Recovering a Sense of Creative Abundance with The Empress

Week Six of the Tarot Artist's Way...

This summer, I’m guiding you through a tarot takeover of Julia Cameron’s 12 week creative recovery program, The Artist’s Way. Each Monday, I’ll pair a key theme from the book with a tarot archetype, and share fresh insights on The Artist’s Way’s message, through a tarot-lens. Today, we’re diving into Week 6: Recovering a Sense of Abundance.

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QUICK NOTE: Apologies this is late! To be honest, I woke up this morning and had a not-small crisis of confidence about my original version of this piece, so ended up rewriting it today. Thank you for your patience, and I hope what you find below resonates!

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Week Six of our tarot-informed journey through The Artist’s Way is a call to redefine our relationship with what it means to experience creative abundance and luxury.

The Empress of the tarot reminds us that our creativity is a natural, regenerating resource, not something we have to buy.

ICYMI, the replay recording of our latest Tarot Artist’s Way journaling session is here.

The word “abundance” is often synonymous with “wealth”, which is, in turn, often synonymous with money. So, it makes sense that Julia Cameron opens Week Six of The Artist’s Way with a lecture on money mindset.

I understand why she would. She rightly identifies that we’ve been conditioned to equate money with security, and that many potential artists have been distracted from their creative path by a fatal misbelief: “we will pursue our art, we tell ourselves, when we have enough money to do it easily.”

The call-out is fair, but her guidance to trust that the universe will deliver is vague and out-of-touch. She promises: “When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us.”

Personally, I think it’s unfair and unhelpful at all times — but especially so early on in a creative recovery journey — to burden creative exploration with the promise of financial success in this way. The optimism feels misguided. Money may never come from some creative endeavours - does that mean that the joy and freedom we might experience while doing them isn’t what we are meant for?

Throughout the chapter, Cameron tries to make the point that you don’t need financial abundance to nurture creative abundance. A point I agree with wholeheartedly, but one that she repeatedly muddies over the course of her argument. She proposes that creative resistance stemming from financial insecurity is “never an authentic block,” but then suggests that we track our spending¹. She says that creative abundance has nothing to do with penthouse views and fancy cars, but in a section on providing ourselves with small, joyful luxuries, she offers the personal example of buying herself a horse.

90% of the examples she offers for cultivating abundance in the chapter require financial investments of some kind. Is it any wonder that we feel creatively starved when we experience financial lack, when all around us creative abundance is so often directly linked to purchasable luxuries, rather than redefined as an organic, generative process that starts within us?

Yes, it’s lovely to indulge our Inner Artist with treats.

But none of us needs to purchase a luxury to buy our way into a sense of creative abundance. Your creativity is already, and always, yours to enjoy.

The Tarot illustrates abundance as The Empress/Mother Earth archetype, offering an opportunity to heal from the commodification of creative abundance and return to a more organic relationship with creativity.

After all, creativity isn’t like money. It’s not man-made and it can’t be earned, spent, stolen or wasted. It’s not a resource that we have to siphon from outside ourselves.

It’s not a good we exchange, it’s an element of our DNA. It grows inside of us on instinct.

Creative living is a cycle, like life, like the moon. Our cells regenerate, the moon moves from new to full, and so does our creativity.

“[The Empress’s] gift is the act of creation: of pouring abundant energy and care into her charge, feeding it, watching it take shape. She knows that things grown with love bloom the brightest. She knows that it is impossible to be spoiled by goodness — only by coldness and withholding. The Empress reminds us to never starve the things we care about.”

— from Wild Card by Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt

To give credit where it’s due, Cameron ultimately lands on a conclusion I can get on board with: “What we are talking about when we discuss luxury is very often a shift in consciousness more than flow—although as we acknowledge and invite what feels luxurious to us, we may indeed trigger an increased flow.”

We do have to rethink what luxury means. I hope that we land far from feeling like it necessitates shopping, and much closer to a sense that giving ourselves over to our creativity as we are — and accepting in turn, what it offers back to us — is the ultimate luxury.

A final reflection: I can’t think of creative abundance without thinking of the Maya Angelou quote: “you can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”

And yet, a confession: Sometimes I do feel that I’ve used it all up. That I’ve drowned my best ideas in a wishing well and have nothing left in my pockets.

But then I remember creativity regenerates. That I don’t have to buy my creativity, and my creativity doesn’t owe me financial abundance. That creative abundance is already mine, if I let myself have it.

I may go to bed with empty pockets but I wake up full of dreams. •

Join me live on Sunday, June 22nd at 7pm UK / 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific for a tarot journaling event where we’ll reflect back over the past week and pull for generating creative abundance.

Below, full-access subscribers to The Shuffle can find:

• Morning Pages prompts

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