Week 8 - Recovering a Sense of Strength-Artists Way

So after filling your minds with all that good stuff from yesterday, I'm preparing for my Artists Way class on Monday, (which I'm sharing here as some highlights from the chapter) and I can't help but hear the connections from the workshop to what this all says...teaching people to problems solve their creative ideas and not to give up and or to swooped up with the end result...got to put those hours in and best do it with small steps...

Week 8  

This week tackles another major creative block: time. You will explore the way in which you have used your perception of time to preclude taking creative risks. You will identify immediate and practical changes you can make in your current life. You will excavate the early conditioning that may have encouraged you to settle for far less that you desire creatively.

Survival-In addition to our many gains, we inevitably suffer these losses in an artistic career. They are the hazards of the road and in my ways, its signposts.

We must remember that our artist is a child and that what we can handle intellectually far outstrips what we    can handle emotionally. We must be alert to flag and mourn our losses.

Have you experienced any artistic losses? 

The Ivory Power- Younger artists are seedlings. Their early work resembles thicket and underbrush, even weeds. The halls of academia with their preference for lofty intellectual theorems do little to support the life of the forest floor.  Julia shares, as a teacher, it has been my sad experience that many talented creative were daunted early and unfairly by their inability to conform to a norm that was not their own.  The feeling of shame can sink in…In order to recover our sense of hope and courage to create; we must acknowledge and mourn the scars that are blocking us.

 In order to get through we have to refeel and mourn the wound and make peace with it, a page at a time, a day at time, slowly build strength.

Give yourself the dignity of admitting your artistic wounds. That is the first steps in healing them.

Gain disguised as loss-Every loss must always be viewed as a potential gain; it’s all in the framing. Every end is a beginning. We know that and tend to forget it as we move through grief. Struck by a loss, we focus, understandably, on what we leave behind, the lost dream of the work’s successful fruition and it’s buoyant reception. We need to focus on what lies ahead.

How can this loss serve me? Where does it point my work?  The trick is to metabolize pain as energy.

The key is to know, trust and act… be willing to look at the work differently or walk through a different door.  Gain a new perspective of the situation.

Another key to career resiliency is self-empowerment and choice. Whenever one avenue for her creativity was blocked, she found another.

Artists who take this to heart survive and often prevail. The key is action. Pain that is not used profitably quickly solidifies into a leaden heart, which makes any action difficult.

When faced with a loss, immediately take one small action to support your artist.

“Ouch. That hurt. Here’s a little treat, a lullaby, a promise.

Age and time: product and process –Many Blocked creative tell themselves they are both too old and too young to allow themselves to pursue their dreams. Old and dotty, they might try it. Young and foolish, they might try it.  In either scenario, being crazy is a prerequisite to creative exploration.

Creativity occurs in the moment, and in moment we are timeless. We discover that as we engage in a creative recovery. “ I felt like a kid,” we may say after a satisfying artist date.

Watch out our ego can start to play tricks on us…”EGO-Easy God Out,”

Remember doing the work…points the way to new and better work to be done.

When we focus in on the process, our creative life retains a sense of adventure. Focused on product, the same creative life can feel foolish or barren. We inherit the obsession with product and the idea that art produces finished product from our consumer-oriented society.  This focus creates a great deal of creative block. 

Filling the form-Take the next step instead of skipping ahead to a large of one for which you may not yet be prepared.

Most of the time, the next right thing is something small.  As a rule of thumb, it is best to just admit that there is always one action you can take for your creativity daily. This daily-action commitment fills the form.

Try to remember the change you make is not about doing it all in one fell swoop.  Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama to scare ourselves out of our creativity with this notion of whole sale and often destructive change. Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time-or at all.

What can you do, right now, in your life as it is currently constituted? Do that thing.

Small actions lead us to the larger movements in our creative lives.

When we allow ourselves to wallow in the big questions, we fail to find the small answers. What we are talking about here is a concept of change grounded in respect-respect for where we are as well as where we wish to go.

Affirmations pick five and work with them in your morning pages.

I am a talented person

I have a right to be and artist

I am a good person and a good artist.

Creativity is a blessing I accept.

My creativity is a blessing I accept.

My creativity blesses others.

My creativity is appreciated.

I now threat myself and my creativity more gently.

I now treat myself and my creativity more generously.

I now share my creativity more openly.

I now accept hope.

I now act affirmatively

I now accept creative recovery.

I now allow myself to heal.

I now accept God’s help unfolding my life.

I now believe God loves artists.