Week #8 "Recovering a Sense of Strength"

"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 Strength”. Julia writes on page 129, “This week tackles another major creative block: time. You will explore the ways in which you have used your perception of time to preclude taking creative risks. You will identify immediate and practical changes you can make in your current life. You will excavate the early conditioning that may have encouraged you to settle for far less than you desire creatively.

Tasks for Week #8 (pages 146-149):

1. Goal Search: You may find the following exercise difficult. Allow yourself to do it any way. If multiple dreams occur to you, do the exercise for each one of them. The simple act of imagining a dream in concrete detail helps us to bring it into reality. Think of your goal search as a preliminary architect’s drawing for the life you would wish to have. The Steps:

• Name your dream. That’s right. Write it down. “In a perfect world, I would secretly love to be a_______.”
• Name one concrete goal that signals to you its accomplishment. On your emotional compass, the goal signifies true north. (Note: two people may want to be an actress. They share that dream. For one, an article in People magazine is the concrete goal. To her, glamour is the emotional center for her dream; glamour is true north. For the second actress, the concrete goal is a good review in a Broadway play. To her, respect as a creative artist is the emotional center of her dream; respect is true north. Actress two would need stage work to fulfill her dream. On the surface, both seem to desire the same thing.)
• In a perfect world, where would you like to be in five years in relation to your dream and true north?
• In the world we inhabit now, what action can you take, this year, to move you closer?
• What action can you take this month? This week? This day? Right now?
• List your dream (for example, to be a famous film director). list its true north (respect and higher consciousness, mass communication.) Select a role model (Walt Disney, Ron Howrad, Michael Powell). Make an action plan. Five years. Three years. One year. One month. One week. Now. Choose an action. Reading this book is an action.
  

2. New Childhood: What might you have been if you'd had perfect nurturing? Write a page of this fantasy childhood. What were you given? Can you reparent yourself in that direction now?
3. Color Schemes: Pick a color and write a quick few sentences describing yourself in the first person. (“I am silver, high-tech and ethereal, the color of dreams and accomplishment, the color of half-light and in between, I feel serene.” Or, “I am red. I am passion, sunset, anger, blood, wine and roses, armies, murder, lust, and apples,” What is your favorite color? What do you have that is that color? What about an entire room? This is your life and your house.
4. List five things you are not allowed to do: kill your boss, scream in church, go outside naked, make a scene, quit your job. Now do that thing on paper. Write it, draw it, paint it, act it out, collage it. Now put some music on and dance to it.
5. Style Search: List twenty things you like to do. (Perhaps the same twenty you listed before, perhaps not.) Answer these questions for each item.

• Does it cost money of is it free?
• Expensive of cheap?
• Alone of with somebody?
• Job related?
• Physical risk?
• Fast-paced or slow?
• Mind, body, or spiritual?

6. Ideal Day: Plan a perfect day in your life as it is now constituted, using the information gleaned from above.
7. Ideal Ideal Day: Plan a perfect day in your life as you wish it were constituted. There are no restrictions. Allow yourself to be and to have whatever your heart desires. Your ideal environment, job, home, circle of friends, intimate relationship, stature in your art form—your wildest dreams.
8. Choose one festive aspect from your ideal day. Allow yourself to live it. You may not be able to move to Rome yet, but even in a still-grungy apartment you can enjoy a homemade cappuccino and a croissant.

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."

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."

Week #6 "Recovering a Sense of Abundance"

"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 Abundance”.

Julia writes on page 105, “This week you are being asked to tackle a major creative block—money. You are asked to really look at your own ideas around God, money, and creative abundance. The essays will explore the ways in which your attitudes limit abundance and luxury in your current life. You will be introduced to counting, a block-busting tool for clarity and right use of funds. This week may feel volatile.

Tasks for Week #6 (pages 113-115)

1. Natural Abundance: Find five pretty or interesting rocks. I enjoy this exercise particularly because rocks can be carried in pockets, fingered in business meetings. They can be small, constant reminders of our creative consciousness.

2. Natural Abundance; Pick five flowers or leaves. You may want to press these between wax paper and save them in a book. If you did this in kindergarten, that’s fine. Some of the best creative play is done there. Let yourself do it again.

3. Clearing: Throw out or give away five ratty pieces of clothing.

4. Creation: Bake something. (if you have a sugar problem, make a fruit salad.) Creativity does not have to always involve capital-A art. Very often, the act of cooking something can help you cook something up in another creative mode. When I am stymied as a writer, I make soups and pies.

5. Communication: Send postcards to five friends. This is not a goody-two-shoes exercise. Send to people you would love to hear from.

6. Reread the Basic Principles. (See page 3.) Do this once daily. Read an Artist’s Prayer—yours from Week Four or mine on pages 207-208. Do this once daily.

7. Clearing: Any new changes in your home environment? Make some.

8. Acceptance: Any new flow in your life? Practice saying yes to freebies.

9. Prosperity: Any changes in your financial situation or your perspective on it? Any new—even crazy—ideas about what you would love doing? Pull images around this and add to your image file.

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."

Week #5 "Recovering a Sense of Possibility"

"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 Possibility”. Julia writes on page 91, “This week you are being asked to examine your payoffs in remaining stuck. You will explore how you curtail your own possibilities by placing limits on the good you can receive. You will examine the cost of settling for appearing good instead of being authentic. You may find yourself thinking about radical changes, no longer ruling out your growth by making others the cause of your constriction.

Tasks for Week #5 (pages 103-104)

1. The reason I can’t really believe in a supportive God is…List five grievances. (God can take it.):


2. Starting an Image File: If I had either faith or money I would try…List five desires. For the next week, be alert for images of these desires. When you spot them, clip them, buy them, photograph them, draw them, collect them somehow. With these images, begin a file of dreams that speak to you. Add to it continually for the duration of the course.


3. One more time, list five imaginary lives. Have they changed? Are you doing more parts of them? You may want to add images of these lives to you image file.

4. If I were twenty and had money…List five adventures. Again, add images of these to you visual image file.

5. If I were sixty-five and had money…List five postponed pleasures. And again, collect these images. This is a very potent tool. I now live in a house that imaged for ten years.

6. Ten ways I am mean to myself are…Just as making the positive explicit helps allow it into our lives, making the negative explicit helps us to exorcise it.

7. Ten items I would like to own that I don’t are…And again, you may want to collect these images. In order to boost sales, experts in sales motivation often teach rookie salesmen to post images of what they would like to own. It works.

8. Honestly, my favorite creative block is…TV, over-reading, friends, work, rescuing others, over exercise. You name it. Whether you can draw or, please cartoon yourself indulging in it.

9. My payoff for staying blocked is…This you may want to explore in your morning pages.

10. The person I blame for being blocked is…Again use your pages to mull on this.

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."

Week #4 "Recovering a Sense of Integrity"

"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 Integrity”. Julia writes on page 79, “This week may find you grappling with changing self-definition. The essays, tasks, and exercises are designed to catapult you into productive introspection and integration of new self-awareness. This may be both very difficult and extremely exciting for you. Warning: Do not skip the tool of reading deprivation!

Tasks for Week #4 (pages 89-90) are:

1. Environment: Describe your ideal environment. Town? Country? Swank? Cozy? One paragraph. One image, drawn or clipped, that conveys this. What's your favorite season? Why? Go through some magazines and find an image of this. Or draw it. Place it near your working area.

2. Time Travel: Describe yourself at eighty. What did you do after fifty that you enjoyed? Be very specific. Now, write a letter from you at eighty to you at your current age. What would you tell yourself? What interests would you urge yourself to pursue? What dreams would you encourage?

3. Time Travel: Remember yourself at eight. What did you like to do? What were your favorite things? Now, write a letter from you at eight to you at your current age. What would you tell yourself?

4. Environment: Look at your house. Is there any room that you could make into a secret, private space for yourself? Convert the TV room? Buy a screen or hang a sheet and cordon off a section of some other room? This is your dream area. It should be decorated for fun and not as an office. All you really need is a chair or pillow, something to write on, some kind of little altar area for flowers and candles. This is to help you center on the fact that creativity is a spiritual, not an ego, issue.

5. Use your life pie (from Week One) to review your growth. Has that nasty tarantula changed shape yet? Haven't you been more active, less rigid, more expressive? Be careful not to expect too much too soon. That's raising the jumps. Growth must have time to solidify into health. One day at a time, you are building the habit patterns of a healthy artist. Easy does do it. List ongoing self-nurturing toys you could buy your artist: books on tape, magazine subscriptions, theater tickets, a bowling ball.

6. Write your own Artist's Prayer. (See pages 207-208.) Use it every day for a week.

7. An Extended Artist Date: Plan a small vacation for yourself. (One weekend day. Get ready to execute it.)

8. Open your closet. Throw out--or hand on, or donate--one low-self-worth outfit. (You know the outfit.) Make space for the new.

9. Look at one situation in your life that you feel you should change but haven't yet. What is the payoff for you in staying stuck?

10. If you break you reading deprivation, write about how you did it. In a tantrum? A slipup? A binge? How do you feel about it? Why?

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.

The bulletin board server has been down, but should be up and working again, Saturday, September 3rd..

.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."