Creativity & Spirituality: Dancing Partners | Julia Cameron | Sunday Talk

I get to introduce someone who has become quite important in my world and I in case you didn't know in the last 10 years the number of books published has doubled I feel it's in direct proportion to this woman's creativity and expression and the thousands of books that she has written she is a prolific New York Times bestselling author speaker and working artist Julia Kalman transformed the cultural creatives with her iconic book the artists way which is now in its 25th anniversary edition but that's barely as old as me huh and we do have a few copies today she was chosen as the science of mine magazine's Person of the Year she is a noted playwright in fact one of her productions the play the animal in the trees will be opening in New York City this coming March field trip MS Cameron was given the Ernest Holmes book creative ideas in 1980 and she calls it quote unquote transformational because it taught her what she refers to as radical praying in the affirmative verses prayers of petition sounds like science of mind to me this is probably what somewhat influenced her latest book and I know she's going to address that this book called life lessons today after service she'll be signing those books and a few of the others and then she's gonna run home because she's working on another book called Wright for life today she is here talking about creativity and spirituality dancing partners please help me welcome miss Julia Cameron Oh Lily Humphrey can you all hear me in the back good it's a pleasure to be here today it's an honor I love Dutchess and I love that she embodies spirit and creativity as dancing partners and I think I want to say I owe my life and my career and my books to Ernest Holmes I was 30 years old I was newly sober I was worried about my brilliant career which I obsessed about and I was given a little book called creative ideas that was published in 1934 and the man who gave it to me was Frank Sinatra's arranger and he said I'm giving you this little book it will change your life and I thought what does he mean by that and I opened the book and I discovered a different form of prayer that was in high self-worth instead of groveling and I thought oh and Billy his name was Billy May the composer Billy said to me look at it this way you have a hundred creative horses and if 30 of your horses are worried about what other people will think of you and ten of your horses are worried that you're a failure that leaves you only sixty horses to round up for your creativity so what I want you to do is use this book and round up all your creative horses so that when you go into a project you have a hundred horses that are all ready to pull you through so so I started writing a different way I had up until this point I was trying to be brilliant I was trying to be memorable I was trying to be the best and when I started reading the prayers it was told to me now let the creative force of the universe right through you and I said what if it doesn't want to and they said well why don't you put up a little sign in your writing area that says okay God you take care of the quality I'll take care of the quantity so I thought that was ridiculous but I was desperate I had given up a decade of cocaine and alcohol which I had used to fuel my writing and so there I was newly sober and desperate for a way to write sober so I put up the little signs and I sat down and I tried to let a higher power a greater intelligence right through me and what I have found out was that it would and they said why don't you try writing from a spirit of service and again I was very skeptical and I thought a spirit of service what does that have to do with being the best the most brilliant the most memorable but I thought well I don't want to drink again and I don't want to use cocaine again so I think I better try and write from the spirit of service so I wrote down what I call my first thought and a first thought this is something that I believe strongly and I have a girlfriend named Natalie Goldberg whom many of you may know Natalie says we need to write from our wild mind and I thought wild mind what does that mean and I began I began a spiritual practice I I want to tell you a little bit about it because one of the things I know and believe is that we are much larger than we know we are much more spirited than we know we are much more spiritual than we know and that if we can just tap into the wild mind of first thoughts we will find ourselves connecting to a higher power so I I was told when I got sober that I needed to have a god I could believe in and I thought you don't understand I have 16 years of Catholic education that is the greased slide to atheism and they said well surely you must believe in something and I thought driving from Los Angeles to Palm Springs on a starry night who made all this then and I remembered a line from Dylan Thomas that said the force that through the green fuse drives the flower so I thought creative energy I can believe in that so I started praying to creative energy and I started reading my little Ernest Holmes book and I discovered that he prayed to creative energy and that he too believed we were larger and more carefully blessed I think one of the things that we don't acknowledge is the amount of care that was taken to create each one of us we are very individuals and we are we are all very gifted and I think that when I started writing to the force I I found myself having a spirit of adventure and a spirit of invention and the spirit of contentment and what happened for me is that I found myself stretching and I think one of the things that happens in a service like today is that we stretch we we expand our vision to say nothing is missing in me and when we start to believe that nothing is missing in me then we start to be able to take risks so I want to talk briefly about some tools that came to me and the the way that it works I was living in New York and I wrote a movie for Jon Voight and his partner called me up and said it's brilliant and I thought oh goody and then I thought I wonder what our next step is and I called him back and he didn't return my calls and I I kept calling and kept getting no answer and so I thought maybe I better go check so I got on an airplane and I flew from New York to California and while I was on that airplane I I prayed you know dear God what should I do next and I heard go to New Mexico and I thought clearly there's an error and this this was 1980 and it was before New Mexico was hip and special and before Ralph Lauren had gotten ahold of it so I I landed in California I still couldn't see John Boyd and his partner and I said to my best girlfriend an actress named Giuliana McCarthy she's a poet now too she's 88 years old and at age 75 she worked the artists way and went for a master's degree in poetry so I said to Julie I've been praying for what to do and I get told that I'm supposed to go to New Mexico and Julie said here is a thousand dollars go to New Mexico so I came to New Mexico and I rented a little house in Taos it was a little Adobe house at the end of a little dirt road and I had my daughter who was six years old with me and she said mom I hate it and we would wake up in the morning and cows would come pressing their noses against the windows so I started getting up every morning before my daughter and racing to a big pine table that overlooked Taos mountain and I would just write and what happened from that was that every day I was writing three pages long hand and I would say what should I do about my movie and the answer would come keep writing so I kept writing and one day a character came strolling into my [Music] consciousness and the character was named Johnny and Johnny was a painter and I realized oh my god she doesn't belong in a movie she belongs in a book so I started writing a book and I kept the three pages of early morning writing intact because that had opened the doorway to the book and then in the afternoon I would write on the novel so what happened is I finished the novel and house was full of people who smoked dope and I thought I don't know if I can stay here and stay sober so I got in my car and I drove back to Greenwich Village which is where I had a an apartment and I started going for long walks still praying now what should I do and I found myself listening walking as you said this morning walking and listening for guidance and I heard you're going to teach and I thought you I'm an artist I don't want to teach and I called my girlfriend Regina and said desperately I've been told I'm supposed to teach and she said I'll call you right back ten minutes later she called me back and said congratulations you're now on the faculty of the new New York feminist Art Institute in your first classmates Thursday so I thought dear Lord what am I going to teach and then it came to me that what had happened to me was writing allowing the higher power to write through me writing three pages in the morning going for walks I actually thought oh my god I have a toolkit I can teach them my toolkit so the first class was about 20 people maybe a few fewer than that I and I would get up and say now what I want you to do is I want you to write pages in the morning and then take a walk and what happened is they started unblocking and I thought oh these tools are powerful and I began to write essays that said what I thought like tried to let the higher power right through you try to go for walks and listen try to take risks and what happened with my students is that they began to take a risk every day writing to get on the page and they would they would say I'm interested in Italy oh that's ridiculous and then the pages would say again you can learn Italian and everything I'm too old to learn Italian and then they'd say just try it and people would say oh maybe I can do it and this is what I find is so miraculous about teaching is that I had a director in my class who was blocked and she started directing and I thought this is pretty powerful and I had a painter in my class who started painting again and I began to realize that when we hooked ourselves up to the higher power to the creative force that through the flower drives the green fuse of energy when we try to connect to a divine source our creativity is unlimited our creativity is expansive our creativity is encouraged we've I began to witness miracles and so I I started mailing out packages to people who were blocked and it was a little Xerox book from a communist book store and I would mail them out and then we would hear back Julia I used your tools and now I have a business of greeting cards Julia I used your tools and now I've written my first book Julia I used your tools and I'm part of a juried show Julia I used your tools and I was perfectly happy drunk in the outback now I'm sober and a Hollywood screenwriter and I'm thinking is this an improvement so I sent the book to my literary agent the little xeroxed book and she read it and she said Julia no one will be interested in a book on creativity go back to writing screenplays that's where you're successful and I stubbornly thought I think it's a pretty good little book I think people will be interested in news about creativity so I fired her and my boyfriend said to me I got the name of a literary agent and I think you should call her and I said I'm scared he said I'll call so he called up a literary agent that he had gotten the card for and said I have a book on creativity and I want you to meet my girlfriends and he shoved me onto the telephone and I was like oh dear God you're an agent I guess it's a book and she said every year at Christmas I get a book maybe this year it's your book so I sent her the book and then I was waiting on pins and needles for for two weeks and then she called back and said I want to represent you and I thought oh dear God in heaven it's a miracle but I was becoming a little bit of custom to miracles so two weeks later she called me back and she said Jeremy tarcher wants to publish your book now Jeremy tarcher was the foremost American expert on creativity and his book was called his press was called torture and so he sent me a ten-page memo of a few thoughts so I moved to an apartment adjacent to the apartment I was living in with my boyfriend and I locked the door and I sat there and I answered his questions and when I was finished we had the artists way so I was scared I thought Oh what if something becomes of this and my boyfriend said I think you should franchise it just like esthe and I said I think it should be free like Alcoholics Anonymous and if a person has a book they can start a group so what happened is that groups began to spring up the creation spirituality Network got a hold of the book some nuns in Connecticut started teaching it I went to England I was afraid I thought mistakenly oh dear God I'll be trapped as a teacher what I didn't realize was that the teaching would actually empower me as an artist that as I taught creative unblocking to people I would become more and more unblocked so it's 40 books later and I want to tell you about the little book that we're talking about today okay it's very small it's called life lessons and I'm gonna just read you a tiny bit of it what happened was that as I was writing about creativity I found myself learning more and more about divinity and I found that if I pursued my create I I lit a spark in myself of conscious contact with the higher power and I began to realize that they were actually what we would call dancing partners that if I said to you let's work on your creativity you would work on your creativity and wake up spiritually and if I said let's work on our spirituality you would find yourself using your creativity so I wanted my publisher tarcher to publish creative ideas and they I said it's a wonderful book it was published in 1934 let's do it again so they called up the press that had done the book and they said you absolutely cannot have the book we're going to publish it ourselves so then what happened is they called me up and said would you write the introduction so I did and then what happened was my publisher Joe Latino said torture said to me if you can't publish if we can't publish Ernest Holmes prayers maybe we can publish yours and I said you don't understand I've been divorced twice who would want to listen to my prayers so then what happened was I I tried writing a prayer and it came flowing through me very quickly and I ended up writing for prayer books I have actually got 600 pages of prayers but then what happened was I moved to Santa Fe and here's how I came here I was living in New York writing musicals and I found myself writing an artist's way exercise of 25 things that you love so here I am I'm living in Manhattan and I'm writing Jim ISA green-chili pinyon-juniper and I thought this is not the New York Chrysler Building so I moved to Santa Fe and when I got to Santa Fe I took a little Adobe house up the mountain from the plaza up old house highway I had found this little house but it had a steep driveway and whenever it's snowed I was snowed in and this frightened me and I was living surrounded by juniper pinyon Jim ISA green chilly when I could get it and we had a bear and I thought this is a little bit scary so I thought maybe I better do something to soothe myself and I thought well Julia don't you know that what you do to soothe yourself is you pray to the higher power so I sat down and this is when Dutchess enters the picture I sat down and started writing prayers longhand and I'm going to just read you a couple of them and let you have a flavor here's the one that started it off frightened one come to us with your fears tell us what troubles you lay your anxiety at our feet practice candor by revealing your woes unburden your heart trusting us to listen we have ears for all parts of you know fear is too large or too small let us reassure you you are safe and protected you are ours little one you pray for guidance and then you ignore it what it taught us you tell yourself that our guidance is just your imagination this is not the case when you ask us for our help we give it to you but our wisdom is subtle and so you discount it pay attention to synchronicity our guidance comes to you in many forms be alert for signs and signals be alert for our presence we come to you when you ask and this one's my favorite one lonely one we are with you at all times although you seldom sense our presence we are by your side closer than your breath when you need companionship turn to us more than any human we are your friend when you crave company come to us with your craving allow us to soothe the anxious pangs of loneliness we are with you now so I wrote these prayers snowbound looking out the window for the bear and what happened is I after I had been writing for a while I went oh my god it's a book so I kept on writing and I was a phrase the the book is very tender and very sweet and it we speak to the higher power and the higher power speaks back to us calling us gently little one little one frightened one anxious one stymied one and each of the prayers addresses a feeling or a fear that we have about the divine and this is what Ernest Holmes helped me to dismantle and this is why it's a wonderful thing I hope you'll all start writing those morning pages and if you do you will be led and when you are led you will find yourself coming squarely back to Ernest Holmes and I I read a book by a man named Arthur Ford who was a very famous medium he spoke with dead people and in the book he says that one of the people he loves talking to the most is Ernest Holmes so what I found I I have had two close girlfriends died in the last two years one of them was my mentor in New York named Jane and the other was a woman you may know from Espanola named Alberta hansteen and what I found was after I finished praying at night and writing out the prayers I would say can I hear from Jane and then I would listen and I would hear you are safe and protected we are with you at all times I'm closer than your breath and I'd say can I hear from Alberta and Alberta would say there's nothing that looms so large that you won't be able to meet it successfully so I found myself exploring new spiritual realms and I was worried with this little book that it would be to woowoo and I called a girl friend of mine who's a Jungian analyst and I said to her I'm talking to dead people I'm I'm praying nightly I'm worried that I'm - woowoo and she said Oh Julia who is where it's at yeah [Applause]

Channel: Santa Fe Center for Spiritual Living

Views: 110,051

Keywords: New Thought, Meditation, Meditative, New Age, Science of Mind, Santa Fe, Center, Living, Peace, Love, Prosperity, Abundance, Consciousness, Universal, Mindfulness, Mindful, Creativity, Connection, Oneness, Wholeness, Positivity, Hope, Community, Faith, morning pages, julia cameron, julia cameron the artist's way, the artist way, spirituality, spiritual awakening, spiritual growth, santa fe center for spiritual living

Id: B3j2Oh-DqgA

Length: 36min 6sec (2166 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2017