The Artist’s Way – Introduction

audreyjm529

I posted two weeks ago about wanting to start The Artist’s Way, perhaps with other bloggers as well. I wasn’t able to start last week, and I realized that coordinating with other people was more than I wanted to handle right now. In any case, here I am this week, all ready to get started.

The Artist’s Way is a 12 week roadmap to uncovering and unblocking your creativity. It’s a spiritual program and a practical program, both of which interest me right now. The practical aspect especially appeals to me. There are exercises and specific activities to follow along with, and I’m committed to trying them, even if they seem silly at the time.

Author Julia Cameron mentions early on in the book that as you work through it, you’ll begin to notice synchronicity, or the universe coming into line with the changes in yourself. I don’t have trouble believing this – I understand selective attention. I agree wholeheartedly in the phrase she uses to describe this – “Leap, and the net will appear.” I get that entirely. One way of leaping is just to take another person’s word for it. In this case, I’m going to leap into the assignments in The Artist’s Way (TAW) and not worry about making sense of anything in particular.

The two major tools in TAW are the morning pages and the artist date. The morning pages are three long-hand written pages every single morning. They don’t have to be about anything, it’s just brain-dump. I have done them before, briefly, and their usefulness is immediately apparent. It’s valuable to have a private place to dump out your inner thoughts. Even only doing them a week or so before, I ran into a fascinating little thing: after three days of writing about the same thing bugging me, I found myself wanting to stop writing in the morning rather than do anything about the thing bugging me. It’s interesting to look at yourself every morning. This time I’m committing to keeping them up, even if it’s uncomfortable.

The artist date is a one or two hour date with yourself every week where you just do something that nurtures your creativity. I don’t know what I’ll focus on for these. Part of the point of doing TAW is to recapture a lost connection to my creativity, so figuring out how to nurture that creativity right off the bat is tough. Cameron encourages silliness and not thinking too hard about it, though, so I’m sure things will come to mind.

Starting Week One: Recovering a Sense of Safety

Even the title is kind of scary to me. Inner safety is something that I don’t really feel. The critical thoughts in my head make my brain an uncomfortable place to be a lot of the time. Over the last two years, I have taken many steps to address my depression, and I’ve been pretty successful. It’s much nicer to be me than it ever has before. Still, I read the word in the title of this chapter – “Safety” – and thought, “I don’t have any of that.” So it sounds like TAW and I are off to a good start!’

TAW talks about “core negative beliefs”, which keep us from being creative or adventurous or more ourselves. It won’t be hard for me to identify some of my negative core beliefs, since I hear them so loudly in my mind. Cameron suggests doing positive affirmations, instead. I’ve always balked at the idea of positive affirmations. First, they often aren’t true – they’re wishful thinking or outright lies. And they just sound hokey. This book helped me realize something important, though. Those negative things I say to myself aren’t true, either, and they’re often just as hokey. Yet I say them to myself over and over again. Why is it such a big deal to say some positive ones over and over again? Indeed.

Cameron suggests some common negative beliefs that could fill in the statement: “I can’t be a successful, prolific, creative artist because:” and when I read that, one immediately popped into my mind, which was, “You can’t call yourself an artist!” So I’m really starting at the very beginning here. I wouldn’t say that I approached TAW specifically because I want to be an artist. I was interested in exploring creativity and personal freedom and playfulness (and I’ve just heard good things about the book). But in reality, there’s probably a reason I feel drawn to this book instead of the gazillion other self-help books that come across my radar. I have considered myself an artist in the past – considered myself a writer – and I’d love to again.

This week’s assignments are the first step. I’ll be doing a weekly check-in, so I’ll let you know next week how it’s going.

Tags: Books, Creativity, Safety, The Artist's Way