Week #1 "Recovering a Sense of Safety"

"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 the divine work through you."

Tasks for Week #1 (pages 37-40) are:

1. Every morning, set your clock 1/2 hour early; get up and write 3 pages of longhand, stream-of-conscioucness morning pages. Do not reread these pages or allow anyone 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.

This week please be sure to work with your affirmations of choice and your blurts (negative core beliefs) at the end of each day's morning pages. Convert all those blurts into positive affirmations.

2. 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 your write. Just for fun.

3. Time Travel: List three old enemies of your creative self-worth. Please be as specific as possible in doing this exercise. Your historical 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.

4. Time Travel: Select and write out one horror story from you 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...." You may find it cathartic to draw a sketch of your old monster or to clip out an image that evokes the incident for you. Cartoon trashing your monster, or at least draw a nice red X through it.

5. 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!"

6. Time Travel: List three old champions of your creataive self-worth. This is your hall of champions, those who wish you and your creativitiy well. Be specific. Every encouraging word counts. Even if you disbelieve a compliment, record it. It may well be true.

7. 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.

8. Imanginary 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 hacker, a soap-opera star, a country singer, a rock- and-roll drummer. Whatever occurs to you, jot it down. Do not over think this exercise.

The point of these lives is to have fun in them--more fun than you might be havng 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?

9. 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.

10. Take your artist for a walk, the two of you. A brisk twenty-minute walk can dramatically alter consciousness.

Help to create as well as to benefit from the group energy. Pick at least one of the above tasks and make a comment to this post about it to share your experiences, successes, thoughts, difficulties and/or questions. Also please e-mail me any ideas and/or suggestions you might have for improving this blog.

The intention here is to support each other and as Julia says to "build a sacred circle of believing mirrors to potentiate each other's growth, to mirror a "yes" to each other's creativity."