ThAW the dark winter of your creative soul with The Artist's Way. 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 the very first chapter, Recovering A Sense Of Safety, Julia guides us toward making peace with the creator within us. The first step is in healing from the past beliefs and negative experiences that led us to think today that we are not artists and neither do we deserve to be. She calls us the "shadow artists", always gravitating around art, never daring to get too close to the Sun lest it burns our wings. Perhaps as a child, you've been discouraged from pursuing creative endeavours? Well-meaning relatives might have warned you against the life of an artist, marred by their own prejudice for what an artist should be: messy, penniless, tormented… You name it. In this chapter, we are encouraged to look within, and find the "enemies" and "heroes" of our past creativity. How can we revive the flame, without feeling like we're in danger of falling?
Morning pages
Do what feels good, for you
It's only the first week, and already I have lost two days of morning pages to fever. I did not feel bad about it one bit. In fact, I think the lesson here is actually a positive one. After taking a much needed rest, I felt so much better, energised and ready for my morning pages! What I needed was to tend to my Personal Well first (as talked about in my previous post), and I consider it a victory that I managed to listen and put to my needs first.
I am not willing to compromise on those healthy habits
I'm not a morning person. Besides — and this is not me complaining, quite the contrary — I have already quite a few habits going on in my mornings (hour-long walk with my dog, language practice and yoga), so add any more and morning turns into afternoon. I am not willing to compromise on those healthy habits. I have been working hard to develop them and maintain them as best I can, and they bring me a lot on many levels. All this to say, most of my Morning Pages were actually Evening Pages. I will still call them Morning Pages, for the sake of consistency and so that everyone knows what I'm referring to.
The first three pages of two-hundred and fifty-two
It was loud, it was confusing, and it was fascinating
On the first evening that I wrote my pages, I went to bed and could not find sleep, because my mind was reeling with a troupe of elephant thoughts each dancing to their own tunes. It was loud, it was confusing, and it was fascinating to watch. It felt exactly like when I am in the beginning of a writing project, at the ideation or conceptualization step, and so many ideas are flowing that I cannot sleep and must write them down. Do you ever have that, dear reader? In any case, it gave me great hope and trust in the Morning Pages, because it really did feel like a dam had been opened in my creative mind, and wild thoughts were merrily flooding down.
Another thing that happened was the pain. Three pages doesn't seem that difficult, physically. I remember writing way more than that during my school days, without batting an eyelash. And yet, ten years later, my wrist fails me. I'm told the pain will go away after a while, so I just plow ahead. I hope you will too!
That one morning
I was writing what I was writing up to my 3 pages, and that was it.
There was one morning where I did manage to fit the pages in. Did it feel different, you ask? Why yes, insofar as it was the beginning of the day and I thus had more energy, compared to the evenings where I wrote before bed, struggling to keep my eyes open and my focus. But there is something to be said in support of Morning Pages being written in the evening: my mind, tired as it was, was freer, probably because my inner critic was just as exhausted as I was. And so it was easy to slip into flow, jotting down whatever passed through my mind without thinking about it. I found myself writing things like "Matcha is growling in her dreams", right in the middle of a recounting of my day, then resuming my story without so much as a twitch. Or I started something, then moved on to a different topic and never come back to the first one, but without feeling guilty or bugged down. I was writing what I was writing up to my 3 pages, and that was it. No judgement. I encourage you to throw your self-consciousness out the window while writing your Morning Pages: it's liberating.
Gratitude
I'm surprised to report that most of the thoughts that made it down on the page were not as whiny and complainy as I thought they would be. I had a lot of gratitude to express. It's all the more interesting that I have always struggled to find things to be grateful about on the spot when asked, for instance during a yoga session. I'm feeling slightly reassured to see that I'm not an ungrateful brat after all. Now part of me wonders: did I filter my words? What if I was harbouring more negative feelings and didn't write them down, keeping them inside to fester? It does sound like it would be healthier to pour all the darkness on the page to let the light through, doesn't it? Perhaps I'm being a worry-wart. For now, I'll be content that the morning pages have wrought good thoughts out of me, and grateful that my days have been filled with reasons to give thanks this week.
Artist's Date
I was both very excited, and completely confused for my first Artist's Date. I had no idea what to do. I asked around people who know the Artist's Way, and based on their own choices of dates, I came up with something that I'm still not convinced counts as an Artist's Date. I went to buy stationery supplies (a bullet journal, various pens, washi tape and creative paper), and crafted my own little daily logbook to track various aspects of my life and habits. Feel free to flip through the pages displayed down here.
I love crafting things. As you probably noticed on this one example, I usually mess it up and have to do a lot of fixing in post — or rather, most of the time, make peace with the little imperfections — but I find making a uselessly beautiful notebook brings a small joy and inner peace inside of me. For that reason, and even if I'm not sure it qualifies as a date, I consider this was a good first try.
Bonus point: I've been using it daily with great enthusiasm, and find having a physical notebook filled with my own little imagination and writing, is much more satisfying to complete and check regularly than any habit tracking app I've tried over the years.
Growth Tasks
The author gives ten tasks to carry each week; think of it like homework. I call them "growth tasks", or "self-growth tasks".
I selected seven out of the ten proposed assignments, hoping to do one each day. This didn't quite go as planned. Most of the tasks revolved around finding, describing and addressing past memories of times when my inner creator had been either discouraged or encouraged by outside sources. I discovered that I struggled at the very first step of this process: I couldn't really think of significant influence from people on my creativity and self-belief, neither in positive nor in negative ways. I suppose I've been my own worst enemy in the past, aiming to be "reasonable" and make "sensible" choices in my life. Not to mention my massive imposter syndrome. But the very fact that I've allowed myself to write a few years ago, and that I'm working through the Artist's Way, is reassurance enough that I am addressing the biggest enemy to my creativity: myself.
One task I did complete with flying colours, was that of the Assertions. Julia Cameron provides us with positive assertions regarding our own creativity. I picked a few, and jotted down any jab and negative thought that came to me upon reading these Assertions, and then transformed each negative sentence into a positive one: a new assertion of my own making. Quite a few felt stilted and hard to believe, but I did find myself writing assertions that resonated with me. I will leave you for today with a selection of them. Let me know in the comments what you think!
My art can touch unexpected people in unexpected ways.
I'm not that unique. If I can relate to my stories, so can others out there.
Creativity does not exist in a vacuum: all inspiration comes from somewhere. Creativity is then found in metamorphosis.
Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for my next stop on this artist's journey, coming soon.
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