Samuel Bercholz's Articles on Lions Roar

Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist's Way and The Vein of Gold in conversation with Samuel Bercholz. Samuel Bercholz: Your work is nominally about creativity, but it seems to be as much about tools for spiritual growth. What is the connection? Julia Cameron: People often say to me, "Your book is a Buddhist book," or "This is a book about mysticism, really, or this is a Sufi book." That is probably because creativity is a spiritual path, and at the core of the various spiritual paths are the same lessons. For instance, I recently read Thich Nhat Hanh for the first time, and I found myself thinking that he sees the world with an artist's eye. I think that's because he is very heart-centered. Even though we think of creativity as an intellectual pursuit, in my experience creativity is a heart-centered pursuit. We actually create from the heart. I think it's interesting that the word "heart" has the word "art" embedded in it. It also has the word "ear" embedded in it. So both Buddhism and creativity involve the art of listening to the heart. That's where the creative impulse arises from. That's why I cannot distinguish between creativity and spirituality. When you're practicing creativity you become a grounded individual, and that communicates the universal. I've been a writer for more than thirty years, and the issues that arise in the creative practice are the same kinds of issues that arise in a spiritual practice. You get to look at your insecurity. You get to look at your inquisitiveness. You get to look at your fantasy that a satisfied desire will lead to satisfaction. As near as I can tell, this is what happens with a grounded meditation technique: you go through all of the shenanigans of the restless nature of the mind and what you are left with is, just be. Out of being, things are made. So creativity is the act of being. Samuel Bercholz: Your creativity exercises could also be viewed as a form of therapy. Julia Cameron: Again, I don't make those definitions. My books are taught by myriad therapists. What they have found is that if they can heal their clients' creativity, neurosis disappears. This is why they all love this approach, and why therapists facilitate artists' circles all the time. My feeling is that an enormous amount of what we think of as neurosis is actually blocked creativity. When people begin living in their creativity, the "neurosis" disappears. I am not certain that we are a neurotic culture; I think we are more a stifled culture, needing to express the self, and you can spell that either small "s" or large "S." My feeling is that we are exhausted with talk therapy. Because The Artist's Way is experiential, it brings people back into their bodies and their hearts. Therapists are using it to bring people into an embodied practice, and that's why everyone's calming down. It's one of the world's best kept secrets that art makes people sane and happy. If you think creativity makes you crazy and broke, let's not do it. On the other hand, if it makes you expanded and connected and joyous and vibrant and beautiful, it may make us a little nervous, but maybe we should try it. The only time I get in trouble is if I'm not making something myself. If I'm too busy teaching to do my own art I get very sad. It's a matter of balance for me. I must keep my artist first and my teacher second. I must be making things and then sharing out of that process. If I am only teaching what I have already learned without doing my practice in order to be learning more, I'm very desperately unhappy. It's dangerous for me. When we are creative we become happier, more stable, more user-friendly. We have this image of writers as grumpy curmudgeons. Well, when they're blocked they are, but a writer who's writing is usually a very festive, even if it's secretly festive, person. A lot of what I teach is playing. I think that as we become more light, we take our ideas more seriously. Samuel Bercholz: Do you mean "light" like "more brilliant" or like "light-hearted?" Julia Cameron: Light-hearted. As we become more light-hearted, we paradoxically take our ideas more seriously. If we're trying to take our ideas seriously without a light heart we do not have the passion to execute them. This is why I say creativity is a matter of the heart: it takes heart to execute. If you can get people back in their heart, you get them into executing their creativity. If you keep them in their head, the heart becomes hobbled and the capacity to make things that connect becomes hobbled. Samuel Bercholz: A big part of The Artist's Way and Vein of Gold is how passion and creativity relate. Julia Cameron: I think passion is a marvelous thing. I was recently bawled out by a shaman because he took my use of the word passion to mean emotion and turbulence. I use passion to mean an act of will and commitment. I believe that we are intended to be utterly present, present with a passionate commitment. Then when we are, we create. Conversely, when we create, we become present with passionate commitment. One of the aspects of certain forms of Buddhism that I have difficulty with is that occasionally I get the feeling that people are using their meditation to avoid experiencing the incarnation we all share. They become detached, they hold the larger view, and it becomes: leaf falls from tree, child dies, same value. I think we can hold that view some of the time, but we are intended as humans to resonate far more deeply than that. I believe that creativity as a spiritual path is very much a felt path. Samuel Bercholz: "Felt" in the sense of passion, or heartfelt? Julia Cameron: I don't see those as two different things. Do you? Samuel Bercholz: No, but...sometimes feeling is just a swirl. Is there a difference between the swirl of emotion and heartfelt feeling? Julia Cameron: When we're in a swirl of emotion, in a funny way it's intellectual. Confusing and conflicting ideas are wrapped up with the emotions, much the way smoke has particles in it. When we are in our heart, there is a clarity to the feeling, a purity to the feeling. It's less like smoke and more like water. Creativity allows you to purify swirling emotions. Samuel Bercholz: By grounding them? By liberating them? What happens? Julia Cameron: You see, for me it's difficult to talk so theoretically. For instance, this morning I was very frustrated. I sat down and wrote four short poems, and then I was fine. The poems both grounded and liberated what I was feeling. Then I think we should talk just about the practice, because the intellectual part of this doesn't make any sense. You can read everything about creativity, everything about meditation, everything about spirituality, and what difference does it make? Okay, let's look at the nuts and bolts of The Artist's Way. Get up in the morning and write three pages of long hand writing about anything. Samuel Bercholz: What inspired you to do that? This is something you created, and people are doing it all over the world. Julia Cameron: It didn't begin with an idea. One day I got up and started doing it, and I found that it worked. Samuel Bercholz: What do you mean by "worked"? Julia Cameron: It made me prioritized for my day; it rendered me present to my life; it gave me a seed bed of ideas that later became creative work; it rendered me profoundly present. So I did it more. (laughs) Samuel Bercholz: Then you wrote the prescription for everybody else. How did you know that this wasn't just for you? Julia Cameron: People would call me up who were confused, and I'd say, "Try this," and it would work for them. That's how it became larger: I simply shared the tool. It's a tool that arose out of the fact that I am a writer with a habit of writing; therefore, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to get up one morning and start writing, and then to notice what it did for me. I also do believe in reincarnation. I think that I'm a teacher, and I suspect I've been a teacher for a very long time. A lot of what I know comes from my thirty years of work as a writer, but I suspect that a lot of what I know is remembered. I think this is true for all of us, that we are often doing in this life a work that we began a long time ago. That's what I think The Artist's Way is; it's a work that I probably began a long time ago. Or that artists began a long time ago. Samuel Bercholz: So do you think there's an ancestry of artists as well as a family ancestry? Julia Cameron: Absolutely. When people talk about a spiritual practice, they talk about the lineage of the practice. I think I'm squarely within the lineage of creativity, from the caves forward. Samuel Bercholz: Is this a natural gift, or something you had to develop? Julia Cameron: I think we have natural gifts and then we develop them. I think my work is helping people to wake up to their gifts and develop them. Samuel Bercholz: Do you think everybody has natural gifts? Julia Cameron: Absolutely! Samuel Bercholz: So what's with all these frustrated people? Julia Cameron: I think we've forgotten who we are. I think we've forgotten we're gifted. We've been made to feel we aren't gifted: we have an enormous mythology that creativity belongs to an elite few. They've known it since birth, they suffer no fear, they always wear black... So what The Artist's Way tools do is reconnect people to their own creative impulses, at which point people become far stronger and begin to move in the direction of those impulses. It's essentially a spiritual process, a listening process: with morning pages you are listening to what's going on within you. You're putting it on the page and communicating it to yourself and, in a sense, to the world. The second basic tool is something called an "artist's date," which is a once-a-week festive period of solitude. This is like turning on the radio to receive. So with morning pages you're listening to yourself and communicating out, and then you go into solitude, a...

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