Just Do It! - Rediscovering a Sense of Strength Artist Way Creative Workshop Wk 8 08/02/23

As creatives, we must learn to become survivors and not victims of artistic losses in our lives. Julia Cameron addresses many causes of Artist Losses. “Creativity cannot be quantified in intellectual terms”. However, we creatives, and most of society for that matter, including our parents, family, friends, teachers, and mentors’ default to this way of thinking, categorizing, evaluating, and treating artists or creatives. There is a lot of power or impact on your artist child in these interactions, sometimes stunting our growth before we even get started.

Depending on how these interactions or criticisms impacted our artistic child, we may experience it as an artistic loss, a loss of hope, a loss of face, a loss of money, or worse, a loss of self-belief. This is how we rediscover a sense of strength, through learning how to survive these losses through a few key essential steps.

· First, we need to acknowledge the loss, no matter how logical, silly, or embarrassing it may seem to us. Because an unmoved disappointment becomes the barrier that separates us from our future dreams.

· Second, every loss must be viewed as a potential gain. It is in how we frame the entire situation. Instead of asking Why Me? We need to ask, “How? and/or What next”?

· Third, we need to remember that our inner artist is in fact a child who needs mothering, and encouragement. We need to tell ourselves that we acknowledge who we are, our loss, and our pain and promise ourselves that our creative future will be worth having.

· Finally, we need to take action to rediscover our strengths. Creativity lies in doing no matter how small. The focus is on the process that retains a sense of adventure and possibility. We need to also focus on “filling the form”, which means taking the next small step, working with what we have instead of what we do not have in our lives. Sometimes as creatives, we have to admit that we become addicted to anxiety. We tend to prefer low-grade pain and occasional. heart-stopping panic attack to the drudgery of small and simple daily steps in the right direction.

Ask yourself this week, what can I do, right now, as it is? Then follow Nike’s slogan – Just Do It!

This week our artist’s creative activity is jewelry. We selected jewelry because it’s fun, but also because we overlook how we express ourselves through our clothes, accessories, hair, make-up, and jewelry we wear day to day. The color we select reflects our mood and even helps give us more confidence and swagger in our day. Jewelry expresses how we feel, our sense of style, a reminder of a special person, a memory, a place, and represents meaning in our lives. We worked on a beaded necklace with jump rings, a pendant, and a clasp ring with elastic cording. Next, we used premade and purchased pieces made short work of a new set of earrings. Finally, we made a bracelet using a double adjustable knot. This is a knot I have been wanting to learn how to do. Successful jewelry-making session.

Remember next week we are discussing Chapter 9 rediscovering a sense of compassion and making a fairy garden. Your imagination for your fairy garden is your only limit on this project. Just have fun with it, collect things around the house, make your pieces, and see what you can find at the local dollar store, hobby store, or even garden center. There are kits if you prefer to follow something specific, but you can create something from recycled materials as well. Looking forward to next week.