When Spirituality Is Found Where You Least Expect It
There’s a place Julia Cameron loves to visit. It’s a pet store where a large gray-and-white bunny named George lives. Cameron visits the shop to spend time with the animal and stroke its fur.
“When I pet George, I have a sense of great well-being,” she told me over the phone. “And George seems to have a sense of great well-being, as well.”
This ritual is what Cameron calls an “Artist Date”—an enchanting solo outing designed to get you out of your usual routines and into a place of discovery. Its purpose is to spark your higher creativity by doing something novel and playful. Something you wouldn’t ordinarily do.
Artist Dates have long been among Cameron’s tools to help people tap into their creativity, a quality she believes lives in everyone. She introduced this concept to the world at large in 1992 when she published her first book, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, the ever-bestselling guide that has inspired millions of people to create, including famed artists Elizabeth Gilbert and Alicia Keys. (To date, it has sold more than 5 million copies.) For those unfamiliar, nourishing creativity might seem like more doing—especially in a productivity-obsessed culture. But Cameron sees it differently. Creativity is the blood in our bodies and the spark in our souls. Beyond denominations or beliefs, creativity connects us to our spirituality.
“Whether it is 'God' or a 'Higher Power' or just our inner intelligence, I encourage you to set aside any past ideas, and instead explore this connection anew,” writes Cameron in her most recent book, The Daily Artist’s Way. “As we work on our creativity, we work on our spirituality.”
As we spoke on the phone, I asked Cameron more about this connection. Why is it so important? She told me that what often plagues humanity is a loss of our originality, which she calls our “spiritual DNA.” Each of us contains endless magic and a deep richness that can be stifled by life’s pressures and routines.
“But when we try working on our creativity, we begin to wake up,” she said. “And this waking up can convince us that we are original.”
That working on our creativity can be “a lot simpler than we think,” added Cameron. Igniting our creativity and, by virtue, our spirituality, needn’t require us to go on an epic sojourn around the world or to a monastery for weeks. We can unlock our link to the divine in three simple, unexpected ways:
- Taking ourselves on a weekly “Artist Date.” (It can be filled with folly and fun!)
- Writing daily “Morning Pages.” Cameron’s other essential creativity-sparking tool, Morning Pages, includes three pages of longhand, morning writing about whatever comes to your heart and mind. (Though she tells me, her latest book, The Daily Artist’s Way, offers short prompts “so that you don't have to write three pages, you write whatever the prompt encourages you to touch.”)
- Exercise. “I’ve been teaching many years, and it’s clear to me that exercise should have a higher priority in terms of what we think of giving us a creative outlet,” she said, adding that walking is a spiritual act in itself.
For Cameron, all of this is another way of caring for our hearts. It is a quest; a way to persist toward who we are.
“I think we don't always know that we need to be healed,” she said. “And so, when we start writing Morning Pages or the writing prompts, we find ourselves feeling an unexpected source of... I want to say... benevolence of healing. And I think we don't always realize that we're starting on a quest, but we are. We have a feeling of curiosity that comes over us, and that curiosity is the quest.”
As our conversation neared its end, I told Cameron that I would be thinking of her next Artist Date with George the bunny. Then I shared how when I pet my own dog, I feel like I’m in direct contact with the divine.
“What kind of dog do you have?” she asked.
As I told Cameron about my little mutt, she said she has a small dog, too. Then she paused for a second before she replied.
“So you do know just exactly what I'm talking about.”
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