This is the second time I have picked up this remarkable course on self-discovery. I last did it in 2021, when I bought it as a New Year’s gift to myself. On the first page, I had then written:
Dear Arvind, I wish this book unlocks the artist in you.
I had worked through the 25th-anniversary edition then, and I see now that the 30th-anniversary edition is available:
This book is quite famous, so I don’t have to introduce it here. Briefly, it is a guide for a 12-week course with two main components: Morning Pages and Artist Dates.
The Morning Pages are “three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness” – first thing in the morning.
The morning pages are the primary tool of creative recovery.
The Artist Date is “a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly; especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist.“
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
– C. G. Jung
I highlighted many parts of the book the last time around, and here is a snippet from the introduction that stood out:
When we engage in a creativity recovery, we enter in a withdrawal process from life as we know it. […] Ordinarily, when we speak of withdrawal, we think of having a substance removed from us. […] It’s useful to view creative withdrawal a little differently. We ourselves are the substance we withdraw to, not from, as we pull our overextended and misplaced creative energy back into our own core.
That last sentence is such a revelation: we are the substance we withdraw to. That connects beautifully with what I have discovered during my deep meditations on the Direct Path.
This year has been a process of recovery for me, in all ways possible. Essentially, it is a spiritual process, working from the inside out. Through TWM, I have been pulling together the various threads and movements in my life, partly to heal and partly to make sense and forge ahead. The underlying theme of these explorations has been to live a life of freedom. This book feels like an apt aid to the process. May it lead to an explosion!
I discovered recently that I had written about half a million words in the last three years! That is a lot of words! All of it was written as stream-of-consciousness in my journals; I now wonder if it was the belated effect of having done the Morning Pages in 2021. Once the sluice gates opened post-divorce, there was a flood, and it has not abated yet. It also led me to start this blog.
In the first chapter of the book, Julia Cameron asks us to write the statement “I am a prolific artist” ten times and watch how we react vehemently to that statement. She calls these put-downs blurts, and suggests we recognize each of them as they arise and reframe them as positive affirmations. Interestingly, the negative self-talk was almost non-existent when I did the exercise this time. I see that I am a prolific writer. It’s a fact. Half a million words is not a joke. While I am not a published author, I am prolific alright. I write all the time and there is vast output, even if it is only as a journal to myself, and now slowly as this blog.
I want to thank two people for this gift of writing.
The first is my father; he did two things for me. [Well, he did a lot more but that is for later.]
When I was in grade six or seven, he would give me a single word every day – cloud, book, anger – and I would write a poem on that word. It would be eight to twelve lines of rhyme on a single page. I filled out a whole book that year. Must have written on some 150 topics. It was of course not great poetry (lol), but it got me writing and I loved it. That book was perhaps one of my earliest accomplishments; it was also my first glimpse of the bond one can create with the written word.
Later, when I joined Rishi Valley School – a residential school – he would write to me every weekend – blue inland letters usually, sometimes longer letters sent in an envelope. I would get a letter every week without fail, sometimes two, for the four years I was at RVS. It continued for another 4-5 years through my university days! The letters got longer as I got older and we would exchange our thoughts on all manner of things – his life, my life, and the world around us. When I sit back and think about it, I see it was an extraordinarily loving thing he did for me! Thank you, Appa.
I used to eagerly look forward to hearing from him; I would write back as soon as I got his letter, and that was the start of my love affair with letter-writing. I found that I could “speak” in my letters in a way that eluded me in person.
Soon, I started writing to my friends during holidays, and I simply loved it. My friendships flourished because of my letter-writing. There was a time when I wrote 18-page letters to a friend in Canada. Since it would take several weeks to get a reply, there would be a lot to say the next time as well.
Email just killed the whole thing in the 1990s; I have struggled to keep up my friendships ever since. As AI creeps into our lives, I wonder about the unintended effects of this new technology. Who would have thought email, of all things, would make it difficult for me to make friends again, or to keep alive my older friendships?
The last set of letters I wrote to my friends was on my crazy overland trip from Denmark to India and back.
The second person who had a deep impact on my writing was my grade 11 English teacher – Sheila. She passed away a few years ago sadly. She was an extraordinary teacher. The way she taught Lord of the Flies and Macbeth – oh boy, I would never have gleaned on my own any of the meanings she brought out from those texts. She changed the way I read books thereafter.
One day, she called me to the library to show her comments on my assignment. She had written in her large, scrawly, difficult-to-read hand: “You write with verve!” I was beaming ear to ear as I read her comment – no one had ever complimented my writing before. I was good at math and physics; there were others in the class who were language wizards (using words like halcyon) but I was not one of them. When Sheila saw me beaming, she smiled and asked: do you know what the word verve means? She figured I didn’t have a clue what it meant! I was just happy!
That is the power of words – they can impact us negatively or positively, and quite deeply. A significant goal of TAW is to reclaim ourselves; I am happy to see that the recovery work I have already done these past few months has almost eliminated negative self-talk. When I spill milk these days, as I am wont to do now and then, I say, “Ah the milk got spilled” and I just clean it up. This is in sharp contrast to how I used to whip myself earlier for being clumsy at times.
I can confidently claim that I have learned not to cry over spilled milk. Now I just got to make hay while the sun shines. (Sorry for the cringe, Sheila! Lol.)
At the start of this year, I created a list of broad movements I wanted to bring into my life. While the list on the blog was deliberately not specific, I had elaborated in my journal how I would actualize this:
| Goal | How? |
| Strengthen my body | Bend, Fitness Blender, Tai chi |
| Sharpen my mind | Read non-fiction daily, do a challenging course, write |
| Broaden my horizons | Meet new people, travel |
| Deepen my understanding | Silence, meditate |
| Challenge my limitations | Micromastery |
| Consolidate my finances | Earn more, invest |
| Express my creativity | TWM |
| Shift my energy | Landmark Forum |
I had also created a more specific set of goals, one of which was writing one post a month on the TWM blog. Initially, my goal had been more ambitious: one post a week. Then I thought it was perhaps unrealistic, that I would not be able to do it, and would end up berating myself for not accomplishing it. This writing was too precious to ruin it with some measurable goals and negative self-talk. Flow was the key to TWM.
Having said that, here are some numbers. While I wrote one post in January and another in February, March has been a bumper month for my writing: this is the fifth post for the month. The words have flowed easily these last couple of weeks.
When I picked up The Artist’s Way last week, I wondered if I should add the morning pages to all this writing that I was already doing: would that impact my journaling and blogging? On the evidence of the first week, it hasn’t. On the contrary, it seems to have enhanced my creativity. Moreover, it has inadvertently helped me accomplish another goal – I wake up half an hour earlier these days!
The theme for the first week was recovering a sense of safety.
I completed my morning pages daily. This time I bought a larger A4-sized spiral binder, so there is that much more space to fill out every day! Twice as much! So far, so good.
For my artist date, I opened a Zentangle workbook and pens I had purchased three months ago, and I started learning how to use them. It was bugging me that I had made another impulsive purchase that just sat on the shelf. Not anymore: I am tangling away!
I don’t want to write about what came up in the morning pages this past week because that goes against the process. Perhaps I might reflect on it at some later date. Or maybe not.
In any case, I am glad I have picked up The Artist’s Way again and am working through it one more time. I feel the artist in me has been unlocked; let’s see what emerges from working with the course this time. Would I gather the courage to write that book I have been meaning to? Something with verve, perhaps?
Featured Image: Photo by Daphne Fecheyr on Unsplash
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