The Artist's Way (12 page)
Authors: Julia Cameron
Artists
who
seek
perfection
in
everything
are
those
who
cannot
attain
it
in
anything.
E
UGÃNE
D
ELACROIX
Many blocked people are actually very powerful and creative personalities who have been made to feel guilty about their own strengths and gifts. Without being acknowledged, they are often used as batteries by their families and friends, who feel free to both use their creative energies and disparage them. When these blocked artists strive to break free of their dysfunctional systems, they are often urged to be sensible when such advice is not appropriate for them. Made to feel guilty for their talents, they often hide their own light under a bushel for fear of hurting others. Instead, they hurt themselves.
A little sleuth work is in order to restore the persons we have abandonedâourselves. When you complete the following phrases, you may feel strong emotion as you retrieve memories and misplaced fragments of yourself. Allow yourself to free-associate for a sentence or so with each phrase.
- My favorite childhood toy was â¦
- My favorite childhood game was â¦
- The best movie I ever saw as a kid was â¦
- I don't do it much but I enjoy â¦
- If I could lighten up a little, I'd let myself â¦
- If it weren't too late, I'd â¦
- My favorite musical instrument is â¦
- The amount of money I spend on treating myself to entertainment each month is â¦
- If I weren't so stingy with my artist, I'd buy him/ her â¦
- Taking time out for myself is â¦
- I am afraid that if I start dreaming â¦
- I secretly enjoy reading â¦
- If I had had a perfect childhood I'd have grown up to be â¦
- If it didn't sound so crazy, I'd write or make a â¦
- My parents think artists are â¦
- My God thinks artists are â¦
- What makes me feel weird about this recovery is â¦
- Learning to trust myself is probably â¦
- My most cheer-me-up music is â¦
- My favorite way to dress is â¦
Take
your
life
in
your
own
hands
and
what
happens?
A
terrible
thing:
no
one
to
blame.
E
RICA
J
ONG
Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself. A creative recovery is a healing process. You are capable of great things on Tuesday, but on Wednesday you may slide backward. This is normal. Growth occurs in spurts. You will lie dormant sometimes. Do not be discouraged. Think of it as resting.
Very often, a week of insights will be followed by a week of sluggishness. The morning pages will seem pointless.
They
are
not.
What you are learning to do, writing them even when you are tired and they seem dull, is to rest on the page. This is very important. Marathon runners suggest you log ten slow miles for every fast one. The same holds true for creativity.
In this sense,
Easy
does
it
is actually a modus operandi. It
means, “Easy accomplishes it.” If you will hew to a practice of writing three pages every morning and doing one kind thing for yourself every day, you will begin to notice a slight lightness of heart.
Practice being kind to yourself in small, concrete ways. Look at your refrigerator. Are you feeding yourself nicely? Do you have socks? An extra set of sheets? What about a new house plant? A thermos for the long drive to work? Allow yourself to pitch out some of your old ragged clothes. You don't have to keep everything.
The expression “God helps those who help themselves” may take on a new and very different meaning. Where in the past it translated, “God helps only those who earn help,” it will now come to signify the amazing number of small free gifts the creator showers on those who are helping themselves to a little bounty. If you do one nice thing a day for yourself, God will do two more. Be alert for support and encouragement from unexpected quarters. Be open to receiving gifts from odd channels: free tickets, a free trip, an offer to buy you dinner, a new-to-you old couch. Practice saying yes to such help.
The scientifically inclined among you might want to make a good, thorough list of clothes you wish you had. Very often, the items on the list come into your possession at disconcerting speed. Just try it. Experiment.
More than anything else, experiment with solitude. You will need to make a commitment to quiet time. Try to acquire the habit of checking in with yourself. Several times a day, just take a beat, and ask yourself how
you
are feeling. Listen to your answer. Respond kindly. If you are doing something very hard, promise yourself a break and a treat afterward.
Yes, I
am
asking you to baby yourself. We believe that to be artists we must be tough, cynical, and intellectually chilly. Leave that to the critics. As a creative being, you will be more productive when coaxed than when bullied.
There
is
a
vitality,
a
life
force,
an
energy,
a
quickening,
that
is
translated
through
you
into
action,
and
because
there
is
only
one
of
you
in
all
time,
this
expres
sion
is
unique.
And
if
you
block
it,
it
will
never
exist
through
any
other
medium
and
will
be
lost.
M
ARTHA
G
RAHAM
1. Describe your childhood room. If you wish, you may sketch this room. What was your favorite thing
about it? What's your favorite thing about your room right now? Nothing? Well, get something you like in thereâmaybe something from that old childhood room.
2. Describe five traits you like in yourself as a child.
3. List five childhood accomplishments, (straight A's in seventh grade, trained the dog, punched out the class bully, short-sheeted the priest's bed).
   And a treat: list five favorite childhood foods. Buy yourself one of them this week. Yes, Jell-O with bananas is okay.
Whenever
I
have
to
choose
be
tween
two
evils,
I
always
like
to
try
the
one
I
haven't
tried
before.
M
AE
W
EST
4. Habits: Take a look at your habits. Many of them may interfere with your self-nurturing and cause shame. Some of the oddest things are self-destructive. Do you have a habit of watching TV you don't like? Do you have a habit of hanging out with a really boring friend and just killing time (there's an expression!)? Some rotten habits are obvious, overt (drinking too much, smoking, eating instead of writing). List three obvious rotten habits. What's the payoff in continuing them?
   Some rotten habits are more subtle (no time to exercise, little time to pray, always helping others, not getting any self-nurturing, hanging out with people who belittle your dreams). List three of your subtle foes. What use do these forms of sabotage have? Be specific.
5. Make a list of friends who nurture youâthat's
nur
ture
(give you a sense of your own competency and possibility), not enable (give you the message that you will never get it straight without their help). There is a big difference between being helped and being treated as though we are helpless. List three nurturing friends. Which of their traits, particularly, serve you well?
6. Call a friend who treats you like you are a really good and bright person who can accomplish things. Part
of your recovery is reaching out for support. This support will be critical as you undertake new risks.
7. Inner Compass: Each of us has an inner compass. This is an instinct that points us toward health. It warns us when we are on dangerous ground, and it tells us when something is safe and good for us. Morning pages are one way to contact it. So are some other artist-brain activitiesâpainting, driving, walking, scrubbing, running. This week, take an hour to follow your inner compass by doing an artist-brain activity and
listening
to what insights bubble up.
8. List five people you admire. Now, list five people you secretly admire. What traits do these people have that you can cultivate further in yourself?
9. List five people you wish you had met who are dead. Now, list five people who are dead whom you'd like to hang out with for a while in eternity. What traits do you find in these people that you can look for in your friends?
10. Compare the two sets of lists. Take a look at what you really like and really admireâand a look at what you think you should like and admire. Your
shoulds
might tell you to admire Edison while your heart belongs to Houdini. Go with the Houdini side of you for a while.
Creative
work
is
play.
It
is
free
speculation
using
the
materials
of
one's
chosen
form.
S
TEPHEN
N
ACHMANOVITCH
Creativity
is
â¦
seeing
some
thing
that
doesn't
exist
already.
You
need
to
find
out
how
you
can
bring
it
into
being
and
that
way
be
a
playmate
with
God.
M
ICHELE
S
HEA
1. How many days this week did you do your morning pages? How was the experience for you? If you skipped a day, why did you skip it?
2. Did you do your artist date this week? (Yes, yes, and it was
awful.
)
What did you do? How did it feel?
3. Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?
4. Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.
T
his week may find you grappling with changing self-definition. The essays, tasks, and exercises are designed to catapult you into productive introspection and integration of new self-awareness. This may be both very difficult and extremely exciting for you. Warning: Do not skip the tool of reading deprivation!
W
ORKING WITH THE MORNING
pages, we begin to sort through the differences between our
real
feelings, which are often secret, and our
official
feelings, those on the record for public display. Official feelings are often indicated by the phrase, “I feel okay about that [the job loss, her dating someone else, my dad's death, â¦].”
What do we mean by “I feel okay”? The morning pages force us to get specific. Does “I feel okay” mean I feel resigned, accepting, comfortable, detached, numb, tolerant, pleased, or satisfied?
What
does it mean?
Okay
is a blanket word for most of us. It covers all sorts of squirmy feelings; and it frequently signals a loss. We officially feel okay, but do we?
At the root of a successful creative recovery is the commitment to puncture our denial, to stop saying, “It's okay” when in fact it's something else. The morning pages press us to answer what else.
In my years of watching people work with morning pages,
I have noticed that many tend to neglect or abandon the pages whenever an unpleasant piece of clarity is about to emerge. If we are, for example, very, very angry but not admitting it, then we will be tempted to say we feel “okay about that.” The morning pages will not allow us to get away with this evasion. So we tend to avoid them.
If we have the creeping feeling that our lover is not being totally honest with us, the morning pages are liable to bring this creepy possibility upâand with it, the responsibility for an unsettling conversation. Rather than face this mess, we will mess up on doing the morning pages.
By contrast, if we are suddenly and madly in love, the morning pages may seem threatening. We don't want to puncture the fragile and shiny bubble of our happiness. We want to stay lost in the sea of a blissful us rather than be reminded that there is an I in the we (or an “eye” in the we) that is temporarily blinded.
In short, extreme emotions of any kindâthe very thing that morning pages are superb for processingâare the usual triggers for avoiding the pages themselves.
Each
painting
has
its
own
way
of
evolving
â¦.
When
the
paint
ing
is
finished,
the
subject
reveals
itself.
W
ILLIAM
B
AZIOTES
Just as an athlete accustomed to running becomes irritable when he is unable to get his miles in, so, too, those of us accustomed now to morning pages will notice an irritability when we let them slide. We are tempted, always, to reverse cause and effect: “I was too crabby to write them,” instead of, “I didn't write them so I am crabby.”
Over any considerable period of time, the morning pages perform spiritual chiropractic. They realign our values. If we are to the left or the right of our personal truth, the pages will point out the need for a course adjustment. We will become aware of our drift and correct itâif only to hush the pages up.
“To thine own self be true,” the pages say, while busily pointing that self out. It was in the pages that Mickey, a painter, first learned she wanted to write comedy. No wonder all her friends were writers. So was she!
Chekhov advised, “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” That's another way of saying that in order to have self-expression, we must first have a self to express. That is the business of the morning pages: “I, myself, feel this way â¦
and that way ⦠and this wayâ¦. No one else need agree with me, but this is what
I
feel.”
The process of identifying a
self
inevitably involves loss as well as gain. We discover our boundaries, and those boundaries by definition separate us from our fellows. As we clarify our perceptions, we lose our misconceptions. As we eliminate ambiguity, we lose illusion as well. We arrive at clarity, and clarity creates change.
“I have outgrown this job,” may appear in the morning pages. At first, it is a troubling perception. Over time, it becomes a call for action and then an action plan.
“This marriage is not working for me,” the morning pages say. And then, “I wonder about couples therapy?” And then, “I wonder if I'm not just bored with me?”
In addition to posing problems, the pages may also pose solutions. “I
am
bored with me. It would be fun to learn French.” Or, “I noticed a sign just down the block for a clay and fiber class. That sounds interesting.”
As we notice which friends bore us, which situations leave us stifled, we are often rocked by waves of sorrow. We may want our illusions back! We want to pretend the friendship works. We don't want the trauma of searching for another job.
Faced with impending change, change we have set in motion through our own hand, we want to mutiny, curl up in a ball, bawl our eyes out. “No pain, no gain,” the nasty slogan has it. And we resent this pain no matter what gain it is bringing us.
“I don't want to raise my consciousness!” we wail. “I want ⦔ And thanks to the morning pages we learn what we want and ultimately become willing to make the changes needed to get it. But not without a tantrum. And not without a
kriya,
a Sanskrit word meaning a spiritual emergency or surrender. (I always think of kriyas as spiritual seizures. Perhaps they should be spelled
crias
because they are cries of the soul as it is wrung through changes.)
Eliminate
something
superfluous
from
your
life.
Break
a
habit.
Do
something
that
makes
you
feel
insecure.
P
IERO
F
ERRUCCI
We all know what a kriya looks like: it is the bad case of the flu right after you've broken up with your lover. It's the rotten head cold and bronchial cough that announces you've abused your health to meet an unreachable work deadline. That asthma
attack out of nowhere when you've just done a round of care-taking your alcoholic sibling? That's a kriya, too.
Always significant, frequently psychosomatic, kriyas are the final insult our psyche adds to our injuries: “Get it?” a kriya asks you.
Get it:
You can't stay with this abusive lover.
You can't work at a job that demands eighty hours a week.
You can't rescue a brother who needs to save himself.
In twelve-step groups, kriyas are often called
surrenders.
People are told
just
let
go.
And they would if they knew what they were holding on to. With the morning pages in place and the artist dates in motion, the radio set stands half a chance of picking up the message you are sending and/or receiving. The pages round up the usual suspects. They mention the small hurts we prefer to ignore, the large successes we've failed to acknowledge. In short, the morning pages point the way to reality: this is how you're feeling; what do you make of that?
And what we make of that is often art.
Stop
thinking
and
talking
about
it
and
there
is
nothing
you
will
not
be
able
to
know.
Z
EN
P
ARADIGM
People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.
As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered.
Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.
As we gainâor regainâour creative identity, we lose the false self we were sustaining. The loss of this false self can feel traumatic: “I don't know who I am anymore. I don't recognize me.”
Remember that the more you feel yourself to be terra in-cognita, the more certain you can be that the recovery process is working. You are your own promised land, your own new frontier.
Shifts in taste and perception frequently accompany shifts in identity. One of the clearest signals that something healthy is afoot is the impulse to weed out, sort through, and discard old clothes, papers, and belongings.
“I don't need this anymore,” we say as we toss a low-self-worth shirt into the giveaway pile. “I'm sick of this broken-down dresser and its sixteen coats of paint,” as the dresser goes off to Goodwill.
By tossing out the old and unworkable, we make way for the new and suitable. A closet stuffed with ratty old clothes does not invite new ones. A house overflowing with odds and ends and tidbits you've held on to for someday has no space for the things that might truly enhance today.
When the search-and-discard impulse seizes you, two crosscurrents are at work: the old you is leaving and grieving, while the new you celebrates and grows strong. As with any rupture, there is both tension and relief. Long-seated depression breaks up like an ice floe. Long-frozen feelings thaw, melt, cascade, flood, and often overrun their container (you). You may find yourself feeling volatile and changeable. You are.
Be prepared for bursts of tears and of laughter. A certain giddiness may accompany sudden stabs of loss. Think of yourself as an accident victim walking away from the crash: your old life has crashed and burned; your new life isn't apparent yet. You may feel yourself to be temporarily without a vehicle. Just keep walking.
All
the
arts
we
practice
are
apprenticeship.
The
big
art
is
our
life.
M. C. R
ICHARDS
It
is
not
because
things
are
diffi
cult
that
we
do
not
dare;
it
is
because
we
do
not
dare
that
they
are
difficult.
S
ENECA
If this description sounds dramatic, it is only to prepare you for possible emotional pyrotechnics. You may not have them. Your changes may be more like cloud movements, from overcast to partly cloudy. It is important to know that no matter which form your growth takes, there is another kind of change, slower and more subtle, accumulating daily whether you sense its presence or not.
“Nothing dramatic is happening to me. I don't think the process is working,” I have often been told by someone who
from my perspective is changing at the speed of light. The analogy that I use is that once we engage in the process of morning pages and artist dates, we begin to move at such velocity that we do not even realize the pace. Just as travelers on a jet are seldom aware of their speed unless they hit a patch of turbulence, so, too, travelers on the Artist's Way are seldom aware of the speed of their growth. This is a form of denial that can tempt us to abort the recovery process that “isn't happening” to us. Oh yes it is.
To
become
truly
immortal,
a
work
of
art
must
escape
all
human
limits:
logic
and
common
sense
will
only
interfere.
But
once
these
barriers
are
broken,
it
will
enter
the
realms
of
childhood
visions
and
dreams.
G
IORGIO
D
E
C
HIRICO
When we have engaged the creator within to heal us, many changes and shifts in our attitudes begin to occur. I enumerate some of them here because many of these will not be recognizable at first as healing. If fact, they may seem crazy and even destructive. At best, they will seem eccentric.
There will be a change in energy patterns. Your dreams will become stronger and clearer, both by night and by day. You will find yourself remembering your nighttime dreams, and by day, daydreams will catch your attention. Fantasy, of a benign and unexpected sort, will begin to crop up.
Many areas of your life that previously seemed to fit will stop fitting. Half your wardrobe may start to look funny. You may decide to reupholster a couch or just toss it out. Musical bents may alter. There may even be bursts of spontaneous singing, dancing, running.
You may find your candor unsettling. “I don't like that” is a sentence that will leave your mouth. Or “I think that's great.” In short, your tastes and judgments and personal identity will begin to show through.
What you have been doing is wiping the mirror. Each day's morning pages take a swipe at the blur you have kept between you and your real self. As your image becomes clearer, it may surprise you. You may discover very particular likes and dislikes that you hadn't acknowledged. A fondness for cactuses. So why do I have these pots of ivy? A dislike for brown. So why do I keep wearing that sweater if I never feel right in it?