What "The Artist's Way" Taught Us, Part 1
Reflections from the past 12 weeks, from me and from you.
We did it. We finished The Artist’s Way. Twelve weeks of reading and daily writing and celebrating ourselves on artist dates, of inner work and difficult reflection on our past and present lives. Thank you so much for spending the past three months with me. It’s been an honor, and it has taught me a lot about myself, community building, holding space for others, and filling my own cup.
This post is not my final reflection on The Artist’s Way. I’ll be processing for some time, especially as I continue my artist dates and morning pages. At the halfway mark, I wrote about what I’d learned each week. I will also write a 12-week version of that, reflecting on what each week brought me. And next Sunday, I’ll share stories from people who didn’t finish The Artist’s Way — with reflections on why that’s okay, too.
Today, I’m sharing one fundamental lesson I’ve learned, followed by several guest entries about what YOU learned, which I’m so excited to highlight here. Let's dig into it:
The Artist’s Way helped teach me radical honesty
“It is the inner commitment to be true to ourselves and follow our dreams that triggers the support of the universe. While we are ambivalent, the universe will seem to us also to be ambivalent and erratic.”
This quote from the final week of The Artist’s Way gets to a core lesson of what I learned from the book this year, something I am now feeling so completely: A fulfilled, happy life requires radical honesty with ourselves. So often fear prevents us from accepting the truth, because, well, it’s fucking scary, and so we waiver in a life that feels unsettled.
Last year, The Artist’s Way showed me what it took to truly love and nurture my artist; this year, it brought me to a new level of honesty with myself. It makes sense it took two rounds of the book to get here. It takes a remarkable amount of inner work, and time, and practice, and for me, solitude and change in routine, to push past the bullshit of our self-sabotage. This sabotage most often takes shape in bad habits we’ve adapted to survive that instead keep us stuck, and of society’s ingrained lessons of quieting our intuition to live a dutiful life that pleases others.
Radical honesty is only possible when we can push all that aside and connect to our gut intuition.
“Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is,” writes Julia Cameron. We already know deep down what we need. We do. Yet we work so very hard to ignore it.
So how can we actually face ourselves? Vulnerability. Most of the honesty I’ve found isn’t about external circumstances; instead, it’s about my own behavior and how I am in control of changing it. Accepting these truths feels like freedom. Until we allow ourselves to be completely vulnerable, with ourselves and others, we will work to suppress what we already know that we know. And no level of suppression will ever suffice; your intuition will keep rearing its head.
When you are being honest with yourself, you can feel it. “There is a path for each of us,” writes Julia Cameron in the Week 12 chapter. “When we are on our right path, we have a sure-footedness. We know the next right action — although not necessarily what is just around the bend. By trusting, we learn to trust.”
So yes, sure, trust the universe, but that cannot replace trusting yourself. We must be brave, acknowledge our deeply buried truths and desires, and trust that it is safe to move toward the truest version of who we are because we will always have our own back.
Inevitably, the universe will see that and have our backs too.
Below, read about what four other members of the group took away from the experience. Then, I’d love to hear from you in the comments about your takeaways.
Clare Egan on taking care of her artist self:
The first time I attempted The Artist’s Way, I abandoned it after a few weeks. It was 2014 and I had just moved to New York from my native Dublin. I was intrigued by the book but found it too emotionally difficult to engage with. This time around, I was determined to find a more compassionate way through the material.
To me, the Artist’s Way qualifies as “inner child work”. As a survivor of childhood sexual trauma, I approached it tentatively. I was on the lookout for triggers, and the book is full of them. Draw your childhood bedroom! Think of your creativity as a “sexual seduction”. Examine your “early patterns”. Despite that, I trusted the process and wanted to engage with it.
Early on, I took a week off. I didn’t plan to, but I was too upset to continue. The house I grew up in was sold. Our cat got very sick. My partner lost her job. Life happened, and I needed a minute to breathe. After a week, I felt ready to return to it and was more confident than ever that I’d be able to finish.
I found it useful to establish a weekly anchor point, replacing the Sunday church services of my childhood with a ritual of connecting with my artist self. Most weeks, I read the next chapter and did the activities. Other weeks, I allowed myself to take a break. I was especially nervous about media deprivation week. When life is difficult, I soothe myself with reading. Even my partner worried that it would be too much for me! But, I did it! Reading deprivation turned down the noise of the world and allowed me to hear my creative desires. (I also broke the rules and read for an afternoon when a bad fish curry shredded my digestive tract!)
I adapted the program so it worked for me. Affirmations make me feel crazy so I wrote my own. My body rejected the generic ones from the book, but softened in response to a few kind (but firm) words to the voices in my head, who claimed my work was stupid and pointless. If you’re curious, my script went something like: “I am OK. I’m doing a great job. You don’t need to be screaming at me, you know? You could just let me do my work.”
More than anything, I learned to take care of myself as an artist: to speak kindly to myself, to relax the rigidity that helps me to feel safe, and to breathe in the knowledge that I’ve got this.
Clare has written two other posts about The Artist’s Way: one on creative regrets (& getting nature stoned!) and another on ambition, trauma, and how we define success.
Nadia Osman on moving towards an improved version of herself:
This isn’t my first rodeo with Ms. Julia Cameron, a woman seemingly SO obsessed with horses I thought using a horse metaphor here would make her smile. I’d done The Artist’s Way a little less than six years ago during a massive, swampy bout of creative frustration. Faced with another, I thought the worst that could happen is more self-introspection. Wow, whatta tradeoff.
Well folks, I got more than I bargained for. I went on the journey hoping to get a little jumpstart on some dormant writing projects. What happened was a deep, disgusting unclogging of my own belief systems, hammered into place since the age of three. I came face-to-face with my relationships with workaholism (bad!), money (bad!), success (still bad!), and play (the worst!). In doing so, I have felt a major shift. I’m still not sure if it qualifies as a tectonic one, but let’s call it a 5.7 on the Richter scale — sizable enough to feel, not necessarily so much that it razes a city.
I have felt myself move toward a wholly improved version of me. I started thinking comedically again. I did a DJ set for fun. I went to the movies, alone, just to watch cinema, my all-time favorite thing. I made various focaccia as if I’d time-traveled to April 2020. Most of all, I took some of the heavy weight tied around my neck since childhood. I had a long talk with my inner child and realized I’d been pressuring them to succeed as badly as my parents had done to me. I vowed to stop the cycle and focus on the work as much as the play. I restored balance and did a little Pilates. Did it change my life irrevocably? No. It shook things up. And that’s exactly what I needed.
Learn more about Nadia on her website and Substack
Three takeaways from :
It's a very personal journey, The Artist's Way, but three of the main takeaways for me are to write daily, not to judge your creations, and to treat yourself.
Writing daily, or creating daily is something that's seen for just artists and real professionals. But writing or drawing or doing one creative task each day has such a positive impact on health, mental well-being, and a strong sense of achievement. It's unmeasurable and brings so much value to my day, no matter if the sun shines or the rain pours incessantly against my windows. How do you write every day when you have nothing to say? It's simple, you just write and if you want to write there's nothing today, go on and write that for three pages. I bet you'll stop at half a page and start writing about what's really bugging you. The trick is to sit with a pen and paper and let the words form.
Everything I write does not need to be published or a masterpiece. Phew! Now that's out of the way, I can create without any restrictions. I can just write and then leave it. Get back to it at a later stage and decide if I need to rework it or if I need to discard it altogether. There's always something in whatever I write that spurs me on to something else for my poems and writing. A word, a phrase, or a sentence. There's a message. The beauty of daily practice is that you train yourself and you improve over time in a way that no studies or literature can. Creative work is learning by doing. The Artist's Way has been a teacher in showing you how you create. What you create is up to you and me. But the basics of the routine building and why are embedded in the book.
Treating yourself is about kindness. We show kindness to others, hopefully, how about showing kindness to the Self?
Take a class or workshop with Writer Pilgrim, and/or read their Substack.
Spiders in the Sink by Nicole Hart
My daughter screams for me from the kitchen at 7am on a Wednesday morning. She’s discovered a spider in the sink. Upstairs, I’ve just sat down to write for the first time in over a month. A family crisis has swallowed me whole, leaving little energy to devote to anything else. During this time, parenting has felt like an unsolvable equation. I find myself sitting in the bathtub at night, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling, trying different variables in my mind to arrive at a solution. I fail every time. This morning, I thought I had this little pocket of time to devote to myself. But she calls and calls from downstairs until I finally come.
“Many of us have made a virtue out of deprivation,” Julia Camaron writes in The Artist’s Way. She encourages us to wrestle free from the “Virtue Trap”, the false notion that martyrdom equals goodness. Believing that we must feel deprived in order to maintain moral superiority is a form of self-destruction, she says. In other words: you can still write while the shit hits the fan. You will not lose any moral ground by setting aside the chaos around you for a few minutes here, a few minutes there. You can even write about the shit hitting the fan.
When I arrive at the sink, I laugh because the spider is so small. But we are not accustomed to seeing spiders in a scrubbed sink. We’re used to seeing them lounging on a web in the garage or on the sidewalk. Yet the spider doesn’t care where it lands; it will crawl over whatever surface happens to be beneath its legs. I gently scoop its small body into a napkin, careful not to crush it. I open the door and release it. My daughter and I watch the spider crawl over the brick pavers towards the front lawn. Then I shut the door, climb the stairs, and write about it.
Nicole Hart is a writer and comedian, who you can follow on X here.
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Thank you for including my The Artist's Way takeaways. Am honoured to be in the list of writers who contributed with what we learned and practice from TAW. I appreciate you! Thank you also to all the readers.
Thank you all for sharing your experiences. I just started The Artist’s Way this week and am anxious/excited to see what the process yields!