Book Quotes — The Artist’s Way

This book is written by Julia Cameron.

I first purchased it back in 2018, when i was going through a change in my life and a friend recommended me to reach this book. It’s designed to write three pages a day and also to have an artist day with yourself every week. Carving some time for personal self to enjoy and do something with pure joy. I enjoyed those principals and I also enjoyed how each week there was a reading to go with unblocking our creative selves.

Basic Principles

1. Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy.
2. There is an underlying in-dwelling creative force infusing all of life — including ourselves.
3. When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives.
4. We are ourselves, creations. And we, in turn, are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves.
5. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God
6. The refusal to be creative is self-will and is counter to our true nature.
7. When we open ourselves to exploring our creativity, we open ourselves to God: good orderly direction.
8. As we open our creative channel to the creator, many gentle but powerful changes are to be expected.
9. it is safe to open ourselves up to greater and greater creativity.
10. Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.

MORNING PAGES

3 pages of allowed and free-flowing thought

ARTIST DAY

do what intrigues you, explore what interests you, think mystery, not mastery.

Week 1: Recovering A Sense of Self

• It takes nurturing to make an artist.
• Creativity is play, learning to all themselves to play. Your artist is a child. Learning to let yourself create is like learning to walk. The artist child must begin by crawling. Baby steps will follow. It’s necessary to go gently and slowly. What we are after here is the healing of old wounds. Progress, not perfection!
• Give yourself permission to be a beginner.

Week 2: Recovering A Sense of Identify

• Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance. You will be led to new sources of support as you begin to support yourself.
• When the universe gave him what he wanted, he gave the gift right back. Creative recovery is an exercise in open-mindedness. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention. Attention is an act of connection.

Exercise: list 20 things you enjoy doing. Look for windows of time just of your, to win back the autonomy with your time.

Week 3: Recovering A Sense of Power

• Anger is meant to be respected. Anger is a map. Anger will always tell us when we have been betrayed. It will always tell us that it is time to act in our own best interests.
• Answered prayers are scary. They imply responsibility. You asked for it. Now that you’ve got it, what are you going to do? Ask and you shall receive. It’s time to take your own ideas seriously enough to treat them well. Take a small step in the direction of a dream and watch the synchronous doors flying open. God helps those who help themselves.
• Never say you can do something, instead that say that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow. First, choose what you would do. Then how usually falls into place of itself. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it!
• Adults who grew up in dysfunctional homes learn to use this coping device very well. They call it detachment, but it is actually numbing out. By telling our shame secrets around our art and telling them through our art, we release ourselves and others from darkness. This release is not always welcomed.
• Make a commitment to quiet time. Just Show Up. Clarity creates change.

Excercise: Jot down notes to yourself on what concepts or phrases bother you. Do something very nurturing for yourself — read an old good review or recall a compliment. Get back on the horse. Make an immediate commitment to do something creative. 2) take a look at what you really like and really admire, and a look at what you think you should like and admire.

Week 4: Recovering A Sense of Integrity

• As we notice which friends bore us, which situations leave us stifled, we are often rocked by waves of sorrow. As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment.
• One of the clearest signals that something healthy is afoot is the impulse to weed out, sort through, and discard old clothes, papers and belongings. By tossing out the old and unworkable, we make way for the new and suitable. The old you is leaving and grieving, while the new you celebrate and grows strong. your old life has crashed and burned; your new life isn't apparent yet. You may feel yourself to be temporary without a vehicle. Just keep walking. Emptying our lives of distraction we are actually filing the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world.
• Choose affirmations according to your needs.

Week 5: Recovering A Sense of Possibility

• God is our source, an energy flow that likes to extend itself, we become more able to tap our creative power effectively. When you become willing to receive your good, she stopped being victimized. God will provide. Our job is to listen to how.
• We can list areas in which we need guidance. Ask for answers in the evening, listen for answers in the morning. Be open to all help. Recovery is the process of finding the river and saying yes to its flow, rapids and all. learning to accept this generosity
• What are my needs?

Week 6: Recovering A Sense of Abundance

• Snowflakes — the ultimate exercise in sheer creative glee. No two alike.
• It begins with getting into the now and enjoying your day. It begins with giving yourself some small treats and breaks. What we really want to do is what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.
• We need to be available to the universal flow. The small gifts of life. What gives us true joy?
• Creative living requires the luxury of time, which we carve out for ourselves. It requires the luxury of space for ourselves, even if all we manage to carve out is one special bookshelf.
• Often our spending different from our real values. We fritter away cash on things we don’t cherish and deny ourselves those things we do.

Week 7: Recovering A Sense of Connection

• Ability to listen is a skill we are honing with both our morning pages and our artist dates. The moments of clear inspiration require that we move into them on faith. Do this, try this, say this. What you want to experience already exists. My job is to listen for it, watch it with mind’s eye, and write it down. The creator will hand you whatever you need for the project. The minute you are willing to accept the help of this collaborator, you will see useful bits of help everywhere in your life. Learn to accept the possibility that the universe is helping you with what you are doing. Become willing to see the hand of God and accept it as a friend’s offer to help with what you are doing.
• Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead it is a loop — an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. Do not fear mistakes. There are none. The perfectionist is never satisfied The perfectionist never says, this is pretty good, i think i’ll just keep going. 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. A film is never cut perfectly, but at a certain point you let go and call it done. That is a normal part of creativity — letting go. We always do the best that we can by the light we have to see by.
• Move out of the head and into action.
• Once we accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly our options widen. If I didn't have to do it perfectly, i would try…”
• Jealousy is a map. Each of our jealousy maps differs. My jealousy had actually been a mask for my fear of doing something I really wanted to do but was not yet brave enough to take action toward. jealousy is always a mask for fear: fear that we aren’t able to get what we want; frustration that somebody else seems to be getting what is rightfully ours even if we are too frightened to reach for it. There is room for all of us.

Week 8: Recovering A Sense of Strenght

• every end is a beginning. Struck by a loss, we focus, understandably, on what we leave behind, the lost dream of the work’s successful fruition and its buoyant reception. We need to focus on what lies ahead. This can be tricky. We may not know what lies ahead. And if the present hurts this badly, we tend to view the future as impending pain. How can this loss serve me? Where does it point my work?
• If you break a task down into daily increments that small smattering of writing can get done quickly and promptly — before the dirty laundry. And it can carry you through the rest of your day guilt-free and less anxious. it is best to just admit that there is always one action you can take for your creativity daily. This daily-action commitment fills the form.
• Take a scary baby step toward our dreams, we rush to the edge of the cliff and then stand there, quaking, saying, i cant leap. Creativity requires activity, and this is not good news to most of us. It makes us responsible, and we tend to hate that. you mean I have to do something in order to feel better?

Week 9: Recovering A Sense of Compassion

• Finding it har to begin a project does not mean you will not be able to do it. It means you will need help — from your higher power, from supportive friends, an from yourself. You must give yourself permission to begin small and go in baby steps. These steps must be rewarded. There is only one cure for fear. That cure is love.

Week 10: Recovering A Sense of Self -Protection

• Blocking is essentially an issue of faith. Rather than writing, and see where it takes us, we pick up a block. Hapy is terrifying, unfamiliar, out of control, too risky.
• People are too busy to hear the voice of authentic creative urges. We are very often working to avoid ourselves, our real feelings. Play can make a workaholic very nervous. Fun is scary.
• A workaholic gets sober by abstaining from overwork. The trick is to define overwork. Your time log will help you find those areas where you need to create boundaries.

Week 11: Recovering A Sense of Autonomy

• I must experiment with what works for me.
• To allow a sense of play in your relationship to accepted standards. To ask the questions Why? to be an artist is to risk admitting that much of what is money, property and prestige strikes you as just a little silly.
• Credibility lies with you and God, not your family or friends.
• We need to move out of the head and into a body of work. Moving meditation. This means one where the act of motion puts us into the now and helps us to stop spinning. Twenty minutes a day is sufficient. The goal is to connect to a world outside of us, to lose the obsessive self-focus of self-exploration and simply explore. One quickly notes that when the mind is focused on other, the self often comes into a far more accurate focus.
• Exercise teaches the rewards of the process. It teaches the sense of satisfaction over small tasks well done. We learn to move through the difficulty.
• We do learn by going. We learn to look at things from a new perspective.
• We are meant to celebrate the good things of this earth. Pretty leaves, rocks, candles, sea treasures all these remind us of our creator.

Week 12: Recovering A Sense of Faith

• The truth is that we are meant to be bountiful and live. Our truest dream for ourselves is always God’s will for us. 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 trigger the support of the universe.
• There is a path for each of us. By trusting, we learn to trust.
• The truth is that this is how to raise the best ideas. Let them grow in dark and mystery. let them form on the roof of our consciousness. Trust the process. Keep Walking.
• We must get serious about taking ourselves lightly. We must work oat learning how to play. Creativity must be free.
• You must hold your intention within yourself, stoking it with power. Only then will you be able to manifest what you desire. We must learn to keep our own counsel, to move silently among doubters, to voice our plans only among our allies, and to name our allies accurately. Make a list: those friends who will support me. Make another list: those friends who won’t. Set your goals and set your boundaries.