The Artist’s Way
Week 6 Reflections & 7 Instructions
Congratulations playmates — we are now over half way through this journey together! I hope you are enjoying your creative self, play and joyful imperfections! Onwards!
This week prompted us to think about money — I shared my answers to the Money Madness exercise online. This is what I spent the past week.
The exercise is supposed to teach us what you value in terms of spending.
It will teach you what you value in terms of your spending. Often our spending differs from our real values. We fritter away cash on things we don’t cherish and deny ourselves those things we do.
Once again, this exercise is not new to me — I’ve done penny-counting for weeks, maybe even months. This week’s spending suggests that I value food, giving, and travel. Dark chocolate is my daily luxury item because I know how much joy it brings me together with a decent coffee. I don’t deny myself this pleasure though I try to stick to my rules to limit consumption — only buy 70% dark chocolate Fair Trade. Seems to work well until others kindly give me non-Fair Trade as a gift! My main job pays less than $25 an hour and I feel very wealthy indeed. Things which make me feel rich include: going out for breakfast or having someone cook eggs for me, ordering soda water in a champagne glass with a slice of lemon when out and about, and sitting in a cafe reading a book. My favourite question and answer from Money Madness exercise was: People think money… will answer the questions they forgot to ask themselves.
I regularly ask myself the $500 million question as I noted in Figuring Out Your Way.
If you had $500,000,000 — what would you do? Quit your job? Go travelling? Take a holiday? Set up your family so they don’t have to worry either? Pay off an organic farming network to feed you and your family for the next few years? Buy your own secret nuclear bunker in a publicly disclosed location in Manningtree?! How do you actually want to live your life? Regularly visualising the details of your ideal life with $500 million could well add more value to your life than that money itself — especially in this highly uncertain world it’s now so clear we live in.
Most importantly, if, over an extended time period, there are drastic differences between your answer and what you are doing today, then you know it’s time to make change. Since I have regularly been asking myself the $500 million question and using it to make adjustments in life, week 6’s money tasks were not particularly useful for me.
Tasks
Natural abundance: I found five pretty leaves and three or four rocks (including a pine cone).
Clearing: there is no way I’m in a position to throw five more items of clothing away — I just put my entire ‘wardrobe’ in the washing machine and borrowed a new set of clothes to avoid public nudity. I thought about suggesting someone else clear away five things but who am I to tell them how to lead their lives, especially when I’m living for free in their house!
Creation: I cooked vege Thai curry for 5 people.
Send 5 postcards: work in progress I’m behind on this one!
Tasks 8, 9 10 seemed a little lazy on behalf of the author — not much to be done here!
I did morning pages about 4 days this week — where I wake (someone else’s, camping) affects whether or not I write them. Other waking pleasures may overrule writing!
For my artist’s date, I did another session of life drawing, playing with charcoals. I enjoyed playing in a new medium and had to wash my hands about every 10-minutes. I need to get creative to try new artist’s dates!
Week 7: Recovering a Sense of Connection
We turn this week to the practice of right attitudes for creativity. The emphasis is on your receptive as well as active skills. The essays, exercises, and tasks aim at excavating areas of genuine creative interest as you connect with your personal dreams.
Art is not about thinking something up. it is about the opposite — getting something down…. Instead of reaching for inventions, we are engaged in listening. We are more the conduit than the creator of what we express…. Learn to accept the possibility that the universe is helping you with what you are doing.
Perfectionism: a refusal to let yourself move ahead. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in geting the details right. Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results. Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again. No. We should not.
Question: What would I do if I didn’t have to do it perfectly?
Answer: A great deal more than I am.
- Complete the following sentence. “If I didn’t have to do it perfectly, I would try….”
- Jealousy Map: Make three columns — Column 1 Who: name those whom you are jealous of. Column 2 Why: be as specific and accurate as you can. Column 3 Action Antidote: Write one action you can take to move toward creative risk and out of jealousy. Make your jealousy map.
- Complete the sentences:
a) As a kid, I missed the chance to …. take gymnastic classes.
b) As a kid, I lacked …. worldly inspiration?
c) As a kid, I could have used …. a decent dad to be quite honest.
d) As a kid, I dreamed of being … somewhere else.
e) As a kid, I wanted a …
f) In my house, we never had enough … peace, calm.
g) As a kid, I needed more …. holding.
h) I am sorry that I will never again see …. grandma, we only met once when I was 10.
i) For years, I have missed and wondered about … what it’s like to feel like I belong somewhere.
j) I tear myself up about the loss of … some of my notebooks. - Positive stock — Complete the sentences:
a) I have a loyal friend in … my Director, Dancing Queen, my legal advisor, I have good choice in friends, obviously!
b) One thing I like about my town is the waterfront.
c) I think I have nice … legs and ass!
d) Writing my morning pages has shown me I can … talk a whole lot more disjointed shit and check back to it sometimes!
e) I am taking a greater interest in … play.
f) I believe I am getting better at …. being bad at things, like drawing.
g) My artist has started to pay more attention to …. beautiful buildings.
h) My self-care is … currently hindered by disrupted sleep patterns from my work.
i) I feel more … alive.
j) Possibly, my creativity is …. helping someone else even just a tiny bit? - Make this phrase a mantra: Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong. Post it wherever you will see it daily.
- Give yourself timeout to listen to one half or whole album. You can doodle at the same time if you want. Notice how giving yourself this time can refresh you.
- Take yourself to a sacred space — a church, library, woods and allow yourself to savour the silence and healing of solitude. Experiment.
- Create one wonderful smell in your house — eg. soup, incense, fir branches, do my farts smell like lavender?
- Wear your favourite item of clothing for no special occasion.
- Buy yourself one wonderful pair of socks!
- Collage — collect a stack of 10 magazine — collect any images that reflect your life or interests. Think of the collage as a form of pictorial autobiography. Include your past, present, future and your dreams. Find at least 20 images then stick them / arrange them as you please.
- Quickly list 5 favourite films. Do you see any common denominators among them? Name your favourite topics to read about. Are these topics in your collage?
- Give your collage a place of honour — in your closet, a drawer — anywhere that is yours. You might want to do a new one every few months.
Check in on day seven and look ahead to plan week 8. How many days did you do morning pages? How/did the morning pages work for you? Describe them — take a non-judgemental look back if you need to. Were you surprised to find yourself writing about anything? This is like a weekly scan of your moods, not a progress check. What did you do on your artist’s date and how was it? What would you like more of/less of in future artist’s dates? Were there any other issues you consider significant? Describe them. Did you experience any synchronicity, aka coincidences?
