
“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are & become it.” – Steven Pressfield
It’s the first in my monthly Rousing Reviews series! OK, it’s technically the second (I reviewed The Renaissance Soul in June of ‘09, so that totally counts, right?), but it’s the first on a consistent basis. Let’s face it, our lives sometimes get in the way, & it’s tough to sit down with a book that you know will do ya a world of good, both for yourself & your fans/readers/followers/clients. So yes, this series is absolutely a structure I set-up for myself to make me accountable to read the books that I’ve been tagging along the way. See, I life coach myself sometimes! And duh – obviously I do this for you kids, too (say it with me: “Awwwwww!”).
I wanted to start off the series with The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield because it’s really a hell of a title. What artist wouldn’t want to go into battle, break through their creative roadblocks, & emerge victorious with the Writer’s Block Vampire’s head on a stick? And while I’d like to say that that’s what this book does, I can’t. Not to say it won’t help slay that Vampire, but it’s more about discovering all the ways the Vampire’s likely to attack you & instilling yourself with the mojo to make it not only not bite you, but to get it to leave you the hell alone, at least until tomorrow.
Let me explain. The War of Art is split into three books: Resistance (Defining the Enemy) Combating Resistance (Turning Pro) & Beyond Resistance (Higher Realm). As you can tell, Resistance is the Vampire here. The long & short of it is that every single thing that causes a creative person to shelve their creativity – whether it’s perfectionism, addiction, procrastination, or the million other excuses a creative person gives themselves to not do – is a direct weapon of Resistance. For me, Book One was eye-opening, powerful, & worth the price of the book a few times over. When I flipped the page to Book Two, I may or may not have clutched it to my chest & said to myself, “You will be beaten & dog-eared when I’m through with you.” And then I may or may not have kissed it. I couldn’t help it – hearing about all the different Vampires that get in the way of making Art, why, it was a wonder that any Art exists at all! The whole reason Resistance exists is to “shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work” & “the more call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel towards pursuing it.” How evil is that? It’s so evil that the more we discover something that’s authentically us, that’s calling us to do it, the more it attempts to stop us! That is so, so evil that I not only wanted it’s head on a stick, I wanted to chop it up into pieces & then stomp it to double death! Seriously, it pissed me off. Read the rest of this entry »