The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (13 page)

1. Affirmative Reading: Every day, morning and night, get quiet and focused and read the Basic Principles to yourself (See page 3.) Be alert for any attitudinal shifts. Can you see yourself setting aside any skepticism yet?

2. Where does your time go? List your five major activities this week. How much time did you give to each one? Which were what you wanted to do and which were shoulds? How much of your time is spent helping others and ignoring your own desires? Have any of your blocked friends triggered doubts in you?

Take a sheet of paper. Draw a circle. Inside that circle, place topics you need to protect. Place the names of those you find to be supportive. Outside the circle, place the names of those you must be self-protective around just now. Place this safety map near where you write your morning pages. Use this map to support your autonomy. Add names to the inner and outer spheres as appropriate: “Oh! Derek is somebody I shouldn’t talk to about this right now.”

3. List twenty things you enjoy doing (rock climbing, roller-skating, baking pies, making soup, making love, making love again, riding a bike, riding a horse, playing catch, shooting baskets, going for a run, reading poetry, and so forth). When was the last time you let yourself do these things? Next to each entry, place a date. Don’t be surprised if it’s been years for some of your favorites. That will change. This list is an excellent resource for artist dates.

4. From the list above, write down two favorite things that you’ve avoided that could be this week’s goals. These goals can be small: buy one roll of film and shoot it. Remember, we are trying to win you some autonomy with your time. Look for windows of time just for you, and use them in small creative acts. Get to the record store at lunch hour, even if only for fifteen minutes. Stop looking for big blocks of time when you will be free. Find small bits of time instead.

5. Dip back into Week One and read the affirmations. Note which ones cause the most reaction. Often the one that sounds the most ridiculous is the most significant. Write three chosen affirmations five times each day in your morning pages; be sure to include the affirmations you made yourself from your blurts.

6. Return to the list of imaginary lives from last week. Add five more lives. Again, check to see if you could be doing bits and pieces of these lives in the one you are living now. If you have listed a dancer’s life, do you let yourself go dancing? If you have listed a monk’s life, are you ever allowed to go on a retreat? If you are a scuba diver, is there an aquarium shop you can visit? A day at the lake you could schedule?

7. Life Pie: Draw a circle. Divide it into six pieces of pie. Label one piece
spirituality,
another
exercise,
another
play,
and so on with
work, friends,
and
romance
/
adventure.
Place a dot in each slice at the degree to which you are fulfilled in that area (outer rim indicates great; inner circle, not so great). Connect the dots. This will show you where you are lopsided.

As you begin the course, it is not uncommon for your life pie to look like a tarantula. As recovery progresses, your tarantula may become a mandala. Working with this tool, you will notice that there are areas of your life that feel impoverished and on which you spend little or no time. Use the time tidbits you are finding to alter this.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

PAUL GAUGUIN

If your spiritual life is minimal, even a five-minute pit stop into a synagogue or cathedral can restore a sense of wonder. Many of us find that five minutes of drum music can put us in touch with our spiritual core. For others, it’s a trip to a greenhouse. The point is that even the slightest attention to our impoverished areas can nurture them.

8. Ten Tiny Changes: List ten changes you’d like to make for yourself, from the significant to the small or vice versa (“get new sheets so I have another set, go to China, paint my kitchen, dump my bitchy friend Alice”). Do it this way:

I would like to ______________.

I would like to ______________.

As the morning pages nudge us increasingly into the present, where we pay attention to our current lives, a small shift like a newly painted bathroom can yield a luxuriously large sense of self-care.

9. Select one small item and make it a goal for this week.

10. Now do that item.

CHECK-IN

1. How many days this week did you do your morning pages? (We’re hoping seven, remember.) How was the experience for you? How did the morning pages work for you? Describe them (for example, “They felt so stupid. I’d write all these itty-bitty disconnected things that didn’t seem to have anything to do with one another or with anything ...”). Remember, if you
are
writing morning pages, they are working for you. What were you surprised to find yourself writing about? Answer this question in full on your check-in page. This will be a weekly self-scan of your moods, not your progress. Don’t worry if your pages are whiny and trite. Sometimes that’s the very best thing for you.

2. Did you do your artist date this week? Remember that artist dates are a necessary frivolity. What did you do? How did it feel?

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

WEEK 3

Recovering a Sense of Power

T
his week may find you dealing with unaccustomed bursts of energy and sharp peaks of anger, joy, and grief. You are coming into your power as the illusory hold of your previously accepted limits is shaken. You will be asked to consciously experiment with spiritual open-mindedness.

ANGER

ANGER IS FUEL. We feel it and we want to do something. Hit someone, break something, throw a fit, smash a fist into the wall, tell those bastards. But we are
nice
people, and what we do with our anger is stuff it, deny it, bury it, block it, hide it, lie about it, medicate it, muffle it, ignore it. We do everything but
listen
to it.

Anger is meant to be listened to. Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand. Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because anger is a
map.
Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go. It lets us see where we’ve been and lets us know when we haven’t liked it. Anger points the way, not just the finger. In the recovery of a blocked artist, anger is a sign of health.

Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out. Anger points the direction. We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us. With a little thought, we can usually translate the message that our anger is sending us.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

DUKE ELLINGTON

“Blast him! I could make a better film than that!” (This anger says: you want to make movies. You need to learn how.)

“I can’t believe it! I had this idea for a play three years ago, and she’s gone and written it.” (This anger says: stop procrastinating. Ideas don’t get opening nights. Finished plays do. Start writing.)

“That’s my strategy he’s using. This is incredible! I’ve been ripped off! I knew I should have pulled that material together and copyrighted it.” ( This anger says: it’s time to take your own ideas seriously enough to treat them well.)

When we feel anger, we are often very angry
that
we feel anger. Damn anger!! It tells us we can’t get away with our old life any longer. It tells us that old life is dying. It tells us we are being reborn, and birthing hurts. The hurt makes us angry.

Anger is the firestorm that signals the death of our old life. Anger is the fuel that propels us into our new one. Anger is a tool, not a master. Anger is meant to be tapped into and drawn upon. Used properly, anger is
use-full.

Sloth, apathy, and despair are the enemy. Anger is not. Anger is our friend. Not a nice friend. Not a gentle friend. But a very, very loyal friend. It will always tell us when we have been betrayed. It will always tell us when we have betrayed ourselves. It will always tell us that it is time to act in our own best interests.

Anger is not the action itself It is action’s invitation.

SYNCHRONICITY

Answered prayers are scary. They imply responsibility. You asked for it. Now that you’ve got it, what are you going to do? Why else the cautionary phrase “Watch out for what you pray for; you just might get it”? Answered prayers deliver us back to our own hand. This is not comfortable. We find it easier to accept them as examples of synchronicity:

• A woman admits to a buried dream of acting. At dinner the next night, she sits beside a man who teaches beginning actors.

• A writer acknowledges a dream to go to film school. A single exploratory phone call puts him in touch with a professor who knows and admires his work and promises him that the last available slot is now his.

• A woman is thinking about going back to school and opens her mail to find a letter requesting her application from the very school she was thinking about going to.

• A woman wonders how to rent a rare film she has never seen. She finds it at her neighborhood
bookstore
two days later.

• A businessman who has secretly written for years vows to himself to ask a professional writer for a prognosis on his talent. The next night, over a pool table, he meets a writer who becomes his mentor and then collaborator on several successful books.

When a man takes one step toward God, God takes more steps toward that man than there are sands in the worlds of time.

THE WORK OF THE
CHARIOT

The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf.

SHAKTI GAWAIN

It’s my experience that we’re much more afraid that there might be a God than we are that there might not be. Incidents like those above happen to us, and yet we dismiss them as sheer coincidence. People talk about how dreadful it would be if there were no God. I think such talk is hooey. Most of us are a lot more comfortable feeling we’re not being watched too closely.

If God—by which I do not necessarily mean a single-pointed Christian concept but an all-powerful and all-knowing force—does not exist, well then, we’re all off the hook, aren’t we? There’s no divine retribution, no divine consolation. And if the whole experience stinks—ah well. What did you expect?

That question of expectations interests me. If there is no God, or if that God is disinterested in our puny little affairs, then everything can roll along as always and we can feel quite justified in declaring certain things impossible, other things unfair. If God, or the lack of God, is responsible for the state of the world, then we can easily wax cynical and resign ourselves to apathy. What’s the use? Why try changing anything?

This is the use. If there is a responsive creative force that does hear us and act on our behalf, then we may really be able to do some things. The jig, in short, is up: God knows that the sky’s the limit. Anyone honest will tell you that possibility is far more frightening than impossibility, that freedom is far more terrifying than any prison. If we do, in fact, have to deal with a force beyond ourselves that involves itself in our lives, then we may have to move into action on those previously impossible dreams.

A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.

ALBERT SZENT-
GYORGYI

Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind.