The Artist's Way: Week One

I'm sure that, even now, there are hundreds of other people doing The Artist's Way, a creative recovery self-help program.  It's such an attractive program, and the rewards it offers are tremendous.  Unblocking creativity is big business, perhaps rightly so.

For personal reasons, I've begun using The Artist's Way to help me be more creative.  I find the system very intuitive; lots of writing, lots of reflection, concrete tasks to help me focus.  The core discipline of the program is writing three pages a morning by hand every single day.  You are also supposed to schedule time for weekly "Artist Dates" to spend time nurturing your creative self.

So for this first week, I agonized, plotted and planned over where to take myself, and finally wound up enforcing an evening of beauty maintenance on myself.  I'm fairly certain that's not a very good date, but it was nice and relaxing structuring a whole evening around self-care.

There are times when the tone of the book, the countless inspirational stories and affirmations, maddens me.  Affirmations are one of those things that I consider harmless lunacy, except that apparently they're supposed to work.  Maybe.  Being told to read and write affirmations feels pointless, but I'm doing it anyway, as much as I can. 

I'll check back next week to let you know how the process is going!