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In March I called into NPR’s On Point show and a listener, who has a blog called Veronica’s Nap wrote an entry, called Dig Deep based on my phone conversation.

Dig Deep

We all go through times of doubt when we question the choices we’ve made. When we wonder if we have the strength, the wherewithal, to keep our commitment to those choices and to follow them through to the end. Writers experience this often. So do others in creative fields, where each bit of progress requires a veritable self-reinvention as grueling and exhaustive as birth.

A few weeks ago, smack in the middle of one of those moments, I heard a caller’s comment on NPR’s On Point that brought a jolt of energy and inspiration I’d like to share.

The guest of that evening’s show was modern dance guru Bill T. Jones, and the caller, named Marissa, was one of Jones’ own former dance students. Like many dancers, Marissa didn’t go on to dance professionally. Instead, she became a yoga teacher and a doula. Yet she found a way to keep her inner dancer alive, to dig deep and draw upon the grueling lessons of constant self-reinvention dance had taught her so she could bring them to others during the most primal creative experience: childbirth.

Marissa begins her comment by explaining that during a class she took with Jones at Ohio State University in the mid 1990s, he got frustrated with the students and asked them all to sit down. She then recounts:

[Jones] said that many of use weren’t going to go on to become dancers. But that regardless of what we did, if we kept true to what it would require to be a dancer, to dig deep, to go to the places that make us uncomfortable, to challenge ourselves, to be fully present, that we would always be dancers, regardless of what it was that we were embarking upon at that present time. And so in my career — I make my money essentially by being a yoga instructor, but I’m also a doula, attending childbirth — there’s nothing closer to to dance than attending to a woman who is in the state of the most primitive action of bringing life into the world. And in the moments where she struggles and she falters and she doubts, and where I myself, after many hours of attending, struggle, falter, or doubt, I honestly have….thought, “this is when I dig deep, this is when I pull out that energy for myself, and for her.”

It’s worth hearing Marissa’s voice as she makes this comment, and hearing Tom Ashbrook’s and Bill T. Jones’ emotion as they respond. (You can hit the “Listen to the Show” button here and scroll ahead to Marissa’s call, which begins at 33 minutes, 15 seconds.)

As a writer, a dance student and a mother having gone through and grown exponentially thanks to two midwife-assisted births, I was stirred to the core by this. Marissa’s bottom line — that to create and express with honesty we must go to the places that make us uncomfortable, challenge ourselves and be fully present — is a powerful reminder of how the very discomfort that often makes us want to quit when we feel challenged and overwhelmed is also the source of our greatest innovation and progress. But that to access its potential, yes, we’ve gotta dig deep.

This is priceless wisdom for any writer, dancer, yogi, actor, athlete, performer, painter or entrepreneur — or anybody who dreams of becoming one. Or for anyone who has a creative vision, a meaningful initiative of some sort they’d like to take, tucked away in the back of their mind.

For in the end, isn’t digging deep and overcoming the challenge of adversity and even pain what creativity — like birth, which so aptly reflects it, and life itself — is all about?