The Artist’s Way, Week Nine: Recovering a Sense of Compassion
This is my series on The Artist’s Way, a workbook focused on creative recovery. Check out my posts on Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, and Week 8 if you haven’t already. This week focuses on healing from past losses, failures, and emotional blocks that have kept us from creative accomplishment.
Fear
Artists often accuse themselves of laziness when they fail to take action on a creative project they’ve been mulling over, but Cameron insists that the inability to start is not laziness, it is fear.
A few steps to overcome the fear that manifests in procrastination are:
Pay attention to how you talk to yourself. Speak kind words to yourself and repeat the positive affirmation you created in week one.
Seek help from your higher power, supportive friends, and yourself. Surround yourself with people who are making their artistic dreams come true.
Permit yourself to begin small and go in baby steps. Don’t try to write an entire novel or one-woman play right off the bat. Start with a short story or a blog post to get your creative juices flowing and some small wins under your belt.
Enthusiasm
Discipline, Cameron writes, is like a battery with a short life span. If we want our creative pursuits to endure over great periods, we need to draw from our well of enthusiasm instead of relying on discipline. While discipline turns us into numb soldiers operating purely out of self-will, enthusiasm comes from a place of self-love and nurtures our inner artist. Enthusiasm invites play and joy into making art.
“Enthusiasm (from the Freek, ‘filled with God’) is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself.”
To encourage playfulness in your art form, try:
Filling the space you create art with fun decorations, like murals, paper mache, little twinkly lights, mobiles, and whatever else brings you joy
To create your art in unconventional ways, eschew your computer for a typewriter, and your paintbrushes for your fingers
Embracing mistakes and setting aside perfectionism. Focus on the process instead of the results.
Creative U-turns
Cameron describes a pattern she’s noticed in recovering artists - as soon as they encounter some success, they make a 180-degree turn back into self-doubt, because “We’re more comfortable being a victim of artist’s block than risking having to consistently be productive and healthy.” Cameron reminds us that these U-turns are normal, and we must extend ourselves sympathy and compassion when we make these U-turns instead of spiraling into shame.
“A successful creative career is always built on successful failures. The trick is to survive them”
To survive these creative U-turns, you must:
Admit to yourself that you reacted negatively to fear and pain and you need help in your recovery journey to succeed as an artist
Review the steps that led up to your creative U-turn and identify the point that scared you into turning back to self-doubt.
Seek out an artist who is one (or a few) step(s) ahead of you in their careers and ask them for advice
Blasting through the blocks
To work freely on a creative project, an artist must be functionally free of resentment and resistance. We must excavate any buried barriers before we can proceed.
Ask yourself these questions before beginning a new project to clear the obstructed creative flow:
“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 a 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.”
The above quotes were taken from The Artist’s Way, Chapter Nine
Tasks
At the end of every chapter, Cameron lists several ways we can take action on this week’s lesson, we are meant to choose a couple that speak to us and complete them throughout the week.
Here is a task all about Creative-U-turns:
a) All of us have taken creative U-turns. Name one of yours. Name free more. Name the one that just kills you.
b) Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for all failures of nerve, timing, and initiative. Devise a personalized list of affirmations to help you do better in the future.
c) 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.
d) Choose one creative U-turn. Retrieve it. Mend it.
e) Do not take creative U-turns now. Instead, notice your resistance.
f) What creative dreams are lurching towards possibility? Admit they frighten you.
