Throwback: Doechii and The Artist's Way

Hello, hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Fluently 4. This is going to be the last throwback that we do before the podcast ends the summer break and gets back into everything in September. And for the last throwback episode, I wanted to resurface this episode because I feel like not enough people listen to it the first time. And I really enjoyed it. This was an episode that I did like a year, two years ago, when Do Chi performed at the Grammys. And I was like blown away by her performance. I was like, "I need to learn more about Do Chi." So I listened to her album and when I was doing a deep dive on her, I noticed that in a lot of interviews, she kept referencing this book called The Artist's Way. And I'm sure if you're creative or even if you, I don't know, like read a lot of pop culture, magazines or interviews, you've probably heard people talk about the book The Artist's Way. And they don't just talk about it. They treat it like it's the Bible or it's, you know, it was responsible for the only reason why they're famous in this book unlocked everything. And it's not just a book. It's this like 12-week course that you do throughout the book. And if you've heard of the notion of morning pages, that comes from The Artist's Way and The Artist's Day. There's all of these concepts in it that once you read the book The Artist's Way, you're like, "Oh my God, a bunch of people are doing this." And I was reading this recap the other day. I haven't yet gotten the book. It was called Games People Play, the Psychology of Human Relationships by Eric Bern. And somebody just wrote up a little summary of it on Reddit. And they were talking about these different traps that we as humans fall into. And one of the ones they talked about is a game called Why Don't You? Yes, but. And this is, I don't know, like something that happens between humans where somebody will share a problem. You'll give them a solution. And they're like, "Yeah, but that's not going to work." So you give another solution. And they go, "Yeah, but that wouldn't work either." And this goes on and on and you end up feeling like exhausted and resentful because the person who's sharing their problem, they don't want a solution, they want confirmation that there is no solution. They want confirmation that whatever they're dealing with is impossible and they're helpless against it. And it's something that happens sometimes. And they talked about other games in the summary of this book. So I'm excited to read it and get it. But it reminded me a lot of the artist's way. Because after I did this episode on Do Chi, I talked about her experience with the book. Over on Patreon, it's still up for anyone who wants to join all of the episodes or evergreen over there. We did like a 12 week course for each week. We would cover a chapter of the artist's way. And everyone on Patreon was doing the morning pages. And we were doing artist's dates. And it was really fun and really cool. And honestly, I kind of want to pick up the artist's way again. Anyway, this summary of the book reminded me about the artist's way. Because in all of the chapters, I think Julia Cameron is the name of the author. She will talk about what blocks you and how you might say, oh, well, if only it wasn't for my partner or where I live, then I would be doing all of these incredible dreams that I have. And how these are these like, I don't know what you would call it like a cognitive distortion or a shield that you think protects you, but really you're just scared to finally do something creative. And I watched this weekend for the first time ever. I was kind of late to the game. I watched the movie Ratatouille. And in it, of course, you have the food critic who's critiquing the food that's being made. And this book talked a lot about the notion of critics and how behind every critic is really somebody who just wants to be creative. So if somebody's shitting on Sabrina Carpenter's performance, there's something behind that. Maybe they want to be up on a stage. Maybe they want time to do music, but they don't have the time to do it. Maybe they want to dress cute, but they don't want to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe. You know, it was this really interesting book. And she also spoke to about how you don't have to be somebody who's a sculptor or a script writer to be creative. If you're a mom who stays at home, there's creativity and how you create your household and how your family operates and even the meals that you cook. Like, there's creativity and absolutely everything and a lot of our pain comes from how we deny that for ourselves. So anyway, all of these notions within the last week just got me thinking about this old episode about Do Chi and the artist's way. And I was just so happy that she introduced me to the book. And I really like it. Check out this episode. It's all about Do Chi. She's got like such a cool come up. I feel like she was always destined to be famous. I remember one of my favorite things about this episode is that she kept journals as a kid. And in her journals, she was almost manifesting in the way that she was writing. She never wrote, I want to be famous one day she would write, I will be famous. And even that kind of self talk, I think is just so cool and how it can energize and propel someone forward. So anyway, this is the old throwback episode. And very soon I will be seeing you guys for regular episodes. But of course, if you're a Patreon member, you'll know that we have been posting regularly anyway. So shout out to everybody on Patreon. Here is the throwback episode. Welcome back to another episode of fluently forward today. We are doing an episode all about Do Chi. Of course, like we do with a lot of our deep dives, we're going to talk about her life how she became famous little fun facts about her. But we're also going to include a snippet on this book, the artist's way, because as I was doing research on Do Chi, listening to her music and different radio shows she would go on, there was little small references to this book called the artist's way. And the story that she tells, she was like a struggling artist for a long time, struggling like she was trying everything at the wall, she was making YouTube videos, she was making music on Soundcloud, she was also working on jobs, I think she worked at Chipotle and Zora or something. And there was one moment where I think she had like some sort of career set back in New York and she was like, all right, I'm going to go back to Tampa, Florida, which is where she grew up. And she was walking around on the sidewalk and somebody had put a bunch of books out. And I think she always grew up as a reader, her first song that took off, Yucky Bucky Fruitcake, any of my fellow girls who grew up reading Juni B Jones, you're going to recognize that title. So anyway, she was looking through the books on the sidewalk and one of the books was this called the artist's way and she took it home and she started reading it and she said that this really completely like reset her creatively and it set her on this path and trajectory where after she read the book and did the course. There's like a 12-week course in it. She, what was it, three years later, won a Grammy. And the more that I looked into this book, it's like every single artist or celebrity or person who's created something, not only have they read this book and done the 12-week program sometimes multiple times, but they talk about it in almost like a religious aspect. And in this book, there's a lot of merging of like creativity and spirituality and the more that I read of this book, the more I kind of picked up similar things that Dochi was saying in interviews. So we're going to talk about Dochi's life and how she became famous, but then we're also going to talk about this book and the interesting, unique things that famous people do to bring out these creative spurts and create this content that just like completely shapes us. So let's first start with a little bit on Dochi. The one song of hers denial is a river. I'm going to include a little snippet of it. This part is at the later half of the song. You've definitely heard this one online. Here we go. And that song is kind of a great introduction to Dochi because she kind of talks a little bit about her life over the past few years. And if you were wondering, the title of the song denial is a river. Is that from the Wendy Williams clip where she says to a caller who's calling in talking about their husband and like something might be going on with their husband and Wendy Williams says the classic quote. So I think her name was I forget where her name was, but she says like, you know, whatever her name is denial is a river in Egypt, your husband is gay. And that I mean, Wendy Williams just has so many quotable things, but a little bit of that story is kind of involved in what happened with Dochi over the last like five, 10 years. So in this song, she's talking about how she came up, what life has been like. And one of the things that she references in that song is that she was kind of encouraged by people to make tick-tock music and then tick-tock music is what blew her up. So I'm going to insert a song here that you might not know was Dochi. It's called Block Boy. Here it is. I had no idea. So not only can she rap, she can also sing. She also I think is really interesting too because, you know, my friend sent me this YouTube video and the title of it was how like the idea of trying being cringe and effortless like that's now out and this idea of trying and putting effort into something is really cool. And they were highlighting people like Chapel Roan and Dochi. And it really just does, I think, mean more not to, you know, randomly drag Selena Gomez. But I just think it's really interesting when people like even Bruno Mars in our episode from maybe like a month back. People who work for years and years and years to finally be able to make it when they put out that first album, although she says that alligator bites never heal is actually a mixtape, not an album. But when they put out that first album or chapel Roan's first album, it's fucking perfect to me. And it's not that it took them a while to come up, but they were probably honing their craft. And now they're like entering at a plane field where they're at the Grammys winning Oscars with just kind of their first quote and quote album mixtape that's officially out. All right, so Do Chi, she was born Jala Hickman. We're gonna talk about how she came up with the name Do Chi. She grew up in Tampa, Florida, where I also used to live. When she was in the sixth grade, she decided that she wanted to become someone new. And she's talked about this in a lot of interviews that she was bullied relentlessly. She was really shy and at 11 years old, she actually attempted suicide. So she says that she was just heinously bullied by people. She said she was really different than all of the other girls. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about this when we get into her life in middle school. But she said that she wrote a new identity for herself into her diary. She said, quote, I am Do Chi. And when people ask her, how did you come up with the name? She says it literally just came to me. And what's really interesting too is that she also says the title for her album/mix tape, alligator bites never heal. Once again, when people say how did you come up with that, she goes it literally just came to me. And something that they talk a lot about in this book is the idea of God, but you could replace it with whoever you want. God, Denta, female God, male God, the universe, mysticism, something about that, like the great creator or God. They say it's so closely linked to creativity because we are supposed to be creative because that's kind of our purpose here on life. And Do Chi also talks a lot about how she went sober recently, helped her to kind of connect with God or that creator or something and get more of these downloads. So I think it's really cool that two things that are very branded about her, her name, Do Chi, and the title of her record, alligator bites never heal, literally just came to her. Something that I also think is interesting, maybe this is just me speculating, but she wraps sometimes about her name, it's Do Chi with two eyes. And she came up with this when she was 11, and I don't know, maybe I was reading into it, but I just thought, you know when you're young and you're in school and everything is handwriting with a pencil, all you want is for your name to have an O, a Y or an I in it because that's like the best doodling real estate opportunities. So part of me wondered, so she was like, well I want an O in there and I want two eyes because then you could put a heart over them or a little star or little things like that. I don't know. So she said about her name change. She said Jala might have been getting bullied, but I decided that Do Chi wouldn't stand for that shit. My whole attitude was different, it's stuck. She waltzed into her classroom wearing a tutu and never looked back. And this is a really interesting concept too, because a lot of pop stars have different altar egos. You know, Beyonce has Sasha Fierce. Nicki Minaj has Roman and Barbie. And I think like a few other different altar egos, Doja Cat, Scarlett, right? This kind of like darker edgier version of herself. Kanye West has Yeezus. I feel like he has a few. David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust. Eminem has Slim Shady. People say that when Tate McCray is dancing, Tatiana, I think comes out and that's like her altar ego where she gets to dance all sexy like. And I thought that was interesting too, because a lot of the celebrities who have these altar egos that they slip into, it's usually artists and performers. I was like, ah, you don't really see that many actors with it. But then I thought about it further and I won't. Well, maybe you could say that actors constantly have an altar ego, because all they're doing is putting on a character. I mean, just ask Austin Butler and he'll tell you in his Elvis Presley voice. Oh, no, like I have an altar ego. But I find it really interesting that so many different pop stars and artists do that basically. The only person who isn't a pop star that I can think of doing that is Paris Hilton. And then I would say that is almost kind of, I don't know, maybe saying a trauma response would be a little bit too dramatic, but I feel like sometimes that's also something you do when you become really famous. Or there is some type of trauma. I mean, we see that with Dogey. Like you just want to separate. And it's almost like a thoughtful, intentional dissociation, dissociation, Dogey dissociation, kind of similar. So she said that in middle school, she felt really misunderstood by people who are constantly trying to put her in boxes that she felt she didn't fit into. She says, "I remember feeling really anxious all the time. I definitely felt seen just not the type of attention I wanted. It sounds cliche, but I felt overly analyzed. It was just very obvious that I was different where people would make me feel like I was. It was always, "Why do you talk like that? Why are you wearing that? Why are you doing that? Who's your daddy? Who's your mama? What's your sign?" And I'd always think, "I'm from the same place as you all, but I just for some reason stood out in a way that I didn't want to." So she was very hyper aware of who she is, how people perceived her and how she showed up in the world. And she said that there were a lot of different dimensions to her and she didn't really know how to express all of them. So when she was at her mom's house, she was adhering to being a church girl with really strong Christian values. And she listened to gospel music. And then at her dad's place, those same rules didn't apply. She said that in middle school, she was bullied because she didn't fit into these specific social categories. And that her style didn't translate to other kids her age. She said, "I see why I could be throwing people off because they're like, she dresses like hailey Williams from Paramore, but also sounds like Kia." And she talks about that too in her first song, "Yucky Lucky Fruitcake," where she was basically saying, like, "Yeah, like I'm a black girl, but I'm wearing like these tall lace-up, kind of like converse, almost like emo style outfits." So it seems like her mom was really, really encouraging of her creatively. So she threw herself into extracurriculars. She did cheerleading, step, choir, dance, theater. And then in the ninth grade, she set her sights on the Howard W. Blake School of the Arts. And she was kind of doing that mostly because, yeah, she wanted to focus on arts, but also because she kind of wanted to get away from her peers who were making her miserable. She said, quote, "I told myself when I go to Blake, nobody's gonna know who I am or where I'm from. I can be gay, I can be weird, I can sing, I can listen to rock music, I can learn how to write rock music, I can do whatever, I can be myself." The school wasn't in her district, so she had to audition for its magnet program. And she said that she didn't even know how to read music yet, but they accepted her there because she had such a strong voice. She said that she really liked the four years there. She said, quote, "They let the performing arts kids get away with a lot. I was never really in class. I would just be in the practice rooms playing piano, going over classical choir songs, dancing. I did everything but be in class." And she was really convinced at this part in her life that she was going to graduate and become a professional choir singer. But then one of her best friends at the school put her onto this idea of producing and releasing her own music online without a label, aka SoundCloud. And what's really cool is that a lot of people know that she's had this long career on YouTube, making like vlogs and doing experiments, and like, you know, thrift try-ons, just like a bunch of stuff on YouTube. But she also always kept these old diaries. And now that she's blown up, people go back. And she has all of these old drama entries that people can look at when they're interviewing her. And a lot of her old diary entries are filled with the phrase "I will." Not "I want." You know, most of us write in our journal. "Hi, journal, it's been a minute. It's me. I really want this for Christmas. I blah, blah, blah." But it seems like manifestation. And this is why I'm so excited to talk about this book. It's really ingrained in her because everything she would write, even as a kid, is like "I will do this." I mean, honestly, one day we need to do this episode about how the CIA has quite literally disclosed documents saying that we have the power as humans to influence our own reality via our thoughts. And I know that I sound crazy and woo-woo, but the CIA has poured money into this and then disclosed it. If that isn't enough proof for you, I mean, come on. So anyway, during her freshman year at this high school, she joined a girl group and it was the first time that she really saw herself as an artist. And she thought originally that they were going to be like a gospel version of Destiny's Child. But then they broke up, the band broke up in 10th grade, and she started exploring the underground music scene in Tampa. Then, of course, like I said, her friend basically showed her how she could make music at home, and she was really surprised by this. She said, quote, "I thought you had to be a superstar to record. I didn't know there were home studios." She, her friend Taylor, had one, and that changed my whole life. I would skip school, go to her house, and we would smoke, and we would record. After that, it was over. So she started posting a few covers and originals to YouTube. And in 2016, a few months after her senior year, she participated in this freestyle challenge set to Monica's So Gone. People really, really liked it. So then she put out her first song, El Chapo, on SoundCloud, and the song gained tens of thousands of streams within a few months. She said, after that, I was like, hell no, I can do this shit. So she started posting original songs on YouTube, building an audience with these vlogs, photoshoots, thrift halls, and life updates. And then in 2019, she hit a wall. She said that she started to feel like she was too aware of what she was doing, that maybe she was trying too hard, or that she was focused on the wrong things. And I think this is kind of an interesting theme that we see with her. Like, she wants to be creative, she wants to be bold. And as I always say, you know, it's great to put yourself out there, but then you're out there. And I think for people who are really creative and take in a lot like a sponge, it's great because you take in so many influences and music and art, but then you're also hyper aware of how people perceive you. And there's nothing that kills creativity more than being too aware of what you're doing. So it feels like kind of that same, I don't know, theme that happened to her in middle school also happened in late 2019. She also said that she grew up in a very Christian household and she had recently become interested in tarot, but she almost started depending on the cards to tell her if she was on the right track. She said, quote, "I never really believed in them, but I thought I needed them to show me something." That is beyond really. The feminine urge to turn to tarot when you think that you need something, or for me as a kid, I know it's going to sound crazy, but I used to obsessively play solitaire on my computer. I would ask a yes or no question. And now, we're going to start the conversation. And then I would say I'm going to play this game as solitaire, and if the final score ends in an even number, then that means the answer to my question is yes, and if it ends in odd, it means that it's no. Just, you know, like the little things that we do when we're all suffering or anxious in life, and you just kind of have to scratch the itch, you know, it's pick accord readings on YouTube. It's plain solitaire. It's going for a walk on the sidewalk, and then if you step on the crack, it means something, or maybe not everyone does that, but all I'm saying is it resonated with me, okay. I also think too, at this point in life, she was an indie creator. She was doing everything on her own. And while you hear from a lot of different artists, I feel like Doja Cat especially talks about this, the way that you want to make music and be creative, but then it always feels like artists are like, you know what, I love my label, but like, I'm mad at my label, because I want to do all of these things, but they're keeping me within the bounds. We hear about that a lot from artists, but I think something that's even harder is when you are completely indie and you're doing it on your own, because let's say for Doja back then, or any content creator now, you have to creatively make content, but then you're also responsible for editing it, producing it, putting it out, marketing it, brainstorming new ideas, ways to reach different audiences, taking in feedback on your content, then adjusting your content, but then don't adjust it so much that you're just appeasing the masses because you still want to have your own original voice in there, but it can't be so original because if nobody likes it, then nobody's going to listen to it, and then what are you even doing it for? So it's this interesting conundrum of people who are trying to be like entrepreneurs or indie creatives, like Doja is so incredibly creative, but what's the inverse of creativity? You know, first of all, it's being too self-aware, and then it's also the business mindset, having to look at numbers, judging your art and your content by what people gravitate to the most, because that's the most successful, and you need to be a little bit successful to share this with people. So that was kind of where she was at, what was this year, 2019, basically. So then, like I said earlier, she was walking around in New York. I believe she was in New York at the time, and this was before something fell through, and then she was like, "Fuck it, I need to go back to Tampa for a bit," and she saw all of these books on the sidewalk in some sort of bin, and she was looking through because I think she had always been an avid reader, you know, #hersongyuckypluckyfruitcake for Juniper Jones fans, and she saw this self-help book the artist's way. And this is what she said about it, because basically this book has a 12-week program of creativity, and she basically recapped every single step of that program on her YouTube channel. It was a series that she called "My Creative Recovery Journal," and here's what she said about it. She said, "Sometimes when I'm flowing creatively, I feel a resistance, like there's this cap or limit. It's almost like this creative spirit in New York wants to jump out, and I find myself kind of suppressing it or stopping myself. It's fear." So she followed everything in this book, you know, she was writing daily, she was doing all of the affirmations, and kind of the journal exercises, and she started to slowly feel really emboldened by this idea that nothing really matters, not in like a depressing or nihilistic way, but more as a way of letting go of her attachment to success. And she says, quote, "I realized if nobody was here on this earth, I would still be making music." And like I said before about this book, it really places this emphasis on creativity and spirituality, and it had Do Chi re-examine her own relationship with God. And she said that for a long time, religion had made it more difficult to understand that she was bisexual. We knew we liked her, right? So she's bisexual. I believe she's dating a woman right now. And she said before in a lot of these different radio shows that I've seen her on, it's always some asshole guy being like, oh my god, like you're bisexual, like what's going on with that? And she previously, I think, dated a man who turned out to be gay. And I believe if I'm listening correctly to the lyrics of denial as a river, he was cheating on her. I don't know everything about it. It feels like she doesn't really blow up this person's spot, but she basically said in these different radio interviews that she's okay dating bisexual men, and then all the guys on the radio show were like, what do you mean, you date bisexual men? And she's like, yes, I'm bisexual, I would date a bisexual man, like I've seen no problem with that. And she said that she dated a partner who then cheated on her in some sort of gay way. And I think it almost hurt her even more because she was like, I would have been accepting, like it wasn't the fact that you were gay or you didn't tell me everything or you weren't forthcoming about your orientation, it was the fact that you betrayed me and cheated. And I would have been accepting if you had told me about it. So she says about this quote, before I didn't even acknowledge I was gay, I was low key closeted, but not really. I just felt like I didn't need to talk about it in my music. Really, it was more about me being scared to accept the fact that I like Gucci. And one of the things I talk about in this book is like, what is something that's blocking you and could it be, you know, the fact that if you explore your creativity, you might be broke, you might be gay, your parents might be mad at you, all of these different blockers that we have. And something that I think is really interesting is this vibe of well, I didn't want to acknowledge that I was gay. I just didn't want to talk about it in my music. These are a lot of things that we tell ourselves like, you know, for example, me like, oh, I don't want to talk about politics on the podcast because like, you know, I want this to be something fun that people listen to and I don't want to bump them out. Eh, there's actually a lot of fear around that, right? Politics is messy. I push people away, and I think for a lot of artists too, they say sometimes, oh, you know, I want to keep my personal life private, I don't want to do this. And it's these different kind of sentences that we put up because we say, well, we're making some sort of caveat or we're diminishing some sort of side of ourselves in service of a greater thing. So you know, you're kind of logic your way into it. I'm not going to talk about how I'm gay because, you know, I don't really need to talk about it in my music. And you logically go, well, this makes sense. I'm doing it for a greater purpose. I feel okay about this. I accept it, but is it truly creative? And that's some of the stuff that this book talks about. So let's kind of dive into the artist's way and try to learn some of the lessons that Dochi herself learned from this book. And it's not just Dochi here, all of the other celebrities who have referenced this book, Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote, eat, pray, love. She's spoken about how this book really influenced her. I think she said that she's done the creative program like three different times. Reese Witherspoon, she mentions this book a lot in interviews. She even included it in her book club's recommendations. Emma Watson has referenced this book a lot in interviews. And she says that she incorporates a lot of the exercises into her creative routine. Tim Ferris, he's like an author and entrepreneur. He did that book the four hour work week or is it the five hour work week? Anyway, he's a big deal. He's read and recommended this. I mean, a Dunham talks about it, Alicia Keys says that this is a big part of her creative practice, Pete Holmes, Shonda Rhymes, and even Julia Cameron herself in this book. I'm only a little bit through reading it, but she says that countless actors, musicians and writers have reached out to her over the years to say that the book changed their lives. And she lives in some sort of house, I think, in Albuquerque. And every day she'll get different messages in the mail. Oh, here's a script of something that I wrote and I was only able to do it because of your book. I've heard that I won. Here's a copy of a pilot. Here's a song that I made, just all of these creative gifts because people are so thankful for this book. So a little bit about the author of it, Julia Cameron. When I was first researching this book and I saw her photo, I was like, oh, she looks like a nice woman, you know, writing about creativity. She actually has a little bit of a scandalous background. She's now considered this like guru, basically, who knows all about creativity, but she wrote this book. She was in LA, and it was after the 1970s, and she had had this failed celebrity marriage. And she was on a scotch and cocaine binge and at complete rock bottom. So she was basically known as this lush, who was married, I believe, to Martin Scorsese. But Martin Scorsese ended up leaving her for Liza Manelli. And she found out that he was cheating on her with Liza Manelli. I believe when she saw her like silk blouses in the closet, it's like Shakira with the jam, and then she found out that she was getting cheated on. And she was like drinking, partying, doing drugs back then. But kind of similar to Dochi, sobriety became her religion and her own recovery and sobriety inspired her to do these creative, unblocking seminars. And then those seminars led to her to write this book, the artist's way, a spiritual path to higher creativity. And now it sold, you know, millions of different copies. People come up to her at the airport with self-recorded CDs and published poetry and handmade jewelry and messages that say you saved my life and all of these things. So it started first as a collection of tips and hints from different artists and authors. And then she ended up putting together kind of this 12 week program where each week you look at something that's blocking you creatively and you journal about it, you do exercises, and you try to work your way through it. Weirdly enough, you know, like any creative person, she also had a lot of setbacks with the book. So the book was originally called Healing the Artist Within. And it was actually turned down by this literary agency. So she decided to self-publish it. But before she did that, she typed up the book herself. And she would sell these Xeroxed copies in a local bookstore. And then after the book started to sell widely, they published it with the new title. And it took off. So we are actually over on Patreon and you just need to sign up for Patreon. This isn't going to be a paid for thing, it's going to be also free and paid for people on Patreon. We're going to go through and do every single week of the 12 week program. But there's a few things that happen all the way throughout. And you've probably heard of it. these before. So there's two core practices when you are doing this creative program and the first one is called the morning pages. I had heard of people doing the morning pages before. I had no idea that it was associated with this. I thought that was just like morning journaling. Who would say no to that? It's such a good thing. But this is very specific and she says every single day for the 12 weeks that you're doing this, you need to write out three pages freehand of this stream of conscious writing every morning. Don't turn it into a script. Don't try to make it anything fancy. Just bleh. You know, some people call it a brain drain and just get out three pages. This will help clear your mental clutter and it will also unlock a lot of creative thoughts. Now the second core practice that you've also probably heard of is something called the artist date and she says each week you should take two hours of alone time and thoughtfully, intentionally spend it doing something creative or something that brings you joy. You could go to an art gallery or maybe you could go on a really intentional walk or you could, I don't know, find like a garden that you really like. Any sort of place where a new experience might be possible and you would be taking something in as an artist. And she talks about how she came up with the concept of the morning pages. She said, quote, "What drew me to working on my creativity was running into a couple of bumps. I had had a blessed decade in my 20s and then when I got to my 30s I felt ported. I was writing movies and selling them to studios, but they weren't getting made. I needed to find a way to maintain equilibrium and optimism in the face of creative despair. I fought my despair with what I call the morning pages, three pages of long hand writing about anything. I don't like the way Fred talked to me at the office. I need to get the car checked. I need to buy kitty litter. They don't look like they have anything to do with creativity. But in fact, as we put these worries, which are sort of a daily soundtrack for most of us, down on the page, we are suddenly much more alert, aware, focused and available to the moment. And we begin to see that we have many creative choices. As I wrote these pages, new ideas began to walk in. And over time, I started to share the morning pages technique with other people. And it is really incredible. I've been doing it only for the past three days. But the way your brain has so much mindless chatter in the morning, I even have a separate list where as I'm doing my morning pages, I'll go, ooh, need to go to the dermatologist. I want to download this app to record my dreams every night. There's just so much shit in our brains. And it's really cool. This intentional practice of writing every morning, not only getting shit out of your brain. So you're then, you know, like she says, more available to creative moments that could hit you. But also, right in the morning, you sometimes have these like really, really good ideas. And when we're going to talk about later in the episode, some other famous celebrities who would use very unconventional creative methods, there's a lot of cool magic that happens right before you fall asleep and right when you wake up. So then you had to go join us over on Patreon if you want to join us for the week. But she breaks it down. You know, week one is recovering a sense of safety where you identify and confront all of these negative beliefs that you have about creativity. You become aware of the critic in your head. You overcome these fears of judgment. Then week two is recovering a sense of identity. You want to uncover breed dreams and aspirations that you have and set boundaries to protect your creative time. And something that I love in the intro of this book is she was saying everyone is creative. She's like, I truly think there's so many misconceptions about creativity. And some people think, well, you either have it or you don't or some people have a lot of it and other people only have a little of it. And she was saying literally everyone lawyers are creative. Stay at home moms are creative. There's creativity woven into every single thing that we do. So she really encouraged us everyone to do this. Now, if you don't want to join us on Patreon, I'll just leave you with the biggest takeaways of this book. It says number one, creativity isn't just about talent. It's about showing up and trusting the process to the morning pages. They helped to clear mental clutter and build a daily creative habit. Three, artist dates, keep creativity fun, playful and personal. Four, you want to uncover limiting beliefs and replace them with empowering ones. And then the last takeaway is that the focus is on process over perfection. It's about creating without fear. And she gave the author Julia Cameron. She gave this interview to belief net. And I found a lot of this really interesting, especially in terms of Dochi and how she grew up really religious, right? Christian and how she now kind of talks about her relationship to God and spirituality and getting these downloads. So this person asked Julia Cameron, what is the relationship between creativity and faith? And she says, art used to be made in the name of faith. We made cathedrals. We made stained glass windows. We made murals. When Michelangelo's flat on his back in the cysteine chapel, he was in service to something larger and greater than himself. And artists have always talked about this interconnection to a larger something, oftentimes they call it the muse. But what we were actually talking about is that anytime you are engaged in a creative act, you're engaged in a spiritual act. And that's probably the single most important sentence. Any time we're engaged in a creative act, we're engaged with something inherently spiritual. Faith is almost the bottom line of creativity. It requires a leap of faith. Anytime we undertake a creative endeavor, whether this is going to be the easel or the page or the stage, for that matter in a homelier way, picking out the right fabric for kitchen curtains, that's also a creative act. You have to muster a certain amount of belief that you're not making a mistake and you're not a fool. And it means you have to have faith. And I love that. I'm not, you know, I'm spiritual, but not religious, but the concept of faith, and even as a name, I think it's so beautiful. The concept of faith has always been so cool to me because it's almost like belief paired with optimism. And I love that line of Daenerys Targaryen and Game of Thrones where she goes, I do have faith, faith in myself, faith in Daenerys Targaryen. And when I tell you, when I went through a bad breakup, I took that quote and I turned it into like an iPhone background just so I could look at it every day because, you know, obviously it's great to have faith in a belief in something higher, but it's also interesting and great to have faith in yourself. And just in the first kind of week of this book that I'm reading, the artist's way, there's an exercise in there where you're supposed to wake up and say different affirmations to yourself. I am creative. I am strong. I am powerful. And she's like, as you do this for the first time, take note of how weird it's going to feel saying that, like, you know, you say an affirmation to yourself in the mirror. I am strong. I am beautiful. It feels, you feel a little unsure of it. You feel a little hokey. You feel a little stupid and embarrassed saying these positive affirmations. But you know what comes so fucking easy to me and to most of us. I'm ugly. I need lip filler. I need to do this. I should be doing this. I should be doing that. I wish I was more like blah, blah, blah. All of the negative shit. It's like wearing a second skin. It's so easy to do. But then in the inverse of that, like speaking well to yourself, affirmations, having faith in yourself, it feels like it's so hard. It almost feels like it's selfish sometimes. And I think that's really interesting. So we'll continue on with this interview. They ask Julia, you say that making art is not an act of the mind or the intellect, but of the heart and soul. And she says, yes, I want to be clear about that. We have a culture that is very competitive and also very product oriented and artists live within this culture. So there's this tendency to advise artists to think about shrewd career moves and consider the odds and pursue an artistic unfolding much the way that someone would climb a corporate ladder. So I'm just going to pause in here and say that I think this is true with a lot of artists. They want to make something creative, but their label says, no, no, no, you need to sing more. No, no, no, no, you need to rap more. You need to do a collaboration with this person. You really need to do something that would trend on TikTok or a TikTok dance could be made. Can't you do the TikTok dance? You know, it's an artist who wants to create something, but they live in this culture. That's like, well, what about the streams? What about the downloads? What about the numbers? Julia continues. She says, I think creativity is just a part of our spiritual DNA in one form or another. Artists talk about it a lot of different ways. But essentially, when you're really in the moment of making something, whether you're singing or acting or painting or writing, you have an experience of something moving through you. And people have that when they get involved with sewing an apron or making curtains or writing a letter. It's that funny sense of altered time. And that's a spiritual experience, although people don't often think of it that way. You know when someone will say, I looked up and three hours had gone by. That's because they were absorbed in the now. All spiritual practices talk about getting absorbed in the now. So I think to in kind of more of like a 2025 version of that, a lot of people talk about the concept of flow when you're in the flow. And I've been reading a lot of books lately about stress. And they say that when you're in that state of flow or the now or the present moment where time just seems to float away from you, that is actually proven to lower our stress. Whenever we find that activity or hobby or talk that we're like completely immersed in, not only do you feel complete, it also lowers your stress levels, which is really cool. Now Julia Cameron has a lot of other books about creativity. And one of them is called Walking in this world. And it's all about the creative benefits of walking. And something that I think is really cool is that is such a theme in all of these different episodes that we do. So for Do Chi, right? She was going for a walk around New York to press about how this hadn't come through walking. He came across the books, picked up the book, read the book, now has the Grammy, with a few steps in between. Over on Patreon, this past Friday, we did an episode all about Conan O'Brien, and when he was working on this pilot and then the pilot failed, he said he was completely untethered, he had no idea what he was gonna do next, and he was just walking around in New York, and he said he was just gonna walk in New York until he figured out what he was going to do. And I think this is really interesting because Julia focuses a lot on just how important walking is. She says, quote, "When we walk, things tend to become clear to us. You know a lot of us intuitively know this, like if we have a relationship that's not working very well, we'll go out for a long walk on it, and we'll think, oh, we're being so moody, but we might come back saying I should stay in it, or I have to break up. We automatically access our bodies just from instinct. This is also why if somebody has trauma, bodywork is often used to release grief. What I'm hoping to do is to get people to integrate their body into their spiritual practice and into their arc, and many times in creative situations, your stomach will start to go crazy, and it will say don't trust this producer, or this agent isn't right for you. Your body is the first line of defense that signals danger, and so creative people really need to learn to listen to their bodies, because often their heads are slower to catch on when something is suddenly wrong. We tend to want to lead with our heads. We say, that's not rational, and actually our intuition, which we oftentimes access through walking, is our early warning system. And it's interesting because she's kind of talking a little bit about like the showering principle, you know how people say, you get your best ideas in the shower, or sometimes people talk about it with golf. When you're just practicing your putting swing over and over again, and your body is doing something and going through the motions, your brain isn't totally turned on and focused. It is a little bit, but not all the way. And that sometimes when you get these incredible, like mental downloads and great ideas, some people think that it's called the shower principle, because being in the shower is kind of now, the only time in the day where we don't have the damn phone with us. So you can do a bunch of different like physical movements to get that, but Julia is a much bigger fan of walking. She says it's like the number one best thing for creative people to do. And what I think is really cool is that Andre 3000. He's a huge fan of walking, and he says sometimes that as he walks, he'll make up lyrics and freestyle as he walks. He won't even write anything down. He'll just do it as he's walking, which I think is really cool. So people ask her, "Can you do anything physical at all, or should it be particularly walking?" And she hones in on this. She says, "I think walking is a spiritual practice. It's an ancient spiritual practice for a good reason." There's something about walking that really integrates the body and heart and the psyche. I'm not saying that skating or roller skating or running don't work, but I think that aborigines and Native Americans go on walk about in vision quest for a reason. Also, walking is easy. You don't need any special stuff. Anyone can do it. You can do it any place in the center of Manhattan or LA or Chicago or Des Moines. I also always like to know the prescription over on Patreon were doing cheat codes at the end of episodes. And I always want to know, what exactly do I need to know to take an advantage of this cheat code? 20 minutes is the prescription. Go out the door, she says. Obviously no phone, no music. 20 minutes to get the most out of it. And then I just want to say here too, what's really interesting is just how woven creativity is into spirituality and somebody asked her, they said to Julia, "Do you ever feel as though you've started a new religion?" And she said, "Which I found really interesting." I probably started an old religion more than anything. People come up to me and say the artist's way is a Buddhist book or it's a creative spirituality book or it's a science of mind book. And I think that's because if you get the barnacles off, most spiritual traditions teach pretty much the same thing. And since art is a spiritual path, it can be pursued within any number of religions. I think it's complementary to other religions. So then I was on this, you know, great deep rabbit hole all about these kind of theories on creativity. And there's another person who comes up a lot in the field of creativity next to Julia Cameron and his name is Robert Epstein. It wouldn't be a fluently forward episode without bringing up Epstein in some sense. But this guy, Robert Epstein, he studied a lot on creativity and he kept popping up in these pieces with Julia. So here's some of his ideas on creativity that really stuck out to me. We're just going to call him Robert and not Epstein for the sake of this. So Robert said he said that there's four different skill sets or competencies that he thinks is essential for creative expression. The first one is capturing. So that would be preserving any new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them, just writing them down. He references the morning pages from Julia as a perfect example of a capturing technique. And he says that there's a lot of different ways. This guy auto-lawy, he won a Nobel Prize for work based on an idea about cell biology that he almost didn't capture. He had the idea in his sleep and he woke up and he scribbled the idea on a pad, but then the next morning he couldn't even read his notes or remember the idea. But then the next night, the same idea came to him in his dream and he used a better capturing technique. He put on his pants and he went straight to his lap. And the work that he got in his dream, he got the Nobel Prize for it. And we did this really cool episode on Patreon all about dreaming and cool things about it. And there are tons of artists who literally dreamed their idea and then painted it and it became a masterpiece. I just think dreams are like so fucking cool. He then says that the second competency of creativity is called challenging and that's giving ourselves tough problems to solve. This is what Taylor Swift needs to be doing. It's the challenging part. So he says that when you're in a really tough situation, multiple behaviors compete with one another and their interconnections create these new behaviors and ideas. And something that I've heard a lot about creative people is that creative people, they always go, oh my god, no, I don't want a routine. I feel trapped by my nine to five. I don't want to do it, but creative people actually really thrive well in routines and structure because you're in a challenging position. And it gives you a little bit of that inspiration to push against your boundaries and try to think outside of the box because you're in a challenging limiting space, it actually breeds more creativity. So Robert continues. He says the third area of creativity is broadening the more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. I think this is why when people talk a lot about Addison Ray, for example, they say, you know, a lot of people think of her as just some sort of stupid tick talker, but her music taste is so vast and varied. A lot of people can't believe that she listens to all these different types of music because she's broadening. And then Robert continues. He says the last competency of creativity is surrounding and that has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become. So I kind of love, first of all, I'm a millennial. I grew up with BuzzFeed. I love any listicle, but I also love this idea because we all know capturing. You have a good idea. Write that shit down. You know, don't don't let it get away from you, but the challenging idea, I think, is really cool. Even with a lot of artists, we see their capturing moment. It's when they record the voice notes and then later on, you know, in the making of the song, they show you, this is when I had the idea and I did the first chords on the piano, blah, blah, blah. But the challenging part, I think, is what a lot of artists struggle with today. I mean, the main example that comes to mind for me is when the Beatles took a bunch of drugs. Okay, they were in their challenging eras when they took a bunch of LSD and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band and they blended rock with different orchestra music and Indian music too. Or Lady Gaga, right? Like she was really so avant-garde in the meat dress. Like that felt challenging at a time. I'm trying to think too. I guess maybe like Billie Eilish, her whisper singing, although some people might say Selena Gomez did it first on accident. I don't know why Selena Gomez is catching so many strings in this episode. But I don't know other than Billie Eilish and Dochi, anything chapel-rown, you know, I think a lot of us are kind of itching and missing that challenging aspect. We see it in music, or I guess we're seeing the problem of it, not being in music as much. And then we're also seeing a lot of it in cinema. You know, Wicked was great, but it was a play that was then turned into a movie and then Gladiator 2 was the movie. And then what else was around on the Thanksgiving holidays? It was Moana too. And everything's like a live action or a sequel. Or guess what? Donald Trump, we're going to have Sebastian Stan play him. Bob Dylan, we're going to have Timothy Chalamet play him. And it's like, where's the challenging part of this? You know, you're just kind of doing things that you know we're going to take off and bring people to the box office. But I think there's a real lack of like challenging stuff going on right now. Although one could say not to bring up politics, but we are going to be in a challenging space for the next four years. So maybe we'll see a huge skyrocket of creativity. Oh, also I had two more examples for challenging lemonade. The visual album. I mean, how challenging was that? That was like completely different when Beyonce put it out. You could also make a case, I think, for folklore ever more with Taylor Swift being this anytime an artist switches up their genre. I think you get really good stuff from them. And then this was another great quote from Robert Epstein that I really loved. I needed to read it. So somebody else might. I appreciate hearing this quote. He said, "When I do seminars on creativity, I teach stress management techniques to help people cope with the rejection that goes hand in hand with creativity. You have to learn not to fear failure and even to rejoice in it. When I'm failing, I say to myself, I'm in a good company. I'm in the company of some of the most creative and productive people in the world." And this is a quote from Do Chi. And this is how I know she definitely read this book because she has a quote about creativity where she says, "I take creativity very literally. It is in everything we do. I believe lawyers have a creative flow. I believe there's a creative flow and motherhood, our family dynamics, our emotions and everything. Creativity is very deep for me." And that's exactly what Julia Cameron says in this book. Now, another interesting Do Chi moment that I caught, I think it was on her interview with the Breakfast Club, is she was saying that she didn't shout out this book, but I knew she was talking about it. And she was saying that when she was diving into her creativity and setting up different boundaries with it, it was really helpful for her and how she is the only person in the studio when she's working there. She doesn't have a whole team or an entourage with her, like Selena Gomez would have. But she was saying it's really important for her to be alone in the studio because otherwise she listens to what her fans are saying and what her haters are saying and what the critics are saying and all of that gets inside of her head and it just messes with her system. And this is another great quote from Robert, he says, "You've got to capture now and evaluate later. A big mistake people make is starting to visualize all of the criticism or the feedback while they're still generating and that can shut you right down." So I think it's really cool how she is the only person in the studio when she's working on her music. And I remember Taylor saying when she writes a song, she cannot envision a studio or a stadium or an arena of people singing it back to her because then she's not gonna be honest in her writing. She has to pretend that no one in the world is ever gonna see this and it's just her solo. So since I'm capturing an idea right now, I think that's something really cool for her next album or since she says alligator bites never heal us. A mixtape when she does do her first album, not her next one, I think there should be some sort of sampling of Julia Cameron's voice or something to do with the artist's way or I don't know, maybe like, God is talking to her to do something with the song. I just think that there's a lot of cool stuff in this book and she could find a way to like wrap it and turn it into a song really well. Now something that I also see for Dochi in the future is probably writing a book. She said this was in an interview with polyester. Dochi confessed rather seriously that she has always had plans to write a book ever since she was a little girl, quote, I have kept a journal since fifth grade and I have every single one. I've always said to myself one day I want to write a book. I think she would be great at it. All right, and before we end the episode, I was just kind of going into a little cool rabbit hole about different unconventional creative hacks and there's a lot of ones that celebrities do that I just kind of want to shout out, not saying that we should do some of these, but man is it interesting. So Salvador Dali, he would sleep with a spoon, right? He was this surrealist painter and he would take these like micro-naps to trigger inspiration. So what he would do is just so fucking nuts, but I feel like it would work. He would hold a spoon in his hand and then he would rest in a chair and let himself doze off for a few seconds and then you know when his body went limp because he was falling asleep, the spoon would fall from his hand, clatter on the floor, make a noise, it would wake him up and then he would immediately paint whatever came into his mind. And he believed that his half-dreaming state unlocked some of the most surreal ideas and I think it's how many times are you falling asleep and you go, oh, I've just got the fucking best idea and then you go, I'll remember it in the morning. Obviously you don't. This is why I think I want to buy a little voice recorder or something. Grimes locked herself in a room for three weeks to make her 2012 album "Visions". She said that she didn't eat much, she barely slept and she forced herself to create music under extreme conditions as Robert would say, challenging. So the result was this very experimental like a ethereal album that became a cult classic rip to Grimes of 2012. Like she made such great music, but I think that's interesting. Try locking yourself in a room for three weeks. You heard it here first. David Lynch, the director of Twin Peaks, he swears by twice daily transcendental meditation, to unlock his creativity. He describes his ideas as fishing in the subconscious and he says that this meditation helps him deep dive and pull up these like dream-like concepts that then become his films. And he even has a David Lynch foundation where he teaches this type of meditation to artists. And I will say like I am so tantalized and tickled and intrigued by the idea of, you know, Dochi's name and album, it just came to me as a download, Salvador Daldi's artwork. It came to me in a dream. It came to me in a meditation. You know, all of these things, the more scientific of us might be like, well actually you already have that idea in your subconscious and you think it came to you, but it was just, you know, you accessing your thoughts, whatever, fuck off. I think of it as a cool form of like magic or spirituality or something, you know, like accessing these parts of our brain and creativity that we normally couldn't. So Prince allegedly, he said that he wrote a song a day, even if it was bad, just to keep the creative muscle strong. And allegedly he left behind a vault of thousands of unreleased songs because he created so much. And his philosophy was, don't overthink, just make the thing. That one I think is interesting because you are in fact flexing a muscle, but I also feel like you would burn out so quick. I don't know what the rules were around that. Doji Kat, she's done different like live streams where sometimes she'll spend hours just live streaming her creative process, whether it's producing or writing songs in real time. And she said that this kind of pressure cooker method makes creativity more spontaneous because the public pressure of being on camera forces her to commit to these ideas quickly rather than overthinking them and then throwing them out. So I think that could be a cool idea, you know. And then Brian, you know, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, he's a producer for David Bowie, you two, Coldplay. He created a deck of cards, so it all comes back to tarot called the oblique strategies that give random abstract prompts when you feel stuck. So whenever you feel stuck, you pull out a card from the deck and it could say, for example, use an old idea. Pull a card, remove the most important thing. Pull a card, try faking it. And it's these different little prompts that force you to think differently and embrace randomness and just kind of try to turn something on its head just for the sake of it to see what happens. So I just think that all of this is so fucking cool. And I'm just really amazed by like the creative process. And also shout out to Dochi too, because I think when you look at someone like Dochi, she's such an artist and everything too. Like we talked over on Patreon. Even her style, like she said before, that she considers herself a student of hip hop, which is by a lot of her fashion is like very academic, you know, it's very 90s, very school girl, 90s. Like I'm here to learn. And maybe honestly, it's because of that performing arts high school that she went to. It's kind of blending like academia with creativity and with art, like even her fashion is cool. So I just think shout out to her mentioning this book 'cause I'm so excited for us over on Patreon to go into the artist's way. So if you head on over there now, and like I said, you don't have to pay money for these artist's way episodes, they're gonna be free. Our first episode is gonna be out on Patreon now. And it's just gonna be walking us through what these 12 weeks are going to be. The contract we need to sign. The time we're gonna have to put aside each week for it. The notebook that we're gonna wanna buy or use 'cause let's be honest, there's so many half-used notebooks and a lot of our houses. And then on Wednesday, two days after, we are going to officially kick off a week one of the artist's way. And for the next 12 weeks, every single Wednesday, we are going to be doing the artist's way and just kind of seeing what happens. So I really encourage everyone to join us because like Julia and Dochi herself say, you don't have to be an artist or a dancer or a Broadway performer. Everybody has creativity within them. And who knows? Maybe one of us could get a Grammy. So thank you guys so much for hanging out with me and I will see you guys soon for another episode of Lonely Forward. Bye guys.