Week #7 "Recovering a Sense of Connection"

"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." The theme of this week is “Recovering a Sense of Connection”.

Julia writes on page 117, “We turn this week to the practice of right attitudes for creativity. The emphasis is on your receptive as well as active skills. The essays, exercises, and tasks aim at excavating areas of genuine creative interest as you connect with your personal dreams.

Tasks for Week #7 (pages 126-128)

1. Make this phrase a mantra: Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong. Watercolor or crayon or calligraph this phrase. Post it where you will see it daily. We tend to think being hard on ourselves will make us strong. But it is cherishing ourselves that gives us strength.


2. Give yourself time out to listen to one side of an album, just for joy. You may want to doodle as you listen, allowing yourself to draw the shapes, emotions, thoughts you hear in the music. Notice how just twenty minutes can refresh you. Learn to take these mini-artist dates to break stress and allow insight.


3. Take yourself into a sacred space—a church, synagogue, library, grove of trees—and allow yourself to savor the silence and healing solitude. Each of us has a personal idea of what sacred space is. For me, a large clock store or a great aquarium store can engender a sense of timeless wonder. Experiment.


4. Create one wonderful smell in your house—with soup, incense, fir branches, candles—whatever.


5. Wear your favorite item of clothing for no special occasion.


6. Buy yourself one wonderful pair of socks, one wonderful pair of gloves—one wonderfully comforting, self-loving something.


7. Collage: Collect a stack of at least ten magazines, which you will allow yourself to freely dismember. Setting a twenty-minute time limit for yourself, tear (literally) through the magazines, collecting any images that reflect your life of interests. Think of this collage as a form of pictorial autobiography. Include your past, present, future, and your dreams. It is okay to include images you simply like. Keep pulling until you have a good stack of images (at least twenty). Now take a sheet of newspaper, a stapler, or some tape or glue, and arrange your images in a way that pleases you. (This is one on my students’ favorite exercises.)


8. Quickly list five favorite films. Do you see any common denominators among them? Are they romances, adventures, period pieces, political dramas, family epics, thrillers? Do you see traces of your cinematic themes in your collage?


9. Name your favorite topics to read about: comparative religion, movies, ESP, physics, rags-to-riches, betrayal, love triangles, scientific breakthroughs, sports… Are these topics in your collage?


10. Give your collage a place of honor. Even a secret place of honor is all right—in your closet. In a drawer, anywhere that is yours. You may want to do a new one every few months, or collage more thoroughly a dream you are trying to accomplish.

Help to create as well as to benefit from the group energy.Go to our new bulletin board at http://www.phpbbforfree.com/forums/theartistsway.html and share your "The Artist's Way" 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."