Julia Cameron - The Artists Way Every Day: A Year of Creative Living

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Table of Contents

BY JULIA CAMERON

BOOKS IN THE ARTISTS WAY SERIES

The Artists Way
Walking in This World
Finding Water
The Complete Artists Way
The Artists Way Workbook
The Artists Way Morning Pages Journal
The Artists Date Book, illustrated by Elizabeth Cameron
Inspirations: Meditations from The Artists Way

OTHER BOOKS ON CREATIVITY

The Writing Diet
The Right to Write
The Sound of Paper
The Vein of Gold
How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy),
illustrated by Elizabeth Cameron
Supplies: A Troubleshooting Guide for Creative Difficulties,
illustrated by Elizabeth Cameron
The Writers Life: Insights from The Right to Write
The Artists Way at Work (with Mark Bryan and Catherine Allen)
Money Drunk, Money Sober: 90 Days to Financial Freedom
(with Mark Bryan)

PRAYER BOOKS

Prayers to the Great Creator
Answered Prayers
Heart Steps
Blessings
Transitions

BOOKS ON SPIRITUALITY

Faith and Will
Prayers from a Nonbeliever
Letters to a Young Artist
God Is No Laughing Matter
God Is Dog Spelled Backwards, illustrated by Elizabeth Cameron

MEMOIR

Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir

FICTION

Mozarts Ghost
Popcorn: Hollywood Stories
The Dark Room

PLAYS

Public Lives
The Animal in the Trees
Four Roses
Love in the DMZ
Avalon (a musical)
The Medium at Large (a musical)
Magellan (a musical)

POETRY

Prayers for the Little Ones
Prayers to the Nature Spirits
The Quiet Animal
This Earth (also an album with Tim Wheater)

FEATURE FILM

(as writer-director)
Gods Will

INTRODUCTION

On January 25, 1978, I got sober. Mark this day on your calendar, I was advised. Its the most important day of your life. I greeted this advice with skepticism. How could a sobriety date be more important than a birthday or a wedding anniversary? It just did not seem possible. Now, thirty-one years later, I recognize the wisdom in singling out that date. I have gone on from there, one day at a time, to maintain my sobriety through both joy and tumult.

God will never give you more than you can handle, I was told, with the added footnote, one day at a time. Again, this advice proved wise. On days when my emotional plate felt overladen, I learned to remind myself, Just one day at a time. Fortunately for me, I got sober in Southern Californiasometimes referred to as the Harvard of Recovery.

If its a choice between sobriety and creativity, I dont know that Ill choose sobriety, I complained to my sober mentors in my early months of abstinence.

There is no choice between sobriety and creativity, they told me. Without sobriety, there will be no creativity.

And so, I learned that the principle of one day at a time applied to my creative life. Pre-sobriety, I had written in binges. Post-sobriety, I learned to write daily, without drama. I was a writer, and writers wrote. Simple as that. God takes care of the quality; you take care of the quantity, I was advised. Stop trying to make something up, and try, instead, to get something down. Direction was important here. If I was making something up, I was straining to reach for something that might be beyond my grasp. If I was getting something down, I was taking dictation from a higher source.

God is the Great Creator, I came to believe, as I strove to forge an artist-to-artist relationship. I came to believe that creativity is Gods will for us, and that we can practice creativity like any other spiritual practicea day at a time.

In 1980, composer Billy May gave me a tiny but powerful prayer book: Creative Ideas by Ernest Holmes. Holmes believed that Gods will for us is expansive creativity. Working with his prayers, I came to believe the same thing. Rather than regard myself as the self-conscious author of my work, I began to think of myself more as a conduit, a channel through which the Great Creators creativity could enter the world.

In 1992, I published The Artists Waya book which hammered out spiritual principles as a path to higher creativity. To my delight, The Artists Way caught fire. More than three million people purchased the book and employed its principles to expand their creativity. The Artists Way worked as a daily spiritual practice. Its central tool, three pages of longhand morning writing called Morning Pages, became known as an effective catalyst for personal growth. Many people worked The Artists Way repeatedly, circling back through its pages at ever-increasing depth. As for myself, I have written Morning Pages more than two decades now. They are the bedrock of my spiritual practice; a daily discipline that yields prodigious results.

Your book changed my life, I am frequently told. I have come to believe that the daily practice of creativity yields an expanded and deepened sense of spirituality in the lives of Artists Way practitioners. And so it is with an eye to increasing both creativity and spirituality that I gathered together the teachings found in this book.

I have written more than thirty books using the tools and the concepts that these pages encompass. It is my belief that heightened productivity will come to all who work with them.

JANUARY

January 1

One of the most important tasks in artistic recovery is learning to call thingsand ourselvesby the right names. Most of us have spent years using the wrong names for our behaviors. We have wanted to create and we have been unable to create and we have called that inability laziness. That is not merely inaccurate. It is cruel. Accuracy and compassion serve us far better. Blocked artists are not lazy. They are blocked. Do not call the inability to start laziness. Call it fear.

January 2

It may be useful for you to think of the Morning Pages as meditation. It may not be the practice of meditation you are accustomed to. You may, in fact, not be accustomed to meditating at all. The pages may not seem spiritual or even meditativemore like negative and materialistic, actuallybut they are a valid form of meditation that gives us insight and helps us effect change in our lives.

January 3

Looking at Gods creation, it is pretty clear that the creator itself did not know when to stop. There is not one pink flower, or even fifty pink flowers, but hundreds. Snowflakes, of course, are the ultimate exercise in sheer creative glee. No two alike. This creator looks suspiciously like someone who just might send us support for our creative ventures.

January 4

Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself. A creative recovery is a healing process. You may slide backward. This is normal. Growth occurs in spurts. You will lie dormant sometimes. Do not be discouraged. Think of it as resting. Very often, a week of insights will be followed by a week of sluggishness. The Morning Pages will seem pointless.

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