Bliss habits Book Club: Artist’s Way, Week Four

Welcome to Tuesdays with Chel.

“All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.”
– M. C. RICHARDS

Welcome to the Bliss Habits Book Club! For the next several weeks, we’ll be discussing and working our way through The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron.

The discussion is continued on Facebook, as well. Please join us.

We’re talking about Week Four/Chapter Four this week. This week’s reading was interesting to me because Cameron focuses on two parts of the Artist’s Way that don’t work for me: the Morning Pages and Reading Deprivation.

But even though I’m not doing these practices specifically as she urges, I understand the purpose of both: creating awareness.

Creating awareness seems to be at the center of this entire book, doesn’t it? Awareness of our past creative wounds, awareness of our misconceptions about our work, awareness of what we want and feel, awareness of our boundaries…

And awareness is basically recognition of what *is* as opposed to what might be or what we have perceived things to be, right?

Cameron writes:

“People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined…. As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self.”

By doing Morning Pages, we are getting in touch with what’s *really* going on. What’s bubbling just under the surface. We’re kind of opening a portal.

And as I have said before, I don’t necessarily believe that Morning Pages “The Artist’s Way way!” is the only way to open that portal. I think ANYTHING that is done on a daily basis which allows us to reach deep inside and figure out what’s REALLY happening is perfectly fine.

It’s funny, because until this week, I thought my little daily collage practice was my version of Morning Pages. But then today I realized that it’s actually my daily gardening that is my version of Morning Pages.

When I go out to the garden, I immediately dive into the physical work. I don’t really need to think too hard out there, I just need to look around and pick somewhere to start, and just go for it. And as I tend to the plants by watering, trimming, repotting, planting, pruning, moving things around, my mind will start to reveal things to me. Complaints. Questions. Concerns. And, also, good stuff- ideas, possibilities, gratitudes. They don’t tumble forward in a rush, they sort of blip in and out.

And by continuing my physical work of tending the garden, I am sort of physically working through the emotional stuff. It’s weird how that works. If something really big and negative comes up, I will find solace and solution in tending to a really big and messy project. As I untangle roots and dig my hands deep into the dirt, I do the same stuff in my mind.

“…we begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings, those on the record for public display. .. At the root of a successful creative recovery is the commitment to puncture our denial, to stop saying, ‘It’s okay’ when in fact it’s something else.” – Julia Cameron

Anyway, my point here is that whether you’re doing Morning Pages or gardening or something else, the important part of it is to find something that you can do daily, or as close to daily as possible, that allows you to “get down and dirty”. A safe place where you can feel comfortable unearthing the funky stuff in your mind and soul, and a place where you have the space and time to really pull that stuff out and EXAMINE it. Find the cause. Maybe even figure out a solution.

“Chekhov advised, ‘If you want to work on your art, work on your life.’ That’s another way of saying that in order to have self-expression, we must first have a self to express. That is the business of the morning pages: ‘I, myself, feel this way … and that way … and this way…. No one else need agree with me, but this is what I feel.’” – Julia Cameron

And then there’s Reading Deprivation.

“It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. With no newspaper to shield us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With no novel to sink into (and no television to numb us out) an evening becomes a vast savannah in which furniture—and other assumptions—get rearranged.” – Julia Cameron

Now, I’ll be honest- there’s no way I’m doing this.  BUT, and this is a HUGE “but”, I totally get why this is great advice.

Cameron developed this book before “browsing the web” was a common thing. Before we had the internet, we spent time flipping through magazines and newspapers, books and whatever else was around for visual consumption.

Now we read blogs and graze on forum posts. Most of us who are online regularly are “monitoring” our peers, and we tend to visit and subscribe to sites that appeal to us. So if we are writers, we read writing blogs, we read blogs written by other writers. If we are visual artists, we check out creative blogs.

I am addicted to reading blogs. I have a list of blogs that I love and every morning I grab my cup of tea and have a blissful few moments checking blog feeds and literally devouring the beautiful images and ideas and techniques and art created by others.

And usually, it’s very positive.

The problem is that it can also be negative. We start to compare ourselves and the work we do to the work we’re seeing. I constantly compare my productivity and output to that of others. And, often my blog browsing functions as a giant tool for enabling me to spend money. I love buying art and craft supplies, so any new product that comes out, I love to read about and see used.

For example, this morning, I was reading a favorite creative blog and the artist who writes it had a post about spray paint. I have NEVER been tempted to introduce aerosol spray paint into my work. I think it’s cool, but it just never appealed to me. It’s messy and it smells and I don’t love the way it looks. But for some reason, I found myself deeply pondering whether I should try out a can.

I caught myself in the act and emotionally backed away. But it may me realize the value of Cameron’s advice. What would happen if I took a one week break from blog reading? I bet it would make a huge difference in my thought patterns,  and my creativity. But reading blogs brings me a lot of joy, so I realized what I really need to do is more MONITORED and AWARE blog reading.

“Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a space some of us begin to immediately fill with new words—long, gossipy conversations, television bingeing, the radio as a constant, chatty companion. We often cannot hear our own inner voice, the voice of our artist’s inspiration, above the static. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own. “ – Julia Cameron

In conclusion, I think this week is about why awareness is so important- not only a growing awareness of what is going on below the surface and coming out, but also an awareness of the stuff we are taking *in*. As we train ourselves to be more aware, we also have to really start working on our personal filters and figure out how to be able to function in the world without taking in all the junk that comes flying at us from all directions. And even if the thing we’re taking in isn’t “junk” itself, sometimes our brains have a way of turning it INTO junk- using it as a way to criticize ourselves, our creativity, our choices… etc.

“When we have engaged the creator within to heal us, many changes and shifts in our attitudes begin to occur. What you have been doing is wiping the mirror, [taking] a swipe at the blur you have kept between you and your real self. As your image becomes clearer, it may surprise you. You may discover very particular likes and dislikes that you hadn’t acknowledged…. Conditioned as we are to accept other peoples’ definitions of us, this emerging individuality can seem to us like self-will run riot. It is not. The snowflake pattern of your soul is emerging. Each of us is a unique, creative individual. But we often blur that uniqueness.”

So, go into this next week with a sense of awareness. Be as aware as you can. Just open yourself up to it. Sometimes awareness is easy, sometimes it’s just too much. Just do what you can, and know that simply by opening up to it, you are changing *so* much.

“Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows. As we gain—or regain—our creative identity, we lose the false self we were sustaining. The loss of this false self can feel traumatic: “I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t recognize me.” Remember that the more you feel yourself to be terra incognita, the more certain you can be that the recovery process is working. You are your own promised land, your own new frontier. Shifts in taste and perception frequently accompany shifts in identity.” – Julia Cameron

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Chel Micheline is a mixed-media artist, curator, writer, and avid gardener/reader/swimmer who lives in Southwest Florida with her husband and daughter. When Chel’s not making art or pondering the Bliss Habits, she’s blogging at gingerblue.com (come say hi!) or posting new things in the gingerblue etsy shop.