Recovering a Sense of Creative Identity with Judgment

Week Two 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 2: Recovering a Sense of Identity with Judgement.

These brief Monday essays are free to read. To deepen your journey through access to live & recorded Sunday journaling sessions, original Morning Pages prompts, themed Artist Date suggestions, our community chat thread and more, consider becoming a paying subscriber to The Shuffle.

Week Two of our tarot-informed journey through The Artist’s Way invites us to dig into who we really are at the core, and how we take ownership of our artistic dreams in a world that seems hell-bent on holding us back from claiming our creative identity.

Judgment, a card about excavation, resurrection, and restoration makes for the perfect tarot companion in this moment….

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

As the penultimate card in the Major Arcana sequence, appearing at XX, just before The World’s XXI, Judgment represents the crucial final step that comes before victory, ascendance, freedom. In the Rider Waite Smith and Marseille editions of the tarot, it depicts the biblical judgment day: the moment at the end of everything, when the faithful are resurrected to begin a new world order under God.

Versions of Judgment from the Marseille and Rider Waite Smith tarot.

The card carries some thorns — its overt Christian influence, for one, and the general ~vibe~ of its name for another. Judgment, as a word on its own, stings for obvious reasons: it conjures experiences where our actions, our appearances, our ways of living and loving, our art have been rejected, criticised, punished… leaving us to feel forever “not good enough” or even outright “bad”. To then pair it with imagery from a religion that has been historically exclusive and judgmental… well. It becomes less of an image and more of a scar.

But like a scar, Judgment can be a sign of life. A reminder of a wound, but proof we can survive and regenerate, too.

In Judgment, what has died and been buried gets a second chance at living.

It can be, if we let it, an opportunity to excavate parts of ourselves that we lost to the labors of life. A practice of creative recovery.

Judgment from The Elemental Power Tarot by Melinda Lee Holm & Illustrated by Rohan Daniel Eason

In Week Two of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron explores creative recovery through the lens of identity. She reminds us that it’s our job to “do the work, not judge the work”,¹ and points out how judgments — meted out by the people in our lives and by our own selves — don’t only hold us back from creative fulfilment, they keep us from knowing ourselves at all.

Recovering a sense of identity, she suggests, is a matter of reclaiming our time, our space, our attention, and our autonomy: “You may find yourself drawing new boundaries and staking out new territories as your personal needs, desires, and interests announce themselves.”²

Week Two then becomes a kind of archaeological dig that brushes away the dirt and dust obscuring our true needs, desires and interests, helping us:

• identify the relationships that make us feel less than, or judged, for our creative aspirations³

• confront our own judgmental attitude toward our creative dreams

• and reclaim our attention, so that we can become more aware of what inspires us and thus more connected to the roots of who we really are as creative beings

In the text of the chapter, Cameron quotes Jackson Pollock: “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.”⁴

Reading these words, whilst preparing for this week and meditating on the Judgment card, I had this image of Pollack as the angel in the card, the trumpet and flag replaced by a paintbrush and canvas. Below, the resurrected bodies transformed into bright explosions of paint, coming up through the surface and reaching up toward that blank canvas, ready to ascend.

Blue Poles, by Jackson Pollack. 1952.

As you move through this week, be open to what wants to come through you. Ask yourself:

• What parts of myself have I denied, judged, or buried?

• How can I invite those parts to emerge through my creative practice?

• What judgments about me, my work, and my life have held me back from creating?

• How can I relieve myself of the weight of those judgments, so that I can be free to create?

I’ve included some suggestions for journaling prompts and artist’s dates to help you explore these questions more deeply below.

I also want to suggest that we give the Judgment card its own second chance at a new life. I think it’s been misjudged… that the clunky biblical metaphor of its imagery has shrouded its radical invitation: come back to life. Claw your way up through the dirt. Be here, alive and naked and messy and breathing and raw and welcoming the music of life — the call of unbridled creativity — with open arms. Embrace the creative identity that was once buried beneath the weight of other people’s expectations, and create a new world order in which you deem your own creative desires worthy of everlasting life.

Can we reclaim a new identity for this card? Can we perhaps imagine that it is called judgment not because some external holy power (God, “Great Creator”, or anyone else) judges us worthy of a second chance, but because that word — judgment — is a representation of all the things our creative desires, dreams, and destinies have been buried beneath?

What if Judgment is not what’s being cast on us, but about what’s being conquered? •

Join me live on Sunday, May 25th at 7pm UK / 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific for a tarot journaling event where we’ll reflect back on the work we’ve done to resurrect our creative dreams over the past week.

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

• Morning Pages prompts

• Artist’s Date suggestions

• What’s next

• A discount code for my limited edition Inner Artist tarot letter