From Hustle to Flow: My Artist’s Way Experiment, Part 5

In this episode, I'll cover what I learned from Weeks 4 & 5 of Julia Cameron's wonderful book, The Artist's Way. 

✔️ Week 4 = reading deprivation, which was incredibly hard yet also highly rewarding for me.

✔️ Possibilities. You gotta believe in them, even if you are blazing your own trail without a firm role model. 

✔️ When you journal, are you being honest with yourself? Don't tiptoe around your feelings. Drag it out onto the paper. 

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

Julia Cameron, morning pages, reading deprivation, sense of integrity, sense of possibility, creative living, personal growth, artistic risks, cubist illustration, playwriting, David Bowie, limiting beliefs, artistic date, personal development.

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. I must apologize for being a bit tardy with my podcasting over here. It was not my intention last week I had to go to the dentist, and it's supposed to just be a couple of routine fillings. Man, it took forever. That's first of all. Secondly, it felt like the woman gave me an epidural for childbirth. I was numb from my forehead to my chin, and it's like I get that you don't want to feel any of the dental work going on while they're drilling and filling. The noise is bad enough, especially if you're familiar with the novel and the film marathon, man. But are you supposed to have your entire face numb? I couldn't even feel my own eyeballs, which is a very strange sensation. And I was laying there thinking, I don't even know how I'm gonna drive home after this. I don't I cannot feel my own eyeballs inside my skull. It's very odd, maybe the weekend likes it when he can't feel his face, but I freaking don't I thought it was awful, but my jaw was sore. What I could feel of it anyway, as the feeling came back later that night in increments, I was like, Oh my God. I feel like I got hit with a frying pan right in the jaws. So the bottom line, my tale of woe is that I was not going to record a podcast episode feeling that bad today. We are going to get back on the good foot. I am going to talk about weeks four and five in Julia Cameron's book the artist. Way, as I always say, you don't have to be an artist or a creative. I'm using air quotes here an artist or a creative to get something useful out of these exercises. So I do hope that you will hang in with me and stay tuned.

Just a reminder, you can find Sara's book, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld on amazon.com the link is available in the summary for this episode. And now back to the show!

Week four is titled, recovering a sense of integrity. And this is a big week for one thing, you're one month in to the program. You're also a third of the way through in week four, she opens up with honest changes. So if you've been doing your morning pages every morning, which is something that I recommend, whether you are an artist or you're seeking a creative career or whatever, it doesn't matter. It's just like what David bear calls taking a morning dump, which is a cheeky, no pun, intended way of saying, I'm going to get these thoughts out on paper first thing so they're not tormenting me or rattling around in my brain all day long. And one of the things that Julia encourages people to do is to really assess. Are you keeping it real when you're doing those morning pages? Are you saying, I feel fine, I feel okay, I guess everything's all right, or are you getting into the nitty gritty? And I think we all have a little bit of that initial overwhelm, maybe, of like, I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm doing this exercise because it was recommended to me. It's not necessarily something I would have chosen, and I know for me, part of the resistance that I had is like, I am a writer now. I'm a published, award winning author. Why do I need to sit here and write like I write all day, and of course, now I'm also illustrating. So typically, I write and edit during the day and then I illustrate in the evening, and I'm just sitting there like I don't know why I need to do this, but in life, sometimes the thing that we are the most resistant to, turns out to be the thing that we really needed to do. I can. We can use the dentist as another example. I was getting tired of the practice that I had been going to because they were keeping weird hours, like elementary school child hours. We only want to be here from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon. And then there's days of the week where we don't have any hours at all, we don't even open the office. And I'm like, What is this? Y'all are adults. You're trying to accommodate other adults. Running it like it's a kindergarten class. Doesn't make any sense to me, but I was resistant to finding another practice. Long story short, I went to a new practice today because, guess what? I had yet another dental issue. Fortunately, this one was easy to fix. I swear for me, these things come in clusters. I will go years without having to have any major dental work, and then kaboom, three or four things all go to hell at the same time. And I'm like, damn it. But the place was amazing. The people were nice. They were a. Affordable. They were reasonable. They have a garden in the back where you can watch like birds and squirrels and look at plants and flowers. And I'm like, oh my god, I should have been coming here all along. So this thing that we typically resist doing is often the thing that we should be doing. We're just self sabotaging and talking ourselves out of it. So when you're doing your morning pages. Don't censor yourself if you need to talk about some crap from childhood that you thought you had processed already. You're mad at your spouse or mad at the world. You hate your job, you hate your house. You're upset about a weight loss or a weight gain, whatever it is, put it down on the paper, and don't self censor your yourself. Self censor yourself. Don't censor yourself. Now, another important thing about week four, probably like the crown jewel, in some ways in a good way, some ways in a bad way, is that she has, you do reading deprivation. This hit me like a freight train carrying a load of cinder blocks. I was like, Are you effing kidding me? Julia Cameron, because as a writer, I wasn't illustrating at that time. I was not doing my own illustration work in week four. And I'm like, I I write, I edit. How's this gonna work? Julia, I was so mad, but she puts in the book like, there are plenty of people who have said the same thing. There are attorneys who say, I have to read case briefs. This is how I make my money. I can't you. I can't not do this. And she's like, Yeah, you can use your creativity to figure out how you're going to do reading deprivation for a week. There's no reading for pleasure, there's no reading for work. You're just cut off at the knees. Now I want to talk about something really interesting that happened to me during week four, when I was on my weeding, my weeding. I'm not editing that out. When I was on my reading deprivation week, I had to go through an eye exam. I used one of those services a year ago. Maybe it's been maybe more than that now where the robots do it, and I mean no disrespect to the AI and the robots that might be listening, haha, but it was just not for me. They screwed my prescription up. I did not like it. I wanted to go back to seeing an actual human being that you can talk to. And I've gone to the optometrist office just for the yearly, you know, eye exam, to get my prescriptions renewed and everything. And I was on reading deprivation, there was a dude in the waiting room who was surfing his phone, which is probably what I would have been doing. I would have either been reading a book or, like, reading something on Kindle, the Kindle app on my phone. Had it not been this reading deprivation week that I'm sitting there and I'm like, Okay, well, you you have to follow along and, pardon me, I had a coughing spell there. You have to follow along and really do the exercises in order to get the most out of this book, you should really do it. And also, this is about recovering your sense of integrity. If you cheat and start reading in the optometrist office, then you're breaking a pledge, and that's not cool. So I'm sitting there, and across from me is the young man on his phone, and then diagonal to me is an older lady, and she has, like, I want to talk energy. So here I am. I'm an introvert in this office waiting around and I can't read anything and I can't play on the phone, and I'm like, I feel like a sitting duck. Well, this woman told me the most amazing story. She struck up a conversation with me, and the story that she gave me, I was like, I want to turn this into a short story. There's a book that I want to write. I haven't gotten to it yet. It's on it's on the to write list, which is quite long. I I could probably live to be 200 and not run out of ideas. For that matter, I could probably be Nosferatu and be relatively immortal and not run out of ideas. But I thought this, this book that I want to write of romance stories, not smart, not X rated stuff, but really true romance stories, the story that she told me, I'm like, That would be great. Finessing it around, adapting it around, and turning it into a short story for that book would be amazing, but I wouldn't have gotten that. My point is, if I had been sitting there with my head buried in my phone or my head buried in a book, I wouldn't have gotten that information from her, I wouldn't have had that interaction. And I noticed that happening a lot during the reading deprivation week. It was like stories would just come to me unbidden, sort of like, Hey, you're not in the middle of something. We don't feel like we're intruding on your time anymore. And so we want to come to you. We want to have other people. Tell you things that you're like, oh my god, that would be a beautiful story. That's a great book idea. That's a screenplay idea. Things just just happened. They just happened unbidden, and it was really cool. Week five is recovering a sense of possibility, and this is a big one, especially when we are thinking about stepping full time into creative living, or maybe you already have, if you know my story, I didn't step full time on purpose. It happened to me. I didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on me. My goal was to have a long off ramp from staffing and a long on ramp to creative living. And on Black Friday of last year, the universe was like, No, No, sweetie, no. It's cute that you wanted to ease your way into it like somebody that's easing their way into a swimming pool for the first time, but we're throwing your ass into the deep end, and hopefully it's gonna work for you. Okay, bye, oh, well, okay, so there's that a sense recovering a sense of possibility, was important for me, because you have to believe it's possible. You have to be able to put away these stereotypes of the starving artist and well, people publish their work, but nobody really buys it anymore. People don't like to read. You get all kinds of stereotypes and negativity and limiting beliefs that tell you it's not possible. You can't do this. Other people can, but you don't get to and you have to have that. You have to see that it's possible. And the reality is you might have to be your own Roger Banister, you know, he broke the four minute mile. People thought it was just physically not possible for the human body to do that. And then after he did it, a whole other group of runners did the same thing because they saw that it was possible. You may have to be the trailblazer. You may be able to find somebody and say, close enough this person has done something in their life that's close enough to what I'm trying to do, that I can say they are a role model. I may have said this before on the broadcast. I don't remember, because I've been out of sorts, right? But I look at David Bowie as being a kind of person like that. For me, not that I listen to every song that he's ever recorded, or that I'm some big, mega fan. I'm actually not. I don't know everything that's in his catalog, and who knows he may be canceled someday, somebody may say he did something terrible, and we're not allowed to listen to his music anymore, whatever. What appeals to me is that people have this sense of Bowie. Could do whatever he wanted because he was David Bowie. He acted. Sometimes he would come up with weird off the wall characters and costumes. Sometimes he would paint, sometimes he would write songs, sometimes he would record music. I mean, he was very versatile, and he did what he wanted to do. And I have taken to doing the same thing. I have a play of a one act play that's in development. It's actually with a proofreader right now. Hopefully we'll come back in the next day or two, the baby will come home from summer camp, so to speak. But I've written this one act play, and I intend to write others. So I'm now a playwright. How the hell did that happen? I'm illustrating. I'm doing the illustrations for simply DAG, which is my next non fiction project about Dag Hammarskjöld, who we all know that I love and care for so deeply, and he had prompted me, was like he was nudging me like, because I was looking at the illustrations for decoding the unicorn, who were done for me by a fabulous artist that does like cartooning type work, and I felt like the art that he did for decoding the unicorn was perfect. It's not right for simply DAG, though, because the tone of simply DAG is different. It's a different work with a different point of view. And dag was like, nudging me like, well, you know, I like abstracts, you know, I liked Cubism. And I'm like, All right, well, then I'll have to find an artist who does that. And he's sitting there like, will you though? I'm like, oh, no, I know what this means, because I want to argue for my limitations. And dag wants to be like, Well, no, not really. Well, you should try it before you say I can't. You should at least try it and see what happens. And I actually have done my very first cubist illustration, and it's not only a cubist illustration, but a cubist illustration of the human form, which I have struggled with so much I've only really worked on one painting of the human form, and that was just recently. That's only just been here in the past year or so that I even started that so to say I've done a cubist illustration of the human form. The first one I did is. A is a portrait of dag as a little boy reading by candlelight. And I'm like, I can't believe I did that. So now I'm an illustrator. I'm an illustrator. I'm doing the illustrations also for how to host a unicorn. I had somebody else commissioned to do that. It didn't work out. I'm not going to go into all the reasons why, but it didn't work out. And then it did work out, because I started doing them myself. And I am so in love with these drawings, and I'm so in love with the fact that I can do it. It's just wild to me. So that's part of recovering your sense of possibility. You have to understand that it's possible. It's just like what dag told me, Don't say that I can't do it. You haven't even tried. How would you know I can't do it? I can't I've never done it before. I can't do it, and I'm over here like Eeyore, and he's like, No, not really, because you should try. And Julia comes up with a list of other suggestions. Maybe trying cubist art is not your thing. Maybe trying to illustrate a kid's book is not your thing. Maybe you decide to learn how to play the guitar or the drums. Maybe you finally take that awesome trip to a foreign country that you've delayed. Maybe you learn how to do skydiving or scuba diving, or she talks about things like belly dancing and Latin dancing. Go out for salsa. Try to get some of your poems published. You're allowed to do these things as an adult, and sometimes it helps. It's funny because, yeah, we're allowed to do these things as an adult, but sometimes we forget that, and it helps to have another adult poke us on the shoulder and say, Hey, you do realize that you're a grown ass adult and you can do this, right? One of the tasks that she has you do in week five is you start to list your grievances with God. And that was big for me too, because it's like I had some things that I wanted to get off my chest, some aggravations, shall we say, that I've carried for a long time, and it was good to just purge those out of my system and to realize, like, yeah, I am allowed to ball up my fists and shake them at the sky and say, It really pisses me off that this and this and that happened in my life. It doesn't feel fair, it doesn't feel right, and I still hold it against you that things didn't go the way that I wanted them to. Back in whatever you're again, if you need an adult to tell you these things, you you are allowed to say those things. You are allowed to express those emotions in real time. I'm actually in week 12, which is the final week of the book. She does have some appendices and some epilogs that I intend to go through probably over the next week or two, just for my own edification. But it's been an experience, and when I think about how much I've changed over the past 12 weeks, that's when it hits home for me, because as you're going through week to week, sometimes the changes may feel microscopic or slow and so you don't necessarily register them. But when I look at it holistically, when I think back to week one, day one week one, or even earlier than that, when I bought the book and I started going through her non negotiables, you have to have your artist date, and you have to have morning pages, basically like, don't do this book if you're not willing to comply with those orders. I think back to where I was then, which I think was back in April, and I look at where I am now in early to mid July, and I'm like, Who even is this person? This person is a playwright. This person is an illustrator and is taking artistic risks that they never thought possible. I do have ideas for a screenplay, and I'm learning how that process works, because it is different. It's not like writing a novel. There's a lot of directing that you don't do the film. Director does the directing you don't you don't teach the actors how to act. And so part of it for me is going to be giving up that sense of control and not micromanaging the process, unless I want to be some kind of auteur film director. And who knows, I have learned in my life to never say never. That is for sure, unless I want to direct a film, if I'm writing the screenplay, I have to butt out to a certain degree. I provide the bones, I provide the story, but I don't provide everything else, and that's going to be a new experience, tricky, but doable. As always, I will say I highly recommend this book, even if you're not an artist, you're not a creative. If you want to get something out of it, like personal growth and development. I think it's excellent for that. Stay tuned, and we will continue winding our way through this little mini series.

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