The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

by Julia Cameron

Because artistic losses are seldom openly acknowledged or mourned, they become artistic scar tissue that blocks artistic growth. Deemed too painful, too silly, too humiliating to share and so to heal, they become, instead, secret losses.

We must remember that our artist is a child and that what we can handle intellectually far outstrips what we can handle emotionally. We must be alert to flag and mourn our losses.

Trust that still, small voice that says, “This might work and I’ll try it.” DIANE MARIECHILD

QUESTION: Do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn to play the piano? ANSWER: The same age you will be if you don’t.

Although we seldom connect the dots, many of our present-day losses are connected to our earlier conditioning. Children may be told they can’t do anything or, equally damaging, be told they should be able to do absolutely anything with ease. Either of these messages blocks the recipient.

List five things you are not allowed to do: kill your boss, scream in church, go outside naked, make a scene, quit your job. Now do that thing on paper. Write it, draw it, paint it, act it out, collage it. Now put some music on and dance it.

Do not call the inability to start laziness. Call it fear. Fear is the true name for what ails the blocked artist. It may be fear of failure or fear of success. Most frequently, it is fear of abandonment. This fear has roots in childhood reality. Most blocked artists tried to become artists against either their parents’ good wishes or their parents’ good judgment. For a youngster this is quite a conflict.

Our artist child can best be enticed to work by treating work as play. Paint is great gooey stuff. Sixty sharpened pencils are fun. Many writers eschew a computer for the comforting, companionable clatter for a solid typewriter that trots along like a pony. In order to work well, many artists find that their work spaces are best dealt with as play spaces.

“I’d love to, but you see . . . I have these crippling fears . . .” can get us a lot of attention. We get more sympathy as crippled artists than as functional ones. Those of us addicted to sympathy in the place of creativity can become increasingly threatened as we become increasingly functional. Many recovering artists become so threatened that they make U-turns and sabotage themselves.

Who do I know who has an agent? Then ask them how they got one. Who do I know who has done a successful rewrite? Ask them how to do one. Do I know anyone who has survived a savage review? Ask them what they did to heal themselves. Once we admit the need for help, the help arrives. The ego always wants to claim self-sufficiency. It would rather pose as a creative loner than ask for help. Ask anyway.

A haunting anticipation of our own death, approaching long before we’re ready for it, long before we’ve done anything of value, shimmers ahead of us like a ghastly mirage.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. JALAL UD-DIN RUMI

You pick up a magazine—or even your alumni news—and somebody, somebody you know, has gone further, faster, toward your dream. Instead of saying, “That proves it can be done,” your fear will say, “He or she will succeed instead of me.”

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. EDGAR DEGAS

We seldom see anew in the sense of finding something utterly unfamiliar. Instead, we see an old in a new light.

Many hits are sure things only in retrospect. Until we know better, we call a great many creative swans ugly ducklings. This is an indignity we offer our brainchildren as they rear their heads in our consciousness. We judge them like beauty-pageant contestants. In a glance we may cut them down. We forget that not all babies are born beautiful, and so we abort the lives of awkward or unseemly projects that may be our finest work, out best creative ugly ducklings. An act of art needs time to mature. Judged early, it may be judged incorrectly.

I will tell you what I have learned myself. For me, a long five or six mile walk helps. And one must go alone and every day. BRENDA UELAND

It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

I AM AN ARTIST. As an artist, I may need a different mix of stability and flow from other people. I may find that a nine-to-five job steadies me and leaves me freer to create. Or I may find that a nine-to-five drains me of energy and leaves me unable to create. I must experiment with what works for me.

Art happens—no hovel is safe from it, no prince can depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about. JAMES ABBOTT MCNEILL WHISTLER

If you are happier writing than not writing, painting than not painting, singing than not singing, acting than not acting, directing than not directing, for God’s sake (and I mean that literally) let yourself do it.

You are lost the instant you know what the result will be. JUAN GRIS

To keep the body in good health is a duty. . . . Otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear. BUDDHA

Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places. . . . I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body. SARAHA

As an artist, walking offers the added benefit of sensory saturation. Things do not whiz by. We really see them. In a sense, insight follows from sight. We fill the well and later tap it more easily.

We are not accustomed to thinking that God’s will for us and our own inner dreams can coincide. Instead, we have bought the message of our culture: this world is a vale of tears and we are meant to be dutiful and then die. The truth is that we are meant to be bountiful and live. The universe will always support affirmative action. Our truest dream for ourselves is always God’s will for us.

Do not fear mistakes—there are none. MILES DAVIS

Mickey Hart’s hero and mentor, the late, great mythologist Joseph Campbell, wrote, “Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.” It is the inner commitment to be true to ourselves and follow our dreams that triggers the support of the universe. While we are ambivalent, the universe will seem to us also to be ambivalent and erratic. The flow through our lives will be char...

There is a path for each of us. When we are on our right path, we have a sure-footedness. We know the next right action—although not necessarily what is just around the bend. By trusting, we learn to trust.

Or, to use a gardening image, we must learn to not pull our ideas up by the roots to see if they are growing.

When I have screenwriting students stuck at the midpoint of act two, I ask them to please go do their household mending. They usually balk, offended by such a mundane task, but sewing has a nice way of mending up plots.

It is a paradox of creative recovery that we must get serious about taking ourselves lightly. We must work at learning to play.

We are stung by loss, bitten by hope.

Life is meant to be an artist date. That’s why we were created.

Our artist is a child, an inner youngster, and when he/she is scared, Mommy is what’s called for. Unfortunately, many of us have Wet Blanket mommies and a whole army of Wet Blanket surrogate mommies—those friends who have our second, third, and fourth thoughts for us. The trick is not to let them be that way. How? Zip the lip. Button up. Keep a lid on it. Don’t give away the gold. Always remember: the first rule of magic is self-containment. You must hold your intention within yourself, stoking it with power. Only then will you be able to manifest what you desire.