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The Artists Way by Julia Cameron

The Artists Way by Julia Cameron

by Parker · 761 things on Twos

Creativity as a Spiritual Practice.
Introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of the artist's way
Difficult as it is to remember, it is our work that creates the market, not the market that creates our work.
Art is an act of faith, and we practice practicing it.
Like all artists—like all of us if we listen—I experience inspiration.
I had not yet learned that we do tend to practice what we preach, that in unblocking others I would unblock myself, and that, like all artists, I would thrive more easily with some companionship, with kindred souls making kindred leaps of faith. Called to teach, I could not imagine the good teaching would bring to me and, through me, to others.
“Remember, there is a creative energy that wants to express itself through you.”
“Don’t judge the work or yourself. You can sort it out later.”
“Let God work through you.”
Creativity is like crabgrass—it springs back with the simplest bit of care.
People “heal” because creativity is healthy—and practicing it, they find their greater selves. And we are all greater than we can conceive.
Higher powers stand ready to help us if we ask. We must remain ready to ask, open-minded enough to be led, and willing to believe despite our bouts of disbelief.
Creativity is an act of faith, and we must be faithful to that faith, willing to share it to help others, and to be helped in return.
For artists, a wing and a prayer is routine operating procedure. We must trust our process, look beyond “results.”
Artists throughout the centuries have spoken of “inspiration,” confiding that God spoke to them or angels did. In our age, such notions of art as a spiritual experience are seldom mentioned. And yet, the central experience of creativity is mystical. Opening our souls to what must be made, we meet our Maker.
We pray. Fame will come to some. Honor will visit all who work. As artists, we experience the fact that “God is in the details.” Making our art, we make artful lives. Making our art, we meet firsthand the hand of our Creator.
Introduction
“Man is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become to fulfill his destiny.” - Paul Tillich
“I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me.” - William Blake
When the word God is used in these pages, you may substitute the thought good orderly direction or flow. What we are talking about is a creative energy. God is useful shorthand for many of us, but so is Goddess, Mind, Universe, Source, and Higher Power. For many of us, thinking of it as a form of spiritual electricity has been a very useful jumping-off place.
The theory doesn’t matter as much as the practice itself does. What you are doing is creating pathways in your consciousness through which the creative forces can operate. Once you agree to clearing these pathways, your creativity emerges. In a sense, your creativity is like your blood. Just as blood is a fact of your physical body and nothing you invented, creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing that you must invent.
My own journey
I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me. I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.
Get out of the way. Let it work through you. Accumulate pages, not judgments.
“The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.” - Piet Mondrian
Spiritual Electricity
“The music of this opera [Madame Butterfly] was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public.” - Giacomo Puccini
“Straight away the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God.” - Johannes Brahms
“We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God’s creative pulse itself.” - Joseph Chilton Pearce
“It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.” - Mary Daly
“Leap, and the net will appear.”
When we move out on faith into the act of creation, the universe is able to advance.
Basic principles
Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy.
There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life—including ourselves.
When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives.
We are, ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.
Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.
The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature.
When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good orderly direction.
As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.
It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity.
Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.
“Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.”” - The Talmud
“Great improvisors are like priests. They are thinking only of their god.” - Stéphane Grappelli
“Creativity is harnessing universality and making it flow through your eyes.” - Peter Koestenbaum
“I paint not by sight but by faith. Faith gives you sight.” - Amos Ferguson
“Why should we all use our creative power ... ? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.” - Brenda Ueland
How to use this book for your creative recovery
Begin by reading the chapter of the week on Sunday night. After you’ve read the chapter, speed-write through the exercises. The exercises in each week are critical. So are the morning pages and the artist date. (More about these in the next chapter.) You probably won’t have time to complete all of the other tasks in any given week. Try to do about half. Know that the rest are there for use when you are able to get back to them. In choosing which half of the tasks to do, use two guidelines. Pick those that appeal to you and those you strongly resist. Leave the more neutral ones for later. Just remember, in choosing, that we often resist what we most need.
In all, make a time commitment of about seven to ten hours a week—an hour a day, or slightly more if you choose.
What to expect
“The purpose of art is not a rarified, intellectual distillate—it is life, intensified, brilliant life.” - Alain Arias-Misson
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others. Their lives have obscured and detoured our own.
The morning pages
In order to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it.
The morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another morning. I have NOTHING to say. I need to wash the curtains. Did I get my laundry yesterday? Blah, blah, blah ...” They might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions.
“Words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.” - Ingrid Bengis
“You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours.” - Anne-Wilson Schaef
There is no wrong way to do morning pages.
As blocked artists, we tend to criticize ourselves mercilessly. Even if we look like functioning artists to the world, we feel we never do enough and what we do isn’t right. We are victims of our own internalized perfectionist, a nasty internal and eternal critic, the Censor, who resides in our (left) brain and keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as the truth.
Make this a rule: always remember that your Censor’s negative opinions are not the truth.
“A mind too active is no mind at all.” - Theodore Roethke
Morning pages are nonnegotiable. Never skip or skimp on morning pages. Your mood doesn’t matter.
We meditate to discover our own identity, our right place in the scheme of the universe. Through meditation, we acquire and eventually acknowledge our connection to an inner power source that has the ability to transform our outer world. In other words, meditation gives us not only the light of insight but also the power for expansive change.
“It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.” - May Sarton
Boredom is just “What’s the use?” in disguise. And “What’s the use?” is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page.
The Artist Date
An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist.
In its most primary form, the artist date is an excursion, a play date that you preplan and defend against all interlopers.
You do not take anyone on this artist date but you and your inner artist, a.k.a. your creative child.
What that child wants is attention, not expensive outings. What that child does not want is to share the precious parent with someone like the new significant other.
“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” - C. G. Jung
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” - Pablo Picasso
You are likely to find yourself avoiding your artist dates. Recognize this resistance as a fear of intimacy—self-intimacy.
The morning pages acquaint us with what we think and what we think we need. We identify problem areas and concerns. We complain, enumerate, identify, isolate, fret.
Filling the well, stocking the pond
In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do—spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.
In filling the well, follow your sense of the mysterious, not your sense of what you should know more about. A mystery can be very simple: if I drive this road, not my usual road, what will I see? Changing a known route throws us into the now. We become refocused on the visible, visual world. Sight leads to insight.
“Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” - Georgia O'Keeffe
“So you see, imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.” - Brenda Ueland
Filling the well needn’t be all novelty. Cooking can fill the well.
Any regular, repetitive action primes the well.
Contract
I, _______________, understand that I am undertaking an intensive, guided encounter with my own creativity. I commit myself to the twelve- week duration of the course. I, _______________, commit to weekly reading, daily morning pages, a weekly artist date, and the fulfillment of each week’s tasks. I, _______________, further understand that this course will raise issues and emotions for me to deal with. I, ______________, commit myself to excellent self-care—adequate sleep, diet, exercise, and pampering—for the duration of the course.
Artists can be sober, sane, solvent, responsible, user-friendly, saved, happy, discovered and recovered
“Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about .... Say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe.” - Jalai Ud-Din Rumi
Creativity Contract
Buy a nice notebook for your pages; hire your babysitter ahead of time for the weekly artist dates. Read the contract on the preceding page. Amend it, if you like; then sign and date it. Come back to it when you need encouragement to go on.
Week 1: Recovering a sense of safety
Shadow artists
Caught between the dream of action and the fear of failure, shadow artists are born.
“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” - C. G. Jung
All too often the artistic urges of the artist child are ignored or suppressed. Often with the best intentions, parents try to foster a different, more sensible self for the child.
Very often audacity, not talent, makes one person an artist and another a shadow artist—hiding in the shadows, afraid to step out and expose the dream to the light, fearful that it will disintegrate to the touch.
“We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic and positive equals unrealistic.” - Susan Jeffers
It takes nurturing to make an artist. Shadow artists did not receive sufficient nurturing. They blame themselves for not acting fearlessly anyhow.
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” - Joseph Chilton Pearce
“When you are feeling depreciated, angry or drained, it is a sign that other people are not open to your energy.” - Sanaya Roman
Protecting the artist child within
Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves.
Too far, too fast, and we can undo ourselves.
Creative recovery is like marathon training. We want to log ten slow miles for every one fast mile.
It is an awkward, tentative, even embarrassing process. There will be many times when we won’t look good— to ourselves or anyone else. We need to stop demanding that we do.
It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.
Your enemy within: core negative beliefs
Negative beliefs are exactly that: beliefs, not facts. The world was never flat, although everyone believed it was. You are not dumb, crazy, egomaniacal, grandiose, or silly just because you falsely believe yourself to be.
Your ally within: affirmative weapons
You could do it better if only you would let yourself do it!
An affirmation is a positive statement of (positive) belief, and if we can become one-tenth as good at positive self-talk as we are at negative self-talk, we will notice an enormous change.
“Affirmations are like prescriptions for certain aspects of yourself you want to change.” - Jerry Frankhauser
Affirmations help achieve a sense of safety and hope.
Where do your blurts come from? Mom? Dad? Teachers? Using your list of blurts, scan your past for possible sources.
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” - C. G. Jung
Creative affirmations
I am a channel for God’s creativity, and my work comes to good.
My dreams come from God and God has the power to accomplish them.
As I create and listen, I will be led.
Creativity is the creator’s will for me.
My creativity heals myself and others.
I am allowed to nurture my artist.
Through the use of a few simple tools, my creativity will flourish.
Through the use of my creativity, I serve God.
My creativity always leads me to truth and love.
My creativity leads me to forgiveness and self-forgiveness.
There is a divine plan of goodness for me.
There is a divine plan of goodness for my work.
As I listen to the creator within, I am led.
As I listen to my creativity I am led to my creator.
I am willing to create.
I am willing to learn to let myself create.
I am willing to let God create through me.
I am willing to be of service through my creativity.
I am willing to experience my creative energy.
I am willing to use my creative talents.
“An affirmation is a strong, positive statement that something is already so.” - Shakti Gawain
Tasks
Every morning, set your clock one-half hour early; get up and write three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness morning writing. Do not reread these pages or allow anyone else to read them. Ideally, stick these pages in a large manila envelope, or hide them somewhere. Welcome to the morning pages. They will change you.
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.” - Henry David Thoreau
“Make your own recovery the first priority in your life.” - Robin Norwood
This week, please be sure to work with your affirmations of choice and your blurts at the end of each day’s morning pages. Convert all blurts into positive affirmations.
Take yourself on an artist date. You will do this every week for the duration of the course. A sample artist date: take five dollars and go to your local five-and-dimc. Buy silly things like gold stick-em stars, tiny dinosaurs, some postcards, sparkly sequins, glue, a kid’s scissors, crayons. You might give yourself a gold star on your envelope each day you write. Just for fun.
Time Travel: List three old enemies of your creative self-worth. Please be as specific as possible in doing this exercise. Your historic monsters are the building blocks of your core negative beliefs. (Yes, rotten Sister Ann Rita from fifth grade does count, and the rotten thing she said to you does matter. Put her in.) This is your monster hall of fame. More monsters will come to you as you work through your recovery. It is always necessary to acknowledge creative injuries and grieve them. Otherwise, they become creative scar tissue and block your growth.
Time Travel: Select and write out one horror story from your monster hall of fame. You do not need to write long or much, but do jot down whatever details come back to you—the room you were in, the way people looked at you, the way you felt, what your parent said or didn’t say when you told about it. Include whatever rankles you about the incident: “And then I remember she gave me this real fakey smile and patted my head....”
Write a letter to the editor in your defense. Mail it to yourself. It is great fun to write this letter in the voice of your wounded artist child: “To whom it may concern: Sister Ann Rita is a jerk and has pig eyes and I can too spell!”
Time Travel: List three old champions of your creative self-worth. This is your hall of champions, those who wish you and your creativity well. Be specific. Every encouraging word counts. Even if you disbelieve a compliment, record it. It may well be true. If you are stuck for compliments, go back through your time-travel log and look for positive memories. When, where, and why did you feel good about yourself? Who gave you affirmation?
Time Travel: Select and write out one happy piece of encouragement. Write a thank-you letter. Mail it to yourself or to the long-lost mentor.
Imaginary Lives: If you had five other lives to lead, what would you do in each of them? I would be a pilot, a cowhand, a physicist, a psychic, a monk. You might be a scuba diver, a cop, a writer of children’s books, a football player, a belly dancer, a painter, a performance artist, a history teacher, a healer, a coach, a scientist, a doctor, a Peace Corps worker, a psychologist, a fisherman, a minister, an auto mechanic, a carpenter, a sculptor, a lawyer, a painter, a computer hacker, a soap-opera star, a country singer, a rock-and-roll drummer. Whatever occurs to you, jot it down. Do not overthink this exercise. The point of these lives is to have fun in them— more fun than you might be having in this one. Look over your list and select one. Then do it this week. For instance, if you put down country singer, can you pick a guitar? If you dream of being a cowhand, what about some horseback riding?
In working with affirmations and blurts, very often injuries and monsters swim back to us. Add these to your list as they occur to you. Work with each blurt individually. Turn each negative into an affirmative positive.
Take your artist for a walk, the two of you. A brisk twenty-minute walk can dramatically alter consciousness.
Check-in
The purpose of check-ins is to give you a journal of your creative journey. It is my hope that you will later share the tools with others and in doing so find your own notes invaluable: “Yes, I was mad in week four. I loved week five....”
How many days this week did you do your morning pages? Seven out of seven, we always hope. How was the experience for you?
Did you do your artist date this week? Yes, of course, we always hope. And yet artist dates can be remarkably difficult to allow yourself. What did you do? How did it feel?
Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.
Week 2: Recovering a sense of identity
Going sane
“All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.” - Doris Lessing
“Snipers are people who undermine your efforts to break unhealthy relationship patterns.” - Jody Hayes
Do not let your self-doubt turn into self-sabotage.
Poisonous playmates
Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance.
Your artist, like a small child, is happiest when feeling a sense of security.
As our artist’s protective parent, we must learn to place our artist with safe companions. Toxic playmates can capsize our artist’s growth.
Do not expect your blocked friends to applaud your recovery. That’s like expecting your best friends from the bar to celebrate your sobriety. How can they when their own drinking is something they want to hold on to?
“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.” - Robert Louis Sevenson
“Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.” - Shakti Gawain
It is very important to understand that the time given to morning pages is time between you and God. You best know your answers. You will be led to new sources of support as you begin to support yourself.
Often, creativity is blocked by our falling in with other people’s plans for us. We want to set aside time for our creative work, but we feel we should do something else instead. As blocked creatives, we focus not on our responsibilities to ourselves, but on our responsibilities to others. We tend to think such behavior makes us good people. It doesn’t. It makes us frustrated people.
The essential element in nurturing our creativity lies in nurturing ourselves. Through self-nurturance we nurture our inner connection to the Great Creator. Through this connection our creativity will unfold. Paths will appear for us. We need to trust the Great Creator and move out in faith.
The Great Creator has gifted us with creativity. Our gift back is our use of it. Do not let friends squander your time.
The best thing you can do for your friends is to be an example through your own recovery. Do not let their fears and second thoughts derail you.
Give yourself the gift of faith. Trust that you are on the right track. You are.
You will learn to enjoy the process of being a creative channel and to surrender your need to control the result. You will discover the joy of practicing your creativity. The process, not the product, will become your focus.
Your own healing is the greatest message of hope for others.
Crazymakers
Crazymakers are those personalities that create storm centers. They are often charismatic, frequently charming, highly inventive, and powerfully persuasive. You know the type: charismatic but out of control, long on problems and short on solutions.
Crazymakers like drama. If they can swing it, they are the star.
“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.” - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“What I am actually saying is that we need to be willing to let our intuition guide us, and then be willing to follow that guidance directly and fearlessly.” - Shakti Gawain
“Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast—you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.” - Eddie Cantor
Crazymakers are often blocked creatives themselves. Afraid to effectively tap their own creativity, they are loath to allow that same creativity in others. It makes them jealous. It makes them threatened. It makes them dramatic—at your expense.
“Whatever God’s dream about man may be, it seems certain it cannot come true unless man cooperates.” - Stella Terrill Mann
Your crazymaker is a block you chose yourself, to deter you from your own trajectory. As much as you are being exploited by your crazymaker, you, too, are using that person to block your creative flow.
The next time you catch yourself saying or thinking, “He/ she is driving me crazy!” ask yourself what creative work you are trying to block by your involvement.
Skepticism
Perhaps the greatest barrier for any of us as we look for an expanded life is our own deeply held skepticism.
Many times, in trying to be good sports we stuff our feelings of doubt. We need to stop doing that and explore them instead.
“To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information with. With our own eyes we see, and with our skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.” - Sophy Burnham
In creative recovery, it is not necessary that we change any of our beliefs. It is necessary that we examine them.
More than anything else, creative recovery is an exercise in open- mindedness. Again, picture your mind as that room with the door slightly ajar. Nudging the door open a bit more is what makes for open-mindedness. Begin, this week, to consciously practice opening your mind.
Attention
A creative life involves great swathes of attention. Attention is a way to connect and survive.
“Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” - Henry Miller
Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention.
Success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain—the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, “unutterably alone.” More than anything else, attention is an act of connection.
In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right. Yesterday the marriage may have ended. Tomorrow the cat may die. The phone call from the lover, for all my waiting, may not ever come, but just at the moment, just now, that’s all right. I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.
“The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.” - Jackson Pollock