The Artist's Way: Week Three


Week three of The Artist's Way is called Recovering a Sense of Power.  The idea is to embrace and take conscious steps into spiritual open-mindedness, and acknowledging the fear that comes with answered prayers and possibilities.


The big message of the week is that as you "help yourself" to little kindnesses and treats, as well as to the work you want to do, you will find more kindnesses and possibilities appearing.

Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about this concept.  It's like The Secret or sketchy spirituality that treats God like a vending machine.  I just don't see this world as a place where people are just given good things in their lives just because they ask for them or take steps towards them.  Certainly not in a direct way, at any rate.

That said, I see the value in actually trying something, even if it seems stupid.  In fact, I think that we usually get the most out of fully throwing ourselves into something we think is stupid.  At worst, you confirm what you thought before.  At best, you experience something unexpected and (hopefully) great.


So that should mean that I threw myself into a search for synchronicity, right?  Nope.  Sure didn't.  I am starting to feel like this log of my time doing The Artist's Way is a log of reluctant bare-bones participation.  Not exactly what I was going for.  I want to give this more of a chance.

It wasn't one of the exercises, but Julia Cameron does talk about taking little treats and kindnesses for yourself and making a list of things you want in life, and then allowing them to come to you.  I am righteously skeptical, and feel like I have sort of tried these things before, but I am going to try it again.  You never know, right?

Besides, when it comes to all this kind of stuff (The Secret, manifesting your desires, whatever), I do believe that it is extremely beneficial to think through what you want and that just by doing that, you make yourself more likely to take positive steps in the right direction, so there is really nothing bad that can come of this.


Okay, let's move on to what I did do, and got a lot out of, which was the exercises:

This week's exercises included things like listing the five traits you liked about yourself as a child, five people you admire (and then five people you secretly admire), five people who are dead that you would like to meet (and then five people who are dead that you would like to hang out with in heaven), five people who nurture you.  In all these cases, you then list what the traits are of these people.

It was easy for me to see that I most admire and want to be around people who are open, hopeful, non-jealous, inventive, creative, and who just do things (instead of imagining doing them).  People who are enthusiastic and supportive and who will take an idea seriously enough to follow through on it (or help someone else follow through on their idea), but not so seriously that it can never grow or change.

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