I love what Sue says about the train that takes to destination ‘zone’.  Love this, Sue!

Guest blogger Sue Thomason on week 11:

“The kind of autonomy that Julia’s asking us to connect with in Week 11 is what sports psychologists call being in the zone. And what a wonderful place it is to be – it’s the foundation of all creativity. Whether you call it autonomy or authenticity, it’s a way of experiencing the moment by being in the moment and wholly focused on the sensuality of your experience. In this space there are no neurotic voices, no past and no future worries and no looking through others eyes and definitely no looking at yourself and thinking about how you (or your art) are coming across. The zone is actually not just the only possible foundation of creativity but it’s the only time that I find myself feeling truly alive.

I live in this zone sometimes and then I lose it and live somewhere else entirely – and no prizes for guessing when I’m happy and writing and when I’m unhappy and not writing! What The Artist’s Way has done for me is to make me realise that, even though I’ll never stop going in and out of this ‘zone’, I can control it a lot more than I have before by following the steps in the book, writing morning pages and, most importantly, going on my artist’s dates. Artist’s dates are like trains that drive you straight to destination ‘zone’. I’ve also noticed that when I’m going on artist’s dates and writing morning pages, I’m always in this autonomous and creative space and when I’m not doing these things I fall out of it and into a kind of unhappy, unproductive apathy.

To be able to move into the big open space of being in the here and now and to be present in the moment and with your mind able to notice and feel the thrill of the smell of coffee or the sight of the clouds in the sky and to feel that sense of belonging and of being whole and to not give a flying fig what other people think is really the only state of mind that can create authentic art.

And you can only get in the zone when you accept yourself as an artist, which means developing a sense of confidence in your own thoughts, feelings and beliefs and creating whatever it is that you create based on this – whether it’s good or bad. Autonomy, in this sense, is the root of our art and without this root, our creativity doesn’t exist. Without the sense of our own ‘self’ and a feeling of fearlessness, what we produce isn’t art at all, it’s photocopying.”