Thursday, May 02, 2019

The Artist's Way


About a month ago I began a 12-week course called "The Artist's Way." I had never heard of it before I started it. My sister-in-law Laurie is doing it and encouraged me to give it a try. And by "encouraged" I mean she bought me the book and a journal to go along with it and said, "Do this." Couldn't get more "encouraged" than that!

Here's the gist of the book and course: all human beings, having been created, are capable of  creativity. We simply have to channel the creativity that is given to us by [insert belief here, God, the Universe, the Divine One, whatever or whomever], and creativity is ours to tap into at any time. We do not have to "wait" for inspiration, we simply need to be open to the experience, or as the author says, "unblocked," be still, and listen.

In a nutshell.

What I'm finding is that to "unblock" your creative self you need to do a lot of self-assessment. Outside of going to therapy, which only a portion of the population does, how else do people improve their personal selves? I've been to hours and hours of professional training: nonprofit conferences, writing/storytelling seminars, how to be a better manager, how to be a better employee, etc. etc. But this course is really "how to be a better person."

My whole sober curious journey began when I started thinking about things that block my creativity, and alcohol was one of them. I decided to try cutting it out of my life, and in the very next chapter I read, "At this point in your journey you may find yourself wanting to remove some toxicity from your life, be it a toxic friend or a toxic behavior." Huh! Imagine that, I was one week ahead of the author.

It has you do exercises like: "If you had five other lives to live, what other professions would you be or do?" Then the next day it has you list 5 more. One of the exercises has you list 20 things you enjoy doing. Twenty! Try it. I did, and I was at a loss after eight. I've got to start some hobbies before I can retire or I'm going to be bored AND boring!

I'm on Week 4 which is the "reading deprivation" week. This is the week that you are not allowed to read anything, to create silence within yourself to allow your own creativity to flow. Two things about this were crushing for me:

1. I just started the novel "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman and it is AMAZING. I'm only a few chapters in and now had to take a one-week break from it which makes me mad because I can't wait to pick it up again.

2. "No reading" also means no social media, so I deleted my social media icons off my phone and logged out on my computer so I'm not tempted to scroll.

The social media one is by far more difficult. Still, five days into this reading deprivation thing, I find myself automatically hitting where the icons on my phone used to be. I check it out of habit several times an hour. It's a great habit to break, I may just leave the icons off my phone from now on.

Supposedly I'm going to start hating this journey starting around week 5 or 6, so I thought I'd better write about it now before I turn against it. We'll see how all of this goes!

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