Why Freeing Expression comes before Tending Spirit (including 25 quotes from the Artist's Way to inspire your creativity)
What is Freeing Expression?
Freeing Expression is the third Key Channel of Change of the Full & Plenty Joy Life Spiral: a framework for helping folks live a life full of connection, resource, authenticity and joy individually, relationally and collectively.
Freeing Expression appears after Becoming Embodied and before Tending Spirit- a channel which has a symbiotic relationship with Breaking Cycles: the first Key Channel of Change. Freeing Expression has a deep relationship with Becoming Embodied, as both of them support the development of the final Channel: Aligning Dreams. Together, they make an Aquifer full of authenticity to draw upon as a resource for living an aligned life.
Freeing Expression is the part of ongoing healing where we learn how to express our authentic selves in ways we were often told not to. This could be expressing emotions or creativity, our gender or sexuality, our relational type or talent in life. It is a season of joyful flow of the divine pouring out of you into some form. Often creatively, but also relationally.
It is not an easy thing, at least not at first. But you know this and you do this still when you’re in the Channel: express yourself authentically through body, voice and energy in a way that fortifies your Pride, processes your pain, and emanates out into the ethers which we all breathe in to heal.
It is the practice ground for play and imagination. It is where we learn who we were as children and follow them through and through. It is where we become devoted to the power of collective storytelling through whatever vehicle has chosen you. Your job is simply to allow the call to come through you. To be moved.
It is associated with channeling, fire, Leo, the Devil Card, The Storyteller and Disrupter, and the mantra “I allow my creativity to come forth non-judgmentally.”
Freeing Expression is the beginning of the Rebirth Spiral, a spiritual framework that comes from The Tarot. The Rebirth Spiral is the last seven cards of the 21 Major Arcana. Lindsay Mack of Tarot for the Wild Soul describes this final sequence as learning the lesson that there is no Self. That the Self is actually an Us. That we are inherently, intrinsically and infinitely interconnected with all things everything all at once. This is often the spiral where we know who we are, but we’re not quite sure where we come from and why we’re here. The greater purpose, meaning, calling. This is what the Rebirth Spiral offers us and is what most directly connect Freeing Expression with Tending Spirit, the second part of that Rebirth Spiral.
Why does it come before Tending Spirit?
If we are working through the Life Spiral in a chronological order, Freeing Expression comes before Tending Spirit. The reason for this is because the result of working through the Freeing Expression Channel of Change is having the Treasured Experience of Authenticity. Authenticity leads to Joy, the Treasured Experience that comes from Tending Spirit.
When we are our truest selves. When we are moving from a space of realness, integrity, truth and being connected to ourselves, more often than not, it brings us joy. It also often brings joy to those around us or in our relationships, in our communities, in the collective. This is one reason why Freeing Expression comes before Tending Spirit.
Another is one of the key doorways to tending our spirit, which is through the act of creating. But if our creative channel is blocked, repressed or fragmented away from our knowing it becomes much harder to tend our spirits, though not impossible, just not full - whole. Creativity is life and tending our spirit is about tending to our aliveness.
Lastly, Re-membering our magic, the Anchor for Tending Spirit, is sort of a scary thing for many folks at first because it involves going into the past which our survival parts: Fight, Flight, Freeze, Submit, Attach and Going-On-With-Regular-Life Part, don’t particularly like unless it’s serving their agenda of survival at all costs and looking for cues of danger.
That’s why it is so important to start with the medicine, with what feels good - something we learn in the Key Channel of Change before Freeing Expression: Becoming Embodied. By the time we reach and work through Freeing Expression, we have integrated to a good enough degree the lessons of Becoming Embodied, like Orienting to Pleasure. This principle is foundational for going into the darkness where we must meet our souls to retrieve the lost parts of our magic - where we come from and why we are here. It is because of this why we allow our creativity and learn to enjoy it and utilize to help re-member our magic so we may fully tend our wholeness, our spirit, and finally reach the last Key Channel of Change: Aligning Dreams.
The Artist’s Way as a tool for bridging Freeing Expression and Tending Spirit
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is sort of like an artists and wish-I-could-be-an-artists Bible. The author structures the self-help book as if someone were in recovery from alcoholism or an eating disorder, except she often refers to it as recovery for blocked artists.
Blocked artists are anyone who wishes to create but instead suppresses the urge and often times is the most critical and jealous person of other peoples creative endeavors. Projection as we like to say in therapy.
She also teaches from a very spiritual stand point, like many recovery programs like AA. The difference being when she refers to “God” she means the Creative Spirit. Which you can take to mean the creative impulse or everyone’s inherent ability to create. Just how various religious and spiritual leaders talk about humans - all life really, being inherently divine, just by being alive.
I purchased the book right after my own recovery in fact. Recovery from an eating disorder that in it’s last phase of a 15+ year run most closely resembled Bulimia, especially through exercise (something many people don’t even know is a thing. Yes calories in calories out mentality is literally a bulimia mindset FYI).
Although I purchased it, I never made my way through it until I was in another kind of recovery nearly 10 years later - recovery from Top Surgery, a life saving gender affirming surgery that trans and nonbinary people receive. I took of three months to heal not just from surgery but from autistic burnout after finally receiving my unrestricted psychotherapy license. A process that took seven years from grad school to associateship and finally licensure (and yet therapists are paid 25% less than physicians. A rate set by both insurance companies and the federal government).
I was really tending my spirit those three months off in a way I had never allowed myself before, and the Artist’s Way was one of my main tools in doing so. I highly recommend the book to anyone and everyone. So as inspiration for your journey in tending your spirit by re-membering your magic through expression and creativity, here are 25 quotes from the book, both by the Author and many quotes the Author quoted throughout.
25 quotes from the Artists Way to inspire you
“Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” -Pablo Picasso
“Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.” -Julia Cameron
“We want to be great - immediately great - but that is not how recovery works.” -Julia Cameron
“I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt.” -Julia Cameron
“Most of us never consider how powerful the creator really is.” -Julia Cameron
“An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude. An artist requires the healing of time alone.” -Julia Cameron
“Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor.” -Paul Hawken
“This creator looks suspiciously like someone who just might send us support for our creative ventures.”
“True life is lived when tiny changes occur.” -Leo Tolstoy
“Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead.” -Julia Cameron
“Learn to accept the possibility that the universe is helping you with what you are doing.” -Julia Cameron
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” -Albert Einstein
“Perhaps the most damaging form of artistic loss has to do with criticism.” -Julia Cameron
“Larger changes occur in tiny increments.” -Julia Cameron
“The blocked artist spends energy on self-doubt.” -Julia Cameron
“Creativity is God energy flowing through us, shaped by us, like light flowing through a crystal prism.” -Julia Cameron
“It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.” -Somerset Maugham
“Creativity requires faith. Faith requires that we relinquish control.” -Julia Cameron
“Many hobbies involve a form of artist-brain mulling that leads to enormous creative breakthroughs.” -Julia Cameron
“Set your goals. Set your boundaries.” -Michelle, Julia Cameron’s friend
“A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.” -Paul Gardner
“Compassion is one of the first fruits of aligning our creativity with its creator.” -Julia Cameron
“I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.” -Emma Goldman
“Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite — getting something down. The directions are important here.” -Julia Cameron
“Artistic losses can be turned into artistic gains and strengths — but not in the isolation.” -Julia Cameron
Which quote will you choose for this week, this month, this season or even a full year?
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