Caroline Myss - The Starving Artist (The Power of Archetypes)

what comes out is but how are you going to earn a living and there it was starving artist you just start from art and I said I said I want you to look at the world I said everything is Art everything needs art commercials are our clothes are our jewelry's art what's not our I said I have to get cushions for my furniture in the summer and they're artistic I said art is everywhere I said the only thing that stops you the only thing is your expectations of what you think you should have what you think you should earn and what you think you're entitled to [Music] hi everybody time for another archetype you know I am really enjoying these because they give me license to just carry on and that's what I'm going to do today I'm going to do the starving artist I was going to do another one because there's so many I want to do I want to get into the bully the detective the uh wounded child the Healer but I decided to do the starving artist today because I went grocery shopping and the gentleman that was checking me out he just oozed the starving artist archetype and so I said to him so you're an artist huh and he looked and he said yes and he didn't he didn't even say how do you know that and I said are you going to follow that career are you going to do something about it why aren't you going to do something about it and I oh Jesus sometimes I can't stab myself and but there there are moments when you just have to sprinkle Fury dust on someone you just have to do I have to do it I just have to do it and this is where when those kinds of Impressions start rolling into me I just have to so I said you have to respond you have to I said you're so artistic look at your whole childhood you were doodling and noodling and he never even said how'd you know that he said yeah I mean and so then of course what comes out is but how are you going to earn a living and there it was a starving artist you just start from art and I said I said I want you to look at the world I said everything is Art everything needs art commercials are our clothes are our jewelry's art what's not our I said I have to get cushions for my furniture in the summer and they're artistic he said art is everywhere I said the only thing that stops you the only thing is your expectations of what you think you should have what you think you should earn and what you think you're entitled to expectations and entitlement they're killers and he looked and he kind of looked back I said I mean it I said if you if you have those two things in your head you'll never jump into your art just do your art and then grab my groceries but then he came and he said thank you thank you I don't know if you'll ever pay any attention to it but you're going to pay attention to it and it it reminded me on my way home I was reminded this may sound like I'm going on a tangent which I am but that's what I get to do because this is my thing years ago after graduate school I was going to pursue a doctorate in California and I had a summer to kill um I had to I had to work and a friend of mine got me a job as a secretary to a renowned scientist at Northwestern University a wonderful wonderful man he was chairman of the Department of pharmacology at Northwestern and so he was the only one who knew that I had just finished a master's degree and was going on for a doctorate and um and that my job was just for the summer and as it turned out that's he he only had enough money on his Grant to have a secret private secretary for the summer and so that was that and you know I I am not good at being a secretary I discovered that but he and I became the dearest of friends and I learned so much as it turned out I ended up there two and a half years but here's what I want here's the point of this that you know during times like that it's very easy to kind of fall off the rails in your life and think what am I doing here where's my career but that's not what I did I I found the most fascinating one of the most fascinating lessons of my life and it had to do with entitlement and expectations because I was surrounded by very accomplished people all of whom had doctorates all of whom were scientists all of whom were a brilliant brilliant people and the expectations on these people to produce was incredible whereas I had none whatsoever and as it turned out paradoxically that positioned me to be the most um empowered person in the department which as you'll see I took full advantage of now the first thing that I noticed was the attitudes that these scientists had about we in the secretarial pool and that and how condescending they were and their expectations of us which were low and judgmental and and unbelievable and um and I remember one day walking in and I knew that during the Sun the first summer the summer it was there when I thought it would be gone by uh September I walked in and this one guy comes out and he just throws this manuscript in my face and he says I need this typed by noon it didn't even say good one he said nothing he just said I need this type by noon and I said and I looked at my watch and I said well that gives you three hours and I threw it back in his face and I kept going and he comes rushing into the office after that and he says I'm going to tell Dr narahashi about this that was the chairman of the department so I looked at him I grabbed the calendar and I said okay what time do you want to see him and I said he's going to be so impressed that you're going to go in there and say your secretary said and this then it was war between us believe you me we never settled that but his Pride was the first thing I noticed and how unbelievable it was and the other secretaries in there were looking at me like are you kidding me and I was like right there was another secretary who would walk in there and she wouldn't talk to it because I belonged to Dr narahashi and she would look to the other two and just she never even acknowledged them she'd walk in and she'd say I need this I need that I need this and walk out these were wonderful girls and they and and they felt this and I you know I I just took note of all of this behavior all this Behavior and what entitlement does and what expectations finally she crossed the line with one of them and that person was afraid to say something but I didn't care so I call this the scientist up and I said doctor I said would you have lunch with me and of course I am a lowly secretary she didn't say anything and she said why and I said because I'd like to I'd just like to have lunch with you should we go to lunch at the Water Tower in Chicago and we're sitting there and she's looking at me as if I had a duck on my head and I said here's why I want to have lunch with you you come in and you have this attitude toward the other girls in my office and then when you walk out I have to put them back together again I have to build their self-esteem I have to tell them that they're okay after what you do your psychic assault on them and I said so here's what I think I think something's going on with you so you can either tell me what that is you could tell me it's none of my business but something is going on with you or you can either tell me to bugger off I said but you're not gonna I'm gonna ask you not to do that again and I am telling you she just her jaw dropped her jaw dropped and she opened up and believe it or not we became friends I took a big risk but to be honest with you I had this whole sense of what doesn't matter I mean if I lost this job I'll get another one I just need a job for a few weeks and it doesn't matter I I learned what freedom of Freedom was what it was to not be burdened with the need to with expectations or any sense of entitlement because I was entitled to nothing nor was anything expected of me I mean other than showing up right other than showing up and I watched what the burden of expectations and entitlement did to other people who should have felt far more secure in who they were but in fact it worked against them because it made them competitive and jealous and Cutthroat and incapable of supporting each other in ways that would have enhanced each other's career and it gave starving a meaning to me the starving artist The Starving scientist the starving creative person the watching someone who feared the creative genius of a colleague I just saw the movie Emily and it's the story of the Bronte sisters really emphasizing Emily and you see the competitiveness between Emily Bronte who wrote Wuthering Heights and Charlotte who wrote the brilliant Jane Eyre which is actually one of my favorite books in my whole life this burden of expectations and entitlement is is really are two dark threads that are more harmful to any any archetypal pattern to be honest any archetypal pattern it then I can even emphasize to you but when it comes to the artistic aspect of the human being I think that everybody has the impulse to create we are biologically designed to give birth to give life to create and maybe not everybody wants to give birth to a child to have biological acts of creation but we want to create and then there are those who actually had the artist archetype who actually want to produce and give birth to creativity to to acts of creation and in all their many forms but there are so many forms of creativity that just flow through people even the way you think and you think I've got to get work I've got to boost my my thinking process to a more creative level I'm I've run out of steam and to that I would tell you that when you kind of level off and realize I'm this isn't going anywhere then I always tell people grab a dictionary fill yourself with new words fill yourself just read page after page of the dictionary and poor language into you vocabulary is your greatest asset start using words to examine to work through your your challenges use different vocabulary become creative in how you think instead of saying I've got a problem call it a curiosity and see how it I've got a curiosity I've got to work something through it's a Fascination it's not a problem take that word out and put something else in and then stop using certain words that are really handicaps and obstacles to you like stop saying you're afraid of something take fear-based language out of your vocabulary and that is like an exorcism that's going to take some doing that you stop telling yourself you're afraid to do something that you just fears are like one other thing one of the teachings of Teresa of Avila that I loved the most when I came upon it I I felt as if a light bulb had been given to me and the true sense of what it means to become illuminated by something when she said that fears were like reptiles that get into your head and reptiles see better at night and they were just reptiles and you had to get them out and I realized and that was a metaphor that just worked for me and I thought that's exactly what they are and I loathe reptiles I loathe them I can't stand those kinds of creatures insects reptiles they just and so that repugnant image actually worked for me and um from that point on when I dealt with a fear and when I deal with a fear inside of me it is I reduce it to this idea that I've been infected by invaded by a reptile and it needs to come out and that's all there's to it and in that same idea the idea that following your creative nature might result in you starving as a reptile that's just a reptile and it's something that you cannot afford to follow and if you have expectations in your head of like like for example that your creativity should result in lots of success and lots of Fame and lots of money that's a reptile that's not an asset it's a liability your creativity is your creativity you should follow it as your this primary Instinct from your soul without this idea that it is attached to a reward you know one of the great I adore mystical wisdom and in all the traditions um there is this thread like the birth in the manger this idea that greatness that true power is born humbly it's born humbly for a reason and one of the reasons is that you are prevented from generating what you think should happen to you how you think your Life Path should unfold how you wanted to unfold because you do not know what is in your own best interests you really do not know and how often I've said to my students if you chart the best things that have ever happened to you there's a real good chance that you'll realize you did not plan them you did not see them coming they surprised you they unfolded they just happened for example meeting meeting the love of your life you may have wanted that but how it happened is more likely a surprise when it happened how it happened um the the wonderful things that happened to us are really surprises they are scheduled but not by us and the catastrophes that happen always have our fingerprints on them or shouldn't I shouldn't say always but lots of them do because we get in our own way because we think this is the way something should happen so we become manipulative and we become temperamental and we get in our own way because we so fear that what we want isn't going to happen and so we become controlling and we become this and this and that and um when I when I I look at I think this one scientist again who um I remember him so well because he he presented himself as being such a you know one of those really kind of Metro male kind of characters and he had a little sports car and he did it and he was the most unaccomplished one there tragically and he absolutely could not produce the papers that were required for the movement from up the ladder of Professor Hood and his insecurity he compensated with his insecurity with you know his clothing and his cool haircuts and his little sports car but it was no compensation for the fact that he wasn't really producing anything of Great Value in his laboratory um I've often thought about him and I wondered where he is today I have no idea but um the expectations I think that he had extraordinary expectations of himself in graduate school and in his uh younger years that were in fact his greatest obstacles ideas of what he could be without actually knowing the language and the pace of his own creativity if you look at nature nature always starts out with seeds it never produces a big huge tree just like that in and I I look at my own I look at my own life and I think I followed a career path I was following the career path as a journalist which is something where I did have expectations I wanted to work at the Chicago Tribune I loved that building I thought downtown it's so cool and the Tribune and so I had expectations and I envisioned that and of course at this point some of you will say shouldn't you envision something and yeah you know we you need that kind of thing to get through school to get to your graduate work to to motivate you but somehow I think woven into all of our plans because this happens to everybody is that they don't always unfold as we there has to be kind of a dance with our plans with our choices the stream of higher guidance Works its way in and that's where our inner guidance our inner intelligence has to work with our creative intelligence that says well if this is the door that is open to me then I'm going to go and make the best of it and assume that it has to do with the greater plan of my life instead of fighting it if this is the river that opens when my writing career which was paltry at Best in Chicago just stopped it just stopped it just came to a halt the only door that opened the only door that was open to me at all were these two friends who said why don't you come to New Hampshire and join us we want to start a Publishing Company what's the last thing I wanted to do I never pictured myself living in New Hampshire New Hampshire in a town of 800 people on this back end farm never never I mean any more than I ever pictured myself swimming in this channel I mean I cannot tell you but how perfect because I was given something that was such a blank page that I there I had no expectations no sense of entitlement nothing it was a blank page and I'm telling you the blank page is the greatest gift in the world because you don't trip yourself up you're literally a new seedling and it if you find yourself on a blank page that's when you think all right this is good this is good this is stopping me from a path of Destruction that would come from my fears my entitlement or my expectations so now all I need to work on all I can do is stay in the present moment and work with what I've got and what a blessing that is and to that I would say to the starving artist turn to your art whatever it is you you you however it is you feel your art best expresses itself just do that just do that and don't then say well who's going to like this and where can I sell it duh just work on your art and generate that energetic atmosphere around you work on your art and think of yourself as an artist see yourself as an artist and and if you have to work as a secretary to pay the bills then do it then do it big deal if you have to do that but do not do not not do your example do your art and and don't tell yourself that you know I I I don't Envision well I I need to have a gallery right it has to be famous before you even bring it out there don't say who's gonna like it who cares you if you like it it starts with that if you like it it's good enough if you begin with that don't starve your own creativity don't ever do that and and what you want to starve are your expectations and what you want to do is absolutely smack down your sense of entitlement one of the things Teresa Babylon always told her nuns was you're not entitled to anything get that out of your head where do you think this world how do you think this world is designed around your entitlements because it's not nothing but remind yourself of all the wonderful things that have happened to you that you didn't see coming and those are blessings that the Universe just provides along the way and this is why I will add that one of the greatest things you can do is the practice of humility just humble up just humble up and say I'll do what I have to do but the most important is to follow those creative instincts that are within you all the time and not listen to the language of reptiles that might might hold and often do hold you back so that's the starving artist kind of in a big huge way but um thank you

Channel: Caroline Myss

Views: 48,966

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Id: oYPsxYkgDiM

Length: 27min 29sec (1649 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023