Listening - The key to creativity

Now, Cameron has published The Listening Path, which lays out a six-week method of creative and personal transformation through better listening, not just to others, but to the silence around us.

The Listening Path was a long time in the making. I moved from busy and noisy New York to calm and quiet Santa Fe, New Mexico. The change was abrupt and healing. In the quiet of my new home, I began thinking about sound. When I went to lunch with my publisher Joel Fotinos, he asked me what I was thinking about and I said, “listening.” “Oh,” he said, “I’d love to hear more on that.” So his curiosity and my own experience combined to be the catalyst for the book.

I think that our enforced solitude has caused many of us to be more introspective. The Listening Path provides a channel for our often chaotic energies to quiet and deepen. Now is a good time for a book on listening, as we are all listening – like it or not – to our tumultuous thoughts.

Yes. I believe that lockdown has shown us a need to be in touch and comfortable with our authentic selves. “It’s now or never,” we may catch ourselves thinking, as we turn to a spiritual toolkit.

Our identity has come to be seen as something separate and distinct from our previous markers. We no longer feel it is our job, or our material possessions, which define us. Instead, we are led through the long hours of the pandemic to seek spiritual grounding. I believe this is good, important, and the silver lining of difficult times.

People find it difficult to listen because they are overwhelmed by the input coming to us from all directions: social media, the television, the constant barrage of news. All of these things make it difficult for people to focus on the root of all listening: the still, small voice that wells up from within.

I believe The Listening Path is needed in our current times and will be needed, too, in our future.

The first tool I would suggest, as I always suggest, is the practice of morning pages: Three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness writing, done “first things first.” The pages quiet our chaotic thoughts and allow us to be authentically present.

The second tool is focusing on the sounds in our environment, perhaps keeping a weekly log of the sounds, pleasant and unpleasant, that we daily encounter. This allows us to tune in, rather than tune out, on our soundscape.

The third tool involves listening to others without interruption; allowing our intimates to fully finish their thoughts, which often surprise us. These three simple tools awaken our inner listener, allowing us to be more present and fully engaged.

The sentence I most often hear is, “Julia, your book changed my life.” I tell them, “You changed your life. I offered you tools, but you used them.” Practitioners report a heightened spiritual awareness: “My perception of the world shifted from hostile and threatening to encouraging and benevolent.”

Many people speak of what might be called “God consciousness.” I don’t think it matters what you name it; the tools of The Artist’s Way engender a spiritual awakening. As the book title says, The Artist’s Way is a spiritual path to higher creativity. I have found creativity and spirituality to be intertwined. If you work on your creativity, your spirituality increases; if you work on your spirituality, your creativity increases. People sometimes tell me, “Julia, I fell in love... with myself.”