The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (16 page)

1. Describe your childhood room. If you wish, you may sketch this room. What was your favorite thing about it? What’s your favorite thing about your room right now? Nothing? Well, get something you like in there—maybe something from that old childhood room.

Whenever I have to choose between two evils, I always like to try the one I haven’t tried before.

MAE WEST

2. Describe five traits you like in yourself as a child.

3. List five childhood accomplishments. (straight A’s in seventh grade, trained the dog, punched out the class bully, short-sheeted the priest’s bed).

And a treat: list five favorite childhood foods. Buy yourself one of them this week. Yes, Jell-O with bananas is okay.

4. Habits: Take a look at your habits. Many of them may interfere with your self-nurturing and cause shame. Some of the oddest things are self-destructive. Do you have a habit of watching TV you don’t like? Do you have a habit of hanging out with a really boring friend and just killing time (there’s an expression!)? Some rotten habits are obvious, overt (drinking too much, smoking, eating instead of writing). List three obvious rotten habits. What’s the payoff in continuing them?

Some rotten habits are more subtle (no time to exercise, little time to pray, always helping others, not getting any self-nurturing, hanging out with people who belittle your dreams). List three of your subtle foes. What use do these forms of sabotage have? Be specific.

5. Make a list of friends who nurture you—that’s
nurture
(give you a sense of your own competency and possibility), not enable (give you the message that you will never get it straight without their help). There is a big difference between being helped and being treated as though we are helpless. List three nurturing friends. Which of their traits, particularly, serve you well?

6. Call a friend who treats you like you are a really good and bright person who can accomplish things. Part of your recovery is reaching out for support. This support will be critical as you undertake new risks.

7. Inner Compass: Each of us has an inner compass. This is an instinct that points us toward health. It warns us when we are on dangerous ground, and it tells us when something is safe and good for us. Morning pages are one way to contact it. So are some other artist-brain activities—painting, driving, walking, scrubbing, running. This week, take an hour to follow your inner compass by doing an artist-brain activity and
listening
to what insights bubble up.

8. List five people you admire. Now, list five people you secretly admire. What traits do these people have that you can cultivate further in yourself?

9. List five people you wish you had met who are dead. Now, list five people who are dead whom you’d like to hang out with for a while in eternity. What traits do you find in these people that you can look for in your friends?

10. Compare the two sets of lists. Take a look at what you really like and really admire—and a look at what you think you should like and admire. Your
shoulds
might tell you to admire Edison while your heart belongs to Houdini. Go with the Houdini side of you for a while.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using the materials of one’s chosen form.

STEPHEN
NACHMANOVITCH

Creativity is ... seeing something
that doesn’t exist already.
You need to find out how you can
bring it into being and that way
be a playmate with God.

MICHELE SHEA

CHECK-IN

1. How many days this week did you do your morning pages? How was the experience for you? If you skipped a day, why did you skip it?

2. Did you do your artist date this week? (Yes, yes, and it was
awful.
) What did you do? How did it feel?

3. Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?

4. Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.

WEEK 4

Recovering a Sense of Integrity

T
his
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!

HONEST CHANGES

WORKING WITH THE MORNING pages, we begin to sort through the differences between our
real
feelings, which are often secret, and our
official
feelings, those on the record for public display. Official feelings are often indicated by the phrase, “I feel okay about that [the job loss, her dating someone else, my dad’s death, ...].”

What do we mean by “I feel okay”? The morning pages force us to get specific. Docs “I feel okay” mean I feel resigned, accepting, comfortable, detached, numb, tolerant, pleased, or satisfied?
What
does it mean?

Okay is a blanket word for most of us. It covers all sorts of squirmy feelings; and it frequently signals a loss. We officially feel okay, but do we?

At the root of a successful creative recovery is the commitment to puncture our denial, to stop saying, “It’s okay” when in fact it’s something else. The morning pages press us to answer what else.

In my years of watching people work with morning pages, I have noticed that many tend to neglect or abandon the pages whenever an unpleasant piece of clarity is about to emerge. If we are, for example, very, very angry but not admitting it, then we will be tempted to say we feel “okay about that.” The morning pages will not allow us to get away with this evasion. So we tend to avoid them.

Each painting has its own way of evolving.... When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

WILLIAM BAZIOTES

If we have the creeping feeling that our lover is not being totally honest with us, the morning pages are liable to bring this creepy possibility up—and with it, the responsibility for an unsettling conversation. Rather than face this mess, we will mess up on doing the morning pages.

By contrast, if we are suddenly and madly in love, the morning pages may seem threatening. We don’t want to puncture the fragile and shiny bubble of our happiness. We want to stay lost in the sea of a blissful us rather than be reminded that there is an I in the we (or an “eye” in the we) that is temporarily blinded.

In short, extreme emotions of any kind—the very thing that morning pages are superb for processing—are the usual triggers for avoiding the pages themselves.

Just as an athlete accustomed to running becomes irritable when he is unable to get his miles in, so, too, those of us accustomed now to morning pages will notice an irritability when we let them slide. We are tempted, always, to reverse cause and effect: “I was too crabby to write them,” instead of, “I didn’t write them so I am crabby.”

Over any considerable period of time, the morning pages perform spiritual chiropractic. They realign our values. If we are to the left or the right of our personal truth, the pages will point out the need for a course adjustment. We will become aware of our drift and correct it—if only to hush the pages up.

“To thine own self be true,” the pages say, while busily pointing that self out. It was in the pages that Mickey, a painter, first learned she wanted to write comedy. No wonder all her friends were writers. So was she!

Chekhov advised, “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” That’s another way of saying that in order to have self-expression, we must first have a self to express. That is the business of the morning pages: “I, myself, feel this way ... and that way ... and this way.... No one else need agree with me, but this is what
I
feel.”

The process of identifying a
self
inevitably involves loss as well as gain. We discover our boundaries, and those boundaries by definition separate us from our fellows. As we clarify our perceptions, we lose our misconceptions. As we eliminate ambiguity, we lose illusion as well. We arrive at clarity, and clarity creates change.

Eliminate somethinq superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure.

PIERO FERRUCCI

“I have outgrown this job,” may appear in the morning pages. At first, it is a troubling perception. Over time, it becomes a call for action and then an action plan.

“This marriage is not working for me,” the morning pages say. And then, “I wonder about couples therapy?” And then, “I wonder if I’m not just bored with me?”

In addition to posing problems, the pages may also pose solutions. “I
am
bored with me. It would be fun to learn French.” Or, “I noticed a sign just down the block for a clay and fiber class. That sounds interesting.”

As we notice which friends bore us, which situations leave us stifled, we are often rocked by waves of sorrow. We may want our illusions back! We want to pretend the friendship works. We don’t want the trauma of searching for another job.

Faced with impending change, change we have set in motion through our own hand, we want to mutiny, curl up in a ball, bawl our eyes out. “No pain, no gain,” the nasty slogan has it. And we resent this pain no matter what gain it is bringing us.

“I don’t want to raise my consciousness!” we wail. “I want ...” And thanks to the morning pages we learn what we want and ultimately become willing to make the changes needed to get it. But not without a tantrum. And not without a
kriya,
a Sanskrit word meaning a spiritual emergency or surrender. (I always think of kriyas as spiritual seizures. Perhaps they should be spelled crias because they are cries of the soul as it is wrung through changes.)

We all know what a kriya looks like: it is the bad case of the flu right after you’ve broken up with your lover. It’s the rotten head cold and bronchial cough that announces you’ve abused your health to meet an unreachable work deadline. That asthma attack out of nowhere when you’ve just done a round of care-taking your alcoholic sibling? That’s a kriya, too.

Stop thinking and talking about it and there is nothing you will not be able to know.

ZEN PARADIGM

Always significant, frequently psychosomatic, kriyas are the final insult our psyche adds to our injuries: “Get it?” a kriya asks you.

Get it:

You can’t stay with this abusive lover.

You can’t work at a job that demands eighty hours a week.

You can’t rescue a brother who needs to save himself.

In twelve-step groups, kriyas are often called
surrenders.
People are told
just let go.
And they would if they knew what they were holding on to. With the morning pages in place and the artist dates in motion, the radio set stands half a chance of picking up the message you are sending and/or receiving. The pages round up the usual suspects. They mention the small hurts we prefer to ignore, the large successes we’ve failed to acknowledge. In short, the morning pages point the way to reality: this is how you’re feeling; what do you make of that?

And what we make of that is often art.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered.