I had one of those aha moments today, maybe more of an Ooooo, as I was doing my Morning Pages. These three pages of free writing allows thoughts I didn’t even know that I had to flow onto the paper and surprise me.
This has been a heart opening chapter this week in The Artist’s Way. As Julia discusses having compassion for our inner artist and re-parenting that child who yearns for creative accomplishment, I have felt deep love, acceptance and understanding for that part of me.
In the section where Julia writes, “In order to work freely on a project, an artist must be at least functionally free of resentment (anger) and resistance (fear)”, I began to have a suspicion about myself. In this year of surrender I am very aware of resistance. Resistance signals to me that I am moving out of Life’s flow. I have not equated resistance with fear before. I was so struck by that realization that I wrote in the margin of my book, something I don’t normally do in any book.
I suspected that I might be blocked, as a writer. Yes, The Artist’s Way is designed to bust through those blocks, yet I haven’t felt that I had any. I’ve expanded my creativity so much since I began this 12 week course, learned incredible things about myself, but I didn’t see myself as blocked…until today.
As I wrote the Morning Pages, I explored the connection between being blocked and resistance (fear). I wrote this quote from my reading in chapter nine this week.
“Do not call the inability to start laziness. Call it fear.”
That hit home. June 2015…I met with a literary agent at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference and pitched a book idea. I was strongly encouraged by the agent to proceed with my idea and to submit a query letter and proposal to her. It’s seven months later and I haven’t submitted either, yet. I thought hard about that today, and called my inability to move forward what it is, for the first time. It’s fear.
Fortunately, I’m working through the perfect book to overcome fear and resistance, and to bust through blocks, entrenched or newly recognized. As an assignment, I answered a series of questions around my fears about writing this book. I couldn’t find any resentment (anger) in me as I searched inward. But as I moved to the second part…listing resistance (fears)…I wrote, and wrote.
On the list appeared statements such as:
This book won’t be accepted. I won’t be accepted. This book will forever change my life. It will be expected that I will only write on this topic.
It was very liberating, to see those fears in black and white, and see how small they were really, how untrue. I know, now, why I’ve resisted this project, and I know how to deal with fear. I know how to release resistance. I’m ready to move forward. I surrender to writing this book.
