This week you are being asked to examine your payoffs in remaining stuck. You will explore how you curtail your own possibilities by placing limits on the good you can receive. You will examine the cost of settling for appearing good instead of being authentic. You may find yourself thinking about radical changes, no longer ruling out your growth by making others the cause of your constriction.
LIMITS
ONE OF THE CHIEF barriers to accepting God’s generosity is our limited notion of what we are in fact able to accomplish. We may tune in to the voice of the creator within, hear a message—and then discount it as crazy or impossible. On the one hand, we take ourselves very seriously and don’t want to look like idiots pursuing some patently grandiose scheme. On the other hand, we don’t take ourselves—or God—seriously enough and so we define as grandiose many schemes that, with God’s help, may fall well within our grasp.
Remembering that God is my source, we are in the spiritual position of having an unlimited bank account. Most of us never consider how powerful the creator really is. Instead, we draw very limited amounts of the power available to us. We decide how powerful God is for us. We unconsciously set a limit on how much God can give us or help us. We are stingy with ourselves. And if we receive a gift beyond our imagining, we often send it back.
Some of you may be thinking that this sounds like the magic-wand chapter: I pray and presto! Sometimes, that is how it will feel. More often, what we are talking about seems to be a conscious partnership in which we work along slowly and gradually, clearing away the wreckage of our negative patterning, clarifying the vision of what it is we want, learning to accept small pieces of that vision from whatever source and then, one day, presto! The vision seems to suddenly be in place. In other words, pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can.
For this to happen, first of all, we must believe that we are allowed to catch the bus. We come to recognize that God is unlimited in supply and that everyone has equal access. This begins to clear up guilt about having or getting too much. Since everyone can draw on the universal supply, we deprive no one with our abundance. If we learn to think of receiving God’s good as being an act of worship—cooperating with God’s plan to manifest goodness in our lives—we can begin to let go of having to sabotage ourselves.
One reason we are miserly with ourselves is scarcity thinking. We don’t want our luck to run out. We don’t want to overspend our spiritual abundance. Again, we are limiting our flow by anthropomorphizing God into a capricious parent figure. Remembering that God is our source, an energy flow that likes to extend itself, we become more able to tap our creative power effectively.
God has lots of money. God has lots of movie ideas, novel ideas, poems, songs, paintings, acting jobs. God has a supply of loves, friends, houses that are all available to us. By listening to the creator within, we are led to our right path. On that path, we find friends, lovers, money, and meaningful work. Very often, when we cannot seem to find an adequate supply, it is because we are insisting on a particular human source of supply. We must learn to let the flow manifest itself where it will—not where we will it.
Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, expect to grow spiritually.
EILEEN CADDY
Cara, a writer, spent far longer than she should remaining in an abusive agent relationship because she thought it would be creative suicide to sever that professional tie. The relationship was plagued with evasions, half-truths, delays. Cara hung in, afraid to let go of her agent’s prestige. Finally, after a particularly abusive phone call, Cara wrote a letter severing the relationship. She felt as if she had just jumped into outer space. When her husband came home, she tearfully told him how she had sabotaged her career. He listened and then said, “A week ago, I was in this bookstore and the owner asked me if you had a good agent. He gave me this woman’s name and number. Call her.”
Tearfully, Cara acquiesced. She got on the phone and connected immediately to the new agent’s sensibility. They have been working together, very successfully, ever since.
To my eye, this is a story not only of synchronicity but also of right-dependence on universe as source. Once Cara became willing to receive her good from whatever source it appeared in, she stopped being victimized.
I recently had a woman artist tell me that she got her new and excellent agent by using affirmations. Even after years of artistic recovery, I still have my cynical side that says, “Mmm.” It is as though we want to believe God can create the subatomic structure but is clueless when faced with how to aid or fix our painting, sculpture, writing, film.
I recognize that many will balk at the simplicity of this concept. “God doesn’t run the movie business,” we want to say. “CAA does.” I want to sound a cautionary note here for all artists who put their creative lives into solely human hands. This can block your good.
The desire to be worldly, sophisticated, and smart often blocks our flow. We have ideas and opinions about where our good should come from. As a Hollywood screenwriter, I had many rueful conversations with other screenwriters about the fact that while our agents were often invaluable, we seemed to get an awful lot of breaks from places like “my next door neighbor,” “my dentist’s brother,” or “somebody my wife went to college with.” Those breaks are God the source in action.
Look and you will find it—what is unsought will go undetected.
SOPHOCLES
I have said before that creativity is a spiritual issue. Any progress is made by leaps of faith, some small and some large. At first, we may want faith to take the first dance class, the first step toward learning a new medium. Later, we may want the faith and the funds for further classes, seminars, a larger work space, a year’s sabbatical. Later still, we may conceive an idea for a book, an artists’ collective gallery space. As each idea comes to us, we must in good faith clear away our inner barriers to acting on it and then, on an outer level, take the concrete steps necessary to trigger our synchronous good.
If this still sounds airy fairy to you, ask yourself bluntly what next step you are evading. What dream are you discounting as impossible given your resources? What payoff are you getting for remaining stuck at this point in your expansion?
God as my source is a simple but completely effective plan for living. It removes negative dependency—and anxiety—from our lives by assuring us that God will provide. Our job is to listen for how.
One way we listen is by writing our morning pages. At night, before we fall asleep, we can list areas in which we need guidance. In the morning, writing on these same topics, we find ourselves seeing previously unseen avenues of approach. Experiment with this two-step process: ask for answers in the evening; listen for answers in the morning. Be open to all help.
FINDING THE RIVER
It is within my power either to serve God or not to serve him. Serving him, I add to my own good and the good of the whole world. Not serving him, I forfeit my own good and deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.
LEO TOLSTOY
For four weeks now, we have been excavating our consciousness. We have seen how often we think negatively and fearfully, how frightening it has been for us to begin to believe that there might be a right place for us that we could attain by listening to our creative voice and following its guidance. We have begun to hope, and we have feared that hope.
The shift to spiritual dependency is a gradual one. We have been making this shift slowly and surely. With each day we become more true to ourselves, more open to the positive. To our surprise, this seems to be working in our human relationships. We find we are able to tell more of our truth, hear more of other people’s truth, and encompass a far more kindly attitude toward both. We are becoming less judgmental of ourselves and others. How is this possible? The morning pages, a flow of stream of consciousness, gradually loosens our hold on fixed opinions and short-sighted views. We see that our moods, views, and insights are transitory. We acquire a sense of movement, a current of change in our lives. This current, or river, is a flow of grace moving us to our right livelihood, companions, destiny.
Dependence on the creator within is really freedom from all other dependencies. Paradoxically, it is also the only route to real intimacy with other human beings. Freed from our terrible fears of abandonment, we are able to live with more spontaneity. Freed from our constant demands for more and more reassurance, our fellows are able to love us back without feeling so burdened.
As we have listened to our artist child within, it has begun to feel more and more safe. Feeling safe, it speaks a little louder. Even on our worst days, a small, positive voice says, “You could still do this or it might be fun to do that….”
Most of us find that as we work with the morning pages, we are rendered less rigid that we were. Recovery is the process of finding the river and saying yes to its flow, rapids and all. We startle ourselves by saying yes instead of no to opportunities. As we begin to pry ourselves loose from our old self-concepts, we find that our new, emerging self may enjoy all sorts of bizarre adventures.
Michelle, a hard-driving, dressed-for-success lawyer, enrolled in flamenco dancing lessons and loved them. Her house—formerly a sleek, careerist’s high-tech showcase—suddenly began filling up with lush plants, plump pillows, sensuous incense. Tropical colors bloomed on the once-white walls. For the first time in years, she allowed herself to cook a little and then to sew again. She was still a successful lawyer, but her life took on a rounded shape. She laughed more, looked prettier. “I can’t believe I am doing this!” she would announce with delight as she launched into some new venture. And then, “I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner!”
By holding lightly to an attitude of gentle exploration, we can begin to lean into creative expansion. By replacing “No way!” with “Maybe,” we open the door to mystery and to magic.
This newly positive attitude is the beginning of trust. We are starting to look for the silver lining in what appears to be adversity. Most of us find that as we work with the morning pages, we begin to treat ourselves more gently. Feeling less desperate, we are less harsh with ourselves and with others. This compassion is one of the first fruits of aligning our creativity with its creator.
As we come to trust and love our internal guide, we lose our fear of intimacy because we no longer confuse our intimate others with the higher power we are coming to know. In short, we are learning to give up idolatry—the worshipful dependency on any person, place, or thing. Instead, we place our dependency on the source itself. The source meets our needs through people, places, and things.
This concept is a very hard one for most of us to really credit. We tend to believe we must go out and shake a few trees to make things happen. I would not deny that shaking a few trees is good for us. In fact, I believe it is necessary. I call it doing the footwork. I want to say, however, that while the footwork is necessary, I have seldom seen it pay off in a linear fashion. It seems to work more like we shake the apple tree and the universe delivers oranges.
Time and again, I have seen a recovering creative do the footwork of becoming internally clear and focused about dreams and delights, take a few outward steps in the direction of the dream—only to have the universe fling open an unsuspected door. One of the central tasks of creative recovery is learning to accept this generosity.
THE VIRTUE TRAP
Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
MARGARET YOUNG
An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as a withdrawal from them. It is.
For an artist, withdrawal is necessary. Without it, the artist in us feels vexed, angry, out of sorts. If such deprivation continues, our artist becomes sullen, depressed, hostile. We eventually became like cornered animals, snarling at our family and friends to leave us alone and stop making unreasonable demands.
We are the ones making unreasonable demands. We expect our artist to be able to function without giving it what it needs to do so. An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude. An artist requires the healing of time alone. Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted. Over time, it becomes something worse than out of sorts. Death threats are issued.
In the early stages, these death threats are issued to our intimates. (“I could kill you when you interrupt me….”) Woe to the spouse who doesn’t take the hint. Woe to the hapless child who doesn’t give you solitude. (“You’re making me very angry….”)
Over time, if our warnings are ignored and we deem to stay in whatever circumstance—marriage, job, friendship—requires threats and warnings, homicide gives way to suicide. “I want to kill myself” replaces “I could murder you.”
“What’s the use?” replaces our feelings of joy and satisfaction. We may go through the actions of continuing our life. We may even continue to produce creatively, but we are leaching blood from ourselves, vampirizing our souls. In short, we are on the treadmill of virtuous production and we are caught.
We are caught in the virtue trap.
There are powerful payoffs to be found in staying stuck and deferring nurturing your sense of self. For many creatives, the belief that they must be nice and worry about what will happen with their friends, family, mate if they dare to do what they really want to constitutes a powerful reason for non-action.
We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I’m not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for that.
TONI MORRISON
A man who works in a busy office may crave and need the retreat of solitude. Nothing would serve him better than a vacation alone, but he thinks that’s selfish so he doesn’t do it. It wouldn’t be nice to his wife.
A woman with two small children wants to take a pottery class. It conflicts with some of her son’s Little League practices, and she wouldn’t be able to attend as faithful audience. She cancels pottery and plays the good mother—seething on the sidelines with resentments.
A young father with a serious interest in photography, yearns for a place in the home to pursue his interest. The installation of a modest family darkroom would require dipping into savings and deferring the purchase of a new couch. The darkroom doesn’t get set up but the new couch does.
Many recovering creatives sabotage themselves most frequently by making nice. There is a tremendous cost to such ersatz virtue.
Many of us have made a virtue out of deprivation. We have embraced a long-suffering artistic anorexia as a martyr’s cross. We have used it to feed a false sense of spirituality grounded in being good, meaning superior.
I call this seductive, faux spirituality the Virtue Trap. Spirituality has often been misused as a route to an unloving solitude, a stance where we proclaim ourselves above our human nature. This spiritual superiority is really only one more form of denial. For an artist, virtue can be deadly. The urge toward respectability and maturity can be stultifying, even fatal.
We strive to be good, to be nice, to be helpful, to be unselfish. We want to be generous, of service, of the world. But what we really want is to be left alone. When we can’t get others to leave us alone, we eventually abandon ourselves. To others, we may look like we’re there. We may act like we’re there. But our true self has gone to ground.
You build up a head of steam. If you’re four days out of the studio, on the fifth day you really crash in there. You will kill anybody who disturbs you on that fifth day, when you desperately need it.
SUSAN ROTHENBERG
What’s left is a shell of our whole self. It stays because it is caught. Like a listless circus animal prodded into performing, it does its tricks. It goes through its routine. It earns its applause. But all of the hoopla falls on deaf ears. We are dead to it. Our artist is not merely out of sorts. Our artist has checked out. Our life is now an out-of-body experience. We’re gone. A clinician might call it disassociating. I call it leaving the scene of the crime.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” we wheedle, but our creative self no longer trusts us. Why should it? We sold it out.
Afraid to appear selfish, we lose our self. We become self-destructive. Because this self-murder is something we seek passively rather than consciously act out, we are often blind to its poisonous grip on us.
The question “Are you self-destructive?” is asked so frequently that we seldom hear it accurately. What it means is Are you destructive of your self? And what that really asks us is Are you destructive of your true nature?
Many people, caught in the virtue trap, do not appear to be self-destructive to the casual eye. Bent on being good husbands, fathers, mothers, wives, teachers, whatevers, they have constructed a false self that looks good to the world and meets with a lot of worldly approval. This false self is always patient, always willing to defer its needs to meet the needs or demands of another. (“What a great guy! That Fred gave up his concert tickets to help me move on a Friday night….”)
Virtuous to a fault, these trapped creatives have destroyed the true self, the self that didn’t meet with much approval as a child. The self who heard repeatedly, “Don’t be selfish!” The true self is a disturbing character, healthy and occasionally anarchistic, who knows how to play, how to say no to others and “yes” to itself.
Creatives who are caught in the Virtue Trap still cannot let themselves approve of this true self. They can’t show it to the world without dreading the world’s continued disapproval. (“Can you believe it? Fred used to be such a nice guy. Always ready to help me out. Anytime, anyplace. I asked him to help me move last week and he said he was going to a play. When did Fred get so cultured, I ask you?”)
Fred knows full ‘well that if he stops being so nice, Fabulous Fred, his outsized, nice-guy alter ego, will bite the dust. Martyred Mary knows the same thing as she agrees to round five of baby-sitting for her sister so she can go out. Saying no to her sister would be saying yes to herself, and that is a responsibility that Mary just can’t handle. Free on a Friday night? What would she do with herself? That’s a good question, and one of many that Mary and Fred use their virtue to ignore.
Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-groomed, and unaggressive.
LESLIE M. MCINTYRE
“Are you self-destructive?” is a question that the apparently virtuous would be bound to answer with a resounding no. They then conjure up a list proving how responsible they are. But responsible to whom? The question is “Are you self-destructive?” Not “Do you appear self-destructive?” And most definitely not “Are you nice to other people?”
There is the risk you cannot afford to take, [and] there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.
PETER DRUCKER
We listen to other people’s ideas of what is self-destructive without ever looking at whether their self and our self have similar needs. Caught in the Virtue Trap, we refuse to ask ourselves, “What are my needs? What would I do if it weren’t too selfish?”
Are you self-destructive?
This is a very difficult question to answer. To begin with, it requires that we know something of our true self (and that is the very self we have been systematically destroying).
One quick way to ascertain the degree of drift is to ask yourself this question: what would I try if it weren’t too crazy?
- Sky diving, scuba diving.
- Belly dancing, Latin dancing.
- Getting my poems published.
- Buying a drum set.
- Bicycling through France.
If your list looks pretty exciting, even if crazy, then you are on the right track. These crazy notions are actually voices from our true self. What would I do if it weren’t too selfish?
- Sign up for scuba lessons.
- Take the Latin dancing class at the Y.
- Buy The Poet’s Market and make a submission a week.
- Get the used drum set my cousin is trying to sell.
- Call my travel agent and check out France.
By seeking the creator within and embracing our own gift of creativity, we learn to be spiritual in this world, to trust that God is good and so are we and so is all of creation. In this way, we avoid the Virtue Trap.
THE VIRTUE-TRAP QUIZ
- The biggest lack in my life is ______________.
- The greatest joy in my life is ______________.
- My largest time commitment is ____________.
- As I play more, I work __________________.
- I feel guilty that I am ___________________.
- I worry that __________________________.
- If my dreams come true, my family will ________.
- I sabotage myself so people will ___________.
- If I let myself feel it, I’m angry that I _________.
- One reason I get sad sometimes is __________.
Does your life serve you or only others? Are you self-destructive?
FORBIDDEN JOYS, AN EXERCISE
You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
COLETTE
One of the favored tricks of blocked creatives is saying no to ourselves. It is astonishing the number of small ways we discover to be mean and miserly with ourselves. When I say this to my students, they often protest that this is not true—that they are very good to themselves. Then I ask them to do this exercise.
List ten things you love and would love to do but are not allowed to do. Your list might look like this:
- Go dancing.
- Carry a sketch book.
- Roller-skate.
- Buy new cowboy boots.
- Streak your hair blond.
- Go on vacation.
- Take flying lessons.
- Move to a bigger place.
- Direct a play.
- Take life-drawing class.
Very often, the mere act of writing out your list of forbidden joys breaks down your barriers to doing them. Post your list somewhere highly visible.
WISH LIST, AN EXERCISE
One of the best ways we can evade our Censor is to use the technique of speed writing. Because wishes are just wishes, they are allowed to be frivolous (and frequently should be taken very seriously). As quickly as you can, finish the following phrases.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I wish _________________________________.
- I most especially wish _____________________.
TASKS 
The specific meaning of God depends on what is the most desirable good for a person.
ERICH FROMM
The following tasks explore and expand your relationship to the source.
1. The reason I can’t really believe in a supportive God is … List five grievances. (God can take it.)
2. Starting an Image File: If I had either faith or money I would try … List five desires. For the next week, be alert for images of these desires. When you spot them, clip them, buy them, photograph them, draw them, collect them somehow. With these images, begin a file of dreams that speak to you. Add to it continually for the duration of the course.
3. One more time, list five imaginary lives. Have they changed? Are you doing more parts of them? You may want to add images of these lives to your image file.
4. If I were twenty and had money … List five adventures. Again, add images of these to your visual image file.
5. If I were sixty-five and had money … List five postponed pleasures. And again, collect these images. This is a very potent tool. I now live in a house that I imaged for ten years.
6. Ten ways I am mean to myself are … Just as making the positive explicit helps allow it into our lives, making the negative explicit helps us to exorcise it.
7. Ten items I would like to own that I don’t are … And again, you may want to collect these images. In order to boost sales, experts in sales motivation often teach rookie salesmen to post images of what they would like to own. It works.
8. Honestly, my favorite creative block is … TV, overreading, friends, work, rescuing others, overexer-cise. You name it. Whether you can draw or not, please cartoon yourself indulging in it.
9. My payoff for staying blocked is … This you may want to explore in your morning pages.
10. The person I blame for being blocked is … Again, use your pages to mull on this.
CHECK-IN 
To accept the responsibility of being a child of God is to accept the best that life has to offer you.
STELLA TERRILL MANN
1. How many days this week did you do your morning pages? Are you starting to like them—at all? How was the experience for you? Have you discovered the page-and-a-half truth point yet? Many of us find that pay dirt in our writing occurs after a page and a half of vamping.
2. Did you do your artist date this week? Have you had the experience of hearing answers during this leisure time? What did you do for your date? How did it feel? Have you taken an artist date yet that really felt adventurous?
3. Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it? Try inaugurating a conversation on synchronicity with your friends.
4. Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.