The Artist's Way
Written by Irene Bratsis
I’ve done The Artist's Way four times in my life. Each time, I am brought to deeper and clearer truths about myself as a creator, an artist, a professional and a being on this earth navigating my path in life through my interests, likes, fears and traumas. For those of you that don’t know, The Artist's Way is Julia Cameron's debut classic, a 12 step artistic exploration into your psyche for the ends of nurturing your creativity in all its forms.
Essentially the process is: you “open the tap” of your creativity daily by writing first thing in the morning (if you can manage it). Then you pick one thing you want to delve into for the week in the form of an “artist’s date”. A date with yourself where you get to explore something you’re interested in. It can be anything from making something, doing a class or listening to a lecture. Something out of the ordinary that helps you fill your creative well of inspiration. Each week will address concepts and have tasks to complete so that you’re integrating
What does that have to do with data science?
I would love to decouple the notion that technical work is not artistic. In Particular, data scientists’ work. Data science couples technical ability with analytics, visuals, words and products that solve real business and societal problems in the here and now. A data scientist must work with integrity, to put an ear to the ground and hear what the data is really saying. It’s a highly creative process and considering we are having our Data + Art Fundraiser, which is a free event, this upcoming week from Dec 7-10 (link below), I thought it would be appropriate for us to explore the wisdom each week of The Artist’s Way can bring us.
With an ever-increasing number of job opportunities in the field of data and tech, we want to work on raising diverse groups of people to be capable of achieving these wonderful job opportunities. We want to help close the diversity gap by training world-class women to bring their best to the table. Data + Art event from Women in Data combines the art and data worlds to help bring more diversity into data careers. So whether you love art or are passionate about women’s empowerment, join this event and start making a difference!
Women in Data Art Fundraiser: https://www.womenindata.org/dataart
Let’s look at creativity as it might apply to us as data professionals and practitioners. Perhaps creativity and artistic expression doesn’t first come to mind with technical roles, but within data science and AI there’s lots of opportunity to see our crafts as a medium for our best creative ideas.
Here we go!
Week 1: Recovering a Sense of Safety
The first week is really about finding stillness and finding out what comes up. As you write daily, you eventually start to notice patterns. Particularly patterns relating to negative core beliefs and sources of doubt that we’ve internalized from our upbringing and professional experiences. This is where we notice the imposter syndrome or the voice in your head that reminds of why you’re going to fail. More important than changing something, we find a way to notice these emotional microaggressions we give ourselves and where they came from so that we can find a way to nurture the creative safety we need to boldly try new things!
Week 2: Recovering a Sense of Identity
This week is all about understanding what’s yours and what comes from other people. Who are our poisonous playmates, our “crazymakers”. Who are the skeptics in our lives that have imposed their own negativity onto us in some form or another. Who are the energy vampires that suck up our creative urges with drama, gossip and distraction. We nurture an identity based on where our attention goes and where we want our attention to go.
Week 3: Recovering a Sense of Power
Putting ourselves out there and continuously delving into our psyche on a regular basis brings a lot of vulnerability and it can lead to burn out. They say it takes 21 days to form a habit so week three is about maintaining our sense of power. What tends to dissuade us? What happens when we tap into a part of us that makes us angry? What about the part of ourselves that makes us feel shame? We know that we, as practitioners, are urged to be putting our work out there on github, on medium but maybe some of these deeper feelings of shame and anger can get in the way of the unabashed self promotion our digital world demands of us. Week three gets into the nitty gritty resistance that can build when you’ve been writing morning pages every day.
Week 4: Recovering a Sense of Integrity
Week four starts the process of starting to build integrity with all the insights gleaned over the first three weeks. If the first three weeks is about noticing and allowing, the next three is about doing. About making small, honest changes to our daily routines. About excavating for buried dreams and about cutting out the distractions we noticed from week 2. We get into the more active part of the program where we are being invited to make concrete actions towards our creative dreams.
Week 5: Recovering a Sense of Possibility
By week five, you’ve gone on four artists dates with yourself, all exploring some facet of your creative outlets. By this chapter, you’re well on your way to understanding your limits and growing your channel of constant inspiration. Rather than taking one class once and forgetting about it, this week challenges us to write longer than-we-expect lists of possibilities for ourselves and recognizing where our interests eventually end. It’s about getting more acquainted with our forbidden joys, our life/creative/professional wish lists. This week is about broadening our sense of what’s possible.
Week 6: Recovering a Sense of Abundance
Everyone loves week 6. This is the part of the program that people beam the loudest for. By this chapter, we are feeling good, we’re feeling capable and brave and we feel we’ve hit our stride with the muse and we’re starting to bring in concepts of value and money. Many of us in the field are working professionals, and better understanding how we want to exchange our labor for financial incentives is an aspect of the business we all have to address at some point. This week also addresses how we feed our sense of abundance into our own lives. Maybe you’re taking an unpaid internship that will allow you to learn a broad new skill set. Are there ways we can relate to abundance even when we aren’t seeing that abundance in the here and now tangibly? We ourselves are addressing this question of how we are being financed and how we want to be financed as an organization. What kind of creative comprises are we making for ourselves when we are well financed?
Week 7: Recovering a Sense of Connection
In week seven we are thinking about how to connect. What kinds of connections do we want to be making? With our peers, students, coworkers, teachers, friends. Our chapters themselves perhaps. Are we nurturing the connections we want to be nurturing or are we calling short because of perfectionistic tendencies? Are we risking? Connection requires authenticity and openness, but if we are cutting ourselves off from that it doesn’t matter how many networking events we attend or create. What about when we do make good connections and we meet people that are doing and being what we want. How do we relate to jealousy? Do we allow ourselves to be inspired by others who have the things we want and use that inspiration to make actionable goals towards our dreams?
Week 8: Recovering a Sense of Strength
We hear it time and time again, everyone has the same 24 hours. This may be true but we all have a different sense of available time based on our lifestyles. Your inner artist is hungry for survival, it wants to be creating and doing all the time to feel creatively powerful, but we seldomly discuss creative losses. They might be painful. We may have tried something and not wanted to go back. Week eight revisits any of our previous creative “failures” or criticisms so that we can go farther than we have so far. We can be complimented nine times but we may remember the tenth if it's a criticism for far longer. Like any athlete, the artist will have its injuries. Surviving injuries, healing, and coming back stronger is what this week is all about.
Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion
By week nine, we’ve been through quite the journey already. Tapping into the compassion we have for ourselves and others that are striving to create is a powerful step. Particularly in data and AI, a field that will most benefit from an open source community as it makes its way ever deeply into the fabric of our lives, it’s crucial for us to have compassion. Recognizing when our fears and enthusiasm is stimulated will help us navigate our professional and creative circles. Which ideas and people are we gravitating towards? Maybe you have a good app or startup idea and you meet a peer that would want to partner with you on it that’s able to help you move past a block. Regaining a sense of compassion for yourself surrounding past struggles will allow for more enthusiasm and growth.
Week 10: Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection
Workaholism, fame, competition are all aspects we all will contemplate during our careers as artists. Avoiding burn outs and creative droughts is essential to our continued success. Week ten is about making sure that we don’t forget about the wonderful progress we’ve made during the program as we start to integrate its lessons into our daily lives going forward. We want to protect ourselves from closing up again after all the hard work we’ve done to become more open. Creativity is an act of surrender. We are surrendering to who we really are and the work we really want to do.
Week 11: Recovering a Sense of Autonomy
Acceptance and feeling into our successes is a huge part of bringing in the concepts of The Artists Way in a way that feels more permanent. We are creating mental structures through programs like this and the general aim is to move through life with more of a say in who we are and how we’re building our lives. We might have things we want to do but can’t because we don’t think it’s for us, we aren’t qualified enough, or don’t have the technical skill for. In order to have full creative recovery, we need to move out of the mind and into a body of work. Creativity requires action. Before you make a visualization you need processed data. We learn by doing. Having the autonomy to pursue the things you think are cool even if you think you can’t for whatever reason is really the most crucial teaching of The Artist's Way. Exercise is what moves us from stagnation to inspiration, from problem to solution and from self pity to self respect.
Week 12: Recovering a Sense of Faith
The heart of creativity is inherently mysterious. We might get ideas from each other or from our own imaginings, but generally there are lots of possibilities swirling around us. I have lots of ideas for data science projects, but which of them will I choose to actually sit down and complete? Committing to our inner artist is an act of committing to always be listening and trusting in the creative process. Creativity begins in darkness, and from there the lightbulb goes on and we spring into action. Some ideas take days, weeks, months or years to materialize. Some ideas are short term projects and others may take a lifetime for us to finally pull out of our heads. The remaining week of the program is all about cementing this new way of seeing creativity as a very alive and active part of our lives, and having faith in it.
Cheers and best of luck to all of my artists out there!
