Being Creative is a Courageous Act - The Artist Way Creative Workshop Week Four

Being creative is a Courageous Act. Allowing yourself the time to quiet your mind, heart, and body to open up to exploration, inquiry, spiritual guidance, and self-introspection seems like an easy and frivolous activity in today’s world. However, truly spending time on these creative opportunities whether it be the morning pages, journaling, meditation, sensory walking, artist dates, and creative projects begin to reveal deep seeded negative beliefs, criticisms, expectations, and emotions like shame, fear, and anger associated with being a creative person. We cover up these negative associations with creative endeavors with many different mental tools, like saying it doesn’t matter, believing that we just are not meant to be an artist or creative, and being too busy, too old, too young, too you fill in the blank to even consider being creative. When we begin to uncover these negative associations, we may even become fearful of what it might do in our lives, how it might change us, or what it might require of us to actually change. Sometimes others do not like that we are making these changes, will it require them to change, or they secretly wish they could do it as well. By the same token, we are not quite ready for all these emotions, or thoughts so we find ways to slow ourselves down, put on the breaks, and prevent our own progress.

In this week’s Artist Way Creative Workshop, we discussed Chapter 4, Recovering a Sense of Integrity. She brings up how this is about the time in the program and in our progress when we question the effectiveness of doing any of it, morning pages, the artist’s dates, etc. She expresses that this is what these exercises, especially the morning pages, do for us that require us to continue using them to go deeper in our introspection and excavation of our inner creative artist child. It is also the process that allows us to connect with our Creator, establish a greater relationship, allow ourselves to listen, and notice how creativity works in our lives. How essential it is to experience joy, beauty, love, self-acceptance, and respect, and how we express it to others in our lives.

Julia Cameron also expresses how this process of unblocking our creative inner artist child offers us clarity, awareness, and self-knowledge. A process that many forget to pursue because they allow themselves to be ruled or dictated to by blindly following or adhering to external guidance and dogma. On the other hand, the more self-knowledge and awareness you can have more integrity in your life because you are making the choice in what you believe based on who are as a person in relation to your creator.

We worked on Blackout Poetry for this week’s Artist Date Project. Everyone selected three of their favorite song’s lyrics and printed them out or worked from a computer. We discussed how Blackout Poetry got started in 2005 when Austin Kleon began posting his blackout poetry in newspapers and it went viral. We discussed the process of creating poetry from found words on the page already written. Circling the words that stand out to you in pencil looking for word choice, imagery, mood, and theme without needing to consider rhyme or specific poetry styles. Once a poem emerges from the words selected, we finalize our poems, making sure to consider our readers will read the poem top-down and from left to right. Once finalized and happy with our poem, it was time to blackout the remaining words on the page. How each one went about doing this was completely up to the individual. Use of color and composition, theme, imagery, and style were all utilized on the pages. They were then placed on a nice scrapbooking paper backing to add to our art journals.

Remember that I try to plan these activities to allow everyone to work at their own pace. Some people are very quick to create and may need more to do in each workshop meeting. Others may only get one complete or nearly complete in the given time. That is completely acceptable. In fact, I highly encourage everyone to complete all our project’s art journal pages and to go back to work on their art journals to add more elements, reflections, writings, etc.

Next Week we will be discussing Chapter 5- Rediscovering a Sense of Possibility. We will be working on Origami projects. Suggested supplies include:

A selection of colored origami paper

A Ruler

Double-sided tape

A Paper folder for edges and folds

Small paper clips

Scissors