Week two of my work on The Artists's way work and I've noticed quite a huge shift. I did all my morning pages again this week - The first half hour or so is so crucial to me in terms of setting my mood for the rest of the day - If I wake early and can't get back to sleep I can end up thinking myself into a panic attack, or into tears, and the morning pages have REALLY helped me curb that. I find it so much easier to arrange my day in terms of the tasks I have to do, just to purge my worries and expectations before I'm even out of bed so I can focus on the tasks at hand.
The content of the pages themselves have come as something of a surprise to me - when I've a mild annoyance, I'm vicious in my language. I express a lot of anger and occasionally bitterness with out actually becoming angry or sinking into despair, which is a huge relief. There is a lot of longing in them - More than I'm aware of, or more than I LET myself be aware of, which is probably more the case. The positive and the hopeful outweighs the Negative but quite a substantial amount though, which is another welcome surprise. I have learned a lot about the way I see the world, and gained a small amount of confidence in the way I handle problems, which was fairly non existent before.
Something pretty crazy happened - I've penned about five sets of lyrics. I can't believe I'm even typing that. It feels sort of numb to me - it wasn't a huge achievement or a big event but just part of my day to day workings - it felt simple to do, and the basic principals of Creativity being a natural human activity are suddenly resonating very strongly with me.
I wrote one about my old tap shoes at the circus - they were in tattered little bits and I lived in fear that they'd fall apart on stage - and afterwards just burst into tears because it suddenly hit me hard, rally hard, how much I missed dancing. It's choking me up now just thinking about it. I did myself some big psychological hurt in my dance lessons, my own quiet, private form of self harm when things were really bad, and I do think somewhere underneath all that is my 10-year-old self watching Cats and thinking "I want to do that." I put my tap shoes on and danced a bit, just improvised, which I tried a couple of times before years ago and it just felt awkward and forced. This time I could have carried on for years. I am afraid of that hurt - the capacity to do it is there, and I know how horrific it can get. I need to dance more, is what I inferred from this week, entirely and completely by accident.
For my Artist's Date I did some guided meditation. It was a much needed break in a hectic week - it highlighted my need to clear my mind as often as I can, ESPECIALLY when I'm busy.
My gut instinct is to just carry on. Carry on with all I'm doing and keep building my faith in myself and in all the arts I love and really try and repair my broken love for dancing. It will not be the same dancer now - The dancer then was constantly comparing and trying to meet expectations and did not love herself. The person who dances now comes to it with the open heartedness of a little child running away from everything else in the world. I need to go back to dancing.
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