<aside> 💡 This week finds us facing the internal blocks to creativity. It may be tempting to abandon ship at this point. Don’t! We will explore and acknowledge the emotional difficulties that beset us in the past as we made creative efforts. We will undertake healing the shame of past failures. We will gain in compassion as we reparent the frightened artist child who yearns for creative accomplishment. We will learn tools to dismantle emotional blocks and support renewed risk.
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Exercise 1, Morning Pages: Check off the days you’ve done morning pages.
How many days this week did you do your morning pages? (Have you used them yet to think about creative luxury for yourself?) How was the experience for you?
Exercise 2, Artist Date:
Details of Date:
Have you had the experience of hearing answers during this leisure time?
What did you do for your date?
How did it feel?
Have you taken an artist date yet that really felt adventurous?
Exercise 3: Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?
Exercise 4: Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.”
Exercise 5, Blasting through Blocks:
List any resentments (anger) you have in connection with this project. It does not matter how petty, picky, or irrational these resentments may appear to your adult self. To your artist child they are real big deals: grudges.
Ask your artist to list any and all fears about the projected piece of work and/or anyone connected to it. Again, these fears can be as dumb as any two-year-old’s. It does not matter that they are groundless to your adult’s eye. What matters it that they are big scary monsters to your artist.
Ask yourself if that is all. Have you left out any itsy fear? Have you suppressed any “stupid” anger? Get it on the page.
Ask yourself what you stand to gain by not doing this piece of work.
Make your deal. The deal is: “Okay, Creative Force, you take care of the quality, I’ll take care of the quantity.” Sign your deal and post it.
Exercise 6, Read your Morning Pages: This process is best under-taken with two colored markers, one to highlight insights and another to highlight actions needed. Do not judge your pages or yourself. This is very important. Yes, they will be boring. Yes, they may be painful. Consider them a map. Take them as information, not an indictment.
Take Stock: Who have you consistently been complaining about? What have you procrastinated on? What blessedly have you allowed yourself to change or accept?
Take Heart: Many of us notice an alarming tendency toward black-and-white thinking: “He’s terrible. He’s wonderful. I love him. I hate him. It’s a great job. It’s a terrible job,” and so forth. Don’t be thrown by this.
Acknowledge: The pages have allowed us to vent without self-destruction, to plan without interference, to complain without an audience, to dream without restriction, to know our own minds. Give yourself credit for undertaking them. Give them credit for the changes and growth they have fostered.
Exercise 7, Visualize: You have already done work with naming your goal and identifying true north. The following exercise asks you to fully imagine having yourgoal accomplished. Please spend enough time to fill in the juicy details that would really make the experience wonderful for you.
Name your goal: I am _____. In the present tense, describe yourself doing it at the height of your powers! This is your ideal scene. Read this aloud to yourself. Post this above your work area. Read this aloud, daily!
For the next week collect actual pictures of yourself and combine them with magazine images to collage your ideal scene described above. Remember, seeing is believing, and the added visual cue of your real self in your ideal scene can make it far more real.
Exercise 8, Priorities: List for yourself your creative goals for the year. List for yourself your creative goals for the month. List for yourself your creative goals for the week.
Exercise 9, Creative U-Turns: All of us have taken creative U-turns. Name one of yours. Name three more. Name the one that just kills you.