Who is your inner artist child? With The Artist's Way, ThAW the frosted cage that keeps your creative identity trapped. In my series of blog posts, "Journey Through The Artist's Way", I invite you along my odyssey on Julia Cameron's workbook "The Artist's Way". If you're new, welcome aboard! You might want to read the introduction first, or you'll be lost.
A Budding Sapling Of Creativity
Recovering A Sense Of Identity helps you define new boundaries to protect your freshly awoken creativity.
You may remember that last week's Morning Pages kept me awake at night, my mind reeling with thoughts and ideas colliding into each other. I also had a recent dream that provided the seed of a new story, something that used to happen to me all the time but that my mind had numbed for the past year or so. For instance, both of my current works in progress have grown from seeds planted while I was sleeping. Do your dreams fuel your creativity too, dear reader? Tell me in the comments!
I have noticed further distinct changes in my daily life and behaviour over the past two weeks. First, I feel like I am always busy. My schedule is packed, as I have added onto my regular mundane life a whole suite of tasks: read chapters and assignments, write Morning Pages, organise my Artist's Dates and blog about my experience. In all fairness, this last one is self-assigned; I cannot blame Julia Cameron for this extra chunk of busy time in my schedule.
Second, and as a consequence of the first, I am (momentarily) cured of my tendency to procrastinate. I used to do this most often to escaping the real world through watching tons of fiction movies and series. I certainly hope that by the end of my twelve weeks with The Artist's Way, that sorry habit will be fully out of my system. As a result, I have been overexcited, overstimulated, overwhelmed and overtired.
In her second chapter, Recovering A Sense Of Identity, Julia Cameron mentions something like this might happen to us as a result of stirring the mystical creative beast within. Ourselves as well as the people around us might think we've gone crazy. Now, and this is the important part: we have not. As Julia puts it, these are all signs that we are going sane.
protect your newfound creative identity at all costs.
But it is a process, a metamorphosis, and like in any change in life, this is where we are the most vulnerable. We must be careful not to let others crush the budding sapling of our true self before it has time to grow roots deep enough that jabs do not threaten our balance anymore. We have not reached stability and resiliency yet. And thus we must ensure that we surround ourselves with people who will support us, not destroy us. Most of all, we must be aware that this is a time where our old self might still be sabotaging us: we don't let it.
With this in mind, Julia strongly advises to keep your work private, giving the example of a man who showed his Morning Pages to a friend, whose criticism drove him back to a block. She further advises us to stay away from crazymakers, who I will summarise as egotistic disrupters. Julia's description of such people is extensive, clearly based on horrifying experience, and terribly delectable to read. It gave me great ideas for villainous characters. But be warned: as a friend confided in me, if you have had to deal with crazymakers in your life, this section might bring back painful memories.
Julia's message in this chapter is simple: protect your newfound creative identity at all costs.
Reading her advice of keeping my journey private, my mind went "oops". I may or may not have started a blog to share my inner voyage with anyone who might be gracious enough to read me on the wide world web. After the first pang of anxiety, I reassured myself: I am not sharing my Morning Pages with the world, simply my growth and experience from The Artist's Way. In this respect, I trust that I am not self-sabotaging my attempt at nurturing my own creativity.
On this candid note, let's see where my second week on The Artist's Way cruise took me.
Morning Pages
This week, I was a good student and did my Morning Pages every day of the week. Well, Evening Pages, but who cares? Despite my most earnest attempts, it seems that I am doomed to nighttime journaling.
it gave me focus and direction to dive deep into myself
We were asked to start the Morning Pages by writing over and over again a handful of Affirmations of our choice (including the ones we created for ourselves in the previous week). This made me think of one of my favourite scenes from Monty Python's Life of Brian, where Brian is caught by the Roman guard while writing slanderous graffiti on the city walls. It reads "Romans go home", with a typo. The Romans' outrage comes not from the disrespectful content, but from the grammatical mistakes in the sentence, and thus Brian's punishment is to write the correct slogan over and over… On the city wall.
You can watch it below if you want to have a good laugh. I know I will.
The key difference here, is that if the grammar of our Affirmations matters little, the content does. I found myself enjoying this menial, repetitive task, for multiple reasons.
It filled up half a page on my three Morning Pages, without me having to think of what to say (I know, I know. This is just me being petty and lazy, but bear with me, there's more).
It put me in a state in between resting peace and trance, reminiscent of yoga mantras. Sometimes, as I wrote an Affirmation, I would find myself alternatively agreeing with it, then writing meaningless words like a mindless robot, and then "waking back up" to reflect on what the Affirmation meant to me on a personal level, often making connections with my life.
More often than not, it gave me focus and direction to dive deep into myself for the rest of my Morning Pages, and brought about quite a bit of self-awareness and insightful reflection and revelations.
I know I said I'm not going to show my Morning Pages, but I'd like to share a few selected sentences as examples:
"I just wrote "as a writer myself" and surprised myself, raising my eyebrows at the boldness of my pen."
"I want to go from passive to active."
Perhaps these do not mean much to you without the surrounding context, but I hope it will give you an idea of what I mean by revelations. My Morning Pages were a lot more directed compared to the previous week, and I experienced some breakthroughs, as a psychologist might say.
Artist's Date
My Artist's Date this week was inspired, once again, by the Growth Tasks from chapter two. I must begin by telling you that I am an avid reader of fiction. Yet the year 2023 has been challenging to me in more than one way, and books somehow got relegated to the very bottom of my priorities. I read a measly two books that year, compared to twenty-nine in 2022. I've been trying to re-introduce that delicious habit in my life since the beginning of the year, with mitigated success. So this week, I decided to make room to start a new book. I say "new" because I had not read it yet, but this particular novel had been making me googoo eyes from my bookshelf over the past year, so I am intimately familiar with it's gorgeous cover and epic title. I mean look at this!
After two hours of bliss, I was recharged for the day
To set the mood for my artist self, I snuggled underneath a blanket on my sofa, lit up a scented candle from my favourite self-care shop, and served a rosemary-flavoured tea in a cup I painted myself.
For the first time in my life, I set an alarm so that I would stop reading (as I mentioned earlier, I've suddenly gotten busier than usual) instead of binge-read the whole thing. I could have, trust me, because based on the first chapters I read, this book is likely to end up in my list of favourites. After two hours of bliss, I was recharged for the day.
Growth Tasks
All of them inspired me
I enjoyed this chapter and its companion tasks much better than the first chapter. Reading Julia's recounting of life events and experience like I would drink tea (that is, without restraint), I was enthusiastic and optimistic to do all the ten suggested tasks. All of them inspired me. Sadly, as I should have realised, this was too much for me to handle in a single week. It did manage a fair amount though, and I hope I will be able at some point to go back to the ones I missed and actually complete on them. Perhaps in the next weeks, perhaps after I have worked my way through the whole book, who knows? All I know is that I will eventually do them, because they sound useful, practicable, and invoke visualisations, which you may have noticed, is right down my alley of interests. Most of them revolve around finding back old dreams or reconnecting with and protecting what we truly enjoy to do in life, The good thing about them is that they can be acted upon not only on this week, but later on to. Do you want to see which aspects of my true identity I have re-discovered? Do you want to know if I'll be able to complete the tasks I couldn't? Keep an eye out for my next posts!
For next week, I already have a big exciting Artist's Date planned.... Don't miss out! Stay tuned for week three of my Journey Through The Artist's Way, coming next week!
Yorumlar