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

Very often, the mere act of writing out your list of forbidden joys breaks down your barriers to doing them. Post your list somewhere highly visible.

In working with affirmations and blurts, very often injuries and monsters swim back to us. Add these to your list as they occur to you. Work with each blurt individually. Turn each negative into an affirmative positive.

Art is the imagination at play in the field of time. Let yourself play.

By holding lightly to an attitude of gentle exploration, we can begin to lean into creative expansion. By replacing “No way!” with “Maybe,” we open the door to mystery and to magic.

Because workaholism is a process addiction (an addiction to a behavior rather than a substance), it is difficult to tell when we are indulging in it. An alcoholic gets sober by abstaining from alcohol. A workaholic gets sober by abstaining from overwork. The trick is to define overwork—and this is where we often lie to ourselves, bargaining to hold

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.”

The perfectionist has married the logic side of the brain. The critic reigns supreme in the perfectionist’s creative household. A brilliant descriptive prose passage is critiqued with a white-glove approach: “Mmm. What about this comma? Is this how you spell …

In my experience, the universe falls in with worthy plans and most especially with festive and expansive ones. I have seldom conceived a delicious plan without being given the means to accomplish it. Understand that the what must come before the how. First choose what you would do. The how usually falls into place of itself.

The snowflake pattern of your soul is emerging. Each of us is a unique, creative individual. But we often blur that uniqueness with sugar, alcohol, drugs, overwork, underplay, bad relations, toxic sex, underexercise, over-TV, undersleep—many and varied forms of junk food for the soul. The pages help us to see these smears on our consciousness.

Write a letter to the editor in your defense. Mail it to yourself. It is great fun to write this letter in the voice of your wounded artist child: “To whom it may concern: Sister Ann Rita is a jerk and has pig eyes and I can too spell!”