With The Artist's Way, ask yourself the tough question so that you can reconnect with the true you and find the creativity that best fits your truth. 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.
In Chapter Four of The Artist’s Way, Recovering A Sense of Integrity, Julia Cameron tackles the honest changes that begin to occur as we recover a connection to our inner artist. We start asking ourselves deeper questions, and answering them honestly instead of brushing off the surface. “I’m fine” isn’t a good enough answer to “How are you?” anymore. We need to dig deeper to get closer to our truth. As we discover more of those personal truths, we start setting boundaries to preserve our newfound identity.
One aspect that I resonated with, was the fact that these changes in our understanding of who we are at the core, might lead to both trouble with recognizing oneself in this new outfit, and an increase in energy. For instance, Julia Cameron mentions that our dreams (day or night) might become stronger. And indeed, looking back on my dream log for this week, I experienced vivid dreams that invoked strong feelings within me (mostly fear, but sometimes that's just what the body needs to process).
As I read this chapter however, I wondered whether I really did go through drastic changes in self-image as described by Julia. Not finding any within myself, I began doubting my progress, but was promptly reassured by her assertion that “[I] may not have them. [My] changes may be more like cloud movements.” That statement sounded more like what I was feeling.
However, after writing this post, I realised, as I’m sure you will, that I indeed began to ask myself deeper questions, albeit without being fully aware that this was what was going on. I take this as a step in the right direction.
Read on to find out more about my week's revelations.
Morning Pages
During Week Three of my Journey Through The Artist’s Way, I got sick and wrote very little morning pages. Returning to them after that break was harder than I had expected. At first, it felt starting from scratch, as though that habit had never existed in the first place. You could say it’s because I’ve only been building that habit for a few weeks now, but I found it just as hard to return to my other habits, those which I’d been working on developing for much longer (yoga, language study). On top of the fatigue after fighting the virus, my own brain worked against me, as I also in the process of writing the blog post for Chapter Three (which you can read here), and all I could think of how the heck was I going to own up to not writing, without sounding like I was making up excuses.
Morning Pages are your friend.
In the end, the solution came up to me while unloading all this guilt onto my Morning Pages: my readers weren’t interested in how many days’ worth of pages I wrote, but in the content and its effect on me. All I had to do in my blog post was focus on the actual pages I did write. I hope I succeeded there. You can judge by yourself by reading the Morning Pages section for that week.
I’m telling you all this to shed light on an amazing power of the Morning Pages. I’m a strong believer in the fact that most of the time, when we have a problem or a conundrum, we actually already own the solution within ourselves. The hard part is finding the right key to unlock said solution.
Are you familiar with that experience? You bring a problem you have to a friend, hoping they might help you get through it. They may suggest a few ways around it, but none quite fit your problem, for this or that reason. So you find yourself refining the problem for them, drawing a more detailed picture of your specific situation and its surrounding context. And in the process of explaining all this to your friend, the solution comes to you. It may sound like you didn’t need your friend after all, but that’s a fallacy. Without them acting as a sounding board for your current issue, the solution (which you already had access to all along) would have stayed hidden in the depths of your grey matter folds.
Morning Pages are your friend. They’re your sounding board. By writing your thoughts down on the pages and expressing the ins and outs of what is going on within you, you are exploring your subconscious to find the key to solutions you never even knew existed. Now, I’m not saying you don’t need your friends anymore since you have Morning Pages. The pages are simply a mirror, a reflection of yourself. They do not provide mental support or human warmth. But they are an easily accessible tool for when you find yourself alone with a problem. And sometimes, you might even need to think through something so private that you wouldn’t even dare bring up to a friend. Morning Pages don’t judge, and they keep secrets. Use them to your advantage, and to grow into a better person, stronger person. But also, reach out to friends. No matter how many solutions you come up with by yourself to thrive through life, it wouldn’t be worth it without the people you care about and who love you back.
This week, my Morning Pages were my sounding board. I did have some crisis moments, and the first thing I did was reach out to friends. In parallel, I reflected on the things that shook me by putting them into writing, and it brought me sometimes perspective and other times, solutions. Against my ingrained coping mechanism of avoidance, I used the pages in a very conscious manner, listing down emotional issues I needed to address instead of ignoring. And then, one by one, day by day, I unravelled them. This gave me insight into the true source of the issue, as well as a starting point for in-depth discussions with my therapist.
Artist's Date
You may already know this: I live in The Netherlands. It’s a great country to live in, with high quality of life, but one mustn’t be picky about the weather. As soon as the sun comes out, so does every single Dutch person in the country. No matter the day and time, you will find them in the parks, on their balconies, or sat on chairs they dragged from their house and into to the pavement. And indeed, when I saw on the forecast that at the end of the week, we would have one day with 23 degrees Celsius, all I could think of that week while watching rain pour out my window, was what I was going to do on that gifted day. Before I knew it, my Artist’s Date was planned: I would take my dog Matcha to a big park South of the city, just the two of us.
As soon as the sun comes out, so does every single Dutch person in the country.
And that’s just what we did.
When the sun finally shed its usual coat of grey clouds, I nestled Matcha in her wicker basket, strapped it on my bicycle and hopped on for the adventure. It’s supposed to be a twenty-minute bike ride from where I live, but the extra twelve kilos of impatient fussing on the rear and my just adequate cycling skills turned the trip into double that time. It was all worth it, once we set foot down on the gravel path that leads up to the woods.
Julia Cameron frequently refers to the importance of spirituality in one’s life. I may not go to church (unless it is to admire the architecture and breathe in quiet and coolness), but I think I find a form of spirituality in nature. If not that, then at the very least, I get out of my hikes inner peace, introspection and awe in the beauty and resilience of nature. This must be why I love hiking so much.
I find a form of spirituality in nature.
Now, nature hiking can be challenging in The Netherlands, a most densely populated country (522 inhabitants per square kilometer versus 37 in the US), so one needs to make abstraction of one or two things. Sure, there was the testosterone-filled clamour from the football field, and the screams of excited kids in the playground nearby, not to mention the constant buzzing of the highway… But once I blocked out the noise and focussed on what's important, then the true magic happened. Warm wind caressed my skin, the sun kissed my back for the first time in months, I relished in the squishy-squish of my boots in the flooded meadow still drenched from the week’s downpour, and in the droplets of mud spraying on my bare legs when Matcha would speed past too close. I drank in the every bit of nature and sun I could, and ate up Matcha’s unbridled glee like a very special treat.
This has been, by far, my favourite Artist’s Date up to now.
Now, what about you, dear reader? What do you do when the sun comes out to play? Where do you go to find inner peace, and maybe even, spirituality? Share your unique stories in the comments at the end of this blog post. Who knows? Maybe it will give me ideas for my next Artist’s Dates!
Growth Tasks
Confession time: I was (very) late in reading this week’s chapter, meaning that when I finally got around to the list of tasks for Chapter Four, I had to disqualify some of them by default, for the simple reason that it was too late for me to do those. In a way, it helped me narrow down on which tasks to actually do for the week (or what was left of it). The real bummer for me was that I missed out on an exercise suggested in the chapter, called “Reading Deprivation”. For the whole week, I was supposed to stay away from “reading” in a very large sense: watching the news, scrolling on social media, binge-watching a TV-show. The detox sounds both like an exciting and challenging experiment, one that no doubt would benefit me very much. The good thing about this exercise is that I can do it anytime. So I promised myself that I will do it on a different week. And to keep me accountable, I am committing myself right here, right now, to exercising Reading Deprivation on Week Six of my Journey Through The Artist’s Way. Can I count on you to keep me accountable, my lovely and faithful reader? In fact, I’ll book it right now in my calendar, blocking the whole week.
Now let’s talk about what I take away from the tasks I actually did do. To start with, out with the old, in with the new! I made space in my wardrobe and got rid of the clothes I didn't wear anymore. Well, at least I tried. My intention was to bring them to a second-hand shop, but after discovering that many of those stores do not do buy-ins, I had to postpone the task until I could take my big bag of clothes to one that does. This, I shall do tomorrow. I hope they'll take my clothes, at least a good amount of them! Cross your fingers for me, please!
Do you remember, on Week Two, when I wanted to do all the ten tasks listed in the chapter but turned out to be overly-ambitious? Well, as luck would have it, one of this week’s tasks was to update a chart made in the second week, one she calls the Life Pie. It was fun to make, here’s the result:
I’m looking forward to keeping updating it, and seeing how it changes throughout my journey. Hopefully, it will get less lopsided as I find more fulfilment in the different sides of my life.
In addition to the chart, I wrote two letters to my current self, one from an imagined eighty-year-old me, and one from me when I was eight years old. I’m sharing the 80 year old Claire’s letter below, but I won’t share the letter from my eight-year-old self, as I did get a bit too much in character, and wrote in a rather childish way, and also mention real people who might not wish to appear on this blog. Eight-years-old Claire had a lot of questions for thirty-years-old Claire, among which “How often do you have sleep-overs with friends” and “How many books have you read now?” The answer to both those questions is, “Not as many as I’d wish.”
Finally, I described my ideal environment to live in and my favourite season (turns out, it’s all of them). I won’t bore you with the written descriptions, but I’m happy to share the silly drawings I made next to my answers. Be kind, and remember these were made late at night, with an unsharpened pencil, on a lined notebook page. Needless to say, it isn’t my best doodle.
I realised while writing this post that a recurring theme is that of friendship, and how much importance I give to it. It’s nothing I didn’t know before, but still interesting to see how every different exercise all led to the same conclusion: value and nurture your friendships.
If I have to leave with a lesson for the rest of my journey, let it be this: don’t put off reading the next chapter, you might miss out on groundbreaking exercises!
Thank you for reading. Stay tuned for week five of my Journey Through The Artist's Way, coming next week!
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