What is your definition of wellness?

The best definition of wellness I’ve ever heard, and I forget where, was the continued ability to teach, create or learn by the mental processes, and the involvement in only reciprocal relationships.

How do you see creativity as a part of or enhancement of the state of wellness?

Well, I think it’s important if we’re not aware enough to be creative in our world and looking for the solutions. I can put it best by saying that it’s a solutions orientation. We’re looking for the solution, not at the problem. We’re asking, "How do we solve the old problems in new ways?" That’s the broadest definition of creativity, and the one I like the most.

Is there anything you’d like to say about creativity from the stand point of the inner voice, and how that may tie-in to wellness?

I think part of wellness is learning which of our inner voices are in our best interest, which ones might be negative or tied to some old version of ourselves, and which are more optimistic and forward looking. Because the major blocks to creativity are not external, they’re internal - they are in our own minds already.

What is "The Artist’s Way?" What does that mean?

Well, the Artist’s Way is a twelve week process allowing someone, first of all, to identify their patterns of behavior, both in the ways that they speak to themselves and in their general temperamental orientation, and then to change these patterns towards the optimistic. Also, it allows us to look at our patterns with others, and look at how we can interact with others in a way that connects us to our most essential values, enabling us to express those values in a manner that’s consistent with our skills.

What can someone do to reach his or her creative part?

First, acknowledge that you have one - that we’re all creative, and that we may express that creativity in many different ways that we don’t currently acknowledge. No matter where we are on the creative continuum, we can enhance the ways that we express ourselves.

Are there any specific tips that you can give?

Well, I think the most important one is from

The Artist’s Way.

We instill a form of daily reflection called "The Morning Pages" that allows us to move from the victim position to one of empowerment and possibility, and this gives us a chance over time to train ourselves towards optimism. In empirical studies, those who expect to win in sports and business and politics tend to win.

Could you tell me what "The Morning Pages" are?

The morning pages are specifically not journaling. Importantly, they are free form, free associative, top of the mind, stream of consciousness writing, and because of that, they allow us in a sense to establish a psychological holding environment for ourselves. We never speak in clinical terms, but that essentially is what we’re doing. We’re opening a window to our own intuition and our own possibility.

These morning pages are done every morning?

They are a three page (8 1/2 by 11, one side each) daily writing ritual that should be undertaken as quickly as possible after getting out of bed, as close to our unconscious sleeping mind as possible. They are to be tossed off in a free form, free associative way. Not reread, not to be used for any future consumption, but just as a way to form an essentially psychological holding environment that over time builds the will.

What are some of the other elements of the "Artist’s Way" besides the morning pages?

Well, of the most important other tools in

The Artist’s Way

that are out there, there’s probably a couple that I like more than others, and the first is the Artist’s Date.

The Artist’s Date is a planned excursion from 1 to 2 hours, done once a week by yourself to any of several possibilities that sound fun. The reason that we do them is first to extricate ourselves from other people’s agendas for us. Second, it is to train us toward solitude and to sort of balance our introversion with our extraversion, if you will. Also, in an oddly paradoxical way, time alone and on our own builds an underlying sense of connection with the human spirit as a whole. One of the most fun tools and one of the things that we always like to emphasize is that this kind of self-reflection work can be very enlightening and fun. It’s not all grief work. It can be exciting and frees up a lot of joy. One of the other most potent tools of the twelve-week process is a week of media deprivation. In the original "Artist’s Way," we called it reading deprivation and we would ask our students not to read anything for a week. But we’ve now expanded that to include all media. We found that in a sense we have habitualized ourselves to a certain amount of input in words and sounds. What happens when we assigned reading deprivation in the past is that our students would start to listen to talk radio, start to video vegetate, the kinds of behaviors that are still filling their minds with other people’s opinions, other people’s ideas, other people’s distractions. So media deprivation, which often strikes our students as aggravating and almost impossible, yields some profound results for them because it casts them into their own inner silence and gives them a connection again with their own opinions, their own thoughts, their own hopes and dreams.

Anything else you’d like to point out, anything with your affirmations?

Julia particularly likes affirmations. I like to think of them as a form of learned optimism. Julia likes to speak in more metaphysical terms. I like to speak in more secular ones, because I’m always conscious of the skeptic that we all have very finely developed for ourselves in American culture. I want to address the skeptics and allow our skepticism into the room, if you will, so that we can deal with it. So speaking in secular terms always helps ground those of us who might be less inclined to the metaphysical.

Is there anything as far as this "Artist’s Way" philosophy that you’d like to highlight for us?

What we’re most proud of about the "Artist’s Way" is that it’s spawned so many imitators over the years. Julia started it in 1978. I joined her in 1986 and we self-published what became

The Artist’s Way

in 1987-88, and bound all of the first couple thousand copies ourselves, she and I. It has reached a million + readership completely through word of mouth, with one person finding it successful for them, and then sending it on to several friends. So that’s what we’re proud of, that it has reached an audience that appreciates it - that always touches us.

If you had one message to give about "The Artist’s Way" and wellness, what would that message be?

That it’s an important step towards being emotionally, psychologically and spiritually well, because it gives meaning to our lives, and essentially we need meaning. We need values. We need some kind of spiritual orientation in our lives so that we can break down what is becoming more and more a hostile style of alienation in today’s society.

Why do you feel the creative part of us is so important to our survival?

It has to do with authenticity. If I’m always solving problems in old ways, then I’m not evolving toward authenticity, and we need authenticity because many of us have lost the ability to tell the truth, both to others and to ourselves, about what we feel and about what we think. Most particularly in our creative worlds or in our work environments, we often find it difficult to do what we really believe and that’s where creativity comes in. It’s solving old patterns of behavior with newer or equally or more successful solutions.

Mark Bryan, co-founder, with Julia Cameron, of the Artist’s Way Workshop, brings to the work an extensive background in business creativity and new product development. He has taught as a guest of the former Soviet Academy of Science, and lectures and consults on creativity in business, science, and the arts. Currently, he is writing for television and teaches at the film school of the College of Santa Fe. Mr. Bryan is co-author with Julia Cameron of The Money Drunk and The Artist’s Way at Work.