From Hustle to Flow: My Artist’s Way Experiment, Part 7

In this episode, I'll cover what I learned from Weeks 8, 9, and 10 of Julia Cameron's wonderful book, The Artist's Way. 

✔️ Recovering your senses of strength, compassion, and self-protection.

✔️ A blockage doesn't automatically mean lazy. It often indicates a sense of fear.

✔️ In any business, how can you turn loss into gain? What can you learn from it?

✔️ What happens if you pour your heart into a project and it flounders?

Links:

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

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My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available next summer

Transcript

Sara Causey discusses her journey through Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way," covering weeks 8-10. Week 8 focuses on recovering strength, emphasizing survival and financial challenges in the arts. Week 9 addresses compassion, highlighting fear's role in creative blocks and the importance of self-belief. Week 10 explores self-protection, warning against self-sabotage and the dangers of fame. Sara shares personal anecdotes, including dealing with a demanding client and the importance of setting boundaries. She also discusses the significance of inspired action, creativity requiring activity, and the need for self-compassion and protection in both artistic and business endeavors.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

The Artist's Way, strength, compassion, self-protection, creativity, fear, blockage, inspired action, role model, David Bowie, self-sabotage, workaholism, boundaries, morning pages, creative goals.

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. Today's episode is the penultimate episode in my little mini series here going through what I've learned from Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way. In this episode, we will cover weeks eight, nine and 10. Week eight is recovering a sense of strength. Nine is recovering a sense of compassion, and 10 is recovering a sense of self protection. As I always say, you don't have to be an artist or even to feel that you're artistically inclined to get something out of these episodes, if you've been having any struggles where you feel like recovering a sense of strength, of compassion, of self protection, would be relevant to you, stay tuned.

What if the unicorn wasn't a myth? What if he walked among us and wore a bow tie, a diplomat, a seeker, a man of frost and fire, misunderstood by the world until now. Decoding the unicorn isn't just a biography, it's a revelation. Discover the real Dag Hammarskjold in Sara Causey’s groundbreaking book, decoding the unicorn, available on amazon.com.

Week eight, as I mentioned, is about recovering a sense of strength, and she opens up the chapter straight away, talking about survival. Now, in the Western world, our mind immediately goes towards basic survival, and in particular money. That's a huge one around anything artistic in nature. Well, how are you going to make a living? Who's going to hire you? What are you going to do? How would you make a business around that? Etc, etc, etc. Even more so beyond any general business idea, I've seen people go on Shark Tank and pitch things that were absolutely bizarre. Sometimes they worked out. Oftentimes they didn't. But with the arts in particular, people really arch an eyebrow, like, are you insane? Don't you know anything about the starving artist? Cliche, all right. But also, artists have to deal with, what if I try something and it doesn't work out, publishing a book that goes nowhere, setting up an art exhibit and nobody comes. How will you deal with a project that you love, that has been life and breath itself to you, that falls flat? Maybe other people just simply don't get it, and that's germane outside of the arts world too. What if you start a business? What if you have one of those red hot ideas so you think and then it goes nowhere. How will you cope with that? Then she has a section, which she calls the ivory power, instead of the ivory tower, the ivory power. And it is about academia. And sometimes we have professors or teachers, whether they are well meaning or not, who derail us and tell us you can't do that? That's never going to work out. It's not for you. It's not about you. This gave me a flashback to my own years in academia, and I'm not going to call out any particular people or any particular institution, because it's not about that. I was in a small class, and I remember there was one particular person that was anointed as like the artist, the creative, the rebel, the avant garde individual. And it was like any of the rest of us who even attempted to do any kind of art. It was like, Yeah, that's fine, and it's whatever, but this person is the Anointed One. Well, academia doesn't get to make that decision. They just don't. And by the way, the person that they anointed is not even involved in the arts world and hasn't been for years. Okay? Thank you. There's one as gain disguised as loss. And she says that this is a potent artist tool. You ask the question, how can this loss serve me? Where do I go from here? What direction am I being pointed in? And I know that can sound like playing semantics like, oh well, turn your turn your frown upside down. Figure out a way to make the best of a bad situation when life hands you lemons make lemonade. And admittedly, it kind of is like that, but I'll use myself as an as another. Example here, I had a situation, and I could spill some tea about it, believe me, but I'm not going to. I had engaged an individual for a job, and I thought that everything was moving along fine, and the work that this person produced was good. I'm not going to say that it was the second coming of the Lord, but it was good. I was happy until I wasn't, until this person turned out to be a jack wagon and went off the rails. They demanded an 800% pay increase. It reminded me of the proverbial dealer who gives you the first hit for free, and then they want an exorbitant amount amount of money thereafter, because they know if they get you hooked, you're going to come back over and over again. So it's worth it to them to have like a loss leader to get you in. And I felt like, that's what this person did to me. I'm going to hold you hostage with this project. I'm going to give you a little bit at a reasonable price, and then I'm going to demand an 800% increase. And I thought, yeah, no, see, I'm not the one for that. You don't come here and play that with me. I'll scorch the earth. Do you understand that I will blow the project up and go full tilt nuclear if I have to, but you're not going to commandeer my project from me or grab me by the short hairs. We're not playing it that way. Boo, no, we're really not. And I was mad and I was aggravated, and I was like steam coming out of my head, but I realized the best thing to do is to move this work in house. And once I did, once I started working on it for myself, I was like, This is so much better. Not only do I have a lot more creative control, but I really feel energized by the work that I'm doing. I never would have guessed I was capable of doing it, but I am so in that regard, figuring out how to use a loss as a gain. Again, you don't even have to be a creative in any kind of business that you own and operate. All right, I've been kicked in the guts. This is hurting. I'm and I'm upset. But where do I go from here? How can I possibly parlay this loss into a game? All right, I'm going to skip ahead a little bit. She talks about creativity requiring activity, which is true, but I would add to that, there is such a thing as taking inspired action. I once had, I don't know what you'd call him a business advisor who was really big on the idea of just do something. Action will always trump inaction. So do something if you don't know what to do, just do something big and it's bound to pay off. Well, no, for me, that hasn't been my experience. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is to be still, whether that's meditation, prayer, contemplation or just getting away from the problem. It's like the cliche that you can't solve the problem from the same energy that created the problem. You have to get away from it a little bit. So yes, creativity does require action. I mean, if you're thinking about a painting, but you never paint it, if you're thinking about writing a screenplay, and you never do, then what happens to the idea. But I do think we need to be more insightful as far as intentional action, inspired action, and not Chicken Little running around like a crazy person. In your homework for this week, you do things like naming your dream, and then you think about concrete goals that will signal to you that the dream has become manifest. The dream is real. You think about your true north, whatever that might be, respect higher consciousness being seen on a massive scale, and you also select a role model. Now this, for me, was cool because one of my creative role models is David Bowie, and it's not because anything he ever did I approve of or I have listened to all of his music on repeat. It's not about that. It's about David Bowie being allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted to do. And we all just accepted it. Everybody just sucked. Well, yeah, gets to do that because he's David Bowie. I'm like, Yeah, that's what I want. That's exactly what I want. I want to be able to cross genres and do whatever I feel like doing, whatever speaks to me, whatever inspires me to just be able to do it and to not be painted into a corner of any one particular genre. Now I feel like these activities relate back to her theme of recovering a sense of strength, because that's what it's going to take. Take, I'm not going to say toughen up in like a drill sergeant kind of way. It's about to me anyway, digging deep and finding resources that you never even thought that you had. I would not have imagined that I would be living full time as a creative again. You know, in academia, it was always like, Oh, well, this other person is the artist. The rest of you, peons and plebs or not? Oh, I just, I never would have guessed, but it's happening, it's working. It's doing what it needs to do. And I'm so much happier, even on a difficult day, when I have one of those days where I feel like the steam is pouring out of my head, it's so much better than when I felt like a left foot stuffed into a right shoe working outside the home for other people who never appreciated me, who exploited me and used me for what they could get out of me working for myself in an HR related business where I felt like I was my own worst task master. No thanks. Week nine, recovering a sense of compassion, she opens this chapter up with fear. There's a big, important F word fear.

One of the myths that she tackles is the idea that if an artist is blocked, it's because they're lazy. No, it's because they're blocked. And fear has an important part to play in that. I'll use another example, but not about me. There's a person I know, just going to have to leave it at that. There's a person I know that everybody in my family is like. That person has a lot of talent. They could be doing more than they are. And one of the things that I realized after reading The Artist's Way is that I think this person lacks confidence in themselves. I don't think they realize that they have more potential, and they might be afraid what some people call misdirection or laziness. So often it's fear. She talks about enthusiasm as well, and that's at work in progress. Some of the things that I'm working on right now kind of give me a headache as of this recording I'm waiting on my next non fiction hammer should work to come out of the editing process. And I miss my baby. I want I want the baby back. It's been out of my hands for almost a month now, and I'm like, damn it. It needs to come home. I want my baby back. But some of the other things that I've been working on, like one of them, is a book about how dag has been portrayed posthumously, and my theories about why his stereotypes are the way that they are. I don't want to get in too far into the weeds right now, but it's been, it's been hard having to write about things that I feel like I shouldn't even have to write about. Anyway, he should have been able to live a full life and go gently in his sleep at the farmhouse. He never should have been murdered in a plane crash. Like the whole thing is just upsetting to me. It's upsetting to me just ipso facto, by the very nature of the thing. But then looking at these curated images of dag as being the cold, snobby intellectual, the weird, potentially perverted crazy, I just Yeah. Having to delve into that arena has taken a lot out of me. And there are definitely days where it's like, I don't feel any enthusiasm about creation. Today, I can tell you that

she talks about creative U turns and she gives some examples of like places where maybe we can dig our heels in, but shouldn't, and this is applicable across the business world. So one example, she has a screenwriter has an agent that's interested in representing script but asks for a few changes, but the screenwriter doesn't make the changes. An actor is told by an agent, hey, you need to get some good professional headshots, but he doesn't go and get the photos, and he just kind of vanishes. A painter gets invited to a group show at a gallery, but instead of going along with it, he nit picks the contract, or he picks a fight with the gallery owner. We have to be careful about self sabotage, because I think, in a way, that's what creative U turning would be. And she says, this is a place where she. Says, Have compassion, because creative U turns are always born either from a fear of success or a fear of failure, but it always boils down to fear. And one of the things I like here is that she points out it doesn't matter which side of the fence, whether you fear success or you feel fear failure, the net result is always the same. I think that's very well said. That's one of the things I was like highlighting in the book. Because, yeah, exactly we can get in the nitty gritty of like, well, do I fear success? Do I fear failure? What's the root of my fear? I need to go into Freudian psychoanalysis for the next six months like Fraser and Niles. No, you don't, because the net result is the same. She talks about blasting through the blocks, which I think is also highly useful, like free association, writing can be really helpful with that where you don't censor yourself, you just sit down with a notebook and a pen and you start writing whatever comes up to the surface. I feel angry because I feel resentful because I don't like it when get that stuff out of your mind. And morning pages can be helpful for that as well. One thing she has you do is list your creative goals for the year, and then you start breaking it down into more minutia for the next month, for the next week, you can think big if you want to. There's nothing wrong with it, but I would argue that you don't have to. And some days for me, living now as a full time creative it's one day at a time, baby, because I may not know, like this morning, I had to get out and mow. We've had so much rain, this has been the weirdest summer slash early fall that we've had in a long time. We have had so much rain, it's been very humid, and it's been very like moldy and mildewy, like damp, just kind of humid and gross, clammy. That's that's a good word for it. It hasn't been as hot as it normally would be, especially like still yet in the dog days of summer, that happened in August, but it's just been clammy, hot, gross and clammy. You go outside and it's bug city. I had to get out there and mow in between thunderstorms, so the grass was like all clumpy and wet, and I wound up with a bad sinus headache, and my eyes are all irritated. I'm not going to sit down and try to do 15 different creative tasks today. After I record this episode and process it, most likely I'll sit down with my tablet and do some illustrating. I don't feel like getting into some heavy duty writing or editing. I just don't, I don't have it in me, and I know that, and to me, that's part of recovering a sense of compassion is knowing when it's when the answer is not today, and being able to honor that she has. You choose an artist totem, and it can be whatever you want it to be. Could be a Barbie doll, it could be a stuffed toy, it could be a little figurine. I don't mind saying that I went on Amazon and got a small little animal figurine of a dough because that's something that I've written about before. Actually, is like I had this so called mentor who was incredibly insulting toward me, and because of his insults, it was like I locked myself in a box for a long time. I made myself stay small, and once I realized that he was full of crap and his insults were just that. They were just insults. They weren't helpful criticism. They were just mean spirited insults. It's like, forget that guy. Who is he anyway? Who in the hell is he to have said such cruel and awful, spiteful things to me and about me f him? So I got this little dough that I use as a totem that I keep here on the desk, and it's just a reminder to me, like you're free from all that, even though you're still getting your sea legs, even though you still feel kind of wobbly sometimes. In this life and lifestyle, you're doing it, you're out of the box, you're free, and you're doing it week 10, recovering a sense of self protection. And that's a big one. She talks about dangers of the trail and plenty of ways that we can numb out, dull out, block ourselves, whether that's eating habits that don't serve us well, drinking too much, using risky sex, pain, getting addicted to painful experiences, making up and breaking up, We might be able to get ourselves in a situation where we can drown out our blocked creativity by wallowing in situations that we have no business being in anyway. Oh, and here we go, workaholism. I laughed when I got to this section, because I was like, oh. If you spot it, you got it, and I have been for large portions of my life a workaholic. So here are some questions she has on her workaholism quiz. I work outside of office hours, seldom, often or never. I take vacations. Seldom, often or never. I try to do two things at once, seldom, often or never. I allow calls to interrupt and then lengthen my work day, seldom, often or never. I allow myself downtime to do nothing, seldom, often or never. That is something that has been huge for me as an artist and a creative I'll go back again to David Bowie, the story of one of his studio musicians talking about how they would ease into the work process. There was no hurry up. Do it now. It was sit down, read the newspaper. Have some coffee. Have some tea. We'll get to recording music when we get to it, and it all just flowed. And there was never, like a hurry up do it now mentality that I believe for me, I can't speak to the whole world, but I think that for me also is highly necessary. I have some of my best ideas when I'm futzing around with something else, folding the laundry, mowing the yard, taking out the trash, taking a shower. It's difficult for us to sit down and force ourselves to really do our best creative work. Again, I'm not saying that it's impossible. I just think that probably for a lot of creatives, it's not our preferred method of work. She covers drought. What happens if everything's been flowing and then the well runs dry? And you wonder, Am I ever going to do anything again? And as she says, very well, droughts do end. My assistant put it like high tide and low tide. There are times when you might be riding a big wave, and you have a big push of stuff that's getting out of the door, and then you may have a slower season where you just need to calm down and rest. I feel a little bit like that too right now, because I know that when simply dag comes out of the editorial process, it's gonna be like, Oh, I'm gonna be like, Gollum, my precious, you've come back to me, and I'm going to want to spend all this time working on it, deciding what edits to integrate and which ones don't sound right to me.

I just want to kind of veg like, just lay on the couch and be a little bit of a slug. I mean, I say that, and then I'm kind of terrible about not laying there for very long, because I just start thinking, like, Okay, I've had a lay down, and now I'm a bit bored. Fame. She talks about people approaching fame almost like it's a spiritual drug. It can be a byproduct of artistic work, but it can also be a very dangerous byproduct. In this regard, I think also of Dag and how his father, halmar had told him, You cannot become dependent on the praises of the press, and you also cannot crumble anytime they criticize you, you have to make ethical decisions and be your own person, because if you get dependent on their praise, or you fall apart every time they criticize you, you're going to be living for other people and not doing what you feel is right internally. Competition. What happens if somebody that you know has gone further, faster, and they're living their dreams, and you feel that little pin prick of jealousy.

Your fear is going to position you to think, well, it's going to happen for them, but not for me, like it's a zero sum game like Gordon Gekko and Wall Street, somebody wins and somebody loses. Well, that's not true. Their success doesn't diminish from you in any way, and you don't have to wallow in it. You can just simply say, Well, that's good for them. My break is the one that's coming next, and I'm not worried about it easier said than done, believe me, but we're in this chapter about self protection, and I really think that that's a good way to protect yourself, to realize that somebody else's goal doesn't have a damn thing to do with yours if they get there faster or they go farther. Mazel Tov, good for you. But that's not taking anything away from me.

I've certainly had that experience with let me be careful. Let me think for just a second. In my opinion, I feel like that, that scene and The Good Wife, you know, if you remember that series Ana Gasteyer was a judge that always made everybody say, in my opinion, the prosecutor is rushing to judgment. In my opinion. Ha. So in my opinion, there are people who have used DAGs legacy for their own benefit. Wasn't really because they cared about him. It wasn't really because they wanted to do anything to further his name and his work in the world. It was because they wanted self aggrandizement and it frustrates me when I feel like those people have a broader audience than somebody who really cares, and I've had to move past that and say, ultimately it doesn't matter, because people I believe will understand the sniff test, people will understand who's sincere and who's not. It might take a little bit of time, but eventually, somebody who's wearing a mask, somebody who's playing a game for whatever reason, they want their ego stroked, or they want to make money, they want to get some official accolade, whatever they get tired of wearing the mask, and the person who's sincere that's not wearing a mask, that's like, here's who I am, here's why I care, is still in the race after everything's said and done. So look, if somebody else is ahead of you. If you feel like you're on a race track and somebody just passed you, it doesn't matter. In your homework, she talks about a list of things that you love, and it can be whatever your favorite kind of tree, your favorite flower, homemade soup, and those things can become like touchstones for you, if you're having a bad day, if you need to cocoon yourself up, there's nothing wrong with that. We all have those days where it's like, you know what all I want is a chunky cable knit blanket, something hot to drink, and I want to sit in this bean bag chair and make the world go away. It's important to have ways of shutting out the drama. She also has an exercise called the awful truth, where you at, where you answer a list of questions, like, what gets in the way of your creativity? What's your payoff in keeping yourself stuck? Which friends believe in you, which friends are encouraging and then which ones are Debbie, the downers that probably need to get the ax. She also talks about making boundaries and then enforcing them. So like, if you are in a day job, it might be, I do not want to be interrupted or bothered before seven. I'm going to get up at five, and from five to seven, I'm going to do things for myself, and I don't want to be bothered during that time, or could be if you're more of a night owl, it may be from 8pm to 10pm that's my time, and I don't want to be bothered unless somebody is dead or it's an emergency. Leave me alone. You have every right to do that. I mean, one day, no, actually, probably not. I was going to be overly optimistic and say, you know, one day America might pass laws similar to Europe, and say, after 6pm It's illegal for your employer to contact you about anything. But I doubt that's going to happen, but it should. It should be illegal, like, go away, buzz off and go away. That's supposed to be my time. And you can make some bottom lines for yourself, not not working an office job on the weekends, not bringing work from your office job home with you and doing them on holidays or social occasions, not postponing things that you love because you feel like you have to do other things for work. And I would add to that, your creativity. If your creativity is your primary means of supporting yourself, you still have to bake in ways to escape even from it. And I don't mean escaping from it in a bad way. I mean escaping from it in the sense that you are leaving yourself with breathing room. I've got something else that I'm working on right now, that it's different and it's weird, it's quirky. I like it, but I don't completely have my arms around it yet. I've written,

hold on. I'll see if I've got it pulled up.

I've written, thus far, about 10,000 words. So like a Prologue and a first chapter, and I don't know, I don't know. I've got an idea of how I want it to end. So I've got my beginning, and I have an idea of how I want the novel to end, but there's a lot in the middle that I haven't figured out yet, and my instinct on it was, let it breathe, let it weave itself together, and then come back to it later, and it will tell you, the characters will tell you. You, the plot will tell you. So that's what I'm doing right now, is I'm just leaving it alone. To me, having that space, that ability to walk away from it, is really important now. Let's say you're in the business world. It doesn't have anything to do with writing a novel or painting a painting. Maybe you have an employee that's being a stone in your shoe. Do I fire this person? Do I write them up? Do I put them on a performance improvement plan? What? What's going to be the thing to turn the situation around? It may be that instead of dwelling on that, you take a couple of hours off and you do something totally unrelated. Maybe you go to the movies, maybe you go for a bike ride, maybe you hang out with your kids, and then afterwards, you come back and think about it again. When your head is clear, it is amazing how we it's like our subconscious mind goes to work on it in the background, where while our conscious mind is occupied, and then it doesn't feel as much like an uphill battle anymore. It's like, Oh, wow. Just came up with a really good idea. Well, you didn't just come up with it. Your subconscious mind processed it, but it had the breathing room to be able to do that. So I think that what Julia is talking about here is relevant across the spectrum, not only for creatives, but for anybody running your own business, or maybe you're an entrepreneur, plugged in at a company, trying to make a difference there. I think it's interesting food for thought. So in the next episode, we will cover chapters 11 and 12 and some final thoughts. And that will conclude our walk through the artist’s way.

Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

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