From Hustle to Flow: My Artist’s Way Experiment, Part 4

In this episode, I'll cover what I learned from Weeks 2 & 3 of Julia Cameron's wonderful book, The Artist's Way. 

✔️ Beware of the wounded birds and drama queens who wish to siphon your energy and attention.

✔️ Synchronicities happen for a reason. You don't have to play hard and be a cynic about everything. 

✔️ Who are you spending time with? Is it enriching or draining? 

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 identity, recovering power, poisonous playmates, crazy makers, skepticism, anger, synchronicity, shame, criticism, artist date, morning pages, creative block, true friendships.

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 going through week two and week three of Julia Cameron's awesome book, The Artist's Way, discussing what I've learned from the exercises, how it's changing me and don't worry, as I always say, with these episodes that are dedicated to the Artist's Way. Please do not worry if you don't consider yourself to be an artist per se, if you're not a writer, a poet, a painter, a sculptor, please do not assume that creativity is not part of your life, or that there's nothing in these episodes that would be beneficial for you to hear. Week two, for example, is recovering a sense of identity. Week three is recovering a sense of power. Really important information, I think, especially in today's world. Stay tuned.

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In week two, which is recovering a sense of identity, Julia talks about what she calls poisonous playmates. She also discusses how your inner artist is a lot like an inner child. It needs a hedge of protection around it. It needs to feel safe and nurtured in order to blossom. And if you have surrounded yourself intentionally or unintentionally with these people that she thinks of as poisonous playmates, you can remain stuck. You can remain a blocked creative because you have these people around you that are negative Nellies. You have people that find your blossoming to be discouraging. Hmm, I'm trying to think of how I want to say this, but sometimes we discover in life that people who we thought were our friends are actually frenemies. Sometimes we find people in our family life are not quite as supportive as we had imagined. It may be that when we were in a very specific role, or we felt very safe and predictable to them, then they felt comfortable around us. I know what I'm getting. I know what's going to happen. Everything feels like a safe, predictable commodity. But when we come out of that shell and we say, Yeah, I don't want to work for corporate America anymore, that chapter of my life is done. And by the way, I'm also not interested in being a starving artist either. I don't feel like there's nobility in poverty, and I'm not interested in creating art under a bridge. I still want to be comfortable and be able to eat and wear clothing and sleep in a bed at night, but I'm not going to sell my soul to corporate America people who are extremely jealous of that. They could do it themselves. They're just not going to they look at you with contempt and disdain. Now they may want to tell you 50,000 reasons why it's not going to work, or they may smile to your face and say, Well, that's good, that's excellent. I'm so happy for you. And then all over town, they're telling everybody what an idiot you are. You're doomed to failure, etc. And in this week, two chapter, Julia writes blocked friends may find your recovery disturbing, and that's so very true. So it's even though it sounds rather sour and dour, to put it this way, you do have to consider the company that you keep, and if you want to come out from being a blocked creative, if you want to let your energies flow again, whether you're planning to do this full time or you're not just be on the lookout. Be aware that there may be some people in your life that do not take that journey with you. She also discusses people that she calls crazy makers, people that enjoy stirring up drama. They enjoy stirring up mess. Some of them might enjoy playing the role of the wounded bird. And so if you're a compassionate empathy. Type of person, you may succumb to the temptation of trying to fix this person or heal their wounds or solve their problems, and all it does is continue to make you stuck. Think of it like quicksand. Instead of improving yourself, honing your craft, taking risks for your own career. You're overhearing left field trying to solve somebody else's problems. Meanwhile, this person is a crazy maker, and they don't really want their problem solved. If you solved one problem for them, they would come up with half a dozen other ones by nightfall that also needed your attention. We also have to deal with skepticism, both our own that's been ingrained in us, more than likely, by parents, grandparents, society and so on. I know that that's definitely something that popped up for me. I have a much greater belief in the mystical and the magical than I ever have before, because I've seen it play out in my own life. I look at decoding the unicorn, it's like exhibit a I had this ghost and Mrs. Muir experience. And the reason why that book is good, and I'm not saying that in some arrogant way, like, Oh, my book is fantastic. Everybody else's book is terrible, no. The reason why the book is good, the reason why it resonates with people, and people enjoy it, and they send me positive messages about it is because it was a co creation between myself and DAG. That's why it's good. It really doesn't have much of anything to do with me. It's about the subject matter and about the fact that it was a co creation that happened in a spirit of love, and yet we can still give in to skepticism and defeatism. Well, I did this, and some really awesome things happened, but I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Julia Cameron talks in this book about allowing the Great Creator to take care of you, allowing the universe to come forward and support your efforts. But that's just a lot of woo, woo. That's just a lot of new age dribble. I mean, I have had some incredibly lucky breaks while I've been doing this, but you know, that has to just be a coincidence. They probably would have happened anyway. We have the voice of this little gremlin inside of us that wants to discount everything she has. You do some auditing of your time, what are you spending time on? Especially if you're blocked, you're feeling a bit hamstrung. Are you goofing off on social media? Are you watching television shows that you don't even like? Are you allowing somebody else to hijack your evenings, or your your days, forcing you to do something that they want to do, that they're into, but you're really not. She also has you consider the things that you do enjoy doing and make a list of like 20 things that you enjoy. And there's no right or wrong answer. Obviously, it could be riding a bike, swimming, sewing, crocheting, cooking, but take a look at the things that you genuinely enjoy doing with yourself and for yourself, and those can also serve as a good springboard of ideas for things that you could do on your weekly artist date. Week Three, we get into recovering a sense of power. And she warns us. I really think that these disclaimers should just be put for every freaking week in this book. Outside of the podcast, let's see I have I'm currently in week nine. Obviously it'll take me a little bit of time, even if I do them two or three at a time, it'll take me a little bit of time to get caught up with where I am in real life, so to speak, doing this. But I think this should be a disclaimer every freaking week. But she talks about like you may have these unexplained or sudden bursts of emotion that come to the center, come to the surface for you, whether that's anger, it's bliss, it's joy, it's rage, it's grief, it's crying jags. And I'm like, Oh, honey, you should just put that as the disclaimer for every week, I think especially for me, you know a Gen X woman in her 40s, perimenopausal. I'm like, Yeah, you could talk about feeling all of these intense emotions at the beginning of every new week of The Artist's Way, we would be just fine. She opens up talking about the emotion of anger. And I think for women in particular, there's a sense of pressure that you shouldn't get angry. I think for those of us in some of the older generations, there was more sugar and spice and everything nice. That's what girls are made of. Girls are supposed to be agreeable. They're supposed to go along to get along. They're supposed to be more sociable. Boys and Men are supposed to be competitive. They're supposed to be aggressive. And if a man gets angry, if he puffs his chest out and says, Well, I'm going to stick up for myself, damn it, then. That's okay. That's a masculine trait, and it's to be admired. But if a woman gets mad and says, I'm not taking this BS anymore. No, no, you're really supposed to be more of a herd animal, and you're supposed to be quiet. So it is kind of nice, even though, long ago, I left that crap in the dust, it's still a good reminder sometimes to hear it from somebody else that just says, No, anger has a purpose. You shouldn't always rush to dissolve your anger, and you shouldn't brush it to the side like it's some terrible evil thing. It serves a purpose. She talks about synchronicity, right? And getting away from this idea of being super cynical, knock and the door will be opened, Ask and you shall receive. But even just saying that, it's like I feel the tension. I feel that there will be people who hear that and they roll their eyes, like, Oh yeah, sure. If it were that easy, everybody would do it. I was thinking about that actually last night. So I have been working with my Surface Pro learning Photoshop, learning how to use the stylus to make sure that the the paint and the sketches and everything that I'm doing artistically in Photoshop, to make sure that it goes where it needs to go on these drawings, how to erase. I'd be like, Yeah, I made a mistake. I goofed that line up, delete, and I had one of those talent shows going in the background. I was listening to it halfway, and there was a woman who came on, and she was like, Well, yeah, the dream is to be a musician, but you know what it's like? You have to wait tables and be a barista and be a dog walker, and I'm like sitting there thinking, but why you have to do that? Why? Because you've been told that you have to do that. You have to eat a lot of dirt sandwiches before anybody might consider maybe giving you a record contract or giving you a steady gig where you can pay the rent through your music. Well, a few contestants later, there was a guy that showed up, and they asked him about his situation. He said, No, I'm a full time musician. I grew up making music. It's all I've ever wanted to do, and this is what pays my bills. And I'm like, I sat there, you know, I'm Mark Cuban. Is sometimes on Shark Tank, somebody will pitch something, or they'll say something he really likes, and he'll lean back. That's how I was with that guy. I'm like, good for you, good for you that you're not out here going, well, you know how it is to be a barista and you have to be a dog walker and you have to babysit 58 kids from hell, the movie Kim, no, no, no, no. And, okay, here's another point. She talks about shame, and she says that, like some people will think, if everything is that easy, I wouldn't need to read a book like The Artist's Way. And sometimes that sense of disempowerment comes from a sense of shame, and that typically very much gets instilled in us at an early age from those parents and grandparents or those types of figures. You should be ashamed of yourself. Why did you do this? What were you thinking? And that can even happen with your artwork, like, what? What were you thinking doing this? I don't like those colors. Look at that. This is foolish. You're wasting your time. You shouldn't do that. And one of the things that she says in the book is, if somebody made all A's and 1b it was the B that got the attention in some families. And I was like, Oh, my God, preach. That's certainly what my experience was like growing up. If it was an A, why wasn't it an A plus? If it was an A minus, oh, you're really skating near the edge. That's almost a B. You need to really work on that, just like I look back on it now as a full ass grown adult, and I'm like, God, that was so stupid. I should have just, I wish that I had just been like, Oh yeah, okay, sure, no problem, and then gone on and did whatever the heck I wanted to do. Anyway, she tells the story about her romantic comedy film God's will, and somebody had given it like this horrible review. Like, even though there were other reviews that were really sweet, there was this horrible review, and so she felt ashamed. In fact, she says I was mortified and and ready to almost die. One person's negative opinion should not completely eviscerate the work that you're doing. She has a great exercise in here too about dealing with criticism and doing detective work, figuring out, like, where did these emotions come from? When was the first time that I came. Remember, what was it about? Was it even something that made any sense, or was this person just straight up being a hater? And I remember going through this exercise back during week three, and I found it really empowering, appropriate, since it's recovering your sense of power. But one of the things that she has you do is you write a letter to the critic, whoever it was that gave you a bad review, bad advice, eviscerated your poem or your artwork in front of the class, whoever it was, it doesn't matter. You write a letter to this critic not to be mailed. You know you could, if you wanted to, I guess. But in her exercise, it's she writes, not to be mailed most probably, where you defend your work and acknowledge if there was anything helpful in the criticism that was offered. You don't have to find anything helpful if you don't want to. And I just thought like that's it reminds me of when you have a bad breakup with somebody and or or a bad breakup of a friendship. Maybe it doesn't even have to be something romantic, and you have all this unfinished emotional business, you feel like you're not going to get closure. At least you can give yourself closure by writing the famous letter or email that you never even send, although some people do send it, and I'm like, good for them in a way, good for them for bucking the system in the exercises. One of the things that she has you to do is to think about five things that you liked about yourself as a child. Think about different accomplishments that you feel proud of. Think about friends that you have in your life who nurture you, who inspire you, think about people that you admire, people that you feel edified by. And looking back on these exercises, actually, in hindsight, I can see more of what she had in mind, because it is empowering. Like these are people that whenever I'm around them, I feel better about myself, and I try to do the same for them. I try to make it so that we have a nice dynamic with each other. We feel good about each other, and, yeah, it's cool, it's nice, it's good. It's not about tearing everybody apart, and it's not about one upsmanship, which can be so toxic if you remember on the show Frasier, every time that Martin's birthday rolled around, they wanted to get into a competition, even though they would set some limit, whether it was $10 or $20 they'd set some artificially low limit on what they were willing to spend. And then here came the one upsmanship. Well, technically my gift was $25 so I've gone over, but don't say anything to Niles. Well, technically my gift was 30, but don't say anything to Fraser. Oh, really. Well, now my gift is 40, now it's 80, now it's 120 now it's 5000 they just kept going on and on and on. Those are not in what I would call true friendships. In a true friendship, you should feel really good about the time that you're spending with that other person. And as an introvert and an HSP, I'm completely fine with having a much smaller social circle, but a more intimate one, so that when I do spend time with the people that I care about, I feel better for having done it, and they feel better for having done it. It's not like, yeah, I've got some random collection of two or 300 people that know me, but I don't really know them, and they don't really know the real me, and our interactions are superficial or they're tacky. I would much rather have something deep and meaningful than something that's superficial and silly. I am getting a lot out of Julia Cameron's book. Obviously, I wouldn't be talking about it on the air if it hadn't made a profound impact on me. I'm continuing to do my artist paid my morning pages, and also my artist date every week. Being able to refill that well is huge. Having those images. It's just tremendous. And as I've said, even if you're not a creator, you will get something out of it. If you do feel that there's something inside of you that needs to get out, and maybe you are a blocked artist in the shadows, you absolutely owe it to yourself to check this book out. No doubt about it. Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

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