The Artist's Way in New Orleans

Week 2 — My Artist's Date — Drumming Circle

(Note: This post is about a formal Workshop that was held in the past. For information about the ongoing weekly Book Study at the New Orleans Healing Center, click here.)

 Each week during The Artist's Way workshop (and perhaps for life), we are to take ourselves on an Artist's Date. That is something we do to nurture our inner artist. And it's best done by ourselves so that we're not spending a lot of our energy being codependent and making sure a companion is having a good time. This is for us. It could be an artistic experience, like going to the art museum or a symphony. It could be an adventure, pushing ourselves to do something we'd thought about but hadn't dared to do.

This week, I went to a community drumming circle. I'd stayed away from drumming circles before for several reasons. First of all, the ones I'd seen were on the beach in Santa Barbara and seemed to be populated by Grateful Dead followers and there was the scent of weed in the air. That's not my scene. The next reason is that I have no idea how to drum. I didn't even know you were supposed to tilt the drum to get sound out of it!

The drumming circle I attended solved both of those problems. It was indoors and there were no substances, legal or illegal. Plus, this one provided the drums (which look almost identical to the one pictured above), and an amazing teacher. There were about 8 of us and we learned simple drum moves: the slap, the snap, the base, etc. I think I have those right. I'll learn more next week.

The sheer power of the drumming sound was therapeutic, a vacation from my writerly life. Not once during the 90-minute class did I think of an article that was due or how to plan my next Artist's Way workshop or that my dog really needs a bath. I was fully present. I wish I could have gotten video. Maybe next time.

Here are some examples of facilitated drumming circles. This was NOT the class I attended, but you can see the value of a good teacher and leader.

 

 Here are some basic tones we learned:

   

 More after next week's class!

Week 2 — So many awakenings

(Note: This post is about a formal Workshop that was held in the past. For information about the ongoing weekly Book Study at the New Orleans Healing Center, click here.)

I absolutely cannot stop looking at my Dream Box, which I painted last night at Week 2 of The Artist's Way workshop. 

The print of my own hand is spellbinding. And the encouraging words around it work like salve for my soul:

You Are My Dream Come True

Let Your Light Shine

Devoted to You

Good Work

Bliss

Who knew? I am my own dream come true. I have all the talent, beauty, initiative, soul, depth, compassion, energy and connectedness that I have sought in other people. I am the full package. Maybe now I can let other people off the hook. I can say: You don't have to be all things to me. I've got that covered.

I also realized last night how important it is for Artist's Way participants to make art during the workshop. While I have introduced written exercises from the book into the workshop, those are tasks that people can do at home from the book. But making art, in different forms, in a supportive group setting . . . well, that's what an Artist's Way workshop excels at.

I will still have a few written exercises. The Inner Critic Push Back exercise is not to be missed, nor the Self Compassion exercise. Those are musts.

But as for the artwork . .  We have four more weeks in our six-week workshop. I definitely want to do a vision collage for the last session, using most of the time to put on large poster boards images and words of where we want our lives to go from here on.

So that leaves three more workshops. My mind is going wild thinking of art projects we can do during the class. I'd like to make lamps from cast off items. Or little painted wood boxes for rings. I want to have my students decorate plexiglass panels with Mardi Gras beads to hang in the Lower Ninth Ward Village. I want us to make a short film in one hour, depicting a woman looking outside herself for fulfillment but finding it inside. I want to decorate Easter Eggs. How about painting chairs? And then there is the Poetry Walk that is so popular with past participants. 

So, my creative mind is on hyperdrive today. I have another six days to figure out our next project. But I also have a bunch of articles to write (four due by next week) and videos to make (three due ASAP). So I must get on those projects.

I've noticed that when I'm highly involved with The Artist's Way — either taking or facilitating a workshop — my career really starts to pick up. It's like the universe feels my energy and everyone wants to get in on it. It's especially frustrating on Tuesdays, though, when I'm super amped about the upcoming evening's activities and I start getting emails from my various clients for last-minute assignments. That's a nice problem to have! But I need to make sure that anything due on Tuesday gets done on Monday so that I'm open for these last-minute opportunities.

And that, my friends, is The Artist's Way!

P.S. One of the reasons I do postings about The Artist's Way workshops I facilitate is to inspire and encourage others who want to attend workshops or facilitate them, especially those from out of the New Orleans area. My friend Marjorie is right on the verge of facilitating an Artist's Way workshop in Pittsburgh, and if she and her future students can benefit from my postings, that would be awesome! As I read in a book: "We will see how our experiences can benefit others."

Week 2 — Encouraging ourselves with finger paints and dream boxes

(Note: This post is about a formal Workshop that was held in the past. For information about the ongoing weekly Book Study at the New Orleans Healing Center, click here.)

 This evening we had the second session of our Artist's Way in New Orleans workshop, and it was so fun. I felt closer to the women in the group than I had last week when we all first met. I found myself really looking forward to our gathering as I prepared throughout the day.

Here was our program for the evening:

• Check In

• Finger painting on Dream Boxes (boxes into which we will put our dreams for the future)

• Written exercises from the book:

    Detective Work (Page 73 in The Artist's Way)

    List 5 Traits You Liked About Yourself as a Child (Page 76, #2)

    List 5 imaginary lives (Page 39)

    Name something you could do this week that relates to one of those lives

• Artist's Share (great painting from a member of the group)

• Finish our Dream Boxes 

The Dream Boxes project is something I invented just today. Initially I had planned to do our Poetry Walk, where we stroll around the neighborhood and write down certain words. But it was literally freezing outside and there was no way I could ask our class to do that. So I cooked up this new project. It's a combination of one of my favorite childhood art forms, finger painting, and what is called a God Box. 

My thought was that when we're kids, or when we have kids, we put their hand prints on paper or in clay and really honor that image. The kid looks at that and feels so special, so important, so real. I thought, why don't we do that for our adult selves? Where is our "atta girl," or "keep strong," or "way to go"? Those encouragements are too rare. We must give them to ourselves. The box would serve as a place to contain our hopes and dreams, and also be a source of strength and self compassion.

To get everyone in the mood for finger painting, I played this little video I made earlier in the day:

Our task was to pour different colors of acrylic paint into our paper plate, press our hand in there, and make a print on the top of a nice box. We let the paint dry while we did our written exercises, then embellished our box with words from markers or from some rub-off letters I found at Michael's. Of course, the other participants in this exercise had their own ideas about how their box should look. The most pleasurable time for me was when we finished the boxes from 8 to 8:30 p.m.. We were all standing at the worktable, embellishing our boxes with kind words, and also talking and chatting the way women do. I knew some in the group had to get home for jobs in the morning and children and other responsibilities. But I wished that scene could have gone on much, much longer.

You can see our boxes below:

 

 

 

In my mind, this was a spectacularly successful evening.