I started the Artist Way’s creativity and journaling process earlier this year at the recommendation of a friend. After having spent the last year secluded in a major life transition, I was feeling more than a little blocked and isolated creatively. I wanted simple, easy steps to reconnect with myself as a creative being, and daily journaling didn’t seem too daunting. My morning scribbles, as I call them.
I am now into my second round through the book, and a second journal. What at first was a very awkward, “Well, what do I scribble about today?” accompanied by gnashing of teeth has become more comfortable. I still get up in the middle of a sentence and wander into the kitchen for a mug of coffee, let the dogs outside or inside again, and talk to the cats. Distraction is inevitable—my goal is to move back to the dining room table and finish the sentence and eventually my daily page quota. Fall down seven times and get up eight, repeated quite often through my day.
I compose lots of drivel and expose endless whining on a daily basis, but occasionally I experience breakthroughs of clarity. It is a very good thing that these journals are private. I think I would be totally embarrassed to expose the silly things that wander through my head and on to the paper.
After going through one 12-week cycle of Artist’s Way journaling, I asked myself what else can I experiment with to create even more positive change in my life? The goal to keep the changes incremental, easy, and ‘safe.’ Like a lot of other humans, I tend to want to go for massive change at a level that is stupidly difficult and complex as a form of self-sabotage.
My inner censor and sundry hooligans hate change and are very sneaky in their ambushes. Other people I knew listen to various podcasts as a part of their daily meditation routine to build mental, spiritual and creative muscle. That seemed easy and fairly innocuous approach to test. How hard can it be, to listen to a podcast for 15 minutes while I am stretching on my whole body vibration machine, drinking my super-keto coffee?
So I added listening to a podcast to my morning routine, before sit down for the daily scribbling. I keep the playlist as diverse as possible, so I don’t get into a boring routine. Recently I started listening to people featured on the “Hay House Live!” podcast. One podcast that really stuck in my mind are podcasts from Dr. Barbara De Angelis and Joe Dispenza on making life changes. Aha. All the discomfort I have been feeling lately is “experiencing spiritual velocity.”
The brain and body don’t want to change anything, thank you very much, but something is calling me to move forward in my life. An unstoppable urge to shift and transform my life, instead of constantly putting on band-aids to the “owies” I have collected. Life is a contact sport, and we all get wounded. Rather than staying stuck in victimhood and wounding and endless rounds of “fixing things”, maybe I try something new. Like let go and learn to think new thoughts that will generate new possibilities.
The Artist’s Way journaling has been a safe, creative laboratory to test what I am learning how to create something new by changing myself – how I think, how I behave, what I believe. People quote Albert Einstein as saying, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ (Except that dear old Albert said no such thing. Feminist author and civil rights campaigner Rita Mae Brown attributes the quote to a fictional character ‘Jane Fulton’. And this idea can be traced further in time. But I digress. It's still a great quote!)
Back to the ‘think different’ approach. I now set daily and weekly ‘impossible’ challenges for myself. Like Alice in Wonderland’s conversation with the Red Queen:
“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'
I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The magnitude of the impossibility doesn’t matter. What matters is that I continue to apply creativity, the more the merrier. And then let go and see what shows up – the good, the bad, the ugly, the downright entertaining. Then note in my daily scribbles what happens next. What shows up in my life, and how I feel. And on to the next new thought to see what hatches when I unleash my endless curiosity.
