Shadow Artists.

In Week One: Recovering a Sense of Safety, the first thing I read about is the Shadow Artist - the person who, from reasons usually arising from fear and low self-esteem, lives in denial of his or her artistic self. The Shadow Artist's life is often one of discontent, filled with a sense of missed purpose and unfulfilled promise. I said a big, fat YES to that one!

The way out of this place is to learn to take your artistic self seriously and with gentle and deliberate effort, to nurture your artist child. Creativity, says Julia, is play, but for shadow artists, learning to allow themselves to play is hard work!

So on to the exercises. There are a lot of them, starting with a daily commitment to the Morning Pages. Wake up early and spend time freewriting for at least three pages. No censorship allowed, nothing but free writing about whatever you like. Morning Pages are not art. They are just a tool to get you to open up and to clear out all the stuff that is cluttering up your head ... not to be reread or edited. Just written and set aside.

Then comes the Artist's Date - a once-a-week date of at least two hours where you spend quality time with your inner artist. It can be anything from a walk on the beach to a prowl through a junk shop to watching an old movie, to baking a batch of brownies, to creating a collage - whatever you like, you do it simply to spend time alone with your fledgling artistic self.

Exercise: Imaginary lives. If you had five other lives to lead, what would you do in them? This is meant to be just for fun, just a quick jotting down. So my list looked like this:

1. Medical doctor.
2. Investigative journalist
3. Cosmologist.
4. Film director
5. Archaelogist.

But what was even more fun and very interesting to me was to take a look at what drew me to each of these ideas and if there was any commonality between them. I see connections - looking for answers, pulling together information, delving deep, presenting findings, creating a cohesive whole out of the separate parts, looking at the big picture by way of the details - and telling stories, stories based in truth or at least in the search for truth.

Then I tried, as an addendum to this exercise, the list the five jobs I wouldn't do for anything in the world. And my second list looked like this:

1. Sales assistant in a clothing store - hate, hate, hate clothes shopping!
2. Catwalk model ...
3. Telesales consultant - actually, any kind of sales but cold-call telesales has to be the pits.
4. Politician - all those little boys fighting in the sandbox? No thanks!
5. Care worker in home for the mentally disabled - did this during my psych training and it was terrible: soul-destroying, repetitive and endlessly depressing.

More exercises to follow!