Moving Above Circumstance into our Real Selves

There is something embedded in the pages of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way that makes me want to step into life as well as into my creativity. I love this book so much and the more often I read its wisdom the more I realise it’s not only for artists to re-affirm their creativity. It’s for all of us to re-affirm our own life issues and to step into our real selves, to find who we really are. 

One of its core tools is to write three pages every morning about anything! It even encourages us to write nonsense and subsequently without judgment but the more we write the more open we become as we free ourselves from expectation and allow the juices to flow, to step into that flow and be ourselves, let go of what we don’t want or need and to be open to what we find. It’s a creative journey but it is also an everyday journey. Whatever it is, it is an eventful journey that requires trust and a degree of courage in both ourselves and our ability to trust. 

I found the section ‘Finding the River’ and in it we are asked to let go of negativity and move with the flow of the river towards spirituality and trust, as we gradually loosen our hold on judgement and step into acceptance. 

‘We see that our moods, views and insights are transitory. We acquire a sense of movement. A current of change in out lives. This current, or river, is a flow of grace moving us to our right livelihood, companions, destiny.’

I love the way this quote encourages us to move forward into the flow of life, opening us to possibilities and acceptance of what we find.

I'm piecing this together with what I am experiencing in my own life at the moment. It is the last leg, the final piece as I put together what a different way of living may look like for me, for however long. I'm back in my home town to get the Italian Visa that will give me that freedom. I’ve found myself in accommodation that is challenging me – it’s aesthetic is not mine. It’s tempting me to wander into negativity and let the stories of doubt run free. The questions arise. Is this how you want to live? Are you prepared to give up some creature comforts to explore a new and different side of yourself and life? It’s so easy to go there but there is little hope of reward with this type of thinking. Here’s another pearl from Julia Cameron that is helping me grasp and hold onto the pointlessness of negativity, “Negative Beliefs are just that: beliefs not facts. The world as never flat, although everyone believed it was. You are not dumb, crazy, egomaniacal, grandiose or silly just because you falsely believe yourself to be.’ 

Aligned with this negativity is judgment and where I find myself is definitely a test for me about judgment versus acceptance. As I move forward into a new spaces and new people, I aspire to let go of the judgment and accept people and things as they really are, without my own ideas of what standard things and people should meet. Stories are so easily run, over and over when we let ourselves go there. People and places have their own journey and I have mine – I want to remember that as I move forward. That’s what can take us so easily out of the present moment. We ca instead choose to land our  bodies in the here and now, feel it embody the space and the whole environment we find ourselves in. 

To bring me to reality further this morning I pulled my regular oracle card and it tells me to ‘Listen to Guidance’ – It’s one I get a lot! So I start writing and I listen. My guidance steps up and lets me know that this is about opening to myself, others and my surroundings whilst staying true and firm to myself. I’m told that it is one of my lessons, one that becomes clearer to me as time moves me forward and I am often tested by circumstance. 

I'm told to write about, paint about, speak about it. It is my mission. I'm currently back in Australia for a short while to organise my visa to stay in Italy and where I have landed is not a space I have fallen in love with but I am told it is testing me, it’s the same thing, the same theme. I'm told to remain here, to embed my own energy here, letting other’s energy pass from this space to the outdoors and to fill it with my own. My energy, the one seeking self, remains and is true and worthy of how I want to live – on my own terms, without hindrance of possessions. Slot into the space as an owner of it, to be a reflection of the real me.