Restarting The Artist’s Way – Week 1: Recovering a Sense of Safety

I mentioned briefly in my July monthly wrap-up that I decided to re-start The Artist’s Way as a way to refresh my creative life. Initially I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to share here since creativity and writing can be an incredibly personal journey. However, I’ve been enjoying documenting the experience and decided that it would be valuable to have my reflections in a place where I can easily look back on them in years to come. Also, if sharing my experience helps someone else jumpstart their creative life, even better.

Over the next few months I’ll be sharing lessons from my journey through The Artist’s Way program. There will likely be a delay between my real-time experience and my reflection posts owing to the need to edit out some personal details from my initial reflections, as well as to keep a decent balance of my content here on the blog.

Table of Contents:

• About The Artist’s Way
• Restarting The Artist’s Way
• Week 1 Reflections & Check-In
  • Morning Pages
  • Artist’s Date
  • Personal realizations
• Notes & Quotes: Key Takeaways from Ch. 1

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What is The Artist’s Way?

The Artist’s Way is a book by Julia Cameron on the subject of creativity. The 12-week course she outlines in this book is meant to free your inner artist from fear and other limitations by exploring creative roadblocks and how to overcome them. Through the use of two pivotal tools, the daily morning pages and the weekly artist date, as well as various exercises, Cameron encourages readers to discover the link between their spiritual and creative selves.

Restarting my journey through The Artist’s Way

I previously worked through The Artist’s Way seven or eight years ago, when I was in very a different place in my life, both literally and figuratively. Since then I’ve moved several times, gotten a master’s degree, changed jobs, gotten married, traveled a lot, and, along with the rest of the world, experienced a global pandemic.

Even with all of those changes, one thing that remains a constant is my desire to live a creative life. My dedication to incorporating creative practices in my daily life has ebbed and flowed over the years as circumstances changed but after I began making my writing a bigger priority again last year, I felt pulled to revisit the lessons in The Artist’s Way.

I decided to re-start on a whim because I was feeling stuck in my creative writing. I finished a messy first draft of a short story for Camp NaNoWriMo in July and felt like I needed to let it sit before attempting to make revisions. I felt restless because I had planned on working on that project for the whole month and wasn’t sure what to focus on next, so I was struggling to write.

I actually intended to start working through this round of “creative recovery”, as Cameron calls it, in February but only made it through the first couple of weeks before I allowed life to get in the way. So, I decided to re-start and fully commit this time. The timing might not be perfect and I’m sure there will be weeks when I fall short or don’t feel like I’m making progress, but the great thing about this journey is that I can make it my own.

✅Check-In and Reflection

Week 1 (July 18-24): Recovering a Sense of Safety

This week’s reading and exercises focused on identifying, understanding, and moving past fears that affect our creative lives.

Week 1 felt very familiar, partially because I’d recently worked through the exercises, but also because I’ve sort of incorporated some of the tools into my daily life to some degree. Re-reading the chapter provided a lot of useful reminders about working through fears that can manifest as creative blocks.

Morning Pages

I’ve been journaling pretty regularly, so for the most part I treated the morning pages like regular journal entries, except in the morning. I didn’t follow the requirements completely. Instead of forcing myself to write a full three pages first thing in the morning I told myself I just needed to write something before work during weekdays. For the most part, I continued journaling later in the day to get to a total of at least three pages and on I did do the morning pages as they were intended to be done on the weekends (and on Friday when a rooster woke me up 1 hour before my alarm by screaming repeatedly right outside my window).

Artist’s Date

Activity: Listening (really listening) to music

These days, it’s rare for me to just sit and listen to music. Even more rare to listen to an entire album in order. Maybe it was a “lazy” activity to choose for an Artist Date but it was meaningful. I’d forgotten how good it feels to allow myself to fully immerse myself in something and I felt more emotionally affected than I thought I would, just thinking about different human connections and the way they manifest through music. Going forward, I know that I want to spend more time listening to music intentionally and to set the mood while doing other tasks instead of mindlessly filling the silence with audiobooks, podcasts or YouTube videos, which often create a lot of mental clutter.

Albums listened in full: emails i can’t send by Sabrina Carpenter, Mercury Acts 1&2 by Imagine Dragons

individual songs on repeat: Lonely by Imagine Dragons, because i liked a boy by Sabrina Carpenter, TV by Billie Eilish, Everything Goes On by Porter Robinson (League of Legends Star Guardian Music Video)

Personal realizations from this week’s creative recovery exercises:

• Fear is a big part of what holds many people (including myself) back from fully committing to creativity. (This also ties into the idea of “negative beliefs” from chapter 1) Different types of fear include:
  • fear of the unknown
  • fear of wasted time
  • fear of what people (in my real life) will think
  • fear of rejection
  • fear of hurting someone unintentionally with my words
• I do still fall into the habit of doubting myself when it comes to my writing and other creative practices so I’m hoping that going through this course again and pairing it with a regular writing practice will help me break through that barrier as I work toward completing and submitting more work in the near future.
• I care more about what other people think than I initially thought. (See: exercise about monsters and champions.)
  • A related thought – my “love languages” seem to have shifted. Words of affirmation are more important to me than they were before, though perhaps this is due to the fact that I’m no longer surrounded by a creative and/or academic community on a daily basis. This means that I don’t get as much feedback (good or bad) and I’ve only realized how important it was now that I feel its absence.
• I have already started to incorporate elements of my “imaginary dream lives” into my everyday life again by exploring my interests and allowing myself to do things I enjoy “just for fun”. Maybe that’s why I’ve been much more content with my life this year.

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📒Notes & Quotes: Key Takeaways from Chapter 1:

Note: This section is essentially a collection of notes and quotes for myself about points that stood out to me in this week’s chapter. They may or may not be relevant to everyone and are not organized in any particular way.

• Support is essential to budding artists. Unfortunately young artists are often met with cautionary advice instead of enthusiastic support from adults in their lives, which can cause artists to give up on their creative dreams out of fear.
• “Shadow artists” are people who surround themselves with art instead of letting themselves embrace their own creativity. (Think of someone taking a creative dream such as being a novelist and trying to make it more practical by using their knowledge of wordsmithing to write advertisements)
• Protect your artist child, allow yourself space to create
• Take baby steps to nurture your artist child. Creativity = play but it can be hard to allow yourself to play.

Remember, your artist is a child. Find and protect that child. Learning to let yourself create is like learning to walk.

Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way

• Don’t measure your first efforts against the masterpieces you admire
• Give yourself permission to be a beginner.
• Being blocked has a lot to do with fear
• Much fear of our own creativity is the fear of the unknown
• Examine your negative core beliefs and brainstorm positive alternatives
• Use affirmations to help achieve a sense of safety and hope. If you find yourself automatically rejecting an affirmation, examine why.

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”

Joseph Chilton Pearce

💬Let’s chat!

Have you ever done The Artist’s Way? What small creative thing would you let yourself do if you weren’t afraid of how people around you might react?