Prosperous Heart: Creating a Life of “Enough”
Written by Julia Cameron with Emmy Lively
Almost two decades ago, I found a copy of The Artist’s Way in the library in the small Mojave Desert town where I was living. Unable to resist its bright red cover, I picked it up, read the first few pages—and began to weep. The voice in my head whispered clearly, “This book will save your life.”
I had recently left Hollywood after a devastating experience in which my agent, literally, allowed my screenplay to be stolen by a Canadian production company. I received a mere pittance for years of labor and no screen credit. No lawyer would touch my case because the foreign studio was considered too influential to sue.
Shell-shocked, I moved to the desert to start a new career as an archeologist/oral historian at Edwards Air Force Base. Though the new work was fascinating, it wasn’t writing. All my life I’d been a writer. Now I was a writer who wasn’t writing. I felt dead.
As author Julia Cameron described me, I needed creative recovery. Just like people who drink too much need a road to sobriety, so, too, said Cameron, did creative people need a path to recovery. And she came up with one that has helped millions of people world-wide. She designed a 12-week program, based somewhat on the Alcoholics Anonymous principles but much funnier, less rigid and more inclusive. Her program reminded creative people of their connection to the Creative Force.
The lesson each week concentrated on an area of creative blockage that few of us recognize and thus rarely face, such as falsely believing that our interior critic tells the truth, or giving up just before the miracle happens.
Two simple steps guide her program. Morning Pages is the practice of hand-writing three pages of free-associate writing first thing every morning. That unclutters your brain from all the stuff blocking it, allowing your creativity to flow. (After a while you learn that Morning Pages is as crucial to a productive day as turning on your computer or making your first brushstroke.)
Artist’s Dates are times spent alone, once a week, priming the creative well by taking artistic trips, such as to art galleries, fabric stores, antique shops—anything that takes you away from your routine day and to something new.
Like a woman dying of thirst, I read The Artist’s Way, one week at a time as it insisted, and followed its principles devotedly. After completing the course, my new play was produced by the local playhouse.
Since then I have followed The Artist’s Way principles religiously. (In fact, often when people ask what my religion is, I answer The Artist’s Way—that’s how all-encompassing the principles of the book have become.) Hundreds of people in Asheville are Artist’s Way “graduates” and more join each week.
One problem is so pernicious among creative people that Cameron felt an entire book, not just a chapter, was needed to solve it—artists and prosperity. Many artists fail to earn what they deserve. Others are so ill-equipped to manage their finances, they can’t balance their checkbook.
“Worry about money,” says Cameron, “is one of the primary blocks to creativity.” With the help of fellow author Emmy Lively, Cameron wrote The Prosperous Heart: Creating a Life of “Enough.” “Prosperity is never just about money,” Cameron says, leading the way into another book that is spiritual as well as practical. Hitting home her points, Cameron fills the book with stories of money-challenged artists who learned how to turn prosperity into their friend. A new definition of the concept of “Enough” makes us learn what true prosperity is—having “Enough.”
Following a similar format as its progenitor, The Prosperous Heart also lays out a 12-week program explaining the specific problems creative people have with money and what steps can be taken to solve them. This program is based on five principles: Morning Pages, Counting, Abstinence, Walking and Time-Outs.
Counting means exactly that—writing down each and every penny you make and where you spend it. Such meticulous, but easy, recordkeeping makes us conscious about money (sometimes for the first time in our lives) and is the foundation of financial clarity. “Prosperity begins with clarity,” Cameron says.
Abstinence is assiduously avoiding debt. Walking is one of Cameron’s favorite meditative techniques. Time-outs are 5-minute brain breaks twice a day. It’s all doable—but, breaking the bad money habits of a lifetime takes commitment and resistance to change is difficult.
Just as Cameron saw creative recovery as the product of a creative soul making itself one with a creative universe, so, too, does Cameron see Prosperity as connecting to a universe that is by its nature prosperous. Her writing is so effective and the stories so illustrative, that you feel as if she’s writing directly to you. For Cameron, “Enough” is the operative principle of Prosperity, and learning to live with “Enough” is what creative people do.
You can find The Prosperous Heart at Asheville’s independent bookstores.
For more information visit www.JuliaCameronLive.com
Recommendation: The Prosperous Heart: Creating a Life of “Enough” is Julia Cameron’s most helpful book after The Artist’s Way. But it should be read, and practiced, not by itself, but only after you’ve read and practiced the first book, or if you practice each book at the same time.
Prosperous Heart: Creating a Life of “Enough”; written by Julia Cameron with Emmy Lively; Tarcher, 2012; 240 pp, paperback; $13.98.