Work begets work and taking one small step in action instead of indulging in the big questions can help us further along. Week 9: Fear is not laziness It didn’t feel like enough to simply write for my own sake, as if there has to be some other external recipient of the words rather than my own contentedness in writing them.

The Artist’s Way Everything I learned from (finally) completing The Artist’s Way

When starting out, I could run for less than five minutes on a treadmill. By week eight of the book, I hit my goal of running 5km without stopping. When you try something and keep trying, it might just work. I reached that goal, and I keep running, for clarity and focus and steadiness. We can also fall into asking what’s the point and berating ourselves for only just starting, worrying that everyone is so much further ahead, we will never quite catch up. My high expectations and lofty plans often mean that I want to leap over the small, incremental steps and dive straight into the impossible tasks. “The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce at all,” she writes. I often focus on the done – the book only when it gets the deal, the columns being published, the podcast being praised when it’s launched. I had ignored the doing, the writing, the recording and learning that all these dream projects contained. I’d skipped over process and progress, straight into perfection.This week was about tossing out the old and unworkable, and noticing changes in tastes, judgments and personal identity. For me, I found myself leaving a talk I wasn’t enjoying when previously I would have continued to sit through out of politeness.

The Artist’s Way | Julia Cameron Live The Artist’s Way | Julia Cameron Live

Each time I sat down to write I took note of an internal objections and negative beliefs the subconscious mind blurts out. One reoccurring blurt was “I should be working” – even though I was writing, it felt like I wasn’t work because it wasn’t paid work.Emotions that might feel counterintuitive such as anger are actually a map. “It tells us we can’t get away with our old life any longer. It tells us that old life is dying,” writes Julia. Just like the bends of a river, things don’t pay off in a linear fashion – there is no neat sequence of events once you’ve made a step, but the important thing is to become internally clear on dreams, desires and delights. So many of this week’s lessons resonate with what I’ve unearthed in the conversations I’ve had with creatives and own personal principles – creativity’s chief need is support and the key is to keep trying and experimenting. The first time I began The Artist’s Way it helped spark the idea for my labour of love, Extraordinary Routines. This second attempt is exactly five year’s after the first interview was published in 2014. Instead of ‘why me’ I needed to ask what next. I needed to see the potential of these endings and what could be opened up in their place – a fresh start, a shake-up of my routine, and push from complacency.

The Artist’s Way at 30: Alicia Keys, Pete Townshend and the The Artist’s Way at 30: Alicia Keys, Pete Townshend and the

It’s the final chapter of the book and I have arrived in New York City with the intention of setting aside three months to work on the personal projects that I have carried with me the last few months – the podcast and the book. The book is divided into 12 chapters, one of which is to be read each week for the duration of the 12-week course. In moving through the mild-to-moderately woo-woo chapters featuring inspirational quotes from the likes of Toni Morrison, Simone DeBeauvoir, and Plato, the book guides the reader to heal and soothe their “inner artist child.”Even without alcohol, there is still room for improvement in respect to how I’m using my time – which is often being the busy worker bee and feeling overwhelmed or worries about money rather than attending to important creative work. When we start with joy, the discipline will follow. The question bubbles up again – what do I enjoy? What do I desire? Why does this continue to elude me? This week felt like a lot of question-asking and meetings, but no step taking. Does this mean I am searching for the joy? Week 10: overwork v. zestful work It hurts, but the antidote to the pain of letting go is opening up to what delight there is in your life.

The Artist’s Way - Онлайн-клуб любителей The Artist’s Way - Онлайн-клуб любителей

Working out my dreams, desires and delights is still a work in progress, but from this week’s readings I know I need time, space and quiet to become clear on those – and that often means saying no to others or to our own expectations and too-rigid plans. When we get ‘there’, there disappears” writes Julia, so we may as well focus on the running, not the end. Week 12: Letting go I expect to hit the ground running immediately, but I can hear a familiar voice inside my mind telling me this has been a mistake, that I can’t afford to be here financially, that I’ve taken a wrong turn and I should focus on finding a job, a real job. Rather than a tool for vanity, exercise teaches us about the rewards of the process, not the outcome.According to me, I am no artist. But according to Julia Cameron — author, teacher, and creativity guru who first published The Artist’s Way almost 30 years ago — I, Emma Turetsky, am a brilliant and prolific artist, and through my creativity, I serve God! The creator! My inner child artist! And I must both shout it from the rooftops and write it in my notebook ten times for good measure! Often planning for me is a symptom of perfectionism, which we can have false ideas about. “Perfectionism is not a quest for the best, but a pursuit of the worst in ourselves.” The day after things ended between myself and my ‘crazymaker’ for the second time, I get a cold – what Julia describes as a Kriya, or “the bad case of the flu right after you’ve broken up with your love. It’s the rotten head cold and bronchial cough that announces you’ve abused your health to meet an unreachable work deadline.” There is no longer a fantasy of what could, would or should be with this person, no longer an addiction to the fantasy.