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ARTFUL UPDATE:

During the first 30 days of this journey, we explored the creative art style of watercolor.

Now for the next 30 days, we will be exploring the art style of mid-century illustration.

Today, let's find freedom from dependencies by focusing our dependence on the creator within.

FINDING THE RIVER

For four weeks now, we have been excavating our consciousness. We have seen how often we think negatively and fearfully, how frightening it has been for us to begin to believe that there might be a right place for us that we could attain by listening to our creative voice and following its guidance. We have begun to hope, and we have feared that hope.

The shift to spiritual dependency is a gradual one.

We have been making this shift slowly and surely. With each day we become more true to ourselves, more open to the positive. To our surprise, this seems to be working in our human relationships. We find we are able to tell more of our truth, hear more of other people’s truth, and encompass a far more kindly attitude toward both. We are becoming less judgmental of ourselves and others. How is this possible? The morning pages, a flow of stream of consciousness, gradually loosens our hold on fixed opinions and short-sighted views. We see that our moods, views, and insights are transitory. We acquire a sense of movement, a current of change in our lives. This current, or river, is a flow of grace moving us to our right livelihood, companions, destiny.

Dependence on the creator within is really freedom from all other dependencies.

Paradoxically, it is also the only route to real intimacy with other human beings. Freed from our terrible fears of abandonment, we are able to live with more spontaneity. Freed from our constant demands for more and more reassurance, our fellows are able to love us back without feeling so burdened.

As we have listened to our artist child within, it has begun to feel more and more safe. Feeling safe, it speaks a little louder. Even on our worst days, a small, positive voice says, “You could still do this or it might be fun to do that….”

Most of us find that as we work with the morning pages, we are rendered less rigid that we were. Recovery is the process of finding the river and saying yes to its flow, rapids and all. We startle ourselves by saying yes instead of no to opportunities. As we begin to pry ourselves loose from our old self- concepts, we find that our new, emerging self may enjoy all sorts of bizarre adventures.

(The Artist's Way, 2016, p. 94-95)

I am safe. I am open. I am free.

download printable affirmation card

If I were twenty and had money … List five adventures.

Again, add images of these to your visual image file.

If I were sixty-five and had money … List five postponed pleasures.

And again, collect these images. This is a very potent tool. I now live in a house that I imaged for ten years.

“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.”

– MARGARET YOUNG