The Artist's Way

[Gianna]

Week 11 Recovering a Sense of Autonomy 

Acceptance

• As an artist, your credibility lies with you, God, and the work. Not money or fame or other people. If you have a poem to write, you need to write it whether it will sell or not, whether other people will like it or not.   
• I need to create what wants to be created. I cannot plan a career to unfold in a sensible direction dictated by cash flow and marketing strategies. Those things are fine but too much attention to them can scare or anger the child within who doesn't like to be put off. Children, as we know, don't like "Later, not now."
• Since my artist is a child, I must make some concessions to its sense of timing. Some concessions does not mean total irresponsibility. It means to let your child have quality time, knowing that if you let it do what it wants to do it will cooperate with you in doing what you need to do. 
• Spoiling my artist means it will let me type a business letter. Ignoring my artist means a grinding depression. 
• Sometimes you create bad work, that is okay in order for you to get to the other side. 
• Creativity is its own reward. 
• As an artist, be careful to surround yourself with people who nurture your work. 
• Your life is your art to a large degree, when it gets dull so does your work. If you let your emotional or intellectual like stagnate your work will show it, your life will show it, your temperament will show it. 
• As an artist, I write whether I think it's any good or not. I may hit a dead-end or I may make a hit. I make create something great that other people hate. 
• As an artist, my self-respect comes from doing the work. 
• ****There is a positive correlation between self-nurturing and self-respect. If I allow myself to be bullied and cowed by other people's urges for me to be more normal and more nice, I sell myself out. They may like me better, but I will hate myself. Subconsciously hating myself will lead to me lashing out at either myself or others. *****
• Your inner artist (inner child) needs to be supported. 
• If I sabotage my artist, I can well expect an eating binge, a sex binge, or a temper binge. ***
• Creativity is oxygen for our souls. Cutting it off makes us savage. We react as if we are being choked. There is a real rage that surfaces when we are interfered with *********************** on a level that involves "picking lint off of us and fixing us up." 
• If I don't create, I get crabby. ***
• Your inner artist can literally die of boredom. I kill myself when I do not nurture my artist child. 
• To be an artist is to recognize the particular. To appreciate the peculiar– "the job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." -Francis Bacon
• To be an artist is to ask "why?" and to allow a sense of play in your relationship to accepted standards. 
• if you are happier writing than not writing, painting than not painting, let yourself do it. 
• the creator (you,God) made us creative. Our creativity is our gift from god and our gift to God. Accepting this bargain is the beginning of true self-acceptance. 

"What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what hap already been said is still not enought" ********* -Eugene Delacroix 

 

"The function of the creative artist consists of making laws, not in following laws already made" -Ferruccio Busoni 

[Gianna]

Week 11 Recovering a Sense of Autonomy 

Success 

• Creativity is a spiritual practice it’s not something that can be perfected, finished, and set aside. 
• A plateau of ~creativity is sometimes followed by a period of restlessness— “there” always disappears. What are we going to do now?
  
  “This unfinished quality, this restless appetite for further exploration tests us. We are asked to expand in order that we not contract. Evading this commitment leads straight to stagnation, discontent, spiritual discomfort. Can’t I rest? The answer is no."
   
• Being an artist is like being a shark if you stop swimming you will die
• Being an artist requires the humility to be able to start anew, to be a beginner again. 
• As artists we are travelers. Too burdened by our worldly dignity, too invested in our stations/positions, we are unable to yield to spiritual leadings– we insist on a straight and narrow path when the artist’s way is a spiral. 
   
• Invested in a career, we can mistakenly place that investment above our inner guidance. 
• Creativity is not a business although it can generate business.
• Don’t let strategy override creativity.
• Those who tempt themselves to work too long with a formula- even their own- rob their creative truth.  
• As artists, we are asked to repeat our work and expand the market we built (sequels, potters, composers, choreography). Sometimes this is possible and sometimes it is not. 
• An artist should not replicate a prior success. God is not interested in redundancy. 
• Attempting to play it safe we lose our cutting edge.
• As the promised projects diverge further and further from our inner learnings, a certain artistic weariness sets in. We must summon our enthusiasm at gunpoint instead of reveling in each day’s creative task. 
   
• Artists should not mortgage the future too heavily.
• This is not to say not to plan. Commit to projects that you are sure of but also commit to those riskier projects that call to your creative soul. 
• You do not need to overturn an entire career, just small adjustments every day that- over the long haul- adjust your trajectory and the satisfaction of your career. This means writing your morning pages. Taking your artist date. 
   
• If we ignore our inner commitment, the cost rapidly becomes apparent in our outer world. A lack of conviction surfaces that evicts our creative excitement.
• Artists must be vigilant  
• Artists can responsibly meet the demands of their business partners. But what is more difficult and more critical is to continue to meet the inner demand of our own artistic growth. 
• As success comes to us, we must be vigilant. Any success postulated on a permanent plateau dooms the work to failure. 

[Gianna]

Week 11 Recovering a Sense of Autonomy 

The Zen of Sports 
"exercise: the act of bringing into play or realizing in action." 

• Most blocked creatives are cerebral beings. We think of what we want to do but can't. Early in recovery, we next think of all the things we want to do but don't. In order to effect a real recovery, the creative needs to move out of her/his head and into the body.  
• Creativity requires action and part of that action must be physical. 
• This step requires acceptance. 
• It is one of the pitfalls of westerners adopting eastern mediation to bliss out and render ourselves high but dysfunctional. We lose our grounding, and with it, our capacity to act in the world– we render ourselves unconscious in a new way. Exercise combats dysfunctional spirituality. 
• Walking is a moving meditation. 
• Any act of motion that puts you into The Now is a moving meditation. They help us to stop spinning. 
• 20 minutes a day is sufficient. 
• The goal is to connect to a world outside of us, to lose the obsessive self-focus of self-exploration and simply, explore. 
• When the self is focused on other, the self often comes into more accurate focus. 
• the fitness of your spirit sets the tone for the day. 
• move for perspective. 
• Rhythmic repetitive action transfers the locus of the brain's energy from logic to the artistic hemisphere. It is there that inspiration breaks through the constrains of logic. 
• You find answers in movement. 
• movement gives you a sense of not only motion, but also the motion of God through you and through the universe. 
• Exercise teaches the rewards of process. It teaches the sense of satisfaction over small tasks well done. 
• Learned creative patience has to do with connecting to a sense of universal creativity. 
• When your mind shuts off– through focused movement– the rationality switches off. Art is not rational, it's magical.
• Focused movement reduces you to feeling.  
• Moments of intense feeling teaches you to be aware of other moments in your life when they occur. 
• As an artist, walking offers sensory saturation; in a sense, insight follows from sight. 
• Gather visual delight as if you are gathering nuts and berries. 
• We learn by going where we have to go. Doing what we have to do. 
• Exercise often takes us from self-pity to self-respect; from questions to answers and stagnation to inspiration. 
• We learn that we are stronger than we thought when we move. We learn new perspective.

Building Your Artistic Altar 

• It is easier to tap into your inner resources when you have a centering ritual– like morning pages. Morning pages are a meditation. 
• A spiritual room or corner helps facilitate centering rituals. 
• Fill your spiritual corner with pictures or things that make you happy– an artist's altar should be a sensory experience. 
• Some examples of small rituals, self-devised, could be: 
  • burning incense as you say (or write) your affirmations 
  • dancing to music
  • lighting a candle while you do your morning pages
  • holding a rock while you do breath-work
  • etc. 
• tactile, physical techniques enhance spiritual growth.  
• the artistic child speaks the language of the soul: music, dance, scent, shells.. 
• your artistic altar should be fun, even silly. 

[Gianna]

Week 12 Recovering a Sense of Faith 

Adventures don't begin until you get into the forest. That first step in an act of faith. 

          Trusting 

• "I know what I know" – an affirmation for opening the channel of acceptance 
• Do not take on the faith of our culture that says we are meant to be dutiful and then die. Take on the faith of our will that says we are meant to be creative, bountiful, channel God energy, and LIVE. live fully, actualize. 
• It is the inner commitment to our souls and our willingness to follow our dreams that triggers the support of the universe.
• When we are ambivalent the universe is ambivalent
   
• If we look back on the times where the world seemed capricious and scary, then what we will see is that we were only conflicted with our own goals, ambitions, and behavior.  
• By trusting we learn to trust. 
• There is a path for each of us.
• When we are on the right path we have the right footing– we know the next thing that needs to be done although we don’t know what’s going to be around the corner.
  
  Mystery 
   
• "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious" - Albert Einstein 
• What shakes the eye but the invisible?" - Theodore Roethke 
• We must acknowledge that creativity starts in the dark just like life does
• The right idea or insight is preceded by a gestation period of murky waters– you can't see things clearly. 
   
• Creativity requires the respect of mystery and darkness— unknowingness. It cannot be forced (like A child or a dog). 
• To patch an idea you can’t open the oven too soon and let the steam come out of the cake; holes will surface in the cake. 
• Creativity requires reticent .
• Let ideas grow in dark and in mystery. Ideas need to rise.
• Let them form on the roof of our consciousness, let them hit the page in droplets and by trusting the droplets we will be surprised one day by a flash that says, "Oh! That's it!"
  
  The Imagination at Play 
   
• Good art requires festivity and humor— the imagination at play 
• We are driven by the standards of our society that says that if creativity cannot produce a direct result it is not worthy but do not force consistent creativity, you will rot its magic.
• Creativity requires a new definition from society. One that expand and includes hobbies. 
• Hobbies are grounding. 
• There is a release of humility that comes with doing something just for love.
• As we engage in hobbies we are released from the ego mind an allowed to merge with expanded resources. 
• This touching of consciousness affords us the perspective needed to resolve conundrums.
• Get serious about taking yourself lightly 
• Work at learning to play 
• Our creativity always leaves us yearning for more. We sing in the car, slam down the phone, make lists, clear closets, short through shelves. We want to do something, but we think it needs to be the RIGHT something— something important. But WE are what’s important. So that 'something' that we do can be something festive and small. 
• You’re either losing your mind or gaining your soul. 
  
  
  Escape Velocity 
   
• "To travel across the sea you must be willing to lose sight of the shore" - I forget who said this 
• The first rule of magic is containment: zip the lip, button up, keep a lid on it, don’t give away the gold. You hold your intention within yourself, stoking it with power. Only then will you be able to manifest what you desire. 
• In order to be a creative, you must learn to be your own counsel, move silently among doubters, to voice our plans only among our allies ,and name your allies accurately. ********
• Do not indulge or tolerate ANYONE who throws cold water in your direction— forget “good intentions” or “they didn’t mean it” 
• Escape velocity requires the sword of steely intention and the shield of self-determination. Set your goals and set your boundaries. 
• “Don’t let the ogre that looms on the horizon deflect your flight.” 

Edited September 15, 2021 by Gianna

[RickyFitts]

This is amazing, thank you so much for sharing ?