Unlearn Beliefs that Stifle Creativity
Week 8, Day 2 of The Artist's Way
Today, let's give ourselves the dignity of admitting when our intellect interferes with our creative urges.
THE IVORY POWER
It has been my perilous privilege over the past decade to undertake teaching forays into the groves of academia. It is my experience as a visiting artist that many academics are themselves artistic beings who are deeply frustrated by their inability to create. Skilled in intellectual discourse, distanced by that intellectual skill from their own creative urgings, they often find the creativity of their charges deeply disturbing.
Creativity cannot be comfortably quantified in intellectual terms.
By its very nature, creativity eschews such containment. In a university where the intellectual life is built upon the art of criticizing—on deconstructing a creative work—the art of creation itself, the art of creative construction, meets with scanty support, understanding, or approval. To be blunt, most academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.
For an artist, to become overly cerebral is to become crippled.
This is not to say that artists lack rigor; rather, that artistic rigor is grounded differently than intellectual life usually admits.
Often audacity, not authentic talent, confers fame on an artist.
The lack of audacity—pinched out by critical abuse or malnourished through neglect—may cripple many artists far superior to those we publicly acclaim. In order to recover our sense of hope and the courage to create, we must acknowledge and mourn the scars that are blocking us. This process may seem both painstaking and petty, but it is a necessary rite of passage.
Give yourself the dignity of admitting your artistic wounds. That is the first step in healing them.
(The Artist's Way, 2016, p. 131-134)
Read the following out loud with purpose and intent:
I give myself the respect and care to acknowledge and heal any artistic wounds.
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New Childhood
What might you have been if you’d had perfect nurturing?
Write a page of this fantasy childhood. What were you given? Can you reparent yourself in that direction now?
“To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backwards.”
– FRANCES WICKES
What is one way you will allow your artistic child to heal today?
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