"I tell them they'll want to be really good right off, and they may not be, but they might be good someday if they just keep the faith and keep practicing. And they may even go from wanting to have written something to just wanting to be writing, wanting to be working on something, like they'd want to be playing the piano or tennis, because writing brings so much joy, so much challenge. It is work and play together. When they are working on their books and stories, their heads will spin with ideas and invention. They'll see the world through new eyes. Everything they see and hear will become first for the mill. At cocktail parties or at line in the post office, they will be cleaning small moments and overheard expressions: they'll sneak away to scribble these things down. They will have days at the desk of frantic boredom, of angry hopelessness, of wanting to quit forever, and there will be days when it feels like they have caught riding a wave." – Anne Lamott
See More advice to creatives at To The Creative

Have you ever felt that feeling of pure creativity?

Have you ever wished you could get back to that? Do you wish you could create spontaneously, and not have to struggle to even create a single inch?

Do you ever try to make something, but your negative emotions stain the piece, and it doesn't come out right?

I didn't want to unlock my creativity.

I didn't think I wanted to "unblock my creativity." I was just looking for how to be more creative, curiosity led me to feel that there was some creative secret that others had that I hadn't found. The Artist's Way captured my attention on this interest, with these taglines,
"the seminal book on the subject of creativity. An international bestseller, millions of readers have found it to be an invaluable guide to living the artist’s life.."

Perhaps my curiosity was outweighed by a fear of not missing out on invaluable information on my own journey toward the artists life. The book's description read,

"The book was written to help people with artistic creative recovery, which teaches techniques and exercises to assist people in gaining self-confidence in harnessing their creative talents and skills."

I didn't want to think of myself as someone who needed a "creative recovery", but that wasn't going to stop me from buying the book.

So I read the book, and the book is a giant sales pitch to make me realize that I'm fooling myself. I'd been making excuses for years for why I wasn't accessing my creativity, when the truth is, I didn't really know how. That's why I was still reading books looking for the secret.

I did learn why we don't just create spontaneously all of the time, and why our negative emotions can ruin the works we do try to create.

This is all because your tunnel of creativity gets polluted. Do you know that Holy Spirit that gives you that pure insight, that gives you pure genius ideas to create? Do you wish you could hear it clearly? There is a way to do this. It's work. But you get that pure, perfect insight when it rains down from the sky.

No, you'll never be able to cause insight to rain. It doesn't work like that. That's what people get afraid of. They think,

"I don't want to force my creativity. It will ruin the whole thing."

Don't worry, because you can't. You can't make it rain. You can only catch rain when it falls. The truth is that it's falling far more often than you think, and because your tunnel is polluted, you aren't catching your rain. And every moment it falls, you're missing out while you tell yourself that you're "protecting your integrity."

If you stay in the house too long, the air gets polluted, it gets cloudy. Eventually, there is decay and rot and negative turmoil; the more static and dry the air becomes, the more dead you feel. Until you open the window to let air in, it just keeps getting worse.

Once you open the window, you don't have to do anything.

The fresh air clears out the old air on its own. You open the window. There's a tunnel between you and insight, and it is dirty. You have to clean it out. You have to clean your house.

It is not that you must receive your genius insights, and flow with your life, and feel perfect creation, but it is miserable sitting in a house full of trash. There comes a point where you look around and say,

"Okay, I'm full of ****, my house is full of ****. I can't live like this. My self-belief that I don't want to "force the creative process" just isn't holding up anymore. I have to do something."

This is not a difficult process to learn or apply. As we know, as we grow older, cleaning up the house is worthwhile. It is work, but it is rewarding and makes us feel better.

Cleaning the house is not a forced method. It is a process, as a metaphor for clearing your tunnel to receive your genius. It is a part of the creative process.

We have a million fears that will happen if we clean; the house. Hoarders do too. I promise you, there is nothing of value that you can lose. The valuable things come back. You can't even use your useful stuff while your house is in disarray.

Once the house is clean, you're able to create when the time is right. And the right time comes. You never lose that. You always retain that.

You put in a tiny bit of work here in the early process, and you get massive return value because you can access your perfect state.

Every second your channel is clogged, you're missing opportunity, you're losing potential, your potential is getting spent, and the actuality is not being gained.

You got to open your channel. You got to open your windows. This is creative life and death. If you don't let in air, the creative mind becomes static and stale and dies, and that other mind, that repressed, obedient to desire, automatic mind that suffers in pain, takes the wheel. Not having access to your creative life is miserable.

There came a point for me when I said, "I can't live like this anymore,

and I can't afford to look back and hold up my own lie and say,
'Well, I didn't want to compromise my creativity,' and know that this reason was empty, too hollow to be a shield."

My excuse would not be a psychological defense strong enough to shield me from my own regret when the truth is that I probably could have figured out how to operate as a creative, just as the evidence shows that millions or billions have before me and will after me.

I thought, I don't hate myself THAT much. I got to at least say I tried. Because I know I have this creativity thing.
I don't know how to use it.
And I know that if I don't use it, it disappears,
and I can't access it anymore,
and I don't know when it will return.
And the older I get, the longer I wait for it to return,
and the books tell me that one day, it won't come back.
And this is too much of a gift for me to live with knowing I didn't even try to access it.

Forget about being an inspiring artist or even successful, just the thought of losing the ability to create, losing my ability to imagine and dream, losing that river of ideas that comes like a flood, I couldn't imagine losing that. If this door had to be opened, I had to open it.

There is no price or cost I wouldn't be willing to pay.

Even if I opened that door and it killed me, I would rather die than lose my creative spark. This was a crisis for me existentially. Not just spiritually, not just for my life, not just for my soul, but as a threat to my existence. This really is the most important thing to me. And I'll be damned if I took the process and took the value and lived that life and didn't share how to walk that process. I would never do that. That's not who I am. I don't just let people fall off cliffs and walk into the sunset. If I can give you a leg up, I'll give it to you.

To be real, you got to clean your house. It gets worse and more painful the longer you don't clean it. There is nothing hard about the process other than choosing to do it. That's the real work, the choice. The process is easy enough. It's just that you are used to doing things the way someone trained you to do things and how you experienced things in a school setting. You don't know the true freedom to operate that you have.

If you clean your house, you clear your head, you clear your mind, and you gain that focus, that clarity, that sense of truth, that sense of yourself, your joy, confidence, flow, your essence, your spark, your heart.

A secret: all of those things are in one direction. In any practice, any method, any process, anything, you are either going toward that direction of your sense of essence or farther away from it.

Point yourself in that direction, and you find yourself.

To unlock your creativity is for more than just fun, it is a survival tool for living life as a human being.

Maybe you don't need The Magic Pages technique. For some people, you might just be able to take the original method Freud found and take it and apply it to your life right now.

If that's you, here it is:

"Here follows the practical prescription I promised. Take a few sheets of paper and for three days in succession write down, without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head.
Write what you think of yourself, of your women, of the Turkish War, of Goethe... of the last judgment, of those senior to you in authority – and when the three days are over you will be amazed at what novel and startling thoughts have welled up in you. That is the art of becoming an original writer in three days." -Ludwig Börne

If you're the kind of person who likes to tackle things on your own, then my advice would be to print out the above quote, do it every day, and never look back.

If you'd like more support, context, and experienced advice on this method, then I would recommend trying The Magic Page Technique.

This is the most refined technique for unlocking creativity that exists right now. If there is a better one, I will find it and incorporate it, and, I am actively studying the techniques of other masters of writing and creativity.

Unlock The Magic Pages while you're ready for it, set the plan, do the work, unlock your creativity!