The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
The world is filled with self-proclaimed gurus, writing with the promise of showing you the way toward a more creative version of yourself. Although these are most likely made with the best intentions, I never really had any inspiration to make anything, or even really considered myself a creative person, until I happened upon The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. This book has been around since 1992, with over 4 million copies sold over its existence. Its timelessness, relevance, and practical wisdom make it an ideal Book Club recommendation. I was enticed by the multitude of critically acclaimed, well-known artists of today–Alicia Keys, Pete Townshend of the Who, among others– that swear by the practices they cultivated per Cameron’s recommendations. Elizabeth Gilbert mentions that there would be no Eat Pray Love without this book. And for me, no blog post! So sit back and grab yourself a fruity thing to sip on, time to explore what this book is about.
Summary
Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is a guided path to creative living. Through the weekly exercises, daily stream-of-consciousness writing, and Artist Dates, Cameron allows us to channel our “spiritual electricity” to conquer creative blocks and tap into our creative selves. She argues that everyone can exercise their own creativity, regardless of profession or skill level. The goal is to tap into this energy source and share it with the world in a way that is original to you. Cameron explains that with these tools, “writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.”
The Basic Tools
Morning Pages
Cameron calls these the “brain drain:” three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing completed as soon as you wake up. This is to free yourself of all the angry, whiny, petty stuff that stands between you and your creativity, and is the “primary tool of creative recovery.” Through the pages, we work through what she calls the Censor, our internalized perfectionism that stops us from getting words on the page, painting on the canvas, or sculpting the clay.
“She’s given you an assignment that is doable, and I think it’s kind of a cognitive centering device. Like scribbly meditation…It’s sort of like how manicurists put smooth pebbles in the warm soaking water, so your fingers have something to do, and you don’t climb the walls.”
- Novelist Anne Lamott for the NY Times
Artist Date
The Artist Date is a tool that allows you to receive inspiration, insight, and guidance. More specifically, this is dedicated time each week, around 2 hours, that you set aside to spend time on your creativity alone. Cameron likens your imagination to a child and urges us to spend quality time nurturing it. Maybe you spend time at a craft store, thrift store, beach, museum, or art gallery. Whatever it is, it’s about the time spent, not the money: “what the child wants is attention, not expensive outings.”
What the Artist’s Way Did for Me
I still do the Morning Pages, and often channel my frustrations, confusions, and insecurities onto the page. If I have big questions about what to do next on a project, I often ask them and get closer to an answer by the end of my pages. With the performative nature of social media, space for reflection and self-exploration must be intentionally set aside, and this book was a gentle nudge towards creating this space. Of the exercises, my favorite was a prompt that guided me to describe my ideal life as an 80-year-old. The process of picturing and writing down where I saw my life as an old woman uncovered a lot about my true personal values, and now reminds me to actively pursue what 80-year-old Marg would be proud to have done: sharing meals with friends, having a lush garden, spending more time exploring in the ocean. Ultimately, I’ve learned to relinquish myself from the heavy pressure and urgency I find myself consumed in on a daily basis. I’ve learned to listen to what I actually care about, and have allowed this new knowledge to guide my creativity. When my therapist first recommended this book, I didn’t consider myself an artist in the slightest. Now, I’ve emerged, lots of morning pages later, with a reshaped definition of what it means to be creative. It’s taken work, but I’ve learned to fall in love with the process of creation and to hold it as a sacred practice rather than a strict goal or objective that must be reached to evade failure. The Artist’s Way continues to redirect me toward myself and my own creative dreams, and it might do the same for you, too.
“I have come to believe that creativity is our true nature, that blocks are unnatural thwarting of a process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming of a flower at the end of a slender green stem.”
-Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
All photos are by Ean Sierra. Check out his Instagram here.
