The Writing Diet: Write Yourself Right by Julia Cameron

Writing makes us conscious.  Once we are conscious, it is difficult to act in any unconscious ways.

Writing is a way to metabolize life.

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron

Part Two

Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention.

Success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality.

The quality of life is in proportion always, to the capacity for delight.  The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

The reward for attention is always healing.

Even the slightest attention to our impoverished areas can nurture them.  

Anger is meant to be listened to.  Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand.… Anger is a map.

Anger is not the action itself.  It is action's invitation.

The universe is prodigal in its support.  We are miserly in what we accept.

Those of us who get bogged down by fear before action are usually being sabotaged by an older enemy, shame.  Shame is a controlling device.  Shaming someone is an attempt to prevent the person from behaving in a way that embarrasses us.

When people do not want to see something, they get mad at the one who shows them.

This surge of sudden disinterest ("It doesn't matter") is a routine coping device employed to deny pain and ward off vulnerability. 

Many blocked people are actually very powerful and creative personalities who have been made to feel guilty about their own strengths and gifts.

Growth is an erratic forward movement; two steps forward, one step back.

Very often, a week of insights will be followed by a week of sluggishness.

Easy does it is actually a modus operandi.  It means, "Easy accomplishes it". 

Okay is a blanket word for most of us.  It covers all sorts of squirmy feelings; and it frequently signals a loss.

Extreme emotions of any kind -- the very thing that morning pages are superb for processing -- are the usual triggers for avoiding the pages themselves.

Kriya, a Sanskrit word meaning spiritual emergency or surrender…. We all know what a kriya looks like: it is the bad case of the flu right after you've broken up with your lover.  It's the rotten head cold and bronchial cough that announces you've abused your health to meet an unreachable work deadline.

When the search-and-discard impulse seizes you, two crosscurrents are at work: the old you is leaving and grieving, while the new you celebrates and grows strong.  

The desire to worldly sophisticated, and smart often blocks our flow.

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.

All too often, we become blocked and blame it on our lack of money.  This is never an authentic block.  The actual block is our feeling of constriction, our sense of powerlessness.

Creativity lives in paradox:  serious art is born from serious play.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right.  It has northing to do with fixing things.  It has nothing to do with standards.  Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead.

We must be alert to flag and mourn our losses.

Every end is a beginning.  We know that.  But we tend to forget it as we move through grief.

Whenever I am willing to ask "What is necessary next?" I have moved ahead.

"I'm too old" is an evasive tactic.  It is always used to avoid facing fear.

The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer.

There is a connection between self-nurturing and self-respect.

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron

PART ONE

Most of the time, when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way.

Just remember, in choosing, that we often resist what we most need.

Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path.

Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams, and plans of others.  Their lives have obscured and detoured our own.

In dealing with the suicide of the "nice" self we have been making do with, we find a certain amount of grief to be essential. 

How do you know if you are creatively blocked? Jealousy is an excellent clue. 

All that angry, whining, petty stuff that you write down in the morning stands between you and your creativity.  Worrying about the job, the laundry, the funny knock in the car, the weird look in your lover's eye -- this stuff eddies through our subconscious and muddies our days.

Insight in and of itself is an intellectual comfort.  Power in and of itself is a blind force that can destroy as easily as build.  It is only when we consciously learn to link power and light that we begin to feel our rightful identities as creative beings.

Our focused attention is critical to filling the well.  We need to encounter our life experiences, not ignore them. 

Negative beliefs are exactly that: beliefs, not facts. 

Your block doesn't want you to see that.  Its whole plan of attack is to make you irrationally afraid of some dire outcome you are too embarrassed to even mention.

Erraticism is a normal part of getting unstuck, pulling free from the muck that has blocked us.  It is important to remember that at first flush, going sane feels just like going crazy.

Be particularly alert to any suggestion that you have become selfish or different. (These are red-alert words for us. They are attempts to leverage us back into our old ways for the sake of someone else's comfort, not our own).

Through self-nurturance we nurture our inner connection to the Great Creator.

Setting skepticism aside, even briefly, can make for very interesting explorations.

Transitions: Prayers and Declarations for a Changing Life by Julia Cameron

Spirit understands adversity as opportunity.

I remember that “God” is the shorthand for “good, orderly direction”. 

Elders walk before us.  The young follow behind.  Ours is a caravan of consciousness.

When outward events jostle me with their velocity and turbulence, I must actively turn within, seeking higher perceptions.

We are like jewelers.  At the start of any day, we have before us the beautiful beads of differing choices.  Choice by choice, moment by moment, I build the necklace of my day, stringing together the choices that form artful living… Moving through my days with conscious grace, I connect to the web of life.  I, too, am a bead in a larger pattern.

I resolve with a loving heart to accept appropriate endings.  I do not grasp at straws when the reality is difficult but clear.  Instead, I release the past, bless it and turn with resolution to the future.  I listen to the dictates of my conscience, knowing that its voice calls me home.

Problems bear the seeds of their solutions.

Sometimes we are less a person than a place for those we love.

Answered Prayers by Julia Cameron

All quotes from Julia's book

What we perceive as failings, god may view as opportunities for help and growth. 

You are a story with no listener.

Attune your heart to a deeper rhythm then the daily news.  Know that for every catastrophe reported, there are a thousand averted.  Know that for every danger, there is more safety, more well-being then the news can count.

Life is an intricate dance, but you are never unpartnered.

Sophistication is difficult.  You put me at a distance.  You want to run your own life and then you wonder at its emptiness.