Welcome to Tuesdays with Chel.
“To accept the responsibility of being a child of God is to accept the best that life has to offer you.”
-STELLA TERRILL MANN
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.
As usual, Week 5/Chapter 5 of the Artist’s Way is full of thought-provoking ideas and suggestions. Here’s my take on it. As usual, I’m shaking things up a bit from the order concepts are introduced in the chapter.
THE VIRTUE TRAP
“‘What’s the use?’ replaces our feelings of joy and satisfaction.” – Julia Cameron
I literally gasped out loud when I read the line above. Because “what’s the use” is something that goes through my head a zillion times a day, especially when I’m thinking about my creativity. It’s something I struggle with constantly.
Creativity feels so SELFISH. I know it’s not. Even if the things I create don’t really have any function or immediately impact the well-being of society, I know creativity is good for the brain. I know it allows me to be a better person, which then influences the way I treat and interact others. I know creativity serves a purpose in this world and by creating with joy I am enabling and inspiring other people (especially my DAUGHTER) to do the same.
I KNOW all this. But it still feels so ridiculously useless sometimes. And I hate that I feel that way.
“One of the favored tricks of blocked creatives is saying no to ourselves. It is astonishing the number of small ways we discover to be mean and miserly with ourselves. ‘We refuse to ask ourselves, ‘What are my needs? What would I do if it weren’t too selfish?’”
It’s a relief to know that this is a very common struggle for creative people and maybe there’s a way to work through it. Because, to be completely honest, I’m really, really tired of this little daily struggle I have with my creative self.
And then there’s this:
“Many recovering creatives sabotage themselves most frequently by making nice. There is a tremendous cost to such ersatz virtue. … We strive to be good, to be nice, to be helpful, to be unselfish. We want to be generous, of service, of the world. But what we really want is to be left alone. When we can’t get others to leave us alone, we eventually abandon ourselves. To others, we may look like we’re there. We may act like we’re there. But our true self has gone to ground…. In short, we are on the treadmill of virtuous production… Our artist is not merely out of sorts. Our artist has checked out.” – Julia Cameron
I totally get this, too. The whole negotiation that we make with ourselves- that we can be creative, but only if we’re producing something “of value”. Cameron calls it “virtuous production.” Something that we can sell, something that’s on trend, something that inspires other people, something that’s part of a project (December Daily or NaNoWriMo come to mind right this very minute) that a larrge community of people are also doing. It’s like we need some sort of permission slip to create, and that permission slip can’t possibly come from ourselves, our hearts or our souls.
It’s twisted, but it seems to be so common.
The problem is that this “virtuous productivity” is pretty much wearing us down into nothing, chafing away at our core creativity until there’s no much left and creativity itself becomes as useless and irritating to us as walking into a concrete wall repeatedly.
So how to work around this?
The first suggestion Cameron has is DOWNTIME. Taking breaks.
“An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as a withdrawal from them. For an artist, withdrawal is necessary. Without it, the artist in us feels vexed, angry, out of sorts. If such deprivation continues, our artist becomes sullen, depressed, hostile. We eventually became like cornered animals, snarling at our family and friends to leave us alone and stop making unreasonable demands.” – Julia Cameron
It’s funny, because even though I’m very familiar with all the proven health benefits of downtime, Sabbath, taking regular breaks, I still couldn’t tell you what “downtime” might mean to me. I have conditioned myself to make sure that all my activities are “of value” to either my family or the community, etc. that I no longer know what the heck I would do if I just had an afternoon to myself and someone demanded I do something extremely enjoyable. It seems like I’m unable to do things I love (painting, gardening, reading, writing, etc.) unless I can somehow define that work as beneficial or somehow useful to someone else.
“An artist requires the healing of time alone. Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted. Over time, it becomes something worse than out of sorts. Death threats are issued. We may even continue to produce creatively, but we are leaching blood from ourselves, vampirizing our souls.” – Julia Cameron
Yikes. This whole chapter has made me realize that I have to take a deeper look at not only my creativity, but also the time I spend NOT being creative. There are a lot of things out of whack.
So what then?
A clean approach to both downtime AND creativity.
FINDING THE RIVER
If our perspective of what’s a “good” use of our creative energy is out of whack, how do we begin to readjust it? I think we’ve been tackling this since the very first pages of the book, but I also think it’s becoming clear that this will be a life-long struggle for some creative.
“Very often, when we cannot seem to find an adequate supply [of creative energy], it is that we are insisting on a particular human source of supply. We must learn to let the flow manifest itself where it will—not where we will it. …The desire to be worldly, sophisticated, and smart often blocks our flow. We have ideas and opinions about where our good should come from. As each idea comes to us, we must in good faith clear away our inner barriers to acting on it and then, on an outer level, take the concrete steps necessary to trigger our synchronous good.” – Julia Cameron
Basically, we need to get out of the way of our creativity. When an idea pops up, instead of evaluating it and tearing it apart and “testing” it to see if it’s useful and a valueable way to spend our creative energy and resources, we need to start asking “is this something I really WANT to be doing?”
I sat down and thought about the last five creative projects I worked on, and only ONE of them was something I WANTED to work on. That frightens me quite a bit. But, Cameron has some words of encouragement:
“With each day we become more true to ourselves, more open to the positive. We see that our moods, views, and insights are transitory. We acquire a sense of movement, a current of change in our lives. This current, or river, is a flow of grace moving us to our right livelihood, companions, destiny.
Recovery is the process of finding the river and saying yes to its flow, rapids and all. We startle ourselves by saying yes instead of no to opportunities. As we begin to pry ourselves loose from our old self-concepts, we find that our new, emerging self may enjoy all sorts of bizarre adventures. My holding lightly to an attitude of gentle exploration, we can begin to lean into creative expansion. By replacing ‘No way!’ with ‘Maybe,’ we open the door to mystery and to magic.”
I love this idea. It’s super scary, at least to me, but the idea of opening myself up to the flow of creativity and letting it pour out as it will is VERY appealing. But how does someone make the shift from awareness of trends/art community/marketplace to awareness of what *truly* appeals to our souls?
Cameron writes:
“We tend to believe we must go out and shake a few trees to make things happen. I would not deny that shaking a few trees is good for us. In fact, I believe it is necessary. I call it doing the footwork. I want to say, however, that while the footwork is necessary, I have seldom seen it pay off in a linear fashion. It seems to work more like we shake the apple tree and the universe delivers oranges. Time and again, I have seen a recovering creative do the footwork of becoming internally clear and focused about dreams and delights, take a few outward steps in the direction of the dream—only to have the universe fling open an unsuspected door. One of the central tasks of creative recovery is learning to accept this generosity.”
Basically, I read this as ask for a map and then follow it, even if it leads somewhere you had no intention of going. The *journey* to that unexpected place is the key to our recovery, because it’s about building trust. It’s not about what we create but HOW we create it. And the more we learn to create from a place of trust and well-being, a place where we are engaged in the work we are doing even if it’s not “on trend” or likely to appeal to a lot of people, the more we will grow as creatives.
So how do we start to trust ourselves, and the creative instincts that flow inside of us?
LIMITS
“One of the chief barriers [in this process] is our limited notion of what we are in fact able to accomplish…. Instead, we draw very limited amounts of the power available to us. We are stingy with ourselves. And if we receive a gift beyond our imagining, we often send it back… One reason we are miserly with ourselves is scarcity thinking. We don’t want our luck to run out. We don’t want to overspend our [creative] abundance.” – Julia Cameron
This is *SO* true. It’s funny because we all dream of doing great work, work that fulfills us and finds an audience that it resonates with, but then when we approach our work, how many of us say “this is the start of something AMAZING?” We just don’t do that. At least, *I* don’t. I often feeling like I’m trying to draw water from a stone when I sit down to make something.
“Since everyone can draw on the universal supply, we deprive no one with our abundance. If we learn to think of receiving … good as being an act of worship we can begin to let go of having to sabotage ourselves.” – Julia Cameron
I LOVE this, I really do. I don’t know if this resonates with any of you but I love the idea of creating and creating in a HAPPY, fulfilling way being an act of gratitude, an act of love. Cameron writes:
“What we are talking about seems to be a conscious partnership in which we work along slowly and gradually, clearing away the wreckage of our negative patterning, clarifying the vision of what it is we want, learning to accept small pieces of that vision from whatever source and then, one day, presto! The vision seems to suddenly be in place. In other words, pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can. For this to happen, first of all, we must believe that we are allowed to catch the bus.”
It’s a hard adjustment, to go from “I really don’t feel good about my work or myself as a creative” to “I am amazing and can create life-changing things!” But I think we all have to start positioning ourselves to someday be able to own our own goodness, our own unique perspective, and what we have to contribute to the world simply by tapping into the creative flow we all have inside us.
“If this still sounds airy fairy to you, ask yourself bluntly what next step you are evading. What dream are you discounting as impossible given your resources? What payoff are you getting for remaining stuck at this point in your expansion?” – Julia Cameron
What ARE the benefits of staying where we are, feeling small and cramped and a little unhappy? What *is* the risk of approaching something creative with a sense of joy and positivity? There doesn’t seem to be one, besides our strange concern that we will seem very egotistical. But honestly, how many of us are planning to run around, screaming (or blogging) “I am a incredible artist! I do amazing creative things!”? THAT’s egotistical.
Enjoying your work, looking at what you do with a sense of awe, tapping into our inner researves of creativity, and taking a little time for ourselves to refill those reserves when they start getting low? That’s not egotistical, that’s the blueprint for a well-lived life.
I’m going to repeat the quote at the top of this post, because it’s so true, but so hard to do:
“To accept the responsibility of being a child of God is to accept the best that life has to offer you.”
-STELLA TERRILL MANN
Let’s all work on accepting the best that life has to offer us. Including the best parts of being creative.
The discussion is continued on Facebook, as well. Please join us.
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.
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