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The Artist's Way: 30th Anniversary Edition

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The Artist’s Way: 30th Anniversary Edition

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Highlights & Notes

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

Why indeed must “God” be a noun? Why not a verb … the most active and dynamic of all? MARY DALY THEOLOGIAN

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel. PIET MONDRIAN

“You mean if I have these gifts, I’m supposed to use them?” Yes.

God must become an activity in our consciousness. JOEL S. GOLDSMITH

The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union; the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity.

“Leap, and the net will appear.” It is my experience both as an artist and as a teacher that 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

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

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.

The purpose of art is not a rarified, intellectual distillate— it is life, intensified, brilliant life. ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON

Withdrawal is another way of saying detachment or nonattachment, which is emblematic of consistent work with any meditation practice.

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. As we consolidate a core through our withdrawal process, we become more able to articulate our own boundaries, dreams, and authentic goals. Our personal flexibility increases while our malleability to the whims of others decreases. We experience a heightened sense of autonomy and possibility.

Stop telling yourself, “It’s too late.” Stop waiting until you make enough money to do something you’d really love. Stop telling yourself, “It’s just my ego” whenever you yearn for a more creative life. Stop telling yourself that dreams don’t matter, that they are only dreams and that you should be more sensible. Stop fearing that your family and friends would think you crazy. Stop telling yourself that creativity is a luxury and that you should be grateful for what you’ve got.

THERE ARE TWO PIVOTAL tools in creative recovery: the Morning Pages and the artist date. A lasting creative awakening requires the consistent use of both.

Put simply, the Morning Pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness:

There is no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing. I stress that point to reassure the nonwriters working with this book. Writing is simply one of the tools. Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included.

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

Nobody is allowed to read your Morning Pages except you.

Although occasionally colorful, the Morning Pages are often negative, frequently fragmented, often self-pitying, repetitive, stilted or babyish, angry or bland—even silly sounding. Good!

The Morning Pages are the primary tool of creative recovery.

A mind too active is no mind at all. THEODORE ROETHKE

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order … the continuous thread of revelation. EUDORA WELTY

Morning pages are nonnegotiable. Never skip or skimp on morning pages. Your mood doesn’t matter. The rotten thing your Censor says doesn’t matter. We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don’t.

Artist brain is our inventor, our child, our very own personal absent-minded professor. Artist brain says, “Hey! That is so neat!” It puts odd things together (boat equals wave and walker). It likes calling a speeding GTO a wild animal: “The black howling wolf pulled into the drive-in …”

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. M. C. RICHARDS

Why all this logic-brain/artist-brain talk? Because the Morning Pages teach logic brain to stand aside and let artist brain play.

The Morning Pages will teach you to stop listening to that ridicule. They will allow you to detach from your negative Censor.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness. AARON COPLAND

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 is impossible to write Morning Pages for any extended period of time without coming into contact with an unexpected inner power. Although I used them for many years before I realized this, the pages are a pathway to a strong and clear sense of self. They are a trail that we follow into our own interior, where we meet both our own creativity and our creator. Morning pages map our own interior. Without them, our dreams may remain terra incognita. I know mine did. Using them, the light of insight is coupled with the power for expansive change. It is very difficult to complain about a situation morning after morning, month after month, without being moved to constructive action. The pages lead us out of despair and into undreamed-of solutions.

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard. MAY SARTON

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Anyone who faithfully writes Morning Pages will be led to a connection with a source of wisdom within.

Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it. ROBBIE GASS

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. PABLO PICASSO

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.

Doing your morning pages, you are sending—notifying yourself and the universe of your dreams, dissatisfactions, hopes. Doing your artist date, you are receiving—opening yourself to insight, inspiration, guidance.

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child. STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH

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.

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

During [these] periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight. FRITJOF CAPRA PHYSICIST

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. This is step one, analogous to prayer. In the course of the release engendered by our artist date, step two, we begin to hear solutions. Perhaps equally important, we begin to fund the creative reserves we will draw on in fulfilling our artistry.

As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them—to restock the trout pond, so to speak. I call this process filling the well.

Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail. Art may seem to spring from pain, but perhaps that is because pain serves to focus our attention onto details

Art may seem to involve broad strokes, grand schemes, great plans. But it is the attention to detail that stays with us; the singular image is what haunts us and becomes art. Even in the midst of pain, this singular image brings delight.

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.

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.

Remember, art is an artist-brain pursuit. This brain is reached through rhythm—through rhyme, not reason. Scraping a carrot, peeling an apple—these actions are quite literally food for thought.

Images trigger the artist brain. Images fill the well.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. OSCAR WILDE

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Now in his mid-thirties, he is very rich and very poor. Money cannot buy him creative fulfillment.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. C. G. JUNG

Artists love other artists. Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe but cannot yet claim their birthright. 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

Shadow artists did not receive sufficient nurturing. They blame themselves for not acting fearlessly anyhow.

In order to move from the realm of shadows into the light of creativity, shadow artists must learn to take themselves seriously. With gentle, deliberate effort, they must nurture their artist child. Creativity is play, but for shadow artists, learning to allow themselves to play is hard work.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse. This happens in any number of ways: beginning work is measured against the masterworks of other artists; beginning work is exposed to premature criticism, shown to overly critical friends. In short, the fledgling artist behaves with well-practiced masochism. Masochism is an art form long ago mastered, perfected during the years of self-reproach; this habit is the self-hating bludgeon with which a shadow artist can beat himself right back into the shadows.

What we are after here is the healing of old wounds—not the creation of new ones. No high jumping, please! Mistakes are necessary! Stumbles are normal.

It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.

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Remember that in order to recover as an artist, you must be willing to be a bad artist. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

I can’t be a successful, prolific, creative artist because: Everyone will hate me. I will hurt my friends and family. I will go crazy. I will abandon my friends and family. I can’t spell. I don’t have good enough ideas. It will upset my mother and/or father. I will have to be alone. I will find out I am gay (if straight). I will be struck straight (if gay). I will do bad work and not know it and look like a fool. I will feel too angry. I will never have any real money. I will get self-destructive and drink, drug, or sex myself to death. I will get cancer, AIDS—or a heart attack or the plague. My lover will leave me. I will die. I will feel bad because I don’t deserve to be successful. I will have only one good piece of work in me. It’s too late. If I haven’t become a fully functioning artist yet, I never will.

All too often, it is audacity and not talent that moves an artist to center stage.

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 help achieve a sense of safety and hope.

Affirmations are like prescriptions for certain aspects of yourself you want to change. JERRY FRANKHAUSER

It’s time to do a little detective work. Where do your blurts come from? Mom? Dad? Teachers? Using your list of blurts, scan your past for possible sources. At least some of them will spring violently to mind. One effective way to locate the sources is to time-travel. Break your life into five-year increments, and list by name your major influences in each time block.

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

  • Lista de afirmciones

An affirmation is a strong, positive statement that something is already so. SHAKTI GAWAIN

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.

  • Ejercicio

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-dime. 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.

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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

Imaginary Lives: If you had five other lives to lead, what would you do in each of them?

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CHECK-IN

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Do not let your self-doubt turn into self-sabotage.

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

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 STEVENSON

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.

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS

Whether they appear as your overbearing mother, your manic boss, your needy friend, or your stubborn spouse, the crazymakers in your life share certain destructive patterns that make them poisonous for any sustained creative work.

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

Whatever God’s dream about man may be, it seems certain it cannot come true unless man cooperates. STELLA TERRILL MANN

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.

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

I like to think of the mind as a room. In that room, we keep all of our usual ideas about life, God, what’s possible and what’s not. The room has a door. That door is ever so slightly ajar, and outside we can see a great deal of dazzling light. Out there in the dazzling light are a lot of new ideas that we consider too far-out for us, and so we keep them out there. The ideas we are comfortable with are in the room with us. The other ideas are out, and we keep them out.

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.

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

The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, “unutterably alone.”

RULES OF THE ROAD In order to be an artist, I must: Show up at the page. Use the page to rest, to dream, to try. Fill the well by caring for my artist. Set small and gentle goals and meet them. Pray for guidance, courage, and humility. Remember that it is far harder and more painful to be a blocked artist than it is to do the work. Be alert, always, for the presence of the Great Creator leading and helping my artist. Choose companions who encourage me to do the work, not just talk about doing the work or why I am not doing the work. Remember that the Great Creator loves creativity. Remember that it is my job to do the work, not judge the work. Place this sign in my workplace: Great Creator, I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality.

TASKS

CHECK-IN

Anger is meant to be listened to. Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand. Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go. It lets us see where we’ve been and lets us know when we haven’t liked it. Anger points the way, not just the finger. In the recovery of a blocked artist, anger is a sign of health.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. DUKE ELLINGTON

When a man takes one step toward God, God takes more steps toward that man than there are sands in the worlds of time. THE WORK OF THE CHARIOT

The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf. SHAKTI GAWAIN

Life is what we make of it. Whether we conceive of an inner god force or an other, outer God, doesn’t matter. Relying on that force does.

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind. ALBERT SZENT-GYORGYI

Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind. LOUIS PASTEUR

“Ask and you shall receive. Knock and it shall be opened to you… .” These words are among the more unpleasant ones ascribed to Jesus Christ. They suggest the possibility of scientific method: ask (experiment) and see what happens (record the results).

C. G. Jung dubbed synchronicity, loosely defined as a fortuitous intermeshing of events. Back in the sixties, we called it serendipity. Whatever you choose to call it, once you begin your creative recovery you may be startled to find it cropping up everywhere.

the possibility of an intelligent and responsive universe, acting and reacting in our interests.

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. OVID

Understand that the what must come before the how. First choose what you would do. The how usually falls into place of itself.

Desire, ask, believe, receive. STELLA TERRILL MANN

Take a small step in the direction of a dream and watch the synchronous doors flying open.

Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.

Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities. WILLIAM BRIDGES

When people do not want to see something, they get mad at the one who shows them. They kill the messenger.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing. But before a wound can heal it must be seen, and this act of exposing the wound to air and light, the artist’s act, is often reacted to with shaming.

We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples’ models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open. SHAKTI GAWAIN

have made my world and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside. LOUISE NEVELSON

We must learn that when our art reveals a secret of the human soul, those watching it may try to shame us for making it.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. EUGÈNE DELACROIX

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.

Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. ERICA JONG

Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself.

Growth occurs in spurts. You will lie dormant sometimes. Do not be discouraged. Think of it as resting.

Marathon runners suggest you log ten slow miles for every fast one. The same holds true for creativity.

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 expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. MARTHA GRAHAM

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.

TASKS

Whenever I have to choose between two evils, I always like to try the one I haven’t tried before. MAE WEST

Creativity is … seeing something 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. MICHELE SHEA

CHECK-IN

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.

“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 short, the Morning Pages point the way to reality: this is how you’re feeling; what do you make of that?

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.

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.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. SENECA

By tossing out the old and unworkable, we make way for the new and suitable.

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 you need to do to receive guidance is to ask for it and then listen. SANAYA ROMAN

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

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.

TASKS

I learned that the real creator was my inner Self, the Shakti… . That desire to do something is God inside talking through us. MICHELE SHEA

CHECK-IN

Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually. EILEEN CADDY

If we learn to think of receiving God’s good as being an act of worship—cooperating with God’s plan to manifest goodness in our lives—we can begin to let go of having to sabotage ourselves.

Look and you will find it—what is unsought will go undetected. SOPHOCLES

Experiment with this two-step process: ask for answers in the evening; listen for answers in the morning. Be open to all help.

The morning pages, a flow of stream of consciousness, gradually loosens our hold on fixed opinions and short-sighted views. We see that our moods, views, and insights are transitory. We acquire a sense of movement, a current of change in our lives. This current, or river, is a flow of grace moving us to our right livelihood, companions, destiny.

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want. MARGARET YOUNG

An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as a withdrawal from them. It is.

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, [and] there is the risk you cannot afford not to take. PETER DRUCKER

THE VIRTUE-TRAP QUIZ

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The specific meaning of God depends on what is the most desirable good for a person. ERICH FROMM

TASKS

To accept the responsibility of being a child of God is to accept the best that life has to offer you. STELLA TERRILL MANN

Money is God in action. RAYMOND CHARLES BARKER The more we learn to operate in the world based on trust in our intuition, the stronger our channel will be and the more money we will have. SHAKTI GAWAIN Money will come when you are doing the right thing. MIKE PHILLIPS

Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor. PAUL HAWKEN

As you expect God to be more generous, God will be able to be more generous to you.

All substance is energy in motion. It lives and flows. Money is symbolically a golden, flowing stream of concretized vital energy. THE MAGICAL WORK OF THE SOUL

What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.

Because art is born in expansion, in a belief in sufficient supply, it is critical that we pamper ourselves for the sense of abundance it brings to us.

All too often, we become blocked and blame it on our lack of money. This is never an authentic block. The actual block is our feeling of constriction, our sense of powerlessness. Art requires us to empower ourselves with choice. At the most basic level, this means choosing to do self-care.

What gives us true joy? That is the question to ask concerning luxury, and for each of us the answer is very different.

Creative living requires the luxury of time, which we carve out for ourselves—even if it’s fifteen minutes for quick Morning Pages and a ten-minute minibath after work. Creative living requires the luxury of space for ourselves, even if all we manage to carve out is one special bookshelf and a windowsill that is ours.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur. LEO TOLSTOY

Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play.

Often our spending differs from our real values. We fritter away cash on things we don’t cherish and deny ourselves those things we do.

MONEY MADNESS, AN EXERCISE

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TASKS

As an artist, it is central to be unsatisfied! This isn’t greed, though it might be appetite. LAWRENCE CALCAGNO

CHECK-IN

Once you accept that it is natural to create, you can begin to accept a second idea—that the creator will hand you whatever you need for the project. The minute you are willing to accept the help of this collaborator, you will see useful bits of help everywhere in your life.

QUESTION: What would I do if I didn’t have to do it perfectly? ANSWER: A great deal more than I am. We’ve all heard that the unexamined life is not worth living, but consider too that the unlived life is not worth examining.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. AGNES DE MILLE

We deny that in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly. Instead, we opt for setting our limits at the point where we feel assured of success. Living within these bounds, we may feel stifled, smothered, despairing, bored. But, yes, we do feel safe. And safety is a very expensive illusion.

Once we are willing to accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly our options widen. “If I didn’t have to do it perfectly, I would try . .

We cannot escape fear. We can only transform it into a companion that accompanies us on all our exciting adventures… . Take a risk a day—one small or bold stroke that will make you feel great once you have done it. SUSAN JEFFERS

“So do it. If you win, you win, and if you lose, you win.” It is always that way with taking risks.

There is no must in art because art is free. WASSILY KANDINSKY

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars. LES BROWN

Jealousy is always a mask for fear: fear that we aren’t able to get what we want; frustration that somebody else seems to be getting what is rightfully ours even if we are too frightened to reach for it. At its root, jealousy is a stingy emotion. It doesn’t allow for the abundance and multiplicity of the universe. Jealousy tells us there is room for only one—one poet, one painter, one whatever you dream of being.

Perversely, jealousy strips us of our will to act when action holds the key to our freedom.

With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity. KESHAVAN NAIR

Your jealousy map will have three columns. In the first column, name those whom you are jealous of. Next to each name write why. Be as specific and accurate as you can. In the third column, list one action you can take to move toward creative risk and out of jealousy.

  • Ejercicio

Complete these phrases.

  • Ejercicio lo que hizo falta

Visit http://bit.ly/2e0lf2M for a printable version of this exercise.

  • Link ejercicio lo que hizo falta

Trust in yourself. Your perceptions are often far more accurate than you are willing to believe. CLAUDIA BLACK

TASKS

CHECK-IN

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice. ERICH FROMM

Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most. FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKI

Imagination is more important than knowledge. ALBERT EINSTEIN

Trust that still, small voice that says, “This might work and I’ll try it.” DIANE MARIECHILD

Like the career of any athlete, an artist’s life will have its injuries. These go with the game. The trick is to survive them, to learn how to let yourself heal. Just as a player who ignores a sore muscle may tear it further, an artist who buries his pain over losses will ultimately cripple himself into silence. Give yourself the dignity of admitting your artistic wounds. That is the first step in healing them.

Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown. CLAUDE BERNARD

We may not know what lies ahead. And, if the present hurts this badly, we tend to view the future as impending pain.

“Gain disguised as loss” is a potent artist’s tool. To acquire it, simply, brutally, ask: “How can this loss serve me? Where does it point my work?” The answers will surprise and liberate you. The trick is to metabolize pain as energy. The key to doing that is to know, to trust, and to act as if a silver lining exists if you are only willing to look at the work differently or to walk through a different door, one that you may have balked at.

  • Ejercicio

I learned, when hit by loss, to ask the right question: “What next?” instead of “Why me?” Whenever I am willing to ask “What is necessary next?” I have moved ahead. Whenever I have taken no for a final answer I have stalled and gotten stuck. I have learned that the key to career resiliency is self-empowerment and choice.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

The key here is action. Pain that is not used profitably quickly solidifies into a leaden heart, which makes any action difficult.

QUESTION: Do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn to play the piano? ANSWER: The same age you will be if you don’t.

Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. LINUS PAULING

“I am writing a screenplay” is infinitely more interesting to the soul than “I have written a screenplay,” which pleases the ego. “I am in an acting class” is infinitely more interesting than “I took an acting class a few years ago.”

Fixated on the need to have something to show for our labors, we often deny our curiosities. Every time we do this, we are blocked.

Art? You just do it. MARTIN RITT

Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama to scare ourselves out of our creativity with this notion of wholesale and often destructive change. Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time—or at all. Instead of writing three pages a day on a screenplay, we prefer worrying about how we will have to move to Hollywood if the script gets bought. Which it can’t anyway since we are too busy worrying about selling it to write it.

Creativity requires activity, and this is not good news to most of us. It makes us responsible, and we tend to hate that. You mean I have to do something in order to feel better? Yes. And most of us hate to do something when we can obsess about something else instead. One of our favorite things to do—instead of our art—is to contemplate the odds.

You’ve cleared a morning to write or paint but then you realize that the clothes are dirty. “I’ll just think about what I want to paint and fine-tune it while I fold the clothes,” you tell yourself. What you really mean is, “Instead of painting anything, I will worry about it some more.” Somehow, the laundry takes your whole morning.

Most blocked creatives have an active addiction to anxiety. We prefer the low-grade pain and occasional heart-stopping panic attack to the drudgery of small and simple daily steps in the right direction.

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently. AGNES DE MILLE

We have found that when we fill the form, we do not often need to make large changes. Large changes occur in tiny increments. It is useful to think in terms of a space flight: by altering the launch trajectory very slightly, a great difference can be made over time.

Visit http://bit.ly/2ePV1zs for a printable version of this exercise.

  • Bloqueo artistico. Link

TASKS

CHECK-IN

Blocked artists are not lazy. They are blocked.

The blocked artist spends energy on self-hatred, on regret, on grief, and on jealousy. The blocked artist spends energy on self-doubt.

Do not call the inability to start laziness. Call it fear.

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

Do not call procrastination laziness. Call it fear.

Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline. Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us. Enthusiasm (from the Greek, “filled with God”) is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself. Enthusiasm is grounded in play, not work. Far from being a brain-numbed soldier, our artist is actually our child within, our inner playmate. As with all playmates, it is joy, not duty, that makes for a lasting bond.

In order to work well, many artists find that their work spaces are best dealt with as play spaces.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. ANAÏS NIN

A successful creative career is always built on successful creative failures.

Once we admit the need for help, the help arrives. The ego always wants to claim self-sufficiency. It would rather pose as a creative loner than ask for help. Ask anyway.

List any resentments (anger) you have in connection with this project. It does not matter how petty, picky, or irrational these resentments may appear to your adult self. To your artist child they are real big deals: grudges.

Ask your artist to list any and all fears about the projected piece of work and/or anyone connected to it. Again, these fears can be as dumb as any two-year-old’s. It does not matter that they are groundless to your adult’s eye. What matters is that they are big scary monsters to your artist.

Ask yourself if that is all. Have you left out any itsy fear? Have you suppressed any “stupid” anger? Get it on the page.

Ask yourself what you stand to gain by not doing this piece of work.

Make your deal. The deal is: “Okay, Creative Force, you take care of the quality, I’ll take care of the quantity.” Sign your deal and post it.

TASKS

Name your goal: I am ________________. In the present tense, describe yourself doing it at the height of your powers! This is your ideal scene. Read this aloud to yourself. Post this above your work area.

Priorities: List for yourself your creative goals for the year. List for yourself your creative goals for the month. List for yourself your creative goals for the week.

CHECK-IN

We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way. JOHN HOLT EDUCATOR

Saying no can be the ultimate self-care. CLAUDIA BLACK

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. ALBERT EINSTEIN

unhappy people. Unblocked, we may be something much more threatening—happy. For most of us, happy is terrifying, unfamiliar, out of control, too risky!

Over time, we will try—perhaps slowly at first and erratically—to ride out the anxiety and see where we emerge. Anxiety is fuel. We can use it to write with, paint with, work with. Feel: anxious! Try: using the anxiety! Feel: I just did it! I didn’t block! I used the anxiety and moved ahead! Oh my God, I am excited!

The phrase I’m working has a certain unassailable air of goodness and duty to it. The truth is, we are very often working to avoid ourselves, our spouses, our real feelings.

The Workaholism Quiz

  • Ejercicio

When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines the kind of men we are. CESAR CHAVEZ

The life which is not examined is not worth living. PLATO

Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us. MEISTER ECKHART

The point of the work is the work. Fame interferes with that perception. Instead of acting being about acting, it becomes about being a famous actor. Instead of writing being about writing, it becomes about being recognized, not just published.

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased. J. KRISHNAMURTI

Whenever you are angered about someone else beating you out, remember this: the footrace mentality is always the ego’s demand to be not just good but also first and best. It is the ego’s demand that our work be totally original—as if such a thing were possible. All work is influenced by other work. All people are influenced by other people. No man is an island and no piece of art is a continent unto itself.

If the demand to be original still troubles you, remember this: each of us is our own country, an interesting place to visit. It is the accurate mapping out of our own creative interests that invites the term original. We are the origin of our art, its homeland. Viewed this way, originality is the process of remaining true to ourselves.

Never, ever, judge a fledgling piece of work too quickly.

The need to win—now!—is a need to win approval from others. As an antidote, we must learn to approve of ourselves. Showing up for the work is the win that matters.

He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened. LAO-TZU

How often—even before we began—have we declared a task “impossible”? And how often have we construed a picture of ourselves as being inadequate? … A great deal depends upon the thought patterns we choose and on the persistence with which we affirm them. PIERO FERRUCCI

If you are working too many jobs and too many hours, you may need to look at your billing. Are you pricing yourself appropriately? Do some footwork. What are others in your field receiving? Raise your prices and lower your workload.

It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

I have to free myself from determining my value and the value of my work by my work’s market value.

What it means is letting the artist have quality time, knowing that if I let it do what it wants to it will cooperate with me in doing what I need to do. Sometimes I will write badly, draw badly, paint badly, perform badly. I have a right to do that to get to the other side. Creativity is its own reward.

Creativity is oxygen for our souls. Cutting off our creativity makes us savage. We react like we are being choked. There is a real rage that surfaces when we are interfered with on a level that involves picking lint off of us and fixing us up.

What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough. EUGÈNE DELACROIX

To kill your dreams because they are irresponsible is to be irresponsible to yourself.

It is to say that the many creatives laboring in fiscal settings should remember to commit themselves not only to projects that smack of the sure thing but also to those riskier projects that call to their creative souls. You don’t need to overturn a successful career in order to find creative fulfillment. It is necessary to overturn each day’s schedule slightly to allow for those small adjustments in daily trajectory that, over the long haul, alter the course and the satisfactions of our careers.

Attempting to insure our finances by playing it safe, we lose our cutting edge. As the promised projects diverge further and further from our inner leanings, a certain deep artistic weariness sets in. We must summon our enthusiasm at gunpoint instead of reveling in each day’s creative task.

Exercise combats this spiritually induced dysfunction.

No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed. ROGER BANNISTER ON BREAKING THE FOUR-MINUTE MILE

To keep the body in good health is a duty… . Otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear. BUDDHA

Exercise teaches the rewards of process. It teaches the sense of satisfaction over small tasks well done.

As we said before, we learn by going where we have to go. Exercise is often the going that moves us from stagnation to inspiration, from problem to solution, from self-pity to self-respect. We do learn by going. We learn we are stronger than we thought. We learn to look at things with a new perspective. We learn to solve our problems by tapping our own inner resources and listening for inspiration, not only from others but from ourselves. Seemingly without effort, our answers come while we swim or stride or ride or run. By definition, this is one of the fruits of exercise: “exercise: the act of bringing into play or realizing in action”

  • Deporte

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one. THEODORE ROETHKE

TASKS

Buy yourself a special creativity notebook. Number pages one through seven. Give one page each to the following categories: health, possessions, leisure, relationships, creativity, career, and spirituality. With no thought as to practicality, list ten wishes in each area. All right, it’s a lot. Let yourself dream a little here.

  • Ejercicio

Adventures don’t begin until you get into the forest. That first step is an act of faith. MICKEY HART GRATEFUL DEAD DRUMMER

CREATIVITY REQUIRES FAITH. FAITH requires that we relinquish control. This is frightening, and we resist it. Our resistance to our creativity is a form of self-destruction. We throw up roadblocks on our own path. Why do we do this? In order to maintain an illusion of control.

All too often, we try to push, pull, outline, and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. ALBERT EINSTEIN

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise. All too often, when we say we want to be creative, we mean that we want to be able to be productive. Now, to be creative is to be productive—but by cooperating with the creative process, not forcing it.

The truth is that this is how to raise the best ideas. Let them grow in dark and mystery. Let them form on the roof of our consciousness. Let them hit the page in droplets. Trusting this slow and seemingly random drip, we will be startled one day by the flash of “Oh! That’s it!”

  • Ideas

It is a paradox of creative recovery that we must get serious about taking ourselves lightly. We must work at learning to play.

Play is the exultation of the possible. MARTIN BUBER

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. ANDRÉ GIDE

TASKS

Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping.

A painting is never finished—it simply stops in interesting places. PAUL GARDNER

WORDS FOR IT I wish I could take language And fold it like cool, moist rags. I would lay words on your forehead. I would wrap words on your wrists. “There, there,” my words would say— Or something better. I would ask them to murmur, “Hush” and “Shh, shhh, it’s all right.” I would ask them to hold you all night. I wish I could take language And daub and soothe and cool Where fever blisters and burns, Where fever turns yourself against you. I wish I could take language And heal the words that were the wounds You have no names for. J.C.

A: The Morning Pages are three pages of stream-of-consciousness longhand morning writing. You should think of them not as “art” but as an active form of meditation for Westerners. In the Morning Pages we declare to the world—and ourselves—what we like, what we dislike, what we wish, what we hope, what we regret, and what we plan. By contrast, the Artist Dates are times for receptivity, preplanned solitary hours of pleasurable activity aimed at nurturing the creative consciousness. Used together, these tools build, in effect, a radio set. The Morning Pages notify and clarify—they send signals into the verdant void; and the solitude of the Artist Dates allows for the answer to be received. The Morning Pages and Artist Dates must be experienced in order to be explained, just as reading a book about jogging is not the same as putting on your Nikes and heading out to the running track. Map is not territory, and without reference points from within your own experience, you cannot extrapolate what the Morning Pages and Artist Dates can do for you.

  • Morning pages

Sacred Circle Rules Creativity flourishes in a place of safety and acceptance. Creativity grows among friends, withers among enemies. All creative ideas are children who deserve our protection. All creative success requires creative failure. Fulfilling our creativity is a sacred trust. Violating someone’s creativity violates a sacred trust. Creative feedback must support the creative child, never shame it. Creative feedback must build on strengths, never focus on weaknesses. Success occurs in clusters and is born in generosity. The good of another can never block our own.

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing. HENRY MILLER

I learn by going where I have to go. THEODORE ROETHKE

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