The impulse to create is strong in everyone. It does not necessarily have to manifest itself in what one traditionally thinks of as “creating” i.e. Painting a picture, taking a photo, or writing a novel, but can be in the little things people do each day.
Satisfaction can be gained from cooking a good meal and being able to share it with others. Tending a garden and watching new plants thrive can be a highly rewarding act of creation. Creativity comes in many forms and it is important that each person nurture that spirit of creating within them, as well as within others.
Living the Artist’s Way
Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way offers the reader a practical 12-week course to unleashing creativity. Central to the course are two powerful tools that anyone can employ to add value to each day and to fuel the creative fires.
Writing Morning Pages as a Meditation Tool
Designed to help release creativity, recover from creative blocks and also as a meditative tool, morning pages are three pages of longhand writing in a stream of consciousness, no editing allowed form. There is no right or wrong, just the commitment to do this each morning right after a person wakes up. This helps clear the mind and acts as a calming meditation tool to relax before the day begins.
Cameron suggests that these are not read until about eight weeks or so after they have been written. She explains that this process allows people to disassociate from their inner censor and to stop judging. The trick with morning pages is to just keep writing. Fill three pages. It doesn’t matter what with, just that this routine is kept every day and that three pages are filled, but only three pages, no more.
The Artist's Date
Schedule a block of about two hours per week ( Heather White of 2020 Communications suggests making up a fake company name to add in to a calendar – clients will see the time is filled and therefore a person doesn’t have to make excuses or sacrifice that time). This is time set aside to do something that feeds the creative spirit.
Go alone, without friends or family. Go for a walk, visit an art gallery, go to a movie, sit in a park in the sunshine and read a book, browse the shops – something that allows a person to relax and feed their soul. The artist's date is a way to show commitment to the self.
Committing to the Self
These two simple tools are deceptively difficult, because for some reason it becomes harder to commit to oneself in this busy world than it does to commit to others. Having some quality alone time, however, and the chance to reflect each day can do wonders to the mood, and whatever the creative endeavour, it can help reconnect one to the creative process and the very basics of life itself.
Geraldine Eliot - Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, I now live in Vancouver, Canada (and am still not quite used to the change in temperature). I ...
