Week 5 Book Club
“It’s the job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
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Journal
Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments
Take one small step in service to your creative project.
Consider (re)visiting mapping your project’s process alongside your creative process
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Are you willing to stop putting things off that are most important to your soul and creative spirit? How come?
Are you willing to persevere after the enthusiasm of an idea goes away? How?
Are you up for the challenge of working past doubt, frustrations, fears, and failures? Why?
Where specifically are you currently doubting yourself or dealing with imposter syndrome? What are the positive attributes you bring to the table to battle these ways of negative self-talk?
In what ways can you be gentler on yourself and your work?
Recall a past resistance. What did you do to overcome it?
Where do you currently feel stuck? What do you think would help?
What is something you've noticed that is preventing you from positive progress?
What would it feel like to believe in yourself?
Where does fear show up in your body?
What's on the other side of your fear?
What's the worst that could happen?
What is an act of courage you can apply toward one of your fears?
Where have you found and embodied moments of courage in your past?
What do you spend too much time on? Where do you need to protect your time and energy more?
What does your typical day look like? Is that working for you?
What is a situation in your life you feel should change but, for some reason, hasn't? What is the benefit of notmaking that change?
Did you creativity suffer from a long dry spell? What was going on?
Where can you set boundaries?
How have you self-sabotaged in the past? Can you identify hints of how and when this might resurface?
How has procrastination gotten in your way? How do you let this happen on both a subconscious and conscious level?
Where can you forgive yourself and let go of feelings of guilt and shame?
How can you remind yourself to not judge your ideas until you have plenty to evaluate?
Where can you move from feelings of not having enough to sufficiency?
What are the should's and ought's in your life? Where can you lessen the grip on these?
How can you move from the mentality of victim to master?
Recommend Readings
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Excerpt from The War of Art
By Steven Pressfield
Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.
Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you might accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.
Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God, you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius. Genius is a Latin word; the Romans used it to denote an inner spirit, holy and inviolable, which watches over us, guiding us to our calling. A writer writes his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center. It is our soul’s seat, the vessel that holds our being- in-potential, our star’s beacon and Polaris.Every sun casts a shadow, and genius’ shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul’s call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We’re not
alone if we’ve been mowed down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us. And here’s the biggest bitch: We don’t even know what hit us. I never did. From age twenty-four to thirty-two, Resistance kicked my ass from East Coast to West and back again thirteen times and I never even knew it existed. I looked everywhere for the enemy and failed to see it was right in front of my face.
Have you heard this story: Woman learns she has cancer, six months to live. Within days she quits her job, resumes the dream of writing Tex-Mex songs she gave up to raise a family (or starts studying classical Greek, or moves to the inner city and devotes herself to tending babies with AIDS). Woman’s friends think she’s crazy; she herself has never been happier.
There’s a postscript. Woman’s cancer goes into remission.
Is this what it takes? Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront Resistance? Does Resistance have to cripple and disfigure our lives before we wake up to its existence? How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumors and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive cell-phone use, simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to? Resistance defeats us. If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every dazed and benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward pursuing his or her dreams, every shrink in the directory would be out of business. Prisons would stand empty. The alcohol and tobacco industries would collapse, along with the junk food, cosmetic surgery, and infotainment businesses, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and the medical profession from top to bottom. Domestic abuse would become extinct, as would addiction, obesity, migraine headaches, road rage, and dandruff.
Look in your own heart. Unless I’m crazy, right now a small voice is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling that is yours and yours alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And unless I’m crazy, you’re no closer to taking action on it than you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.
[Introduction]
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Excerpt from Curious?
By Todd Kashdan
Rather than being encouraged to learn about ourselves and our interests, we are more often taught how to make decisions about what to do with our lives as early as possible so we won’t waste time achieving our goals. Pick an academic major, choose a career, and start a family. Whether other interests are squelched isn’t important. What’s important is to “make something of yourself,” “be able to support yourself,” and “realize life is more than just having fun.”
We also live in a climate of fear. Headline news reports bombard us with warnings of what we should be wary of. Terrorism, kidnappings, credit-card and Internet scams, mad cow disease, sexual predators, plane crashes, killer bees, shark attacks, tire recalls, and more. As a result, we do everything in our power to stay out of harm’s way.
But there’s a risk to playing it safe. Our actions are dictated by what we don’t want instead of what we do. Aspirations are put on hold. But the things we fear are often unlikely to happen. We fear a terrorist attack, a child kidnapping, a mad gunman at school—yet chances of any of these things happening is infinitesimally small.
Most people overestimate risk, failure, and danger, and underestimate the value of being curious. It is time to reclaim our neglected strengths. We can—and should—choose how we want to live our lives. Are we governed by fear and the need for safety, or are we willing to accept a bit of risk and anxiety in pursuit of satisfaction, growth, and meaning?
Living a life of curiosity is not about ignoring risk and anxiety. It’s about being willing to do what one values, even in the face of risk and anxiety. What if we saw things as they really are without judgments of what we expect or want them to be? What if we acted on our curiosity when deciding what to do with our free time, what careers to choose, who to spend our time with and devote our lives to? Curiosity serves as a gateway to what we value and cherish most. We can reclaim the lost pleasures of uncertainty, discovery, and play from our youth. Outside of childhood, our innate curiosity does not come as easily or naturally, but these obstacles can be acknowledged, confronted, and ultimately, overcome. We can cultivate curiosity to shape our lives closer toward the direction of where we want it to be. Realizing our potential depends on it.
[pp 8-9]
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Excerpt from Living an Examined Life
By James Hollis
Through the years, a question that I often ask in workshops around the world is "Where are you stuck?" Inevitably, in every workshop, wherever given, there are questions about the questions: "What does this mean?" "Can you give an example?" "Is this all right?" These questions are understandable at one level, but at another, they are symptomatic of the unstated problem of personal authority: Is this what you want, and therefore I will have your approval? Can I do this? And what happens if I guess incorrectly? The presumption is that of the parent-child template no matter how much we contend otherwise. I write this not in judgment or criticism but merely to point out how subtle, how systemic, the template of external authority is, how it persists even in the most productive of lives, and how stuck one may be even around the question "Where are you stuck?"
Still, in all those occasions and geographies, never has anyone asked me to define what I mean by stuck, even when the word is translated into Swedish, Russian, or Portuguese. And everyone starts writing in their journal within one to two minutes, suggesting that the concept of stuckness is quite close to the surface in our lives and that we all have a sense of where we are stuck. But if we find it so easy to bring to mind our stuckness, why is it so difficult to get unstuck?
For millennia, humans have recognized that we are often our own worst enemies, that the same problems show up again and again in our lives. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul observes that though he knows the good, he does not often do it. Why? He employs a Greek word, akrasia, which might be translated as a "dilatory will," or an insufficiency of intention. Why then-if these stuck places hurt us, embarrass us, and perhaps even spill over onto others—don't we will more, will better, be more resolved?
We may be sure that wherever there is a stuck place in our life, we have a sore toe from stubbing it, and that a complex has built up around this contentious, tender place. We can, of course, mobilize even more will, which sometimes proves effective, and the obstacle is pushed through. But most of the time, renewed, ever-persistent stuckness prevails.
I suggest two principles of depth psychology that might be useful here. By depth psychology, I mean to take into account the whole person, not just the externalized behavior. I propose to dialogue with the unconscious world (an impossibility from the perspective of limited consciousness), to track the invisible energies that course through the venues of the visible. To that end then, two principles:
It's not about what it's about.
What you see is a compensation for what you don't see.
The first principle tells us that the place of stuckness is not about what it appears to be about. So what then is it about? For example, a common resolve, so easily frustrated, is the desire to lose weight, exercise more, or practice other self-improvement behaviors. But why do these intentions get set so easily aside?
Much of eating, to choose one example, is driven by invisible agendas, the nutritive needs of the psyche, the hungers of the flesh and spirit. The more concrete the need, the more easily understood. The more abstract, the more elusive. If food were just about food, then we could measure the amounts and count the calories rather easily. But food is animated matter. And matter derives from the Mater. What feeds our needs most deeply? We project onto the raw material of food our emotional and social needs, far in addition to the nutritional needs of the organism. Food becomes love, continuity, ready presence. No matter how miserable the day, we can come home, open the fridge, and "lights on, and welcome home!" And why is it we have so many eating disorders-anorexia, bulimia, obesity? These disorders are hypermanagement efforts in a world elsewhere beyond our control or a plaintive cry that there is never enough love, security, or reassurance. Why not? When the life of the spirit is compromised by the decline of the mediatorial institutions and connective imagery to the transcendent, one transfers the search for the numinous-that which speaks to the soul, engages the spirit-to some surrogate such as power, business, sex, satiety, or a palliative substance.
So, how difficult it then becomes to regulate by will alone these metaphor-carrying, symbol embodying substances. We think it’s about food alone, sustenance alone, but it is about all that is missing in our life—and why would we let go of our available anodyne, our treatment plan? That is where the stuckness originates and then grows armored with Maginot Lines of defense, rationalization, and reinforcements. So, we have to analyze what the stuck place is really about. Also, we need to recognize that what we are readily able to identify, the behavior, for example, is only what is visible, while it is the invisible mechanism that runs our lives.
Under each stuck place there is a wire, so to speak, that reaches down into the archaic field and activates a field of anxiety of which we are largely unaware but that has enough power to reinforce whatever complex has been holding the line against change. As anxiety, it is amorphous, free-floating, imperceptible, yet quite real. If we can reach into that obscuring cloud, we might find specific fears. To give an example, if I let go of my daily connection to the food as a reassuring object, what then will be there in the darkness for me? I recall a woman in a bad relationship saying to me that she would not let go of that hand until there was another hand in the darkness for her. So we cling to that which in the end offers only a modicum of nurturance and leaves behind its traces in the corpulent body. So too of sexual dependency, ritualized behaviors, and all that seems to offer continuity and connection in a disjunctive world. What numinous links were once provided for many through tribal mythology are presently scattered amid the secular world, where individuals now must search for their own connections.
In the end, there are two existential threats to our survival and well-being: the fear of overwhelmment and the fear of abandonment. In the encounter with the former, we are reminded of our relative powerlessness in a large and potentially invasive world. This discrepancy, this unpredictability of the environment, is inculcated in childhood, reinforced and ratified by multiple experiences of the power of the world over our capacities. No wonder so many power stratagems show up in intimate relationships, for who does not want to stake out something measurable, predictable, and controllable.
Similarly, the opposite existential threat, abandonment, means the person is driven to achievement in order to attain the reassuring accolades of the other, or transfers the need for nurturance, constancy, or reassurance to some promising surrogate yet estranges the other through coercive behaviors. The person might also seek a position in life wherein approval and reassurance are structurally provided, or become addicted to a substance whose presence is
easily managed yet whose payoff in satisfaction progressively declines. This need to connect to, hold fast to, and fixate the other is one of our most common human patterns in reacting to change, discontinuity, and ambiguity.
It is for this reason that fundamentalisms of all kinds, in all corners of the world, respond to the changes in our time, the deconstruction of presumed fixities, with so much militancy and even violence. Those same troubled souls would not insist on the medicine practiced millennia ago were they to visit the ER of their hospitals tonight, yet they insist on tribal, agrarian, and parochial dogmas ratified by tradition in their tribal histories, with all of their primitive rules and prejudices. All of this disparate and desperate behavior is a reaction to abandonment, however unconsciously it is playing out in the depths of their unconscious. As they are abandoned by certainty, so they grow desperate to reconstitute certainty’s presumptive authority, its presumptive presence.
So, we begin to get a picture of why it is so difficult to get unstuck. The stuckness is not about what it is about, and what we are able to see is usually only a surface manifestation of what we don't see. What we don't see is the way in which this sensitive organism we are mobilizes its defenses, its projections, and its fixations on objects, behaviors, images, practices, codes, institutions, and dogmas precisely because they seem to offer some relief from the archaic anxiety to which we all are subjected.
None of us is free of addictive patterns—by this I mean reflexive anxiety management systems. Frankly, we have to have these systems, but they can come to manage us rather than the other way around. That is when the cost of the addiction accumulates. Reflexive means that our response is automatic, not reasoned, not nuanced nor differentiated, and replete with rationalizations assembled in advance to defend the behavior the moment it is questioned. Anxiety is ubiquitous and drives the human animal, so it is understandable why we would develop our protective techniques. Through repetition, these protections get locked in and become systems that take on a life of their own, becoming the titular governors of our separate kingdoms. It is typically these management systems that we vow to replace or transcend, but this also explains why they are so resistant to our wills. To replace the systems will mean we either replace them with other systems, perhaps even more pervasive and costly, or stand nakedly before our two greatest threats, overwhelmment and abandonment.
Accordingly, we either have to make peace with our stuckness and move on as best we can or risk the activation of the archaic anxiety that pools in the historic basement for all of us. If we can discern what the stuck place is really about, then we will have flushed a specific fear out of the morass of disabling anxiety. In most cases, that fear will not happen, but it could, and we carry always the memory of when it did happen and was too much for us. Such fears include implicit premises, such as "If I move forward on this front, I will be out there alone, or I will lose the understanding and support of loved ones or my tribe—and I will not be able to bear that."
Naturally, we do not think this consciously, for if we did, we might first realize that such will not happen, or second, that were it to happen, we could manage the cost, given that a resilient person has grown in place of the dependent, powerless child. But third, sometimes we have to go there, the place of the fear, in order to grow up, to recover our lives from all the assembled defenses, of which denial, repetition, and rationalization are the accomplices. Only in those moments when we take life on, when we move through the archaic field of anxiety, when we drive through the blockage, do we get a larger life and get unstuck.Ironically, we will then have to face a new anxiety, the anxiety stepping into a life larger than has been comfortable for us in the past. This growth itself can be so intimidating that we often choose to stay with the old stuckness. We have to want something larger, really want it. We have to risk feeling worse before feeling better, and we have to risk the loss of the oh-so-comforting misery of stuckness.
[pp. 33-38]
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Excerpt from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
By William H. Murray
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back; always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way.
I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.”
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Excerpt from No More Secondhand Art
By Peter London
A journey of any magnitude is bound to raise some stock-taking before the moment of embarkation. As a consequence, there are several questions that we often ask ourselves whenever we set out on any journey into uncharted domains. These types of questions are the same ones neophyte art students and even certain more experienced artists ask themselves whenever they engage in the creative process and in so doing stand in their own way: Am I skilled enough? Am I talented enough? Am I sensitive enough? Am I... enough?
These questions are always lethal when asked at the outset of a creative engagement because there are always two answers to each question, both of which are always true, always opposed to each other, and always wrong. The first answer to any of the questions is: No! We are never skilled, smart, or talented enough, because there is always more we can be, and if we were smarter we would do different and probably better things. Compared to what can be known and is known, we know less. Compared with at least someone else on the planet, we most likely are not the smartest. It’s sad, but it’s true.
Quite opposed to this first answer is the equally true response: Yes! We are smart enough, simply because at any point in time we can only be exactly who we are and what we are. We will only and always be what we are at that moment. If we were smarter, we would be smarter, but still exactly who we are, doing exactly what we are doing, wanting to be smarter. That will be true until our dying day and then some. While we wait because something is lacking in our makeup, life is inexorably going on. Our visitation privileges are running out. So, we might as well start getting down to work because, like it or not, our time is running out.
However we respond to the question, “Am I ------ enough?”, be it yes or no, the answer will always be destructive. We can never win the encounter with such a question, because the very underlying assumption of “Am I ------ enough?” is a faulty appraisal of the human condition and false understanding of what it does take to engage in creative enterprises
This false assumption is that we must be or have enough of something in order to successfully engage in creative activities. But just what are these somethings? What do they look like? How many of them are necessary? And who determines what and how much is necessary for us to join the fracas? Any doubts we may have concerning our personal imperfections will therefore be magnified by a confrontation with such unknowables.
The other reason why the question “Am I ------ enough?” is bound to be lethal is that the question forces us to compare ourselves to some external standard. Since standards are always hypothetical extremes and people are not, real people will always, must always fall short of the standard. We are all imperfect versions of some external standard, some Platonic absolute. We are supposed to lose. So don’t do it. Don’t engage with this tar baby.
There are other, more propitious mind-sets with which we may approach the creative process. Rather than paralyzing ourselves with the existential bone-crusher “Am I good enough?” we would do better to ask ourselves questions that invoke no comparisons. Instead, we could become interested in describing the new terrain being uncovered or invented.
In this frame of mind we would be curious about how honest, candid, and accurate we are in our portrayals of the urgencies of our inner life. What does happen when we allow our hand to have its sway, as lightly reined in by the scrutiny of the conscious mind as we dare? Rather than rushing to obliterate “mistakes,” we might become interested in just what our “mistakes” actually look like. We might study these unpreferred marks and try to appreciate what about them we do not identify with or why they do repel us. Why are we made uncomfortable with the products of our own mind and hand? What powers do these marks contain that we will not or cannot use?
We might also ask ourselves how far we dare travel before feeling lost, or out of control, or past our boundaries within which we feel comfortable, sane, whole, and see if they are not as rigid as we take them to be. We might ask ourselves what it looks like to be on the other side of the boundary, what it feels like to trespass into (self-) forbidden pastures and thickets. In other words, instead of “Am I good enough, am I ready enough?” we might ask ourselves what it would feel like, how would we proceed if we did feel good enough and did feel ready to dance with the universe?
[pp 55-56]
References
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Riverhead Books, 2016.
London, Peter. No More Secondhand Art: Awakening the Artist Within. Shambhala Publications, 1989.
Pressfield, Steven. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2002.