Week 12 : Recovering a Sense of Faith

The final week in The Artist's Way.

Checking in.

Last week, the Eleventh Week. Recovering a sense of Autonomy

This week we focused on our artistic autonomy. We examined the ongoing ways in which we must nurture and accept ourselves as artists. We explored the behaviors that can strengthen our spiritual base and therefore, our creative power. We took a special look at the ways in which success must be handled in order that we not sabotage our freedom. Did you do the task list? How was that? What was the hardest or most interesting part of the tasks?

Week 12:

Recovering a Sense of Faith

Remember: Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure, creative energy. There is an underlying, in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life — including ourselves. It is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.

In this final week, we acknowledge the inner 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.

Adventures don't begin until you get into the forest. That first step in, an act of faith.
Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead.

Creativity requires faith, and faith requires that we relinquish control. This is frightening, and we resist it. Our resistance to our creativity is a form of self destruction. We throw up roadblocks on our own path. This gives us the illusion of control. Depression, like anger, like anxiety, is resistance, and it creates dis-ease. This manifests itself as sluggishness and confusion… “I just don't know…”

The truth is, that we do know… and that we actually know that we know.

Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our admission. The admitting is often very difficult. One tool that we have that is potent in opening the channel to our inner dreams is the use of a clearing affirmation. One excellent one is, “I know the things I know.” Another is, “I trust my own inner guide.” Either of these will eventually yield us a sense of our own direction — which we will then promptly resist!

This resistance is really very understandable. We are not accustomed to thinking that the Universe's will for us and our own inner dreams can coincide. Instead we have bought the message of our culture: this world is a vale of tears and we are meant to be dutiful and then die. The truth is that we are meant to be bountiful and live. The Universe will always support affirmative action. Our trust dream for ourselves is always God's will for us.

Mickey Hart's hero and mentor, the late, great mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote, “Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.” It is the inner commitment to be true to ourselves and follow our dreams that triggers the support of the Universe. While we are ambivalent, the Universe will seem to us also to be ambivalent and erratic. The flow through our lives will be characterized by spurts of abundance and long spells of drought, when our supply dwindles to a mere trickle.

If we look back at the times when the world seemed to be a capricious and untrustworthy place, we see that we were ourselves ambivalent and conflicted in our goals and behaviors. Once we trigger an internal “yes” by affirming our truest goals and desires, the Universe mirrors that “yes” and expands it.

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

Mystery.

What shakes the eye but the invisible?
Theodore Roethke

Creativity — like human life itself — begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often we think only in terms of light: “And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!” It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

We speak often about ideas as brainchildren. What we do not realize is that brainchildren, like all babies, should not be dragged from the creative womb prematurely. Ideas, like stalactites and stalagmites, form in the dark inner cave of consciousness. They form in drips and drops, not by squared off building blocks. We must wait for an idea to hatch. Or, to use a gardening image, we must learn not to pull our ideas out by the roots to see if they are growing.

Mulling on the page is an artless art form. it is fooling around, it is doodling. It is the way that ideas slowly take shape and form until they are ready to help us see the light. 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.

The most beautiful thing that we can experience is the mysterious.
Albert Einstein

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise. All too often, when we say we want to be creative, we mean that we want to be able to be productive. Now, to be creative is to be productive — but by cooperating with the creative process, not forcing it.

As creative channels, we need to trust the darkness. We need to learn to gently mull instead of churning away like a little engine on a straight ahead path. This mulling on the page can be very threatening. “I'll never get any real ideas this way!” we fret.

Hatching an idea is a lot like baking bread. An idea needs to rise. If you poke at it too much at the beginning, if you keep checking on it, it will never rise. A loaf of bread and a cake, both, need to rise for a good long time in the darkness and safety of the oven. Open that oven too soon and the bread collapses — or the cake gets a hole in its middle because all the steam has rushed out of it. Creativity requires a respectful reticence.

The imagination at play

For me, (creating art) is like a story which stimulates the imagination and draws the mind into a place filled with expectation, excitement, wonder and pleasure.
J.P. Hughston, painter

When we think about creativity, it is all too easy to think art with a capital A. For our purposes, capital A art is a scarlet letter branding us as doomed. In order to nurture our creativity, we require a sense of festivity, even humor. “Art. That's somebody my sister used to date.”

We are an ambitious society, and it is often difficult for 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.

Then too, there is that hidden benefit that they are also creatively useful. Many hobbies involve a form of artist — brain mulling that leads to enormous creative breakthroughs. When Julie Cameron has screenwriting students stuck on act two, she asks them to please go home and do their household mending. They usually balk, offended at performing such a mundane task, but sewing has a nice way of mending up plots. Gardening is another hobby she assigns to creativity students — when someone is panicked halfway across the bridge to a new life, she'll suggest they go home and repot plants into larger containers. This literally grounds the person, and gives them a sense of expansion.

Spiritual beliefs accompany the practice of a hobby. There is a release into humility that comes from doing something by rote. As we serve our hobby, we are freed from our ego's demands and allowed the experience of merging with a greater source. This conscious contact frequently affords us the perspectives needed to solve vexing personal or creative conundrums.

It is a paradox of creative recovery that 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 (that word again.)

As we work with our morning pages and artists dates, many forgotten samplings of our own creativity may come to mind. You may suddenly remember how much you loved painting sets in high school, or murals in grade school. Or playing a role in a theatrical skit, or writing one, or tap dancing or …. and you remember the joy of the play in it.

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. The impulse cooks in us all, simmering along all the time — without our knowledge, without encouragement, even without our approval. It moves beneath the surface of our lives showing in bright flashes like a penny in our stream of thoughts, or new grass under snow.

We are intended to create. As grey, meaningless and drably controlled as we may strive to be, the fire of our dreams will not stay buried. The embers are always there, stirring in our frozen souls like winter leaves. They won't go away. We make crazy doodles during boring meetings, draw or write in the condensation on the window, nickname the boss something wicked.

Restive in our lives, we yearn for more, we wish, we chafe. We sing in the car, slam down the phone, make lists, clear closets sort through things. We want to do something, but we think it has 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. Mismatched socks bite the dust. We are strung by loss, and bitten by hope. Working with the morning pages a new — and gaudy? — life takes form. Who bought that azalea? Why the sudden taste for brilliant color? Is this picture you've tacked up a you you're going toward?

Your shoes feel worn, you throw them out. You host a garage sale, you buy a first edition, splurge on new sheets, a friend worries once too often about what's come over you and you take your first real vacation in years.

The clock is ticking and you're hearing the beat. You stop by a museum shop, sign your name on a scuba diving sheet and commit yourself to Saturday mornings in the deep end.

You're either losing your mind or gaining your soul. Life is meant to be an artists date. That's why we were created.

Escape Velocity.

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
Andre Gide

When you reach escape velocity, when you're just about ready to blast off into your new life… wham. You're drawn into the test. It's like, when you're all set to marry Mr. Right, the nice guy who always treats you well, and Mr. Poison gets wind of it and phones you up. The whole trick is to evade the test. We draw to us the test that is our total nemesis. You're all set to go to the east coast for your first clinic tour, and suddenly your parents need you, with a capital N. You're all set to leave a position that is clearly wrong, and suddenly the boss from hell gives you your first raise in years. Don't be fooled. A little flattery can go a long way to deter our escape velocity, so can a bit of money, and more sinister than either is a well placed doubt. Like… “For your own good, just wanting to make sure you've thought about this…” a doubt voiced with deep concern by one of our nearest and dearest.

Many of us find just as our career heats up, we reach for the nearest wet blanket. We blurt out our dream to the most skeptical person we know. This is… the test.

Our inner artist is… an inner child, and when it's scared it looks for Mommy. Unfortunately, many of us had wet blanket mommies so we reach for a surrogate that feels like home. The trick is not to let them be that way to us. 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, stroking it with power. Only then will you be able to manifest your desire.

In order to achieve escape velocity we must learn to keep our own council, to move silently among doubters, to voice our plans among our allies, and to make our allies accurately.

Make a list: Those friends who will support me. Make another list: Those friends who won't. Name your W.B.'s for what they are — wet blankets. Wrap yourself in something else: dry ones. Fluffy, heated towels. Do not indulge or tolerate anyone who throws cold water in your direction. Forget good intentions, forget they didn't mean it. Remember to count your blessings and your toes, escape velocity requires the sword of steely intention and the shield of self determination.

They will try to get you. Don't forget that, set your goals and set your boundaries. Set your sites and don't let the ogre that looms on the horizon deflect your flight.

Tasks.

The Final Week: Keep up with the Morning pages and Artists date

1. Write down any resistances, angers, and fears you have about going on from here. We all have them.
2. Take a look at your current areas of procrastination. What are the payoffs in your waiting? Locate the hidden fears. Do a list on paper.
3. Sneak a peek at week one “core negative beliefs” (appended at the end of the task list). Laugh. Yes, the nasty critters are still there. Note your progress, and read yourself the affirmations that you invented to counter some of the core negatives. Write yourself some new ones about your continuing creative nurturance after this course is completed.
4. Mend any mending.
5. Repot any plants you have that are pinched.
6. Select a “God” jar. A what? A jar in which you place your fears, hopes, dreams, and worries into.
7. Use your jar. Start with your fear list from Task 1 above. When worried, remind yourself it's in the jar — “God's got it.” Then take the next action.
8. Now, check how: Honestly, what would you most like to create? Open-minded, what oddball paths would you dare to try? WIlling, what appearances are you willing to shed to pursue your dream?
9. List five people you can talk to about your dreams and with whom you feel supported to dream and then plan.
10. Reread this book. Share it with a friend. Remember that a miracle is one artist sharing with another. Trust God. Trust yourself.

From week one:

Core Negative Beliefs.

Most of the time when we're blocked it's because we feel safer that way. Fear of creativity is quite often fear of the unknown — at least we know HOW to be blocked, and how to be unhappy. If I am fully creative, what would that mean? We have an inner set of core negative beliefs that our psyche has set up to protect us from what it once experienced as a real threat. We have wonderful coping mechanisms, don't put them down! They keep us sane. But… they are buried deep, and they keep us locked up as well.

We think things like this.

“I can't be successful at what I want to be because…”

• I'll never be as good as others
• It's not important
• I'll embarrass myself or my family
• I can't be responsible for what I create
• People will dislike me or try to shoot me down
• I”ll think I'm good at it, and then discover I'm deluding myself
• I'll never make a living at it
• I'll never make a contribution worth making with it
• I'll overshadow my mentor
• I'll go crazy
• I'll be unattractive to men (or to women)
• I'll turn out just like… fill in the blank with the name of some jerk doing your thing
• I'll be alone
• I don't deserve to be successful
• I will only have one good piece of work in me, the rest will be pointless
• It's too late, I'm too old, I'm past the point that you can start this

None of these beliefs, or whatever yours are, is true. They are beliefs we took on from important people, or inferred from events we experienced when we were vulnerable.

What you are is scared. Core negative beliefs make sense out of fears, and they keep you scared. They attack your jugular, they go right for your core. How do you counter them? With… affirmations. Now. Isn't it interesting that affirmations seem foolish, dumb, hokey and embarrassing. But bludgeoning ourselves with negativity seems rational. Censors LOATHE anything that sounds like real self worth.