The Artist's Way (13 page)

Conditioned as we are to accept other peoples' definitions of us, this emerging individuality can seem to us like self-will run riot. It is not.

The snowflake pattern of your soul is emerging. Each of us is a unique, creative individual. But we often blur that uniqueness with sugar, alcohol, drugs, overwork, underplay, bad relations, toxic sex, underexercise, over-TV, undersleep—many and varied forms of junk food for the soul. The pages help us to see these smears on our consciousness.

Is you look over the time you have been doing your morning writing, you will see that many changes have entered your life as a result of your willingness to clear room in it for your creator's action. You will have noticed an increased, sometimes disconcerting, sense of personal energy, some bursts of anger, some flash points of clarity. People and objects may have taken on a different meaning to you. There will be a sense of the flow of life—that you are brought into new vistas as you surrender to moving with the flow of God. This is clear already.

You may well be experiencing a sense of both bafflement and faith. You are no longer stuck, but you cannot tell where you are going. You may feel that this can't keep up. You may long for the time when there was no sense of possibility, when you felt more victimized, when you didn't realize how many small things you could do to improve your own life.

It is normal to yearn for some rest when you are moving so rapidly. What you will learn to do is rest in motion, like lying down in a boat. Your morning pages are your boat. They will both lead you forward and give you a place to recuperate from your forward motion.

It is difficult for us to realize that this process of going inside and writing pages can open an inner door through which our creator helps and guides us. Our willingness swings this inner door open. The morning pages symbolize our willingness to speak to and hear God. They lead us into many other changes that also come from God and lead us to God. This is the hand of God moving through your hand as you write. It is very powerful.

One technique that can be very reassuring at this point is to use your morning pages—or a part of them—for written affirmation of your progress.

“Put it in writing,” we often say when making a deal.

There is a special power in writing out the deal we are making with our creator. “I receive your good willingly” and “Thy will be done” are two short affirmations that when written in the morning remind us to be open to increased good during the day.

“I trust my perceptions” is another powerful affirmation to use as we undergo shifts in identity. “A stronger and clearer me is emerging.”

Choose affirmations according to your need. As you excavate your buried dreams, you need the assurance that such explorations are permissible: “I recover and enjoy my identity.”

As recovering creatives, we often have to excavate our own pasts for the shards of buried dreams and delights. Do a little digging, please. Be fast and frivolous. This is an exercise in spontaneity, so be sure to write your answers out quickly. Speed kills the Censor.

1. List five hobbies that sound fun.
   
2. List five classes that sound fun.
   
3. List five things you personally would
   never
   do that sound fun.
   
4. List five skills that would be fun to have.
   
5. List five things you used to enjoy doing.
   
6. List five silly things you would like to try once.
   

As you may have gathered by this point in your work, we will approach certain problems from many different angles, all of them aimed at eliciting more information from your unconscious about what you might consciously enjoy. The exercise that follows will teach you enormous amounts about yourself—as well as giving you some free time in which to pursue the interests you just listed.

 

If you feel stuck in your life or in your art, few jump starts are more effective than a week of
reading
deprivation.

No reading? That's right: no reading. For most artists, words are like tiny tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our system. Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried.

It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. With no newspaper to shield us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With no novel to sink into (and no television to numb us out) an evening becomes a vast savannah in which furniture—and other assumptions—get rearranged.

Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a space some of us begin to immediately fill with new words—long, gossipy conversations, television bingeing, the radio as a constant, chatty companion. We often cannot hear our own inner voice, the voice of our artist's inspiration, above the static. In practicing reading deprivation, we need to cast a watchful eye on these other pollutants. They poison the well.

If we monitor the inflow and keep it to a minimum, we will be rewarded for our reading deprivation with embarrassing speed. Our reward will be a new outflow. Our own art, our own thoughts and feelings, will begin to nudge aside the sludge of blockage, to loosen it and move it upward and outward until once again our well is running freely.

Reading deprivation is a very powerful tool—and a very frightening one. Even thinking about it can bring up enormous rage. For most blocked creatives, reading is an addiction. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own.

In my teaching, the week that I assign reading deprivation is always a tough one. I go to the podium knowing that I will be the enemy. I break the news that we won't be reading and then I brace myself for the waves of antagonism and sarcasm that follow.

At least one student always explains to me—pointedly, in no uncertain terms—that he or she is a very important and busy person with duties and obligations that include reading.

This information is inevitably relayed in a withering tone that implies I am an idiot child, an artistic flake, unable to grasp the complexities of an adult's life. I just listen.

When the rage has been vented, when all the assigned reading for college courses and jobs has been mentioned, I point out that I have had jobs and I have gone to college and that in my experience I had many times wriggled out of reading for a week due to procrastination. As blocked creatives, we can be very creative at wriggling out of things. I ask my class to turn their creativity to wriggling
into
not reading.

“But what will we do?” comes next.

Here is a brief list of some things that people do when they are not reading:

Even at the safe remove of the written word, I can feel the shock waves of antagonism about trying this tool. I will tell you that those who have most resisted it have come back the most smugly rewarded for having done it. The nasty bottom line is this: sooner or later, if you are not reading, you will run out of work and be forced to play. You'll light some incense or put on an old jazz record or paint a shelf turquoise, and then you will feel not just better but actually a little excited.

Don't read. If you can't think of anything else to do, cha-cha.

(Yes, you can read and do this week's tasks.)

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