Week 7!!

Next week I will be two thirds through this book.  I am so pleased to be finally getting through it, even if I did have to commit to paying people money if I didn’t finish it.  Whatever the motivation, it is certainly giving more pause to think, and I am getting more out of it this time than any other time I have attempted it!

This week was centered on recovering a sense of connection with your own creative interests and dreams.

A lot of the tasks were experience based again, although there was also a bit of journaling that took place as well.  Some of the tasks included listening to music and doodling, going to somewhere you consider a sacred space, wearing a favourite item of clothing, and creating scents in your home either from baking, incense, candles etc.

She also introduces the concept of the jealously map where you look at jealousy as a healthy feeling, and look at what you are actually jealous off and what step you can do to move you in the right direction. All very interesting and powerful work.

I did have to create a vision board this week that reflected my life or interests.  She said it was okay to include images that called to you, so I did though there are many aspects that I am not too sure about yet. (I am also linking to Aimee’s Glue it Tuesday because there was a WHOLE lot of gluing that went on in the construction of this vision board, so I figure it counts)

Here are the close up photos of the three panels (all in my Artist’s Way Challenge Journal):

Panel 1:

Panel 2:

Panel 3:

You then had to list down your 5 top movies and 5 top book genres and assess whether they are represented in the vision board.

My top 5 movie list was problematic, I found it so hard to limit myself to 5, I would have much preferred 10, but my top 5 movies I finally decided on are:

• Edward Scissorhands
• Dirty Dancing
• The Castle
• Sound of Music
• Whale Rider

My top 5 book genres are:

• History
• Science Fiction
• Crime/Justice
• Politics
• Art

I see elements of some of these movies or books in the vision board, but I don’t know how much I am reading into the images either (I have a special talent of reading between the lines!! :)). I don’t see all of them represented…not at the moment anyway!

The last page to show is an art journal page. It started off as the doodle page from listening to music and then became the background for a sentence that Julia Cameron wanted you to write up.

On to my quotable quotes from this week, all from this weeks chapter by Julia Cameron!

Art is not about thinking something up.  It is about the opposite – getting something down….If we are trying to think something up, we are straining to reach for something that’s just beyond our grasp….When we get something down, there is no strain. We’re not doing; we’re getting.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best.  It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be enough – that we should try again.  No. We should not.

Jealousy is always a mask for fear: fear that we aren’t able to get what we want; frustration that somebody else seems to be getting what is rightfully ours even if we are too frightened to reach for it.

Selecting a challenge and meeting it creates a sense of self-empowerment that becomes the ground for further successful challenges.

My artist date this week was to the beach, I went to a windswept isolated beach to gather stones for me new stone obsession (see here and here), and also to take some time to myself in a space I consider sacred.

I am also pleased to say that so far I have done the morning pages every day as well, and I do feel so much more productive and organised, like I am actually getting stuff done.  Which is a much better feeling than feeling like I am trudging through sticky mud.

My other Artist’s Way Challenge posts can be found here.

Week 4!!

I failed one of the tasks this week…I want to acknowledge that right up front! Reading deprivation did not happen fully. Some reading snuck in. Though I didn’t read any newspapers, magazines or books (apart from the artist’s way).

I did read text messages (that were needed to be read), and I scanned my email sort of. I missed some things (as my inbox exploded I need to do some unsubscribing from newsletters and what have you), but I did try and catch emails I needed to check and respond to. I tried not to read what didn’t need to be read straight away.

I did read a couple of blogs though, and then remembered I “wasn’t” reading and stopped. I don’t know how complete reading deprivation is possible, certainly I was not successful. I also really missed reading my books.

But with that confession out of the way I did complete the other tasks. There is not as much art journal stuff this week, mainly because there was some actually “doing” tasks instead such as creating a corner for you that you love to reflect in (see the chair I described last week, now has no clothes or other items anywhere near it and I have moved a couple of pot plants over to that space as well), and getting rid of a low self-worth outfit.

You had to write a couple of letters this week and I have popped them into my post box spread I made for this week.

You can see that I used different paper that does not fold into the envelope the same, but I quite like that.

You also needed to find a picture of your ideal environment. What I liked about this picture was the wooden floorboards, the chandelier and the rustic-y dining room chairs. As well as those bookcases!! Be still my heart, how I love bookcases!

Selecting images of my favourite season was surprisingly hard. I super adore summer and sun and warmth, and I love the first blooms in spring. I have never been a huge fan of winter because I intensely dislike being cold, and I never really liked the oranges and browns I associated with autumn. But in the last couple of years I see beauty in all the seasons, so even winter I have a fondness for (as long as it packs up and goes when it should and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome). The colours of autumn have also become such a joy for me, and so much more than the dingy browns and decaying oranges I used to have in my head.

So I went for my feelings, and I don’t know if it is because I am currently in autumn, but that feeling of shedding leaves and stories and that which you don’t need appealed. The autumnal chill that brings clarity. Those vibrant blues in the sky, and the stormy grays against deep red leaves. It all seemed to fit where I am and was what stood out feeling wise so that is where I went with it. But all these words to say it could have gone any way!! :)

I reviewed my life pie from week 2, and was not expecting to have made much progress except for spirituality (because I am attempting to meditate most days and reading more dharma), but surprisingly when I self-assessed I had made more progress than I suspected I had, which was a good feeling! :)

The last page I worked on was this:

It isn’t finished, but not many of these pages are, I will add to them as things go forward, I am trying not to feel pressure to finish completely each week.

I realised last week that I did not give any stand out quotes from my reading, and I had them noted, so I am going to sneak in a couple of quotes from week 3, as well as week 4! The author of all of them is of course Julia Cameron! :)

Week 3:

Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because Anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go. It lets us see where we’ve been and lets us know when we haven’t liked it. Anger points the way, not just the finger.

Anger is our friend. Not a nice friend. Not a gentle friend. But a very, very loyal friend. It will always tell us when we have been betrayed. It will always tell us when we have betrayed ourselves.

Understand that the what must come before the how. First choose what you would do. The how usually falls into place itself.

See there was juciness there that I did not want to get lost!! :D

Week 4:
As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered.

That final line gives me chills!! :)

I have done the morning pages EVERY DAY. Some things keep making it onto the pages every day, which is good because then it doesn’t let me forget things that need to be done, at least for too long, and also I do the things that I write about because I get sick of writing them down!!

My artist date this week was watching two videos from 21 Secrets when that opened up. Some thing that I did not think I had time for this week, but I am so glad I made the time, it felt a lot like playing hooky. I sat down with a mug of tea, lit some incense and watched some arty goodness. It felt like a lovely break just for me, from my life of child-wrangling, laundry and entertaining house guests (as lovely as that was!).

I do feel that I have accomplished more this time around with the Artist’s Way than I have any of the previous times I have attempted it, and it is making certainly much more of a difference. I don’t know if it is my added motivation to actually complete the tasks and the course as a whole, but in any event long may that continue. (At least for 8 more weeks!! haha)

This week’s artist date involves GELATINE. I AM VERY EXCITED.

Late to the posting but still within my deadline!  Whew!!  :)

My father, who lives in Australia is in the country and has been staying with us for much of the week since we got back from weekend adventuring, and I have been soaking him in and spending time with him and the children.

But I have still been working on pages (if not taking photos of them and posting!).

Here are my pages and reflections from this week.

This week spent a lot of time looking back at our childhood.

First of all we looked at favourite things in our rooms when we were younger and then what we loved now.

I got to “choose” (there was much discussion during the choosing process) the colours for the last room I lived in while at home, and I picked orange in the end. It wasn’t the orange I had in mind, but I loved that I had had some role in the paint colour on my walls. I also loved the fact that that room had an old defunct chimney. My room had been an extension at some stage, and they had built it around an old chimney (the fireplace was long gone). It was papered over but I loved the quirkiness of it. I had a picture hanging on it like a display wall and it made me ridiculously happy. Now the thing in my room that makes me happiest is a floral arm chair in my little quiet reading corner I have claimed (that may or may not have become storage for other things until they are put away!).

After travelling back to what I loved about my room when I was little (which I struggled with), we hung out a bit in the past coming up with achievements, favourite foods and attributes. This took a wee while, and then while I was discussing with Dad he remembered a few other things that could have easily made it on to my lists as well. Especially my favourite foods.

I once won a boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia books and they are still among my prized possessions though looking a bit worn for wear as they have been read and reread over the past decades. My favourite foods could have extended way past this list!! I finally decided on my Nana’s vanilla biscuits which were Huge with sultana’s in them. I loved when she baked them. Toffee and date pudding which I very rarely had, I think the first time was in a restaurant when I was a wee thing but I loved it, the hot caramel sauce…YUM. Still makes me smile. Homemade fried rice that my mother made, I always claimed leftovers for lunch the next day (or breakfast!).

Brandy snaps which I love. I remember when I was very little making dinner for Dad with my sister while we were staying with him, and we chose brandy snaps, so he took us out to get ingredients (brandy snaps and cream) and we made a plate full for dinner. Dad said it had taken us a surprisingly long time and it turned out we had also helped ourselves to a can of his bear which we had shared between us! Such a delicious memory, and I love brandy snaps even now. And mince on toast, mince spread on toast and lightly toasted in the oven. My father also reminded me of my Nanny’s fry bread (a bit like a fried scone) which we ate with lashings of golden syrup, and I always asked her to make them for us when we were visiting, and so easily could have slipped on my list had I remembered them when I was compiling the list!)

From childhood to looking at bad habits, both overt ones and the quiet sneaky ones. Without judgment considering the pay off for those habits, and what we get out of it. This took a lot of journaling, and the insights were a slap in the face for what I was getting out of them. Things I hadn’t considered, and this exercise has definitely given me much pause to think about.

Then we had to go through and make lists, of people we admire and secretly admire. I have to say I struggled with that. I couldn’t think of people I secretly admire, I have no problem with admiring who I admire, and don;t have a list of “shoulds” with who I should or shouldn’t admire. They are who they are. So I spent a lot of time in my journal writing about “secret” admiring, and wondering who I was going to write. In the end I decided on a few people close to me, like the children especially different aspects of them that I adore. But I don’t have secret people. On the other side of some of the doors is journaling and in some cases there is journaling on the page underneath as well as I was distilling what qualities I was gravitating towards at the moment I selected people.

We then had to look at people we wish we could have met who have died, and those that we would want to hang out with for a while in eternity. The people I wanted to meet who were dead were all quite famous (or infamous!), artists like Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock and Picasso, and also Minnie Dean. The first and only woman to be hung in New Zealand. I did a research report on her when I was a tiny thing, before there was a lot of information about her (now there are books) and I have always been fascinated by her story.

The people I would choose to hang out with in eternity for a while were actually all my grandparents. Things I wish I had asked them, stories I would dearly love to collect. This surprised me a little I wasn’t expecting them to come up and before I got to the exercise properly in my journal I was tossing around other ideas, but when I started writing it was my grandparents and a couple of my great grandmothers that I wanted to see for any length of time.

Here is one of the doors open (not the one with any words, just another round of representative faces on the other door.

I have done the morning pages every day, and the processing of things that happened has been useful (especially this week). Sometimes it is much like a giant waffly, rambly to-do list and I am wondering if I am doing it right because Julia Cameron often states not to show others the morning pages (because of criticism of the early writings) and I can’t imagine anything of worth that people would find in mine that I would show them, but I am counting my three pages writing as done in spite of my wonderings! My artist date this week was a good long soak in a HOT geothermal mineral spa while we were away last weekend that was one of my highlights of the year. So divine and I had it all to myself for a good long while.

Yay for finishing week 2! Still no money to be sent out!!! hahaha

My morning pages were completed every day, and I had forgotten how much more organised and productive I am when I have them. Maybe it is the constant writing down each day of everything I still need to do, that keeps everything present and ticking along!

The stand out quotes from Julia Cameron for me this week were:

The essential element in nurturing out creativity lies in nurturing ourselves. Through self-nurturance we nurture our inner connection to the Great Connector.

Your crazymaker is a block you chose yourself, to deter you from your own trajectory.

In creative recovery, it is not necessary that we change any of our beliefs. It is necessary that we examine them. More than anything else, creative recovery is an exercise in openmindedness.

The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

This reinforced motivation is allowing me to dive deeper than I have previously which is surprising and very motivating to continue (though I am only on week 2 so that is easy for me to say now!!!)  :)

This week I added some more imaginary lives to the page:

I made a background that I thought I would use, but then none of the tasks called out to use it, so it is now an intermission! :)

Looking at my sacred circle and the issues that I am careful about who I talk to. Again in my journaling I am much more fulsome, than my representational images. Also there were some people who had limited access to the circle for some topics and not others. It was also interesting some of the people for whom I realised that I would say nothing of any real meaning to. I felt clearer about some of my boundaries than I have for a long time, so this was a useful exercise.

Looking at my “Life Pie” was next, so looking at exercise, spirituality, romance/adventure, friends, work and play.

My exercise I am really happy with at the moment: Walking/jogging 5.5kms at least 5 days a week and then the fitness group I have joined where I have been doing exercises like 100 push ups, a zillion lunges and freaking awful burpees (this week’s challenge) every day. So tick, in fact as I look at it now, I wonder that I didn’t actually score that higher! Spirituality was one of my lowest, I realise I haven’t read any of my dharma books for a long time, or meditated consistently, so I am making an effort to do that every day. There is no excuse for when the children and my beloved go off to church on a Sunday either that I can’t do more to refill my spiritual well. So that is on the agenda.

Romance and adventure I am happy with, but who couldn’t do with more adventure if the opportunity arises! :) Friends is the same, I have some really good friends around me in real life and online and I am grateful. So really that score is reflective of me being a better friend and connecting more, than any needs I have. Work I felt let the side down, and I don’t know if I play enough. So I am going to take the time to play more, or take time to do things for no set purpose.

It doesn’t look so flash, but I wonder if I was a little harsh on my scores because I was actually surprised at how happy I was for most of the sections!

Twenty things I liked to do for fun was easy. I could have kept going! Some of the things that came up surprised me, but I wrote them down as they came to me without thinking too much about them. Part of the exercise was also to record when we last did the activities and I was pleasantly surprised that for the most part, things have been done relatively recently. Go me!

Ten changes I wanted to make, was also quite easy. Particularly in light of the Life Pie exercise.

My artist date this week was to take the time in amongst everything else to make an Easter Tree and an easter nest:

Completely not what I had on my to-do list but two things that bring me so much joy when I look at them. I had so much fun, and was completely catapulted into the Easter spirit. :)

I have had a couple of people mention the “God”, or high spiritual nature of the book. I haven’t found it a problem, although she does mention that aspect relatively often. In the Introduction, Julia Cameron actually alludes to not letting semantics to get in the way of what you take out of the book, and that you can substitute her use of “God” for any concept that works for you, whether that be “in the flow” with “Spirit” etc, etc. I have not found it off putting.

I don’t have any bad experience with “God” or the church though, and I live in a house of Catholics (:)), so I take from it what I take from it, and carry on, and that works or me.  I don’t know how useful that is to those who have asked about that aspect of the book. But speaking from Week 2, that is where I am and what I would have to say about it.