The Artist's Way at Work: Riding the Dragon - Softcover

This week we begin working in the swirling mists of our history. For this reason, our initial bedrock tools concern communication of the self to the self. We call these tools the Radio Kit. They allow us both to determine and to broadcast our creative and emotional bearings. They are simple, workable, and mandatory.(If you have already worked with the Artist's Way, then some of the first few tools will be familiar to you. However, we will be using them in new and unexpected ways that we think you will find illuminating and exciting. As the weeks progress, you will discover many new concepts and exercises that will expand your use of these classic tools and will reward you for your faith in this work. For now, the drill as you know it.)

Our primary tool -- the morning pages -- is three pages of daily longhand morning writing. You will be using this tool first to contact your inner self and later to discover your patterns in groups.

We all suffer ambivalence about our simultaneous desires to be a part of, and apart from, groups, and many of our new tools are designed to explore this ambivalence. We have found that morning pages show us both our connectedness and our individuality.

As you will soon discover, the inner self has a variety of voices. In doing morning pages, you will experience some of them. You will also learn to discern which voices of this "self" are best heeded and which best disputed. You will discover many positive forces that might have become silenced over the years, including one we call the Inner Mentor.

This Inner Mentor, which some of us characterize as an older sage, is not unlike the eldest dragon of Chen Rong's painting or Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi in our popular mythology. Knowledge of this and similar voices will eventually evolve into a guidance system you can depend on. But first you will meet a host of other voices, the voices most of us think of as "myself."