Recovering a Sense of Creative Strength with Strength
Week Eight of the Tarot Artist's Way...
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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 8: Recovering a Sense of Strength.
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Week Eight of our tarot-informed journey through The Artist’s Way guides us to find the strength to treat inner artist with tenderness, to let ourselves love what we love.
The Strength card is the perfect guide for this week — in name and in theme — because it reminds us that to be strong is not necessarily to be forceful. Rather, creative strength is about being present and sweet with the bitter losses we suffer in our creative lives.
ICYMI, the replay recording of our latest Tarot Artist’s Way journaling session is here.
In her prayer of a poem, Wild Geese, Mary Oliver writes: “Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a line that I, my fellow tarotist Sam, and many other readers of poetry and tarot have connected to the Strength card over the years.
I think Oliver’s words fit just as well with Julia Cameron’s take on Creative Strength in Week Eight of The Artist’s Way — the most generous, warm, and fortifying chapter in the programme.
Up until now, Cameron’s focus has been on challenging the reader, on disentangling us from the wounding mindsets that hold us back from authentic creative living. Why are you doing it this way, she asks. Fix this approach, she advises. Cut out this person, this behaviour, this thought pattern, she directs.
But in Week Eight, she turns her attention to the wounds themselves, and — maybe for the first time — she holds genuine space for the vulnerability that her prescribed programme demands. She trades corrective advice for gentle medicine; she acknowledges the soft animals that we are.
Washing up on the shores of this week, I, for one, never needed anything more.
Both Week Eight and the Strength tarot card are love songs to healing: to acknowledging that soft animal within us, releasing it from its cage, and showing it the gentle love, care and feeding it deserves — even when that’s a hard thing to do.
The Strength major arcana card is about the qualities that we cultivate and the development of character to withstand the pressures of life. … [T]he lion represents our inner shadow. Not as a beast we have to tame and subdue, but as a source of great passion and power.
— Tarot Therapy, by Leona Nichole Black
Cameron writes about tending to “artistic scar tissue” by naming our losses, and administering the care we need whenever we suffer rejection, bad-faith judgement and other dissapointments in our creative lives: “When faced with a loss, immediately take one small action to support your artist … your action says: ‘I acknowledge you and your pain. I promise you a future worth having.’”
This gentle promise is exactly what the Strength card prescribes, too: courage, vulnerability, care, presence.
In Tarot for Creativity, I summed it up like this: “Being soft and open is a crucial skill for getting real with the hard things. When this card comes up for you … seek out ways of working that prioritise openness, curiosity, and beauty over the brute force of a ‘just get on with it already’ attitude.”
When we take the guidance of this week and this card together, we have a blueprint for healing the inner artist — and while the work is hard, it doesn’t have to be harsh.
When facing [forces] like anxiety, self-doubt, or a harsh inner critic, we’re more likely to find that attempts to outrun, hide from, deny, or even destroy them is a path toward grave danger and deep trouble.
But when we learn to honor the humanity in these difficult experiences—anger, grief, loneliness, despair, guilt, shame—we discover that they cannot “kill” us, nor can they pull us from our paths. We honor them by paying our respects, summoning willingness, being curious, and engaging a genuine desire to understand.
— Tarot for Change, by Jessica Dore
It’s worth noting that I didn’t adhere to the numerology of the tarot when devising this program — I wanted to be able to give some of the cards beyond 12 some love, and to focus on the overarching themes emerging through each chapter title of The Artist’s Way. But that Week Eight just so happens to be associated with Strength, a theme with its very own card in the tarot — conveniently number VIII in most modern decks — feels significant.
In a vintage episode of the Tarot For the Wild Soul podcast, Lindsay Mack called the Eights of the tarot “portals of transformation”. Mack’s take on Strength fits alongside what Cameron, Black, Dore, and I all have to say:
That Strength is always an invitation for us to touch into some part, something that feels big, overwhelming, maybe even frightening, confronting, just big, whether it be inside of ourselves or outside of us, and to do so with an open heart. And not an open heart in a way that is without wisdom, without intelligence. Obviously, we don't want to totally bear all parts of us and open up all of our gates and doors when we're not fully, you know. We want to be as open as we can, while also having the appropriate boundaries that are important for us at that given moment.
… So we know right away, from reflecting on Strength card, that to move through the Eights, it's asking for us to show up soft, willing, with an open heart.
These next seven days are about opening our hearts back up to the creative desires that old wounds have kept us from reaching. It’s about returning to process, and remembering that no matter what the world around us — and our own internalised critic — tells us about our creative worth (or lack thereof) — we are valuable in all our raw and messy creative glory. We don’t have to get it right — we just have to let ourselves love what we love.
This week’s transformation functions as a powerful portal drawing us back home — it returns what was ours, restores creative strengths we abandoned, and allows us to become what we always were: artists, soft animals, our own strong, safe harbours. •
Join me live on Sunday, July 6th at 7pm UK / 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific for a tarot journaling event where we’ll reflect back over the past week and pull for tapping into creative Strength.
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