The Artist's Way

The sub-title of the book is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.”

It’s basically all about helping us connect to and let the best within us shine through us and our work.

You can call that force we want to connect to God. Or the Universe. Or Source. Or Higher Power. (Or, if you go with the subject of our last Note on The Master Key where we explored the power of Qigong, you may call it “Life Force.”)

Julia calls it the Great Creator.

I like the way Stephen King describes his man-muse in his genius book On Writing where he tells us:

“What follows is everything I know about how to write good fiction. I’ll be as brief as possible, because your time is valuable and so is mine, and we both understand that the hours we spend talking about writing is time we don’t spend actually doing it. I’ll be as encouraging as possible, because it’s my nature and because I love this job. I want you to love it, too. But if you’re not willing to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well—settle back into competency and be grateful you have even that much to fall back on. There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think this is fair?

I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life.

Believe me, I know.”

P.S. Makes me think of Joseph Campbell’s great line: “What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?”

A spiral path. Imagine that.

We evolve and move past certain limitations as we spiral up.

And, yet, we experience similar challenges again and again—albeit from a higher level of consciousness than before.

That’s how it works.

As much as we want to be exonerated from all future work, that’s N E V E R going to happen.

Eric Maisel tells us the same thing in Mastering Creative Anxiety: “A time never comes when life is settled and anxiety is banished. This is true for life in general, and triply true for the creative life.”

As Campbell says, the good life is one hero’s journey after another.

And guess what? When you leave that community of the known to venture into the dark forest of the unknown, it’s scary. If it isn’t, you aren’t doing it right.

Remember: Our infinite potential exists on the other side of our comfort zone. Leaving that comfort zone is, by definition, uncomfortable. Do it anyway. Hopefully with a little more grace and dynamic recovery of equanimity each time!

Here’s how Darren Hardy puts it in The Entrepreneur Rollercoaster: “I used to be far more sensitive to failure, but worked hard to reduce my recovery time – to stand up taller, sooner. Here is the evolution I have gone through and recommend to you: What used to bum me out for two weeks, I eventually whittled down to two days by focusing my attention not on the failure, but on the lessons learned and the opportunities created. Then I got it down to two hours and then to 20 minutes. Now, when I get knocked down, I give myself about two minutes to sulk, and then I brush myself off and get back on the horse.”

How long does it take you to get back on the horse?

That better than before? (Congrats!)

What’s one tiny thing you could do to improve it a bit?

Lots to discuss in there.

First, the “morning pages.” They are the cornerstone of The Artist’s Way.

Basic idea: Write three pages of whatever comes to mind. That’s it. Whatever bubbles up. Write it down. Three pages. Every day.

Julia says: “When people ask, ‘Why do we write morning pages?’ I joke, ‘To get to the other side.’ They think I am kidding, but I’m not. Morning pages do get us to the other side: the other side of our fear, of our negativity, of our moods. Above all, they get us beyond our Censor. Beyond the reach of the Censor’s babble we find our own quiet center, the place where we hear the still, small voice that is at once our creator’s and our own.”

So, the point of the morning pages is to get to other side of our fear. To tame the gremlin that is our “‘Censor.” You know, that part of us that chants all the things that are wrong with us, etc.

Steven Pressfield calls that Resistance.

Here’s how he describes it in Do the Work: “We’re wrong to think we’re the only ones struggling with Resistance. Everyone who has a body experiences Resistance.

Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy- five.

In other words, fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

We must fight the battle anew every day.

It’s helpful to have practices that allow us to drop into a consistent groove. That’s what the morning pages can do for people who practice it.

Julia calls them a type of meditation. Now, I have my own type of meditation that does what I need it to do so I haven’t tried (and won’t be trying) the morning pages. But, if you’ve been looking for a way to unblock your creativity you might find them as useful as the countless people Julia has coached.

Here’s what I love most about the morning pages: You do them. Every day. Period.

“Feeling like it” has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Michael Beckwith puts it this way in Spiritual Liberation: “The gift of self-discipline is that it has the power to take you beyond the reasoning of temporary emotion to freedom. Think of how empowered you’ve felt on occasions when you haven’t given in to the ‘I don’t feel like it’ syndrome and honored your commitment to yourself. What does not feeling like it have to do with it? The combination of love for something with the willingness to do what it takes to practice it—discipline—results in freedom.”

What practices help YOU get past your Censor/Resistance/self-doubt/fear/etc?

You doing them whether you feel like it or not?

P.S. It’s funny because as I was reading this book I was like, “Oh! Morning pages. That would be fun.” Then I’m like, “Dude. There’s only so much time in a day and you’ve figured out your path to crush it so just ignore this tool and continue doing what’s working.”

(Yes, that’s how I talk to myself. :)

Anyway. Point of the story: It’s easy for us to get overwhelmed thinking we have to do every.single.thing we discover. Obviously, we can’t.

Ken Wilber describes that as being a “metaphysical glutton.” We can’t do everything. Let’s not try. Let’s stay open to new things to Optimize but know when to focus on what works.

Artist dates.

This is the second pillar of The Artist’s Way.

And (I’m laughing as I type), with a newborn baby I’m definitely wondering where I’ll find my time for it.

I think it’s time to bring that action back.

Movies are my favorite creative indulgence. They turn my thinking brain off and inspire me.

You?

Gain disguised as loss.

Julia tells us the stories of her many losses—all those scripts she wrote and sold only to see them stall in the process and never reaching production.

She took those heartbreaking losses and decided to create an independent film on her own. She finished it. It was awesome. Except for one thing. The sound tapes we stolen. She had to dub the whole thing. Oops.

In the process, she learned to metabolize pain as energy, asking, as she says, “What’s next?” rather than “Why me?”

“What’s next?” vs “Why me?” <— That’s a really (!) powerful distinction.

Have you experienced any loss lately?

Can you metabolize the pain into energy as you reframe it to see the gain?

What’s next?

That’s from a section on Synchronicity.

And, that W.H. Murray quote is one I’ve shared a ton of times. Every time I read it I get fired up. Know that something magical happens when we dare to trust ourselves and truly commit to doing something great.

As Campbell says in The Power of Myth:

Moyers: “Do you ever have this sense when you are following your bliss, as I have at moments, of being helped by hidden hands?”

Campbell: “All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time—namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

To what do you need to commit?

What’s your next baby step?