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 […]
Author and creativity expert Julia Cameron explains that creating should not be a difficult process of thinking something up; instead it is a way of “getting something down” and doing so without strain. Some people might call this being in a state of creative flow. Plumbing the Deep Well of Creativity Instead of thinking desperately […]
In good times as well as in bad, our beliefs about money can restrain our creativity. Do you, like many creative types, feel it is inevitable to be struggling and broke because we want to be an artist, actor, writer, musician, fill in the blank instead of working at a “real” job? Do you think […]
Creativity is a hungry beast and if the artist doesn’t feed it right, the result is implosion, artistic anorexia. Feed your creativity a steady diet of input – besides the weekly Artist Date recommended in the Artist’s Way program, also give it “creative solitude” or what Julia Cameron describes as taking the time to do […]
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 […]
Not doing your Artist’s Way Morning Pages by hand? It’s surprising how many of us really resist this directive. Doing the daily pages and writing them out by hand is an important part of the process. Author and teacher Julia Cameron gives all sorts of reasons why, but for me the critical aspect is that […]
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, […]
What do shame and creativity have in common? Possibly lots. In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron ties the two together in many ways and offers methods for artists to use to cope with shame and learn to deal with criticism. Shameful Secrets, Darker Thoughts Making art can be a form of secret telling, […]
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 […]