an example:

When I started over the Graynbow, I had no idea what exactly I wanted to write about. I was exploring a million different things across the spectrum of creativity and magick and simply saying I wanted to write about creativity and magick was wayyyy too broad of a container for me. It wasn’t helping organize my inner resources and magnetize the right contents to the top of my consciousness.

In fact, I had been trying to write about these things for several years and my attempts all felt very disorganized and discombobulated. I couldn’t find a good angle of attack. I couldn’t find an approach to the work that made all of my non-linear, abstract ideas make any degree of sense to anyone but me. In truth, they barely made sense to me.

So I decided to drill down and focus on what had become the core of my practice: creative worldbuilding with hypersigil work and embodiment. Self-creation as a science that generates a prolific abundance of inspired ideas.

From there, I started making connections within my own work I never would’ve seen before. The new container literally changed how I saw the old contents and drove my personal experiments in an entirely new and much more focused direction.

Barely a year later, I’ve written a book, a massive, multi-part course, and have several more projects in the works.

My vision of my own work is constantly expanding and diversifying—differentiating itself from all the other bodies of work that I see other people creating in my niche.

I invented my own science of worldbuilding and self-creation that is totally unique to me and the folks like me who have benefited from it.

And it all started when I journeyed deep into the Void, into inner space, and started building my own laboratory in the astral. I found my creative center and set about discovering who lived there. In the process, I came to know, for the first time in my life, who I really am.

And the truth is I’m a lot of people. I’m someone new on different days. But there’s an underlying energetic frequency that pulls them all together. And now, that vibration resonates so loudly in my auric field that people can’t help but stop and stare.

Enter The Alchemist’s Laboratory

I have two offerings right now for folks who want to learn how to use magick to absorb deeply into their inner world, get in contact with their most inspired Self, and magnetize and transmute their unconscious contents into creative gold.

The first is The Alchemist’s Laboratory, which is a self-led, experimental container for the development of energetic intelligence as a creative discipline—made in honor of Uranus’ ingress into Gemini.

All 3 packages include 3 basic items:

The first is an initial energetic attunement and aetheric onboarding guided meditation audio to help you access your new laboratory—a specially crafted and heavily spelled astral space I’ve created that you can essentially ‘duplicate’ in your own astral space. This process allows you to inherit all of the spellwork I’ve created on the parent space as well as limited access to the knowledge base of myself and other participants without any energetic entanglement.

This space includes enchantments and specially crafted equipment to increase creative flow, connection to vitality, stability in your creative center, potentiate quantum leaps, and a whole plethora of other stuff.

It’s an astral playground and workspace you can enter to meditate, channel, or just before you begin work on a creative project to support your alchemical work.

The second item you will receive is a special piece of astral equipment—an unruly Uranian technology to aid you in your creative and magickal work. Each cohort will receive a new, exclusive piece of technology. To provide you with more ways to access and utilize this equipment, you’ll receive a digital copy of the sigil I have linked to its astral body.

To help you use your new laboratory and astral equipment, you’ll receive a PDF guidebook full of instructions and advice on how to engage with and apply these tools.

The third item you will receive is a video response to any question you may have about the creative, alchemical work, your specific intentions for the space, and your own magickal aims. This will help you kickstart your quest with a big burst of energy, mental clarity, and direction to make your initial experiments even more fruitful.

For additional support, you’re welcome to schedule a coaching call and we’ll troubleshoot it together, co-create a space that fits you like a glove, and brainstorm how you can use these tools to support your unique process.

Learn The Magickal Art of High Strangeness

My second offering to help you get the most out of your creative practice, discover your individual voice as an artist, and turn your entire life into performance art to sway universal forces in your favor, is my one-of-a-kind course, The Magickal Art of High Strangeness!

The course includes:

• a Handbook to give you a rundown on what High Strangeness even is and how it can make your life more fun, enlivening, and potently magickal—which you can also buy separately for $22.22 or subscribe for $11/mo to read.

• a Spellbook full of instructions and rituals to help you apply this philosophy in the real world and create the life of your dreams from it with some good, old fashioned alchemy, theurgy, thaumaturgy, energy work, embodiment, channeling, astral travel, and other practices.

• Excessively theatrical audiobooks for both documents for your listening pleasure.

• 11 Guided meditation audios

• 9 Worksheets

• Video walkthrough to help you navigate the course

• A starter Grimoire to keep track of your rituals, spells, notes, research, and other learning materials

This course is my effing masterwork; it’s the successor to Birthing the Godself and an excellent primer on manifestation through embodiment and art-making.

If you’ve ever wondered how I constantly and prolifically create heaps of art that is highly personal, inspired, and so alive you can practically hear me reading it (yes, I get that a lot), and how I used my art making practice to change my entire life in a year—gaining thousands of followers on Threads, hundreds of subscribers on Substack, tons of new friends, overcoming decades long visibility fears and mental blocks, and generally succeeding at the things I’ve been failing at for years—it’s all in The Magickal Art of High Strangeness Course.

If you’re curious to learn more about my work or which of my current offerings is right for you, schedule a free consultation by phone or video call, or email me at graygarland.coaching@gmail.com and let’s chat. 😘

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Special thanks to Adriana Michelle for supporting this publication. <333

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