The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (17 page)

Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.

As we gain—or regain—our creative identity, we lose the false self we were sustaining. The loss of this false self can feel traumatic: “I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t recognize me.”

Remember that the more you feel yourself to be terra incognita, the more certain you can be that the recovery process is working. You are your own promised land, your own new frontier.

Shifts in taste and perception frequently accompany shifts in identity. One of the clearest signals that something healthy is afoot is the impulse to weed out, sort through, and discard old clothes, papers, and belongings.

“I don’t need this anymore,” we say as we toss a low-self-worth shirt into the giveaway pile. “I’m sick of this broken-down dresser and its sixteen coats of paint,” as the dresser goes off to Goodwill.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. RICHARDS

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

SENECA

By tossing out the old and unworkable, we make way for the new and suitable. A closet stuffed with ratty old clothes does not invite new ones. A house overflowing with odds and ends and tidbits you’ve held on to for someday has no space for the things that might truly enhance today.

When the search-and-discard impulse seizes you, two crosscurrents are at work: the old you is leaving and grieving, while the new you celebrates and grows strong. As with any rupture, there is both tension and relief. Long-seated depression breaks up like an ice floe. Long-frozen feelings thaw, melt, cascade, flood, and often overrun their container (you). You may find yourself feeling volatile and changeable. You are.

Be prepared for bursts of tears and of laughter. A certain giddiness may accompany sudden stabs of loss. Think of yourself as an accident victim walking away from the crash: your old life has crashed and burned; your new life isn’t apparent yet. You may feel yourself to be temporarily without a vehicle. Just keep walking.

If this description sounds dramatic, it is only to prepare you for possible emotional pyrotechnics. You may not have them. Your changes may be more like cloud movements, from overcast to partly cloudy. It is important to know that no matter which form your growth takes, there is another kind of change, slower and more subtle, accumulating daily whether you sense its presence or not.

“Nothing dramatic is happening to me. I don’t think the process is working,” I have often been told by someone who from my perspective is changing at the speed of light. The analogy that I use is that once we engage in the process of morning pages and artist dates, we begin to move at such velocity that we do not even realize the pace. Just as travelers on a jet are seldom aware of their speed unless they hit a patch of turbulence, so, too, travelers on the Artist’s Way are seldom aware of the speed of their growth. This is a form of denial that can tempt us to abort the recovery process that “isn’t happening” to us. Oh yes it is.

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO

When we have engaged the creator within to heal us, many changes and shifts in our attitudes begin to occur. I enumerate some of them here because many of these will not be recognizable at first as healing. If fact, they may seem crazy and even destructive. At best, they will seem eccentric.

There will be a change in energy patterns. Your dreams will become stronger and clearer, both by night and by day. You will find yourself remembering your nighttime dreams, and by day, daydreams will catch your attention. Fantasy, of a benign and unexpected sort, will begin to crop up.

Many areas of your life that previously seemed to fit will stop fitting. Half your wardrobe may start to look funny. You may decide to reupholster a couch or just toss it out. Musical bents may alter. There may even be bursts of spontaneous singing, dancing, running.

You may find your candor unsettling. “I don’t like that” is a sentence that will leave your mouth. Or “I think that’s great.” In short, your tastes and judgments and personal identity will begin to show through.

What you have been doing is wiping the mirror. Each day’s morning pages take a swipe at the blur you have kept between you and your real self. As your image becomes clearer, it may surprise you. You may discover very particular likes and dislikes that you hadn’t acknowledged. A fondness for cactuses. So why do I have these pots of ivy? A dislike for brown. So why do I keep wearing that sweater if I never feel right in it?

Conditioned as we are to accept other peoples’ definitions of us, this emerging individuality can seem to us like self-will run riot. It is not.

The snowflake pattern of your soul is emerging. Each of us is a unique, creative individual. But we often blur that uniqueness with sugar, alcohol, drugs, overwork, underplay, bad relations, toxic sex, underexercise, over-TV, undersleep—many and varied forms of junk food for the soul. The pages help us to see these smears on our consciousness.

Is you look over the time you have been doing your morning writing, you will see that many changes have entered your life as a result of your willingness to clear room in it for your creator’s action. You will have noticed an increased, sometimes disconcerting, sense of personal energy, some bursts of anger, some flash points of clarity. People and objects may have taken on a different meaning to you. There will be a sense of the flow of life—that you are brought into new vistas as you surrender to moving with the flow of God. This is clear already.

You may well be experiencing a sense of both bafflement and faith. You are no longer stuck, but you cannot tell where you are going. You may feel that this can’t keep up. You may long for the time when there was no sense of possibility, when you felt more victimized, when you didn’t realize how many small things you could do to improve your own life.

It is normal to yearn for some rest when you are moving so rapidly. What you will learn to do is rest in motion, like lying down in a boat. Your morning pages are your boat. They will both lead you forward and give you a place to recuperate from your forward motion.

It is difficult for us to realize that this process of going inside and writing pages can open an inner door through which our creator helps and guides us. Our willingness swings this inner door open. The morning pages symbolize our willingness to speak to and hear God. They lead us into many other changes that also come from God and lead us to God. This is the hand of God moving through your hand as you write. It is very powerful.

One technique that can be very reassuring at this point is to use your morning pages—or a part of them—for written affirmation of your progress.

“Put it in writing,” we often say when making a deal.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.

W. H. AUDEN

All you need to do to receive guidance is to ask for it and then listen.

SANAYA ROMAN

There is a special power in writing out the deal we are making with our creator. “I receive your good willingly” and “Thy will be done” are two short affirmations that when written in the morning remind us to be open to increased good during the day.

“I trust my perceptions” is another powerful affirmation to use as we undergo shifts in identity. “A stronger and clearer me is emerging.”

Choose affirmations according to your need. As you excavate your buried dreams, you need the assurance that such explorations are permissible: “I recover and enjoy my identity.”

BURIED DREAMS, AN EXERCISE

As recovering creatives, we often have to excavate our own pasts for the shards of buried dreams and delights. Do a little digging, please. Be fast and frivolous. This is an exercise in spontaneity, so be sure to write your answers out quickly. Speed kills the Censor.

1. List five hobbies that sound fun.

2. List five classes that sound fun.

3. List five things you personally would never do that sound fun.

4. List five skills that would be fun to have.

5. List five things you used to enjoy doing.

6. List five silly things you would like to try once.

As you may have gathered by this point in your work, we will approach certain problems from many different angles, all of them aimed at eliciting more information from your unconscious about what you might consciously enjoy. The exercise that follows will teach you enormous amounts about yourself—as well as giving you some free time in which to pursue the interests you just listed.

READING DEPRIVATION

If you feel stuck in your life or in your art, few jump starts are more effective than a week of
reading deprivation.

No reading? That’s right: no reading. For most artists, words are like tiny tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our system. Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried.

It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. With no newspaper to shield us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With no novel to sink into (and no television to numb us out) an evening becomes a vast savannah in which furniture—and other assumptions—get rearranged.

Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a space some of us begin to immediately fill with new words—long, gossipy conversations, television bingeing, the radio as a constant, chatty companion. We often cannot hear our own inner voice, the voice of our artist’s inspiration, above the static. In practicing reading deprivation, we need to cast a watchful eye on these other pollutants. They poison the well.

If we monitor the inflow and keep it to a minimum, we will be rewarded for our reading deprivation with embarrassing speed. Our reward will be a new outflow. Our own art, our own thoughts and feelings, will begin to nudge aside the sludge of blockage, to loosen it and move it upward and outward until once again our well is running freely.

Reading deprivation is a very powerful tool—and a very frightening one. Even thinking about it can bring up enormous rage. For most blocked creatives, reading is an addiction. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own.

In my teaching, the week that I assign reading deprivation is always a tough one. I go to the podium knowing that I will be the enemy. I break the news that we won’t be reading and then I brace myself for the waves of antagonism and sarcasm that follow.

We are always doing something, talking, reading, listening to the radio, planning what next. The mind is kept naggingly busy on some easy, unimportant external thing all day.

BRENDA UELAND

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

THEODORE ROETHKE

At least one student always explains to me—pointedly, in no uncertain terms—that he or she is a very important and busy person with duties and obligations that include reading.

This information is inevitably relayed in a withering tone that implies I am an idiot child, an artistic flake, unable to grasp the complexities of an adult’s life. I just listen.

When the rage has been vented, when all the assigned reading for college courses and jobs has been mentioned, I point out that I have had jobs and I have gone to college and that in my experience I had many times wriggled out of reading for a week due to procrastination. As blocked creatives, we can be very creative at wriggling out of things. I ask my class to turn their creativity to wriggling into not reading.

“But what will we do?” comes next.

Here is a brief list of some things that people do when they are not reading: