This week’s focus is all about Autonomy – a sense that you can do this for yourself, despite what everyone else is doing.
“There is a connection between self-nurturing and self-respect. If I allow myself to be bullied and cowed by other people’s urges for me to be more normal or more nice, I sell myself out. They may like me better, feel more comfortable… but I will hate myself. Hating myself, I may lash out at myself and others. When we are not creating, artists are not always very normal or very nice – to ourselves or to others. Creativity is oxygen for our souls. Cutting off our creativity makes us savage. We react like we are being choked.
To be an artist is to recognize the particular. to appreciate the peculiar. to allow a sense of play in your relationship to accepted standards. To ask the question ‘why?”
Julia Cameron encourages us to think about how we can create our own spiritual practice – a daily practice that may include sports and physical exercise, plus the creative daily showing up that we know we need to do. This is particularly timely for me personally because about 6 months ago I started going to Kundalini Yoga, which has transformed my relationship to my own daily practice and sense of being. I can feel the shifts literally happening inside me, day by day, getting stronger and stronger.
There have been many tests in the outside world – the bank is threatening to foreclose on our house building project next month, which means we have about 5 weeks to find a solution or lose our home that we have spent the last 7 years creating, and our income levels are challenging, being the lowest I think we’ve ever experienced – but somehow I feel stronger and more determined to work this through, bounce back and make this whole thing work.
And I did my Artist’s Date in the middle of it all! Our first trip the cinema in Spain since we moved here – and in 3D!! Woo-hoo!
It may be an illusion, but let’s see – my creativity feels fully engaged. I love coaching other artists – I have two coaching sessions later this morning and I’m really looking forward to them. Let’s see what we can create together… in the flow.
So, it’s a powerful chapter and the penultimate one too – let’s see what the final week brings then….
- How many days this week did you do your morning pages? 5
- How was the experience for you? rushed, but glad I did them.
- Have you recommended them to anyone else? Yes, my writers.
- Why? They need the daily habit of writing and getting in touch with themselves.
- Did you do your artist’s date this week? We went to see Alice in Wonderland at the cinema.
- How did you feel? I felt so happy that I was keeping a promise to myself. I was sad that David didn’t like it and that TheO was upset by the fighting, but I didn’t let it spoil my enjoyment of it.
- Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it? The whole house subasta thing – that we’d just done the yurt roof, that it was the week of the root chakra in yoga (home, security, foundation, stability), that there’s now a plan (in theory) for the summer, rather than drifting along (which is what I wanted). Also, that Sada Nam chose this week to talk about Shakti Pad.
- Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant in your recovery? Describe them. In our Kundalini Yoga session, the root chakra was a very powerful set and the events afterwards have been huge. At last I started my own daily yoga practice – again it feels powerful.