Cameron - The Complete Artists Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice

W HEN PEOPLE ASK ME what I do, I usually answer, Im a writer-director and I teach these creativity workshops.

The last one interests them.

How can you teach creativity? they want to know. Defiance fights with curiosity on their faces.

I cant, I tell them. I teach people to let themselves be creative.

Oh. You mean were all creative? Now disbelief and hope battle it out.

Yes.

You really believe that?

Yes.

So what do you do?

This book is what I do. For a decade now, I have taught a spiritual workshop aimed at freeing peoples creativity. I have taught artists and nonartists, painters and filmmakers and homemakers and lawyersanyone interested in living more creatively through practicing an art; even more broadly, anyone interested in practicing the art of creative living. While using, teaching, and sharing tools I have found, devised, divined, and been handed, I have seen blocks dissolved and lives transformed by the simple process of engaging the Great Creator in discovering and recovering our creative powers.

The Great Creator? That sounds like some Native American god. That sounds too Christian, too New Age, too Stupid? Simple-minded? Threatening? I know. Think of it as an exercise in open-mindedness. Just think, Okay, Great Creator, whateverthatis, and keep reading. Allow yourself to experiment with the idea there might be a Great Creator and you might get some kind of use from it in freeing your own creativity.

TheprimaryimaginationIholdtobetheLivingPower.

S AMUEL T AYLOR C OLERIDGE

Because TheArtistsWay is, in essence, a spiritual path, initiated and practiced through creativity, this book uses the word God. This may be volatile for some of youconjuring old, unworkable, unpleasant, or simply unbelievable ideas about God as you were raised to understand him. Please be open-minded.

Remind yourself that to succeed in this course, no god concept is necessary. In fact, many of our commonly held god concepts get in the way. Do not allow semantics to become one more block for you.

When the word God is used in these pages, you may substitute the thought goodorderlydirection or flow. What we are talking about is a creative energy. God is useful shorthand for many of us, but so is Goddess,Mind,Universe,Source, and HigherPower. The point is not what you name it. The point is that you try using it. For many of us, thinking of it as a form of spiritual electricity has been a very useful jumping-off place.

By the simple, scientific approach of experimentation and observation, a workable connection with the flow of good orderly direction can easily be established. It is not the intent of these pages to engage in explaining, debating, or defining that flow. You do not need to understand electricity to use it.

Do not call it God unless that is comfortable for you. There seems to be no need to name it unless that name is a useful shorthand for what you experience. Do not pretend to believe when you do not. If you remain forever an atheist, agnosticso be it. You will still be able to experience an altered life through working with these principles.

Manisaskedtomakeofhimselfwhatheissupposedtobecometofulfillhisdestiny.

P AUL T ILLICH

Imyselfdonothing.TheHolySpiritaccomplishesallthroughme.

W ILLIAM B LAKE

I have worked artist-to-artist with potters, photographers, poets, screenwriters, dancers, novelists, actors, directorsand with those who knew only what they dreamed to be or who only dreamed of being somehow more creative. I have seen blocked painters paint, broken poets speak in tongues, halt and lame and maimed writers racing through final drafts. I have come to not only believe but know:

No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity. One fifty-year-old student who always wanted to write used these tools and emerged as a prize-winning playwright. A judge used these tools to fulfill his lifelong dreams of sculpting. Not all students become full-time artists as a result of the course. In fact, many full-time artists report that they have become more creatively rounded into full-time people.

Through my own experienceand that of countless others that I have sharedI have come to believe that creativity is our true nature, that blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming of a flower at the end of a slender green stem. I have found this process of making spiritual contact to be both simple and straightforward.

If you are creatively blockedand I believe all of us are to some extentit is possible, even probable, that you can learn to create more freely through your willing use of the tools this book provides. Just as doing Hatha Yoga stretches alters consciousness when all you are doing is stretching, doing the exercises in this book alters consciousness when all you are doing is writing and playing. Do these things and a breakthrough will followwhether you believe in it or not. Whether you call it a spiritual awakening or not.

In short, the theory doesnt matter as much as the practice itself does. What you are doing is creating pathways in your consciousness through which the creative forces can operate. Once you agree to clearing these pathways, your creativity emerges. In a sense, your creativity is like your blood. Just as blood is a fact of your physical body and nothing you invented, creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing that you must invent.

WhyindeedmustGodbeanoun?Whynotaverbthemostactiveanddynamicofall?

M ARY D ALY THEOLOGIAN

I began teaching the creativity workshops in New York. I taught them because I was told to teach them. One minute I was walking in the West Village on a cobblestone street with beautiful afternoon light. The next minute I suddenly knew that I should begin teaching people, groups of people, how to unblock. Maybe it was a wish exhaled on somebody elses walk. Certainly Greenwich Village must contain a greater density of artistsblocked and otherwisethan nearly anyplace else in America.