UNLOCKING YOUR CREATIVITY:

an interview with Julia Cameron

Whether you are an artist, writer, banker, consultant or gardener, being able to tap into your inner creativity enhances your life. Being creative means following your dreams and finding your life’s purpose. For whatever reason, most of us get trapped in the daily busy-ness of life and leave our passion behind. Or we become a victim of our own fears of failure and self—doubt, and are unable to take the risk and make the jump. This doesn’t have to be the case, says Julia Cameron, an award—winning writer with extensive credits in film, television, theater and journalism. Her credits include feature films as writer and director, documentary films, movies of the week and television. Her essays have been anthologized twice, and she has published short fiction as well as criticism. She is also a published poet who teaches creativity workshops and creative writing at the graduate level.

Julia Cameron is the author of the best—seller The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity and The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart.

Michael Toms: In your book The Artist’s Way, and also in Vein of Gold, you see creativity as a spiritual process. Can you elaborate on that?

Julia Cameron: Creativity is a human process; to be human is to be spiritual. It is my experience that all of us are creative. It is not something that belongs to an elite few, and it is not something that can be intellectually calibrated. I don’t make a distinction between being human, being spiritual and being creative. I think of this as our endowment.

MT: Often we hold ourselves back; we see others as creative, but not ourselves. Why do you think that is?

JC: We are very well-trained to see other people as creative. There is a pervasive mythology that says there are geniuses and then there are the rest of us, and that artists are born knowing they are artists. We don’t hear artists speaking to one another very often. We hear artists talking to us through the mechanism of the media. So, we hear things like, “Stephen [Spielberg] got his first movie camera at eight, and he always knew he was going to be a film director.” We don’t hear the stories about him sitting in a New York hotel room and terrified, eating carry—out pizza and wondering if he would ever be able to make “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I was in that hotel room, and I heard him be terrified. All artists are often terrified. They simply learn to move through the fear. But the mythology we carry is that if we have fear around our creativity we’re not supposed to be doing it, because fear means you are not a “real” artist.

MT: Susan Jeffers wrote a book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. In it she writes about making fear a friend.

JC: Yes. The tools I teach people have to do with recognizing that inner censor who says, “Who do you think you are?” and “What are the odds of selling this book, if you ever manage to write it?” and “You’ll never make a living at this,” and “You’re too old,” and “You’re going to look like a total fool.” We make the mistake of thinking this is the voice of reason, when actually it is an internalized wet blanket that dampens our creativity and tries to keep us from committing creativity. The tools I teach allow people to hear that voice as a sort of cartoon character, like the wet-blanket relative who, when you say, “Let’s have a picnic,” says, “It’ll rain.”

Well, that is what we’ve internalized in terms of making art. We’re always telling ourselves it’s going to rain.

MT: I know you’ve put a lot of value on story, and especially on telling our own story. I’m wondering about your story—how did you become a writer? Can you capsulize your own story for us?

JC: I doubt it. But I grew up in a big family; there were seven of us, and we all wrote and drew and painted. It is often true, if you are from a big family, that if the first kid has a strong musical gift—and my sister Connie is fantastic in music—the next kid will avoid it. So when I came along music was sort of “taken.” I did music, but I also wrote and I painted. Americans tend to have a lug—bolt mentality around creativity; we think that if you are a writer you shouldn’t be a painter; you shouldn’t let yourself follow your creative itches. I know a lot about this because I happen to be a writer, since that was the available slot in my family. It took me years to realize that I am also a very good painter, just like my sister Libby. And I’m a very good composer, like my brother Christopher. It was okay to have all of those gifts.

MT:  A few years ago I visited Bali, and I was truly surprised that everybody there does many kinds of art.

JC: That’s right, and that’s because everybody can. That’s what my tools are about: “Wake up you guys; we can all do this.” Of course it is a little anarchistic and anti-hierarchical. This is not what the art establishment would have us believe. We are all supposed to believe that someone else is going to come along and tell us that we are a real artist. If we are galleried, if we are published, if we are written up in the New York Times—then somehow we are going to get our passport stamped “artist,” and everybody will have to believe it.

But what I know after thirty years is that you just make things. It is the act of making things that a) makes you happy—which is another thing we aren’t told, and b) makes you an artist. Even when you have all the credentials in the world, you will still sometimes have those nights when you don’t know you are an artist. So you have to learn to do it anyway. You need to learn to know that mood does not matter. It is like sex. You can think, “I’m not interested,” but once you begin you may find out it is more interesting than you expected. It is the same thing with creativity. If we keep waiting for the perfect mood, we’re going to end up starved.

MT: I sense from your writings and your work that your “doing” comes out of “being.” This is a salient issue in our culture and in our times— the difference between “being” and “doing.” We tend to live in a “doing” culture; when we “do,” then we can “have,” and then we can “be.” It really needs to be in reverse.

JC: I believe that we are intended to “be” in the moment. We are intended to make things, and the joy is in the process, not the product. We are all exhausted from trying to become finished products, to turn out well: When will I be okay? This is why we need to learn to play. Because when we play we end up making things in the moment that are, in fact, eternal.

MT: Why do we procrastinate so much? We have all this talent, we have all this creativity, yet we hold ourselves back.

JC: We’re scared. We want things to be perfect, we don’t know how to do baby steps, and we want to be safe. What we profoundly want is to be safe. We don’t understand that being in our creativity is what makes us safe. We think that not doing it is what makes us safe. When The Artist’s Way came out, therapists all over America started using it, and their clients started getting better in droves. This is because a lot of what we think of as neurosis in this country is simply people being very unhappy because they are not using their creative endowment. Most of us are far healthier than our seventy-year-old paradigm of therapy would tell us.

MT: Do you recommend that people quit their job and follow their passion?

JC: No. You see, people believe that they have to change their entire life to be happy. If we change little teeny pieces everyday, we get happier, and often the last thing we change is the big job. By the time we change it we’ve invented the new job, one little tiny piece at a time. Mark Bryan, with whom I taught for a long long time, used to say that people think they have to blow up their lives and dismantle everything. We get very dramatic about it, because then we can stay blocked—if we make it so dramatic, then we can’t make the change. I try to tell people to just do one little thing. Writing “Avalon’ [her first musical], I did it one note at a time, one song at a time. Now I’ve written seventy songs, and I know it can be done. But if I had looked up and said, “Okay, you’re going have to learn how to notate music,’ I might not have started. If I had looked up instead of taking the next footfall, I might never have taken the first step. This is why one of the tools I teach is walking. It teaches us to do it one beat at a time.

Walking is a vastly overlooked creative tool. I have found that if people walk—I’d say twenty minutes a day—they enter an altered state where they have an expanded sense of self and of connection. It is at once very large and very particular. It is often on walks that you will integrate a problem, or if you are a writer and you have a tangled plot line, you will suddenly see a new solution. Lots of us intuitively do this. If our relationship is getting dreadful, we go for long walks. It is also true that if you go for enough walks, your relationships might not get quite so dreadful, because you put things into a higher perspective. Walking is an enormously potent tool. I don’t think I can say enough about it. People really need to just try it for a couple of weeks, and that’s usually sufficient for them to notice.

When you walk, you are able to hear more cleanly and more keenly. Life is about listening. It is about listening to ourselves; it is about listening to our greater selves; it is about listening to the things we hear with what you might call inner ears. The word “heart” has the word “ear” in it, and also contains the word “art.” When we walk, we begin to be able to hear with the ears in our hearts. We begin to learn from our landscape.

MT: I wonder why we don’t let life unfold, rather than desiring to control it. We have the illusion that we can control it.

JC: You’re onto something very interesting. We try to control the parts that we can’t, and we refuse to control the parts that we can. If we allow ourselves to make things—to make a little piece of art, to write a lullaby, to take a wounding situation and do a nasty little poem at it—when we take that kind of power, we discover that we have an enormous capacity to make course adjustments in our life. We pretend that we are powerless. We are not powerless. We need to listen.

The musical I’m writing now is called “Magellan,” who was the greatest navigator of his time. Either there is wind or there isn’t, but if you know how to work with what you’ve got, even if there isn’t much wind, you can go a long way. What we are trying to do is listen for the direction in which it is possible to make movement.

This article has been excerpted from New Dimensions

Program #2591.

http://www.newdimensions.org/online-journal/articles/unlocking-your-creativity.html