The Emerald Waters by Chi-King
The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
Julia Cameron
ISBN 0-87477-694-5
Julia Cameron teaches the methods she created from The Artist’ s Way in Hollywood, California. The co-founder of “The Artist’s Way Wookshop” is Mark Byron. She recognizes that the path to unblocking creativity is a spiritual path.
Spiritual Electricity: The Basic Principles begins the book and includes such knowledge as: Creativity is the natural order of life. Life is energy: pure creative energy. Creativity is God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God.
The two pivotal tools in creative recovery are the morning pages (a daily journal) and the artist date. The morning pages are the primary tool of creative recovery. An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist. Doing the moring pages is sending your thoughts, dreams, etc. and the artist date is receiving inspiration, insight, and guidance.
The rest of the book is divided into chapters about recovering a sense of: safety, identity, power, integrity, possibility, abundance, connection, strength, compassion, self-protection, autonomy, and faith.
She require her students to sign a creativity contract and includes one for her book students.
An excerpt from Week 1: Recovering a Sense of Safety:
“One of our chief needs a creative beings is support. Unfortunately, this can be hard to come by. Ideally, we would be nurtured and encouraged first by our nuclear family and then by our ever-widening circles of friends , teachers, well-wishers. As Young artists, we need and want to be acknowledged for our attempts and efforts as well as for our achievements and triumphs. Unfortunately, many artists never receive this critical early encouragement. As a result, they may not know they are artists at all.”
Cameron uses quotations in the margins of the pages for inspiratin and also includes many experiences she has had in helping others to regain the creative path. I say recreate because I believe we are each born with creativity and I believe life to be a return to bing our joyful, playful, creative child.
In the chapter in the first week, she dwells on the foundation upon which we each live—our beliefs. If you are telling yourself that you can’t—you are probably helping to make that come true. None of your core beliefs that are negative needs to be true. Beliefs aren’t facts. Your allies for replacing negative beliefs with postitive ones are creative affirmations. She lists several suggestions for these. At the end of each chaper, she assigns tasks (homework) to be completed before moving on the next chapter. Some of the tasks for week 1 are: to take $5.00 and go to a discount store and buy goold stars, stickers, glitter, glue crayons—buy what you’d like to play with.
