Getting Clarity with Julia Cameron
The 'high priestess of creativity' shares her secrets
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Julia Cameron has been called "The Godmother" and "High Priestess" of creativity, and the New York Times hailed her as "The Queen of Change." She is a bestselling author, poet, songwriter, filmmaker and playwright.
Julia has written dozens of books—nonfiction and fiction—and her most recent book is part of The Artists Way series. It's called Living the Artist's Way: An Intuitive Path to Greater Creativity.
I wrote last week about my experience with The Artists Way. This 12-week course has been translated into forty languages and has sold over five million copies. If you have read this book, it's easy to see why.
While The Artists Way started out as a course to help writers, the fact is it can help with almost anything whether it’s writing a book, launching a business, or taking up a hobby. It can also help people get clear about what they really want in life versus what they are doing because they "should" or because social or familial conditioning tells them that the thing that really lights them up is not worth spending time on.
If you don't like "woo" or the idea that there is a higher force that can help us with our creativity and our lives, then consider this your trigger warning. This book and my interview with Julia focus on asking for guidance when you are stuck or feeling blocked.
For those who don't believe in a higher power, or at least one that interacts with us this way, another way to think of this is as tapping into your intuition. This practice doesn't require belief in anything particular for it to work. In fact, when Julia first started this practice, she was skeptical. She explains in the interview:
In 1978, I got sober from an alcohol problem, and I found myself feeling like, oh, I don't know if I'll be able to be creative without alcohol. And friends told me, well just try it. And they said, let a higher force write through you.
And I said, what if it doesn't want to? And they said, well, just try it. And I tried it and my prose straightened out and I began to have insights about creativity.
Once she saw that it was working for her, she started getting more specific in her requests.
I found myself saying, I don't know what to write next. And then I wrote, what should I write next? And I heard an answer and I thought, oh my God, you mean I could ask about anything? And the answer came back, yes. And so I started to trust guidance.
I haven’t done this practice, though I know people who have. They’ve gotten remarkable insights, as seems to happen when you just listen to Julia Cameron and do what she tells you to do—even when you feel it sounds a little too “woo.”
The reason I haven’t done the specific guidance exercise that Julia recommends in this book isn’t because I don’t believe in it. It’s because I already regularly engage in this kind of dialogue without writing it down. I’m one of these people who is always praying and asking for help and guidance, and I am always tuning into my intuition for what my next step should be. I don’t do this because of a set of theological beliefs; I do it because I’ve found that it works and makes life much easier for me.
I hope you enjoy the interview. Let me know what you think in the comments, which are open to everyone today.
Loved this conversation so much! I appreciate that you keep the conversation short and ask good questions to help clarify the points being discussed.
It's so interesting because almost everyone is glad to get on board with the idea of intuition, but then many balk at the idea of "Guidance," considering it too "woo-woo," but in my experience these are essentially the same thing, and l think Julia is in essence saying that here. Of course many people have had painful experiences with religion (thus have negative associations with the idea of "God") and there is also the fear of the "quackery" of psychics or mediums as being a "departure from reason" -- so from both those places comes hurt and fear. But l strongly believe Julia knows what she is talking about. l grew up as an Evangelical -- finally escaped it in my mid-thirties -- tossed God and religion out completely for many years -- now have come to the place where spirituality (no religion involved) is where l indeed find comfort, help, and guidance. Both my daughter Ivy Sunderji (The Happy Medium, here on Substack) and l have written about this. Thanks for this, Kirsten! l love that so many people have found The Artist's Way to be life-changing.