Last chapter of Artists Way....Week 12

Week 12 Recovering a Sense of Faith- In this final week, we acknowledge the inherently mysterious spiritual heart of creativity. We address the fact that creativity requires receptivity and profound trust-capacities we have developed through our work in this course. We set our creative aims and take a special look at last minute sabotage. We renew our commitment to the use of the tools.

Trusting- Our resistance to our creativity is a rom of self-destruction. We throw up road blocks on our own path. Why do we do this? In order to maintain an illusion of control.

Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And faith is trust of our own admission. The admitting is often difficult. A clearing affirmation can often open the channel. “I know the things I know.”  “I trust my own inner guide” Eventually yielding us a sense of our own direction.

“Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.”-Joseph Campbell, It is the inner commitment to be true to ourselves and follow our dreams that triggers the support of the universe.

There is a path for each of us. When we are on our right path, we have a sure footedness. We know the next right action although not necessarily what is just around the bend. By trusting, we learn to trust.

Mystery-Creative-like human life itself-begins in darkness. It is true that insights ma come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however also true that such bright idea are preceded by gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

We must wait for an idea to hatch…Or, to use a gardening image; we must learn to not pull our ideas up by the roots to see if they are growing. All too often, we try to push, pull, outline and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The Creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. Truth is that this is how to raise the best ideas. Let them grow in dark and mystery. Let them form on the roof of our consciousness. Let them hit the page in droplets. Trusting this slow and seemingly random drip, we will be startled on day by the flash of “ Oh! That’s it!

The Imagination at Play-We are an ambitious society, and it is often difficult of us to cultivate forms of creativity that do not directly serve us and our career goals. Recovery urges our reexamining definitions of creativity and expanding them to include what in the past we called hobbies. The experience of creative living argues that hobbies are in fact essential to the joyful life.

Many hobbies involve a form of artist-brain mulling that lead to enormous creative breakthroughs.

Spiritual benefits accompany the practice of a hobby. As we serve our hobby, we are freed from our ego’s demands and allowed the experience of merging with a greater source.

We must get serious about taking ourselves lightly. We must work at learning to play. Creativity must be freed from the narrow parameters of capital A art and recognized as having much broader play.

As we write, digging ourselves out of denial, our memories dreams, and creative plans all move to the surface. We discover anew that we are creative beings.

We are intended to create. We want to do something but we think it needs to be the right something, by which we mean something important. We are what’s important, and the something that we do can be something festive but small.

Life is meant to be an Artist Date.

Escape Velocity-When you’re going to leave them, they know. “There’s a time for blast-off, like a NASA space launch, and you’re heading for it when wham, you draw to you the Test.” Yeah, the Test, It’s like when you’re all set to marry the nice guy, the who treats you right, and Mr. Poison gets wind of it and phones you up.

The whole trick is to avoid the Test. We all draw to us the one test that’s our nemesis.

As recovering creative, many of us find that every time our career heats up, we reach for our nearest Wet Blanket. We blurt out our enthusiasm to our most skeptical friend-in fact, we call him up. If we don’t, he calls us this is the Test.

The trick is not to let them be that way.  How? Zip the lip. Button up. Keep a lid on it. Don’t give away the gold.

Always remember: the first rule of magic is self-containment. You must hold your intention within yourself, stoking it with power. Only then will you be able to manifest what you desire.

In order to achieve escape velocity, we must learn to keep our won counsel, to move silently among doubters, to voice our plans only among our allies, and to name our allies accurately.

Escape velocity requires the sword of steely intention and the shield of self-determination. “Set your goals and set your boundaries.”