Recovering a Sense of Creative Integrity with The Hermit

Week Four 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 4: Recovering a Sense of Integrity.

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 Four of our tarot-informed journey through The Artist’s Way calls us to clear our creative path forward and stick to it…

The book’s material for this week highlights withdrawal and deprivation as a tool for recovering integrity, and indeed I’m pairing the week’s themes with a card that also represents withdrawal: The Hermit.

But all is not as it seems, and we’re going to be leaning into our own integrity to define whether or not withdrawal is right for us.

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

While Albert Camus may argue that “integrity has no need of rules,” Julia Cameron advises that we follow hers: “Do not skip the tool of reading deprivation,” she warns in the opening lines of Week Four of The Artist’s Way.

If she had her way, we would all spend the week abstaining from reading books, magazines, blogs, the news, etc.

Sorry, Julia, but for the sake of my own integrity, I must offer an alternative warning for anyone reading and working along with The Tarot Artist’s Way: Do not let a requirement that doesn’t work for you keep you from mining this program for the elements that DO work for you. Skip the reading deprivation if it doesn’t feel right for you.

I have, many times over, felt personally victimised by Cameron’s assertion that reading deprivation is an essential step to creative recovery. My experience has been the opposite: not reading has a 1:1 correlation with low moods and sapped creativity. Losing interest in reading is one of the most reliable indicators to me that burnout or depression are looming. Choosing to deprioritise reading even when I’m feeling fine feels dangerous, too… I’ve found that it’s not just a symptom but a trigger: if I don’t make the time to engage with stories, I invite depression to my door.

Cameron’s argument is essentially that reading is passive, and when we strip it out, we have more brain space to actively create. For her, reading deprivation is a tool that opens up possibilities. But in my experience, the more I read — the more I engage with media that I consider meaningful, or healing, or fun — then the more inspired I feel to create.

Reading is an essential act of mental health maintenance for me: I won’t trade it for someone else’s version of what my creative recovery should look like.

Owning this self-knowledge some years ago helped me give myself permission to rethink my relationship with The Artist’s Way. OK, I thought to myself as I approached it for the fourth time, already suspecting that I’d give up in Week Four once again. I’m just going to ignore that advice, and see if I can find something useful on the other side.

As it happens, making this choice was the secret to recovering a sense of creative integrity… to recognising my own creative needs and trusting myself to meet them.

When I did what was right for me (continuing to read), and rejected what I knew was wrong for me (depriving myself of a core part of my mental health care), I felt more creatively aligned and empowered.

I chose to pair this week with the Hermit tarot card. On first glance, the imagery in this card may seem to affirm the withdrawal associated with reading deprivation.

But, as I often tell clients who see the Hermit and think they need to separate themselves from their community or friends, this is not a card about isolation or being alone. It’s a card about integrity… about choosing to be guided by what feels right for you, to walk your own path rather than stray onto someone else’s just because they said you should.

Like Camus, the Hermit has no need of rules: their inner sense of what’s right for them lights their way. They have no need for external direction.

All of this said, I won’t deny that there is wisdom in some of the principles of the reading deprivation, especially given the “a little bit of everything all of the time” consumption culture that defines our Internet age.

We are inundated with content — video, audio, and literary. For all kinds of reasons, this all-access pass can hold us back from using the creative power we only just started to recover last week. “Brainrot” can steal hours, days, weeks of our time and zap our creative wells dry. Escaping into the endless sea of entertainment available to us can be distracting, dissociative, and ultimately unsatisfying.

But there’s also magic in the access we have to the things that interest, excite, and inspire us: Scrolling my Instagram feed a few months ago reintroduced me to the work of Leonora Carrington, an artist I’d only ever appreciated in passing and who has lately become a major muse for a burgeoning fiction project. Substack is the library of my dreams — and reading and being in community with other writers here has played such a crucial role in keeping my own creative spark alive. I recently gave myself permission to bingewatch My Lady Jane and gobble up Ashley Flowers’ latest crime novel — mental holidays that helped me rest, reminded me how much fun stories can be, and fueled me to pull myself out of a creative funk so I could get back to my desk with gusto.

I would never want to deprive myself of all that possibility — would you?

In the same way that starvation diets are never the answer to a healthier relationship with food, media deprivation is not the answer to creative recovery. More mindful consumption that aligns with our creative goals and values is.

With that in mind, I want to propose that this week, you get curious about the media you consume instead of mindlessly cutting it all out. Allow yourself to reject rules — you have no need for them — and follow what feels right for you, instead.

Two alternative approaches to the “reading deprivation” tool are available to paid subscribers below, alongside

• Morning Pages prompts

• Artist’s Date suggestions

• What’s next

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

Join me live on Sunday, June 8th at 7pm UK / 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific for a tarot journaling event where we’ll reflect back over the past week and pull cards for guidance on doing what’s right for us in our creative lives.