Chapter 17

“First Thought Best Thought”: The Felt Sense in Creative Process

ISADORA DUNCAN, founder of modern dance, wrote about her youthful explorations of movement:

For hours I would stand quite still, my two hands folded between my breasts, covering the solar plexus. My mother often became alarmed to see me remain for such long intervals quite motionless as if in a trance—but I was seeking and I finally discovered the central spring of all movements, the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversities of movements are born.¹

What Duncan called “the central spring,” Chögyam Trungpa (a prolific artist in his own right) called “first thought.” Trungpa once cowrote a poem with Allen Ginsberg, the iconic Beat poet who was also his devoted student, in which Trungpa gave as the opening line, “First thought is best, then you compose.” Ginsberg later reduced this to the phrase “first thought best thought.” This slogan has gained some notoriety but is often misunderstood to mean “Be spontaneous, just go with the first thing that pops into your head.” As Trungpa himself later clarified, that was not his real meaning. What he was pointing to was precisely the need to be in touch with the preconceptual, preform source or seed—he also referred to it as “first dot”—from which authentic artistic expression arises. Far from being the first random idea that comes to mind, “first thought” means touching into a more primal level of experience than conventional thought altogether. As his original line had it, first thought is best, then you compose.

For Trungpa, with his deep contemplative training as well as innate creative gift, the gap between first thought and composition tended to be brief. His process of creating a poem or calligraphy or flower arrangement appeared to be spontaneous and without second thoughts. Yet an attentive observer could feel the power of his inner centeredness, the way his words or gestures arose from a deep, nonconceptual source. Isadora Duncan, on the other hand, describes standing still for hours to find her “crater of motor power.” Most of us ordinary mortals will be situated somewhere between those two poles in the tempo of our creative process.

One doesn’t have to be a trained artist to let the creative juices flow. Cooking, gardening, rearranging a room, and many other everyday activities lend themselves to dipping into the felt sense. Trungpa was a great advocate of what he called “art in everyday life,” which he explained as “an appreciation of things as they are and of what one is—which produces an enormous spark. Something happens—clicks—and the poet writes poems, the painter paints pictures, the musician composes music.”

My own inner artist loves creating little haiku poems. Here’s one I just wrote:

Birds chirping outdoors,

phone chirping in the next room—

getting down to work.

Although I don’t adhere to most of the aesthetic principles and compositional rules of the venerable Japanese haiku tradition, I do stick strictly to the traditional format of three lines consisting of five, seven, and five syllables each. I find I need the structure, the constraint, provided by this form to challenge me deeper into my felt sense. Often, if I start out with lines that have too many or too few syllables, the requirements of the form direct me back to the nonverbal, felt source of those lines. New lines that meet the syllable requirements won’t mean exactly the same thing as the original ones, but they must articulate the original felt sense. I am made to ask inside, what am I really feeling? Just as in the focusing step of resonating quality words, images, or gestures against an unclear felt sense, the feeling or insight I began with crystallizes more precisely through this process.

By way of illustration, the last line of my haiku, “getting down to work,” took some time to show up. There’s a leap involved—noticing bird chirps could lead to an infinite variety of next thoughts, feelings, or memories. This morning it led me to notice scratchy sounds issuing from the next room, my wife’s conference call for her work, audible but not clear enough for me to make out actual words. Having already registered the birds’ chirping from outdoors, I recognized these indistinct speaker-phone sounds as also being chirps. Hence the second line.

The new associations of indoors versus outdoors, other people at work, and unclear meanings moves the poem in a certain direction, both narrowing its scope and opening it to new possibilities. Now there is a tension, something unresolved: two things that are mostly different have something in common, but so what? How does this relate to the bigger picture? At first I felt only that tension—birds chirping / telephone chirping. It was pleasing to have found this connection, but it wants more. What’s at stake here for me? What’s the deeper source of this clever comparison? After a pregnant pause came a sudden insight, accompanied by a felt shift in my body: this is actually about the challenge for me of getting to work. It is the effort to focus attention on my intended purpose—the next chapter of my book—that has caused me to notice other things in the environment, things I’ll need to not attend to in order to undertake the inner process of writing. With this, the five-syllable line “getting down to work” emerged at once, resolving the felt tension and completing the poem with an unexpected twist.

One of the things I love about the haiku form is how it implies everything I’ve just rather laboriously spelled out, and much more, but the reader has to find his or her own way of making sense of the highly compressed language. That third line in particular is, at first blush, a non sequitur. Are the birds getting down to work? In a way, yes. Are the people on the conference call getting down to work? Definitely. But the unexpected twist, the flash of fresh insight, is that this is really about me getting down to work.

My little haiku is not immortal poetry, but I hope it indicates to some degree the role of the felt sense in creative process—the need for going to the nonconceptual source, and the novel understanding and expression that can emerge there. I also want to say that creative expression, even when it is not on a high level of accomplishment, is valuable to the creator to the extent that they have found something fresh in their own experience, something that carries their life process forward, if only in a small, subtle way.

Following my morning work session, I went for a walk with Luna. These walks are frequently the occasion for a new haiku—not because I have the intention to “write a haiku” but because something in the environment strikes me as unusual, vivid, or moving. This afternoon, it was the few remaining patches of snow, remnants of a series of unusually heavy late winter snowfalls that extended right into the first week of spring.

Last patches of snow,

grimed with gravel and dead leaves,

yield to crocuses.

On the one hand, this is a quite ordinary observation—anyone out today would have noticed the shrinking piles of snow and especially the yellow and purple crocuses just emerging through the detritus of winter. But it also expresses a very particular moment of experience and feeling, something triggered by seeing the melting snow, dirty and diminished, a pathetic remnant of February’s record-breaking blizzard that buried us in more than two feet of wind-drifted snow and caused the governor to ban car traffic for twenty-four hours. Pathetic yet somehow endearing.

When I had just the dirty snow piles and the crocuses, I came up with a nice five-syllable third line: “yellow and purple.” Those fresh, vivid colors contrasting with the dirty white snow and the general brownness of early spring pleasingly evoked the transition from old burdens to new life. But when I checked against my felt experience, I saw that this was too much attention on the crocuses and not enough on the main trigger of my feeling, those dirty, rather pathetic snow piles. It took several tries to come up with “grimed with gravel and dead leaves,” but I found it by staying with my felt sense of what had moved me in the first place and checking possible descriptions against it. And by some alchemy that we don’t really understand, the felt sense generated the gritty and gratifyingly alliterative phrase “grimed with gravel,” a perfect marriage of sound and sense. Likewise, it took a few tries to come up with the wonderful word yields, which seems to capture both the diminishment of the snow and the curiously endearing quality I felt in it. Finally, the odd-sounding word crocuses gives just the right touch of spring. The word itself introduces fresh color; it doesn’t need purple and yellow to make its point.

Forgive me for imposing my amateur poetic efforts on you. My intention is simply to stimulate your own seeds of creativity, which I invite you to engage now.

Exercise 17.1   Composing a Haiku

Experiment for yourself with the three-line haiku form. Don’t worry about counting syllables to begin with, but keep in mind the basic progression:

1.  Initial observation

2.  Elaborating or qualifying the observation

3.  A leap or twist, fresh perception or insight, more-than-logical, sparked from the felt sense

The three lines don’t have to come to you in order. Sometimes the leap—the fresh perception or thought—may come first. Then the challenge is to consult your felt sense to find the source or background of that novel perception.

When you have three lines that seem to capture your experience, see if you can modify them to meet the 5-7-5 syllable count. The key is to check the new lines against your felt sense. They should preserve the essence of the original inspiration and deepen or sharpen it in ways that feel even more right.

To inspire you, here are two further examples, the first from Matsuo Basho (in Sam Hamill’s translation) and a second from Chögyam Trungpa. Basho’s haiku adheres to the seventeen-syllable form, whereas Trungpa’s is freer in form, but both illustrate the three-line observation / expansion / leap progression.

Azaleas placed

carefully—and a woman

shredding dried codfish.

Skiing in a red and blue oUTFit,

Drinking cold beer with a lovely smile—

I wonder if I’m one of them.