From Hustle to Flow: My Artist’s Way Experiment, Part 3

In this continuation of my journey through Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way, I'll cover my own experiences with Week 1, which focuses on recovering your sense of safety.

✔️ Many parents don't say, "Experiment. Try it out. See what happens." A toddler making a finger painting? Sure. But teens ready to decide what to do in life? Nope. It's all about money and the ability to find a job. 

✔️ Early criticism can stay with us if not properly exorcised.

✔️ Shadow artists are frequently found attached to practicing artists. 

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/0143129252 

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Decoding the Unicorn is live on Amazon! Check it out: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron, recovering safety, creative self, shadow artists, inner artist, morning pages, artist date, limiting beliefs, negative beliefs, imaginary lives, synchronicity, inspiration, self-nurturing, creative growth.

 Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I will be continuing my walk through Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, and what I'm learning as I go through Week by week. Today I will cover week one, which is recovering a sense of safety. And that's a big one. No wonder she puts this at the very beginning as week one, I'll talk about things that I've learned, painful points, fun points, things that have been jubilant, things that have been terrible. Whew, big, heavy sigh. And don't worry if you're not an artist, if you don't feel creative in air quotes, that's okay. You don't have to sit this one out, because there are concepts and tools that are applicable across genres, across categories of work. So stay tuned.

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So as I mentioned, week one is about recovering a sense of safety, and she does warn that you may feel a lot of mixed emotions as you go through this week, and it's really your first week in the program. So anytime you're trying something new, especially if you're coming to this book for the very first time, which I'm in that category, you don't know what to expect. It's bit like being Stranger in a Strange Land. And I had to wrestle with this idea of, well, what does recovery mean to me anyway? Because I hadn't been working as an artist. It's not like, Well, I started out as a painter or a sculptor or a published author, and then I got away from that for a while to get sucked into corporate America. And now I want to come back. For 15 years I was involved in staffing, recruiting and HR work, and for five years before that, I was doing technical writing and AutoCAD drafting, plus a whole lot of other tasks at an oil and gas company, I was really like a Jill of all trades. One of the reasons for that was because after a little while, the job became so repetitive and so dull. Anytime somebody said, Hey, do you want to learn how to do whatever? I always said, Yes. Part of that was just playing it smart. I wanted job security, and part of that was because I was bored. Anything I could do to mix it up a little bit and not feel so much on we was important. So some of it was my desire to be a good employee, and some of it was my desire to not be bored out of my gourd. There was some creativity in the job, sure. I mean, I remember one project I worked on, I had taken some parts literally from a napkin sketch, turned them into something more professional in AutoCAD, and then I went out to the shop and I fabricated the parts myself. That aspect of the job was really cool. But even so, after a while, when you've done the same thing over and over again, if it's not necessarily your passion, it can get pretty boring, and it did. So I'm like, What does recovery mean to me? Recovering a sense of safety, recovering your creative self? I had to sit with that for a little bit, and what I realized was that my my game plan. So when I was a kid, I went through several different ideas of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I think probably every kid does that. For a little while, I thought about getting into finance and being a stock broker or a banker. I also had thought about being like a teacher or a college professor, thought about being an architect, but what I really settled on and and notice my language there, right? That's not, there's not just a Freudian slip. What I really settled on was becoming an attorney, and I had hoped that I could get into an. National Law. And one of the things that I felt passionately about was diplomacy. It's not so strange that I came to the legacy of Dag Hammarskjold truly. I got into law school. Hated it. I made it through one semester and was like, I'm out of here. Man. I got a blow. This is terrible. But the thing with law school is you don't necessarily have to major in pre law. So you don't have to have a bachelor's degree in pre law or in criminal justice. You can have a bachelor's degree in basically anything and get accepted to law school. So my feeling was, I'm going to major in something that I like, I'm not going to worry about, so called marketability for my degrees. I just want to do what I want to do. And so I got an Associate's and a bachelor's degree in liberal arts, and I focused on things like Global Humanities, English, philosophy, art history, and I loved it. I had a lot of fun. Now, I'm going to back up a little bit, because I started out as a history major, but my experience, and that's all it is, all right, I'm not trying to speak for everybody, or say that everybody at this school had the same experience. My experience was that it felt like an old boys club. You had to be a white, Anglo, Saxon, Protestant man over the age of 60 to be taken seriously. It also reminds me of over on the History Channel, years ago, they ran a series called The men who killed Kennedy. I did a whole profile on this over on my nighttime broadcast, the conserracy theories, if you're interested. And after the series was over with, they did this rebuttal episode where they called in the Old Guard, the old white Wasp professors that tell all the rest of us what we're allowed to think. Heaven forbid that you get any diversity, you're not going to have a young person. You're not going to have anybody from the LGBTQ community. You're not going to have anybody that's a person of color. That's for damn sure. No women, it has to be old white Wasp dudes, preferably with PhD and a stuck up attitude, in my opinion, let's just say that, in my opinion, that's that's what I found. And I'm like, no, no, no, this is not history. Is not meant to be gate kept by Wasp dudes. So I switched my major to liberal arts and and had a wonderful time studying art and art history and philosophy, and I still got to study history. I just was able to do it in a way that wasn't so gate kept. And that is really what I started thinking about with my idea of recovery and my idea of recovering my creative self. I thought back to my college days and just being like, well, I want to do what I want to do. I love art and art history. I love reading and writing and being creative. And it was like having to go all the way back to the 1990s like, hey, remember the way that you were feeling and thinking in the 90s? Like you can get back to that person and think about how to move forward now, even though it's 2025 what can you take from that part of yourself that eventually got stifled and shoved into a box and made to work in cubicles? Which is just little she brings up a great point. Julia brings up a great point right towards the beginning of this chapter, which is, it's not common for parents now, maybe you had a different experience. Maybe you had highly progressive, artsy parents yourself, I don't know, but it's not common for most parents to say, be experimental. Do it, try it. See what happens. Everything is just data. Everything is just feedback. See how far you get. See what happens. They might do that when you're a toddler and you're finger painting, but you get to be a teenager and no shit, no, they don't Spartan me, I normally don't cuss on daytime broadcast, but I'm not going to bleep that out. No, they don't. They don't do that when, when you're two years old and you're like, hey, I want to make a red giraffe with my finger paints. Knock yourself out, kid who cares? Or you come home with macaroni art that looks terrible. Everybody's like, that looks great. We'll hang it on the fridge. But you get to be a teenager, and it's time to think about the future. Think about what you want to do. Think about where you want to go to college and Oh, you better major in something that pays because if you study underwater gender studies of the 15th century, then you're never going to be able to get a. Job, and it's all about pleasing corporate America and licking the right boots. You have to sort of become Malcolm McDowell at the end of Clockwork Orange when he's watching propaganda films with his eyes taped open or held open by those forcers like you have to do. You have to do what you're told by society, and you need to conform the whole idea of, sure, make a red giraffe with finger paints knock yourself out. It's like, that's for kids. It's about like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. So we have to be able to give this nurturing and this parenting to ourselves as an adult, you have to be willing to say, I will tell myself, try this and see what happens. It's an experiment. It's data, it's feedback. She brings up another point that I really had not ever considered, but it made so much sense because she starts talking about what she calls shadow artists, people who they surround themselves with, artists or people within the arts community. Maybe they're even a patron of somebody in the arts, but it's like they themselves are a little bit too nervous to try something. Maybe they moonlight a little bit. This definitely made me think of DAG, and I was like, Oh, my God. In some respects, Dag was a shadow artist too, because he had a number of friends that were involved in the arts, and dag was writing in his journal, doing haiku and poetry, and people didn't know. It was almost like he was his own little secret artist on the slide. And Julia talks about people that maybe they become teachers, they don't produce anything themselves anymore. They become teachers. They become coaches. Or they marry an artist and say, Well, my spouse is the one with the talent. I don't have any. They become a patron, etc. And so it's like they feel nervous or insecure or intimidated in some way about becoming an artist themselves. Maybe they have self esteem or self worth issues. A parent or grandparent early in life might have told them you're never going to make it because your work stinks. Your paintings are not any good, your sculptures don't look good. You're too weird. You tried to write a play and it folded, and so you just said, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go through that anymore. I thought that was really fascinating, and it it gave me some real food for thought. She talks a lot about, like, considering your inner artist to be similar to an inner child, and in the same way that you would nurture and protect a child, you should be doing that with your artists, too. And a cool thing, something that has really like, it's been like letting out a breath that I was holding. Like, oh, she says, Give yourself permission to be a learner, a novice, a newbie, realize that you might make some things that are maybe you know, things you don't consider to be so great. You might write a composition at the piano and you're like, I don't think this sounds very good. You might make a painting like I am working on a painting right now. That is the first time ever in my whole life, in 40 plus years on this planet, that I have ever attempted to sit down and paint a human form. I'm actually doing it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I've done some vague sketches before, like when I was in school, but in terms of sitting down in my leisure time and trying to paint the human form. No, I haven't tried that before, and this gave me the permission to do that because I'm like, if it sucks, if I look at it after it's done, and I'm like, Yeah, this, this looks very, um primitive for this looks very not good. You know, I wouldn't hang it on the wall, or I wouldn't try to sell it in a gallery. Who cares? Who cares? I gave myself permission to do the thing. That's what really matters. It reminds me of on intervention, like whenever Jeff Van vonderen in particular would be trying to intervene on somebody, and they would always have a list of excuses. I've got to be in court. I'm worried about my kids. I've got to do this. I've got to do that. And he would tell them the time's going to pass regardless, 90 days will pass, you could be dead, you could be in jail, you could be strung out in a gutter somewhere, or you could have completed 90 days of treatment and be clean and sober. It's up to you, and Julia makes a similar point about practice, play, do? Goof around. Well, it's going to take me years to be a better painter than I am right now. Okay, that time is going to pass regardless. It's going to take me a long time to learn how to do this and to learn how to do that. Well, the time's going to pass regardless. There are plenty of people that didn't even come to some calling that turned out to be their true will until later in life. There are tons of stories like that. I mean, if we want one that's painting specific, you can look at Grandma Moses, you have to just get started. You can sit back and use a lot of excuses. Well, my early work is going to be stinky and I'm not going to be happy with it, so I'm not expecting the first time I ever try to paint a human form that it's gonna be Rembrandt. I'm just glad I'm doing it at all. I'm glad that I can look at the canvas and be like, You know what? That's a human. I can tell it's a human that's progress. She talks also about limiting beliefs, negative beliefs, don't we always have those things floating around, and the importance of being able to not only exercise those negative and limiting beliefs, but to turn them into something positive, you know? And that's an easy exercise to do. Let's take money, for example. You probably heard like I did growing up. Money doesn't grow on trees. Money, it's it's easy to spend, it's hard to save and it's hard to make. All you have to do is turn all of that around. It's easy to save money. It's easy to make money. It's easy to manifest money. We live in a universe that is abundant. Money is everywhere. There's more money on the planet right now than there has ever been in the history of the world. It's easy to find money, simple as that. You can do the same thing with your artwork. My artwork gets better every day. I feel more confident about my craft every day. It doesn't have to be something that's like monumental you can say something that's just that simple, and then really focus your energy on that, instead of, well, the first few things that I make, I tried, I took a pottery class, and the vase that I made didn't look very good, or I tried to make a teacup, and it turned out wonky, so I guess I just shouldn't do this ever again. If that's the attitude that you take, you may as well not do it again, because you you have to be forgiving of yourself. Yeah, the first tea cup you make might not hold the tea it might have some issues, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't go back if you want to. She also has tasks at the end of each week, so you go through your reading, and she may have tasks embedded or like little points to ponder, food for thought, if you will, within each chapter. But then she also has tasks at the end of each chapter that you're supposed to work on here and there throughout the week. Obviously, for week one, she wants to make sure that you're doing your artist date and that you're doing your morning pages. At this stage, you're not supposed to go back and reread your morning pages. You're just doing it, to do it, to start that morning purge and to get in the rhythm of it, but without self censoring, without worrying about, am I saying anything in the morning that's even making any sense? I personally don't worry about that. I don't care if it makes any sense. Sometimes I'll have an idea of what I think I'm going to sit down and write, and what I actually do write surprises me. And sometimes I'll think that I'm over something irritating, or I'm over something maddening that happened recently, I'll be like, Well, I think I've kind of buried that. I think I've put it out of my mind, and then it'll come up come back up again in my morning pages, and I'll be like, well, I guess I haven't repressed that. I guess I haven't worked through that. I guess it's still there and it wants to be heard. I Yeah, she has you do some other exercises about people that maybe they were discouraging. They said nasty things to you. Maybe you showed them some of your art, or you tried to be creative in their presence, and they just smacked you down. Write about that, get into that, talk about it, think about it, and start to exercise those demons. And then you also, like, defend yourself. It's almost like going for a defense for your thesis or your dissertation. Like, here's why my work was meaningful, here's why it had depth, and here's where you were wrong. You really get to challenge those people instead of allowing the mean, nasty things that they said to you to go unchallenged, it's your opportunity to speak for yourself. Another thing that she has you do is to think about what she calls imaginary lives. And that one was fun. It was kind of weird. It, but also kind of fun, like you pick five lives. You think about, if I hadn't been whatever you are, here's what I would have been instead. And I had fun playing around with that, because that's, that's all you're doing. You're playing. You're not literally saying, I want to go off and buy a ranch and be a cow poke, or I want to go to NASA and try to be an astronaut. You're just having fun. And sometimes those things can spark other ideas. No, I don't want to go to a ranch and be a cow poke, but maybe I want to go to a petting zoo. Maybe I want to volunteer my time at a ranch and just be around some animals for an afternoon. Maybe you want to buy a book on astronomy if you always wanted to work for NASA. Or maybe you wind up writing a short story or doing a painting or a sculpture that's inspired by something that came up on that list. Inspiration comes from sometimes the strangest things. I swear that's true, and for me, the more that I have been doing The Artist's Way. It's almost like ideas are going out of their way to come to me. I got a delicious short story idea handed to me on a silver platter. I was in the waiting room for a medical appointment. And this was during, I'll get I'll get to this, because this isn't a later week of The Artist's Way, but I was in week four where you have to do reading deprivation. Oh god, that was horrid. I'll talk about that later, when I'm covering week four. I'll get there. But I'm sitting in the lobby and I'm like, okay, you know, I'm on reading deprivation. I can't I can't surf on the cell phone, I can't play around in a magazine and read something. I just have to sit here. It felt so awkward, but this woman struck up a conversation with me. I didn't start anything with her. She struck up a conversation with me, and she told me a story, and it was incredible. And I'm like, You were meant to hear this. You were meant to be in this space with this woman, and she was meant to tell you the story, because it is a short story waiting to happen. It's a gorgeous story. Another similar thing happened later that week, somebody else in my family this time was telling me about a friend of theirs and gave me this big, weird story about unrequited love from like, the 1940s and I'm like, well, I'll be this is another gorgeous short story that's just waiting to be brought to life, and it got dropped in my lap. I didn't have to go out brainstorming. I didn't have to think about anything. It's like these stories said, we want to be told there's real potential here, and we want you to be the mother that births us into existence. Wild Things like that have happened ever since I've been on The Artist's Way. And I would say, if you decide to read this book, which I hope that you will keep your antennae tuned for those bits of synchronicity, those coincidences that really aren't because they will find you 100% even if it doesn't happen right away, it will happen. Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay tuned. We'll cover week two in the next episode, and I will see you then.

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