Week #9 "Recovering a Sense of Compassion"

"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 Compassion”. Julia writes on page 151, “This week finds us facing the internal blocks to creativity. It may be tempting to abandon ship at this point. Don’t! We will explore and acknowledge the emotional difficulties that beset us in the past as we made creative efforts. We will undertake healing the shame of past failures. We will gain in compassion as we reparent the frightened artist child who yearns for creative accomplishment. We will learn tools to dismantle emotional blocks and support renewed risk.

Tasks for Week #9 (pages 160-161):

1. Read your morning pages! This process is best undertaken with two colored markers, one to highlight insights and another to highlight actions needed. Do not judge your pages or yourself. This is very important. Yes, they will be boring. Yes, they may be painful. Consider them a map. Take them as information, not an indictment.
a. Take Stock: Who have you consistently been complaining about? What have you procrastinated on: What blessedly have you allowed yourself to change or accept?
b. Take Heart: Many of us notice an alarming tendency toward black-and white thinking: “He’s terrible. He’s wonderful. I love him. I hate him. It’s a great job. It’s a terrible job,” and so forth. Don’t be thrown by this.
c. Acknowledge: The pages have allowed us to vent without self-destruction, to plan without interference, to complain without an audience, to dream without restriction, to know our own minds. Give yourself credit for undertaking them. Give them credit for the changes and growth they have fostered.
2. Visualizing: You have already done work with naming your goal and identifying true north. The following exercise asks you to fully imagine having your goal accomplished. Please spend enough time to fill in the juicy details that would really make the experience wonderful for you:
Name your goal: I am ___________________________________
In the present tense, describe yourself dong it at the height of your powers! This is your ideal scene.
Read this aloud to yourself.
Post this above your work area.
Read this aloud, daily!
For the next week collect actual pictures of yourself and combine them with magazine images to collage your ideal scene described above. Remember, seeing is believing, and the added visual cue of your real self in your ideal scene can make it far more real.
3. 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.
4. Creative U-Turns: All of us have taken creative U-turns. Name one of yours. Name three more. Name the one that just kills you. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for all failures of nerve, timing, and initiative. Devise a personalize list of affirmations to help you do better in the future. Very gently, very gently, consider whether any aborted, abandoned, savaged, or sabotaged brain-children can be rescued. Remember, you are not alone. All of us have taken creative U-turns. Choose one creative U-turn. Retrieve it. Mend it. Do not take a creative U-turn now. Instead, notice your resistance. Morning pages seeming difficult? Stupid? Pointless? Too obvious? Do them anyway. What creative dreams are lurching toward possibility? Admit that they frighten you. Choose an artist totem. It might be a doll, a stuffed animal, a carved figuring, or a wind-up toy. The point is to choose something you immediately feel a protective fondness toward. Give your totem a place of honor and then honor it by not beating up on your artist child.

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."