The Artist's Way ~ Julia Cameron

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to a Higher Creativity
By Julia Cameron

When I first got this book as a teenager I started to read it, got bored with it (probably because I didn’t have a good frame of reference to connect to it) and put it away.  Over a decade later, I picked it up again and used it as a twelve week course.  I wrote the three longhand, brain dump, morning pages every morning (almost) and I read one chapter every Sunday then picked out a couple exercises I could readily do.  It was a game changer for me.  Along with The Joy Diet by Martha Beck, it turned how I approached life on its head.

The text at the top of the cover says “A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self.”  That creativity can be applied to any area of your life.  You do not need to be a writer or a painter.  The writing that she asks you to do is not about creating something for someone else to read, it is merely a pouring out of your thoughts onto paper.  In fact, you are admonished NOT to show them to other people.  This is for your mind alone.

 “As you work with the tools in this book, as you undertake the weekly tasks, many changes will be set in motion.  Chief among those changes will be the triggering of synchronicity: we change and the universe furthers and expands that change.  I have an irreverent shorthand for this that I keep taped to my writing desk: ‘leap, and the net will appear.’ ”

The basic tools are the morning pages and the artist date.  Sometimes referred to as “brain drain,” the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness” to help you get the junk out of your brain.  No one will be reading them, not even you.  “All that angry, whiny, petty stuff that you write down in the morning stands between you and your creativity.”  Let it out and let it go.  Morning pages are, in essence, a type of meditation.  Meditation is learning to let our thoughts pass by without judgment.  Here they are passing out onto our pages. 

If the morning pages are the outpouring of angst, then the artist date is the inflow, the filling of the creative well.  You need both.  Many things can constitute an artist date, from listening to music to gardening to cooking. 

“Remember, art is an artist-brain pursuit.  This brain is reached through rhythm – through rhyme, not reason.  Scraping a carrot, peeling an apple – these actions are quite literally food for thought.”

The weeks proceed through recovering a sense of Safety, of Identity, of Power, of Integrity, of Possibility, of Abundance, of Connection, of Strength, of Compassion, of Self-Protection, of Autonomy and, finally, of Faith. 

As a child you may have been instilled with the ideas that you can’t make a living at what you love doing, that you aren’t an artist or that you’re no good at it.  This book is about inspiration and permission to do what you love, what you may be thinking you can’t do.  You can, and this book can help you figure out how.

Reading through this again has inspired me.  I think it’s time to do this course again from a new perspective.  Mid June seems like the perfect time.  Meet you at the end of summer and we can compare notes.