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

Selecting a challenge and meeting it creates a sense of self-empowerment that becomes the ground for further successful challenges. Viewed this way, running a marathon increases your chances of writing a full-length play. Writing a full-length play gives you a leg up on a marathon.

We’ve all heard that the unexamined life is not worth living, but consider too that the unlived life is not worth examining.

we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting’s own plan. This is often expressed as “The brush takes the next stroke.”

What factors keep people from being creative? A: Conditioning. Family, friends, and educators may discourage us from pursuing an artist’s career. There is the mythology that artists are somehow “different,” and this mythology of difference inspires fear. If we have negative perceptions about what an artist is, we will feel less inclined to do the d

Words For It I wish I could take language And fold it like cool, moist rags. I would lay words on your forehead. I would wrap words on your wrists. “There, there,” my words would say— Or something better. I would ask them to murmur, “Hush” and “Shh, shhh, it’s all right.” I would ask them to hold you all night. I wish I could take language And daub

A little flattery can go a long way toward deterring our escape velocity. So can a little cash. More sinister than either is the impact a well-placed doubt can have, particularly a “for your own good, just wanting to make sure you’ve thought about this” doubt—voiced by one of our nearest and dearest.

quickly notes that when the mind is focused on other, the self often comes into a far more accurate focus.

Most blocked creatives are cerebral beings. We think of all the things we want to do but can’t. Early in recovery, we next think of all the things we want to do but don’t. In order to effect a real recovery, one that lasts, we need to move out of the head and into a body of work. To do this, we must first of all move into the body.