How I Got My Creative Mojo Back (And Yes, I Was Naked)
Asana teaching Hip Mobility
By Asana
I've spent the better part of my life making things for clients. Taking photos, designing logos, websites, package design, and displays. For a long time, it’s been rewarding, clients are happy and keep calling back, which in business is the only metric that actually matters. My work was sharp, smart, and won things. The work did what it was supposed to do.
But somewhere along the way, I started to feel like a very expensive photocopier.
Everything I made was solid, but that thing, that weird, electric, slightly dangerous thing that makes creative work actually matter, seemed to disappear. I'd sit in front of my computer and feel like I was solving a puzzle instead of chasing something alive. I was assembling work the way you assemble IKEA furniture: following the instructions, ending up with something functional that nobody would ever call earth-shattering or even interesting (not to me at least). If you've ever looked at a KALLAX shelf and felt absolutely nothing, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
At first, I did what every creative director does when the spark dims. I blamed burnout. Burnout is the creative class equivalent of "I think I'm coming down with something". It's vague enough to explain everything, specific enough to justify a long weekend in Guernville. So I leaned into the prescribed remedies. I folded and put away my "wealth pile" of clothes scattered about my apartment and covering my bed. I meditated for 11 minutes a day, perched on a branch while reading The Power Of Now; then I forced everyone I knew to read it too. (I'm a great recruiter, lmk if you have a nice cult going).
These things did help, but not as much as I expected. In the end, they weren’t my salvation from the slow suffocation of safe, or a creativity cure-all.
So I swung the other direction. I decided what I really needed was pressure. If you've worked in advertising long enough, you develop a Pavlovian relationship with panic. The impossible deadline. The brief that lands at 4 pm on a Thursday for a Monday morning presentation. The client who calls and says, "We're killing the campaign," and suddenly you have seventy-two hours to save six months of work. That's when the magic used to happen, right? That beautiful, terrible adrenaline state where your back is against the wall and your brain has no choice but to get interesting because there's literally no time left to be safe. In the brand world, they now call this "Sprints" (such a nice word for creative massacre), a way to light a fire under everyone's ass. I'd built an entire career on that feeling. I will admit that some of my best work comes from moments when the only options were brilliance or catastrophe, and the deadline was so close I could smell it.
Admittedly, most of my creative time is spent sitting at my desk, bare-assed, because sometimes you have to just sit in your towel and do it. (This is my new book title, look for it on shelves by 2070, right around my 100th born day).
Asana and Sasha creating art inspired by yoga
The adrenaline showed up on cue. But it was a trick; I was confusing urgency with inspiration.
That's when I realized something had to give. The pressure game wasn't fixing the problem anymore. It was just making me faster at producing empty ideas. So I stopped saying yes to impossible timelines. I stopped living in that constant state of low-grade panic. And for the first time in years, I had space to just sit with how mentally exhausted I actually was. That's when I started noticing things I'd been ignoring for a long time.
I figured this out because I eventually got tired of living in my own head and started paying attention to the rest of me.
I noticed things I'd been ignoring for years. Like the fact that my shoulders were basically earrings. That my breathing was so shallow you could've timed it with a stopwatch, and my V02 Max was dwindling. I'd been doing it so long, I thought that was just what being a person felt like.
Then one day, I started practicing yoga and creating art with my nude-willing friends.
It wasn't some grand plan. I didn't set out to become a naked yogi. There was no moment where I stood in front of a mirror and declared, "Today, I shed my athleisure and my creative limitations." If you'd told me five years earlier that the secret to better creative work was doing naked handstands while painting with my feet, I would've assumed you were pitching me a Super Bowl spot for a wellness brand. The truth is, I would never have thought I would be doing any of this either.
It started because I needed to feel my body again. It started with a bodysuit and yoga on Instagram. For a while, I was THE bodysuit yogi, I started that trend, Yes, me, not the millions of ballerinas that have come before. Then one day, while taking photos, I shed my bodysuit, and the images were just way more real, beautiful, and honest.
In my head, all I was thinking was, 'Can I really share this?' Is this going to hurt my career? What will my teenage son think? Remember, I posted this on my Instagram. But also, I can't not share it; people need to feel, I need to feel, right? There's a certain logic to it that only makes sense if you've spent decades in an industry built on risk-taking. So when the opportunity came to get naked and potentially show my ass on the internet in the name of creative renewal, some part of my brain just went: sure, why not? What's the worst that could happen?
My heart raced, and blood flooded to my face; my ears started ringing, I was having a full-on panic attack as I hit post, and I loved it.
It was like someone had turned the volume up to eleven on a channel I’d had on mute.
Here's what I think was actually happening, because I've spent a lot of time thinking about it since. My mind was running a constant, low-grade threat assessment, even though the most dangerous thing in my environment was a passive-aggressive email from a client; it compensated by defaulting to what it already knew. It reached for patterns, references, and safe choices. It gave me the version of an idea most likely to survive a conference room, not the one most likely to make someone feel something. That's not creativity. So when I had no client, no one to impress but myself, I wanted to feel like a real artist again, so I just said, 'Fuuuuuuck it' and hit post.
To no one's surprise, that post received the most comments (and likes) I had ever gotten with my bodysuits. Actual positive comments. I love the discussion around it. Some people were shocked and unfollowed, but many were extremely positive and had conversations around why we consider nudity with such judgment.
What I eventually understood, and this took longer than I'd like to admit, because I am, at my core, a person who believes she can think her way out of anything, is this: creativity is not something you produce. It's something you allow. And allowing requires space.
This is what creating nude art combined with yoga gave me.
Not ideas. Not inspiration. It gave me space.
After a session, I stopped rushing to fill the silence. I got more comfortable not knowing. I could sit with a half-formed concept without immediately trying to resolve it, which, if you've ever been in a brainstorm with me, is roughly equivalent to a miracle. I started treating the gap between not-knowing and knowing as the most valuable part of the process, rather than the most uncomfortable.
What I realized was that I'd become dependent on the crisis to access my own creativity. Nude yoga broke that. It showed me I could get to that same raw, unfiltered creative state without needing a deadline to scare me into it. When your body calms down, your mind creates. That's not metaphor. It's structural.
Inspiration arrived.
My ideas had a quality that I recognized from earlier in my career. They were messy, weird, and way more interesting, albeit not always public-friendly. I believe creativity begins when the body moves. I know that sounds like something you'd read on the wall of a yoga studio in Silver Lake, right next to the kombucha menu. But I mean it structurally. Your capacity to feel something is the raw material of creative work. Nude yoga strips away the noise (sorry, pun intended) and puts you in contact with sensation in a way that most of us have been carefully avoiding since roughly middle school.
The practice changed my relationship with my own body. I trusted my mind and my body’s capabilities more, and this bled into everything.
I've also seen this pattern repeat with other people who have joined me in this practice. All of the willing, strong, fearless, and creative ladies and men who have shared their experience with me. By training with our videos or in the studio, and often when we go on hikes and strip down in nature to explore, ground ourselves, and create. They show up looking for a break from the monotony of their regular gym, tan, laundry routine. Turns out removing restrictive clothing from physical movement is not just a philosophical win; it's a biomechanical one. But the thing that keeps people coming back isn't the improved hamstring flexibility.
Audri & Asana painting themselves and Asana’s studio. This was an inspiring, fun mess!
It’s the inspiration, really, and also not giving a chaz what other people think. Do ALL the things that give you joy!
Letting go of what we are taught to believe or behave, and letting that show up as art, better conversations, and clearer minds. Sometimes, as the courage to try something you've been afraid of your entire life, like standing on a stool with one foot, naked, holding nails in your mouth and a hammer in your hand, holding a painting of yourself up with the other foot. (Geez, someone give this girl a hand, and please, help her with run-on sentences!)
You can find more of Asana’s art here
Creativity isn’t just about making things. It’s about how you engage with being alive.
If you feel disconnected from your own creative energy, I'd gently suggest that the problem might not be what you think it is. It might not be burnout, a lack of inspiration, or the wrong deadline. It just might be that you're looking for the space to do what you already know how to do.
You don't have to take your clothes off to be creative. But I will say this: it's a hell of a place to start
So why not start here Audriasana Workouts, and get those creative juices flowing
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