Week 4 : Recovering A Sense of Integrity

Honest Changes.

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.

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
– Seneca

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

Checking in.

The third week may find you dealing with unaccustomed bursts of energy and sharp peaks of anger, joy, and grief. You are coming into your power as the illusory hold of your previously accepted limits is shaken. You will be asked to consciously experiment with spiritual open-mindedness.

How many days this week did you complete the morning pages? How was that experience for you? Anything surprise you there? Anything hold you back there?

Did you do your artist date this week? What did you do? How did it feel?

Did you experience any synchronicity this week? (Magical coincidences that supported your stated aim?) Did you encounter criticism in a different way?

Were there any other issues this week that you felt had to do with recovering a sense of creativity?

The Fourth Week. Recovering a sense of integrity.

 

Honest Changes.

Morning pages help us, among other things, begin to note the difference between our real feelings and our public, official feelings. Official feelings are often preceded by the phrase “I feel okay about that (job loss, missing friend, someone dating someone else…).

What does “I feel okay” mean? Resignation? Acceptance? Suppressed emotions or numbness? “Okay” is a squirmy kind of word with no real meaning which frequently signals a loss. In the morning pages, because they are personal and not shared, we have the opportunity to say out loud the underlying emotion. Getting out of denial is a first step toward healing. People tend to avoid the morning pages when they DON'T want to admit feelings — we suddenly find we just don't have time to write when something is quietly waiting to surface that we're pretty sure it's safer to just stuff, or leave unexamined — it can be anything from not wanting to deal with anger to not wanting to burst the bubble on happiness. The morning pages are where we find ourselves, orient ourselves, and keep a line of communication open to our selves.

Checkhov advised, “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” In order to have self expression, we must first have a self to express.

Identifying the self means setting boundaries around what we are and are not — it means eliminating ambiguity, arriving at clarity and clarity creates change. “I have outgrown this job.” May appear in the morning pages. At first it's a troubling perception, then it may become a call to action, and then an action plan.

We may want our illusions back at first! They left us comfortably stuck. I don't WANT to raise my consciousness! I want… I want… and the morning pages help us identify what we want. We're used to feeling abandoned. The morning pages find us a constant ally, our own selves. How cool is that?

Change, however, does not tend to come without a spiritual sneeze. She calls it a kriya, from the Sanskrit, meaning a spiritual emergency or surrender — i tis that cold you always get what you've pushed yourself to the limit to accomplish some goal, the asthma attack when you're having a talk with your alcoholic brother. Always significant, frequently psychosomatic, kriyas are the final insult our psyche adds to our injuries — GET IT? They ask. You can't work an 80 hour week. You can't stay up all night studying and then work in the morning. You can't rescue a friend or brother, they have to heal themselves.

The morning pages point you to the actions you will take to heal yourself, to have the life you want, to realize your dreams. They keep you returning to your own inner voice, your own truth.

People often think the artistic life is a life based on fantasy. It is not. It is based on truth. As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. We become original because we become something specific, an origin from which our work flows.

This may feel disorienting. We had built a false sense of self, and letting that go leaves us fresh and unsure of our edges. Shifts in taste and perception frequently follow this transition — you may find yourself giving away old clothes you no longer want, repainting rooms, reorganizing spaces and schedules to fit a new sense of direction.

You may find yourself volatile and changeable — as old emotions get unlocked, you may find you're depressed, or exhilarated, or enraged. Think of yourself as an accident victim walking away from a wreck — your old life has crashed and burned, your new life is not yet apparent, and you may not even have a vehicle yet. Dont' worry, just, keeping walking.

Then again, some people don't Feel It. They say, “it's not happening to me. I'm not changing.” Actually, you are. The morning pages are like a way of wiping at the glass of the mirror, each swipe clears away some of the mist between you and your real reflection. Keep gently writing, it reveals you. We often blur that unique self with sugar, alcohol, drugs, overwork, underplay, bad relationships, toxic sex, under-exercise, over-TV, under-sleep — many and varied forms of junk food for the soul.

The morning pages both accelerate the process of recovering, and giving us a place to rest from it. They are like a boat that you can lay down in and rest, while still moving forward.

Use them this week to affirm your right to excavate buried dreams… write for yourself, “A stronger and clearer and healthier me is emerging.” Or “I am recovering and enjoying my real identity.” Or… whatever is the right affirmation for you.

Buried Dreams: An exercise.

As recovering creatives, we often have to excavate our own pasts for the shards of buried dreams and delights. Do a little fast and furious digging. THis is an exercise in spontaneity, write quickly: speed kills the censor.

List:

• 5 hobbies that sound fun
• 5 classes that sound fun
• 5 things you personally would NEVER do that sound fun
• 5 skills that would be fun to have
• 5 things you used to enjoy doing
• 5 silly things you'd like to try once

Reading Deprivation.

Words are like tiny tranquilizers. Like greasy food, media clogs our systems. Too much and we feel fried.

With no novel, study, facebook, or television to distract us an evening becomes a vast savannah to reorganize closets, furniture, our lives. We write, we draw, we ride, we go for a walk… reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a space we begin to immediately want to fill with someone else's thoughts. We do anything we can to avoid hearing our own thoughts.

This week we're going to keep the inflow of other people's ideas and chatter to a minimum. We will be rewarded for this with alarming speed. Our own outflow, our own ideas and thoughts and feeling sand creative urges will begin to push away the sludge blocking the pipeline, and we'll find our own wellspring of creativity running more clearly with each moment. Honest.

This is not easy at first. Reading deprivation is a very powerful tool, and can be a very frightening one. Fear has another face in anger, even thinking about not reading, not watching television, not listening to talk radio, can bring up enormous rage. Reading and being entertained is actually an addiciotn. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, and rather than cooking up something of our own.

By the way, don't fill the time with chattering endless telephone conversations or text messaging. Good conversations, yes, prattling on with friends just to avoid thinking, no.

Things you will have to read: stop signs, notes from clients, business that can't be postponed. Honestly limit the amount you read to what you absolutely have to, if you can't eliminate it altogether. And if you find you can put it off til next week, do.

Those who most resist this week will get the most out of doing it.

Things you can do instead of reading:

• Write.
• Clean your room.
• Wash your clothes.
• Tie-dye your clothes.
• Write to your friends, just don't read their responses until next week.
• Paint your face. Paint a friend's face.
• Meditate.
• Dance.
• Work out.
• Have friends over for dinner.
• Ride a horse. Ride several horses.
• Clean your tack room.
• Super-groom those winter woolies.
• Go dancing.
• Listen to music.

Sooner or later, if you are not reading or being entertained by television or other people's story lines. you're going to start to play. Don't read, don't watch television, stay off line, don't listen to media. If you can't think of anything else to do, do the cha-cha-cha.

Tasks.

The Fourth Week –

Reading and media deprivation. Music is alright, writing is alright.

Morning pages and Artist's date –

Remember, it's supposed to delight you.

1. Environment: Describe your ideal environment. Is it in town? Country? Swank? Cozy? One paragraph. Find one image, either drawn or cut out of a magazine or something, that conveys this idea. Season: what's your favorite season? Why? Find or draw an image of this. Place these images near your working area.
2. Time Travel: Describe yourself at 80. What did you do after you were 50 that you enjoyed? Be specific. Write a letter from yourself at 80 to yourself at your current age. What would you tell yourself? What interests would you urge yourself to pursue? What dreams would you encourage?
3. Time Travel: Remember yourself at 8. What did you like to do? What were your favorite things? Now write a letter from yourself at 8 to yourself now. What would you tell yourself?
4. Environment: Look at your house. Is there any room that you could make into a secret private space for yourself? If you have only one room, can you hang a curtain over a corner? This is a dreaming area. Decorate it for fun, have a place to sit, something to write on, some kind of little special area for flowers or rocks or candles to remind you that creativity is a magical endeavor, not an ego based one.
5. Re-make your life pie from week two. Divide a circle into six parts. Label one piece spirituality, one exercise, one romance, one play, one work, one friends and family. Place a dot in each section at the level to which you are fulfilled in that area — out on the rim if you're delighted with that part of your life, in toward the center if you are less fulfilled. Connect the dots. Has your lopsidedness altered itself a bit? Find a tiny way to nurture the areas you are impoverished.
6. Write your own “artist's prayer”, or “artist's statement of intent”. Begin with something like, “Life is meant to be lived, not hidden from, and I ask the world to support me in living my life authentically.” Ask for what you want support in, take a stand for yourself as a creative person and request the universe to line up with you in this stance.
7. Plan an extended artist's date. A whole day doing something that absolutely enchants you. Get ready to have it happen, schedule it, do it if you can this week.
8. Open your closet and throw out one low-self-worth outfit. You know what we mean. Make a space for a new, REAL self worth outfit.
9. Look at one situation or set of circumstances in your life that you feel you should change but haven't. What is the payoff for you in staying stuck in that? No shame, just identify what you are getting from staying with something you think you'd like to change.
10. If you break your reading/television/radio other people's voices deprivation, write about how you did it. In a tantrum? A slip-up? A binge? How do you feel about it? Why? What did you learn about how to relate to other's voices?

I’ll be posting my check-in notes to the comments. Please share your experiences from Week Three's exercises, if you need support in an area you’re struggling with reach out for encouragement.