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The Artist’s Way Month One Recap. Chapter One: Recovering a Sense of Safety

Hi! If you’re new here: I’m doing a year-long series where I work through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and document it here on the blog. This is the first post of the series (!!). You can find the explanation for this series here.

Recovering a sense of safety: shadow artists

The first thing we’re introduced to in chapter one of The Artist’s Way is the idea of shadow artists—people who were artists in childhood, but for one reason or another stopped tapping into their creativity as they got older. Shadow artists are those who work adjacent to the arts—either in their line of work or in the people they spend time with—but don’t necessarily spend time being creative themselves.

Until a few years ago, I unfortunately related to this. I wanted to make art, but instead made friends with and dated artists, people who painted or drew daily, people who were in bands or wrote novels. I never thought I could do any of these things—I thought it was for other people. In that sense, I’ve been recovering a sense of safety and have since changed how I look at creativity—I write, and draw, and knit, and play piano, occasionally—but I still find myself struggling to put it first, or make anything if I’m not in the mood.

Recovering a sense of safety: core negative beliefs

Chapter one of The Artist’s Way also talks about core negative beliefs and how they stop us from being creative, and how, when we flip those negative beliefs around, we can talk back to the critic in our heads and just create. Through this, we can start working toward recovering a sense of safety.

When I was younger, my core negative beliefs were “art is for other people” (it’s not) and “I could never focus long enough to write a novel” (I have since written a few novels) and “I could never be recognized as a writer” (I won’t list everything I’ve published here. Just know it’s a lot). 

Now, I think my only real core beliefs are “I could never make writing my full time job.” In line with Cameron’s suggestion of flipping core negative beliefs to positive affirmations, I’ll instead say: “I am capable of writing full time.”

Morning pages

Morning pages written this month: 26/30 (counting the two days following this post because I know I’ll do them).

For those of you unfamiliar with The Artist’s Way or morning pages: morning pages are a daily writing exercise where you dump everything in your brain onto the page. You’re supposed to just write—no stopping or reading back on what you read—for three whole pages. If you don’t know what to write, you write “I don’t know what to write” until you do.

Personally, I’ve never been all that good at following rules or instructions (no surprise to anyone who knows me in real life!). However, I do take these as guidelines. So, for the first few days, I was writing my morning pages by the book: three pages, no stopping or looking back. 

But, aside from my morning pages, I have a journal where I write every day: thoughts, ideas, what I’m planning for the day. Basically, morning pages, but smaller. And because I didn’t want to give up this journaling practice, and I also didn’t want to do three morning pages and write in my journal, I ended up combining them, which has worked so well for me.

There’s something about journaling every morning, even if just for a few minutes, that helps clear my head and get me sorted for the rest of the day. I actually only started this practice last October (almost exactly a year ago!), but I never want to go back to how often I was doing it before (sporadically, at best).

Artist dates

Another pillar of The Artist’s Way is artist dates, where you (the artist) take yourself on at least one date a week. This could be anything from writing in a coffee shop to visiting an art gallery to making art in the park. The goal of this is to “nurture your inner artist,” as Cameron states in the introduction of the book. 

She also states that these should be solo dates, but truly, am I going to follow the rules all the time? Certainly not. I think it’s important to bend things to fit who you are and what you want to be doing.

During September, I took myself on six artist dates:

• Time at a coffee shop to read and write (x2) (solo and with friends)
• Playing with tarot cards in the park (with a friend)
• Read/made art at the park (x2) (solo)
• Sat by the lake and watched geese fly overhead (with a friend)

Tasks

Every chapter, Cameron outlines a list of tasks for the reader to engage in. This chapter’s tasks were abundant, and so I chose two:

“Time Travel: Select and write out one happy piece of encouragement. Write a thank you letter. Mail it to yourself or the long lost mentor.”

“Time Travel: List three old champions of your creative self worth. This is your hall of champions, those who wish you and your creativity well. Be specific. Every encouraging word counts. Even if you disbelieve a compliment, record it. It may well be true.”

—Above quotes are taken from The Artist’s Way, Chapter One

Some important creative things of note for this month:

• I’ve been working hard on my novel and hit 36,000 words (up from about 8,000 at the beginning of the month!).
• I wrote a spooky short story—which I’m very proud of!—and submitted it to a local zine.
• I’m this close to finishing one of my (many) knitting projects: a patchwork cross body bag. I also started another: a small, patchwork rug for in my office.
• I made art for the first time in four months. It wasn’t anything huge, but it felt so good to wake up one morning and realize “Wow, I actually want to make art today.”
• I was recently hired as a learning support teacher, with a focus on social emotional learning (a fancy way of saying self care and emotional intelligence), a couple days a week. I’ve already had so much fun creating worksheets and posters for the kids, and am excited I get to stretch my creative muscles in this new way!

How did you make time to be creative this month? And what did you create?

xoxo

Catherine

Free Printable Planner Page

P.S. As part of my creative journey, I’ve started making printables! Some of them will correspond with blog posts, others will just be useful things to help you in your day-to-day lives. You can download the first one here!

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