According to Julia Cameron, many creative people spend years mislabeling themselves. When we do not create the way we think we should, we label ourselves lazy when in fact we are blocked by fear. The way past fear, asserts Cameron, is through love for your inner artist. Your inner artist is like a child in […]
“Filling the form” means to respect the creative process by making the commitment each day to take the next required step, and then the next step after that. We simply make small changes and take small actions right now where we are, with what we have available, to ultimately shift the trajectory of our creative […]
According to Julia Cameron, we need to take the pain of artistic losses or failures and ask: “How does this loss serve me? Where does it point my work?” What if you could turn that pain into creative energy to recover and keep moving forward? What if you could use a painful creative loss to […]
Week 8 of the Artist’s Way program discusses how to nurture hope and the courage to create despite the pain and loss of failure. I’d say, “Non illegitimi te carborundum*” pretty much sums it up; the chapter title is “Recovering a Sense of Strength.” Many Kinds of Artistic Loss Julia Cameron considers artistic survival to […]
Being creative and creating new work involve taking risks and “moving out of the head and into action” as Julia Cameron succinctly describes it in The Artist’s Way. But most of us are very careful not to take risks. We’d rather be safe, but safety keeps us blocked, and so we are stuck. Is this […]
Perfectionism is such a fabulous trap. It sounds so lofty and pure and worthy to insist on our creative work being perfect. But aiming for perfection means there is always some aspect yet to be fixed, yet another detail to improve, tweak, polish, fine-tune, finesse… This obsessive mindset or standard or expectation means that the […]
In chapter five of the landmark creativity book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, Julia Cameron discusses some unexpected reasons for how and why creative people stay blocked or stuck. For example, we may unintentionally limit what we can achieve by ruling out an idea as crazy or impossible — when in […]
Reading deprivation is the infamous main event during Week 4 of The Artist’s Way program, based on the iconic book by Julia Cameron. The thing about reading and other similar inputs we add to fill up our lives — such as internet browsing, on-line media consumption, listening to talk radio, mindless television viewing, overly long, […]
Julia Cameron is a firm proponent of Synchronicity and she discusses it at length in the third chapter of her creativity book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, in the context of a creative person recovering a sense of power. According to Cameron, synchronicity is a source of power whether you believe […]
In week three of the creativity program outlined in The Artist’s Way, author Julia Cameron encourages recovering or emerging creatives to discover a sense of power. One of the sources for that power is anger. How Angry Are You? You might not think you are angry at all. I certainly didn’t realize how angry I […]