The Artist's Way Workshop

So far in our "The Artist's Way" Workshop for Beaders, I've worked up all of the ten suggested exercise each week. this week, I'm taking a slightly different path. I want to focus on the two "big" exercises. 

First - the "reading deprivation" and the things to do when not reading. I saw this exercise the first time I looked through the book, It so freaked me out that I decided to try it immediately, just to see how it would affect me. Yes, I went out of turn and didn't have the clarity of the daily pages yet to help me but I did it anyway. 

In the book, Julia Cameron gives us a list of reading substitutions. Because we are focussed on beading, I'd like to try to keep to the beads this week while we are on reading sabbatical (I like that term better than deprivation). That way, we can give ourselves some time to readjust our perspectives and spend some more "quality time" with the beads. 

If you read yourself to sleep, try drawing a pattern before you drop off. If you bead while on the bus, then that's easy - take a project instead. The whole point is to pull us up off the page (where we can hide and very safely procrastinate) when we do not want to deal with other things. Incidentally, this kind of procrastination and "hiding" tend to predominate when we are going through change - and since we are involved in a program of change, we are particularly vulnerable to this kind of behavior, so what the "deprivation" is trying to accomplish is a refocus of our energies and to teach us that we will better benefit from the growth if we do not hide from it! Not being clear about this, I reacted rather badly when I tried the exercise. I felt like I had to because I was so horrified by the prospect of no reading, even for one day, that I would have to work this step immediately. 

The first day was not a real big problem, but I was nervous. At first I just made up stories in my head. By the middle of the second day, I was focussing on other things, mainly everything that was wrong with my husband and our house. I shared this with him, and he suggested I remove myself to my studio and play with the beads for a while. 

By the evening of ay Two I was picking up an old UFO and reworking it. Day 3 was kind of bad, I mostly just sat around feeling sorry for myself. But by evening was back to the beads. The rest of the week was pretty much just me & beads and pen & paper. I wan not writing a lot of morning-type pages, but was writing out ideas. I figured that reading my own writing as I wrote was not cheating and I sure did work up  lots of great ideas. 

And, after I completed the week, I realized just how much time I can waste reading when what I am really doing is procrastinating. Now I understand what Ms. Cameron means to convey with this exercise. As creative people, we tend to bind ourselves up in other people's art when our own is stalled or when we are in the midst of change. By forcing ourselves to see and feel our own changes, growth and creativity, we learn to have courage and not mistake it for a "scary thing". We can then embrace growth and accept it as an opportunity to move in to new creative territory. 

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