The Artist’s Way for Healthcare Workers - Spring 2025
“Success occurs in clusters” - The Artist’s Way
Join us for a 12 week Book Club and Accountability Group reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
We believe healing our creativity as healthcare workers can assist in healing our moral distress and reclaim our agency.
Have you heard of this book before and been wanting to do this for a while but lack the organization or discipline to do so? Or are you wanting a community to ground yourself in this fall?
We are thrilled to take on something we’ve wanted to do for years— The Artist’s Way as a healthcare worker community!
The Artist’s Way is a twelve week workbook of sorts to reconnect with your inner artist through play, reflection, exercises, and examining our inner beliefs about our creativity.
We feel this is especially important for our community of HCWs since many of us put our inner artist/ child on hold when we entered our healthcare training and haven’t quite figured out how to reawaken them.
We see this as an important tool in unblocking our own creativity, healing our imagination, so we can reimagine a new way forward into healthcare together.
We will be offering this to individuals in our community, but we are also seeking clinics, units, and workplaces who may have more than one person interested so we can form a pod at that institution for a discounted rate. If you think two or more folks may be interested in your workplace, please reach out so we can start organizing!
Read about my experience as a nurse and doing the Artists Way here
We are excited to take this journey together as a community! Starting January 27!
No artistic experience needed!
Join a small pod of 3-5 people to meet weekly for live accountability, insights, and sharing. We will have some pre-selected options available! To be as flexible as possible, if you are joining with your own group, you can pick a time that works for you OR join fully asynchronously
We will read asynchronously one chapter a week and check in about the creative practices offered by the book
Private WhatsApp group with the wider community of healthcare workers doing Artist’s Way together during the journey to share insights, experiences, and questions
Weekly Artist’s Way specific newsletter tailoring the journey to the healthcare worker experience
The groups will be given self- facilitation guides and are self-led
No materials required - just a paper and pen!
Our 12 week journey will culminate in a live (optional) evening CELEBRATION in Los Angeles.
Register here by January 6!
FAQs
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Absolutely! We can add you to an asynchronous group.
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You will be assigned to a weekly live accountability group via zoom. This will be peer-led with a provided facilitation guide. The goal here is to check in on how the reading and tasks have been going.
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You are right to understand this is a significant undertaking. However, we are working with the book to tailor it to our busy clinical environments and workloads. If you participate at 10%, you will still be greatly enriched.
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Although it can feel like you need to have an art practice, this journey together is more about reconnecting with your inner self by exploring your past, what gives you joy, and self-reflection. All of this aids in us becoming more creative.
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Religious Aspects of Artist's Way
Julia Cameron uses religious language in the artist's way to describe the spiritual nature of creativity. She encourages folks to replace the word "God" with the word universe, spirit or nature. It is designed to be open to folks who have religious and non-religious beliefs. There's been a lot written about how to ensure atheists or folks who are non-religious can engage comfortably in the Artist's way. We are happy to speak with anyone who has any concerns about this! Anu is a Buddhist and replaces the word "God" with "universe" in her engagement with the book.
“When people ask me what I think is the single most important factor in an artist’s sustained productivity, I know I am supposed to say something like ‘solitude’, or ‘an independent income’ or ‘childcare’. All of these things are good and many people have said so, but what I think is better and more important than any of these things is what I call ‘a believing mirror’” (someone who believes in you and your creativity)”
— The Artist’s Way