SHARING CUPS OF HOPE AND CREATIVITY

Our Summer Book Club Starts June 23! THE LISTENING PATH by Julia Cameron

Heart’s Content Summer Book Club

THE LISTENING PATH: The Creative Art of Attention by Julia Cameron

Six weeks of reading, learning, and unblocking our creativity together.

I have led several public groups through the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. In 2023, I took the entire year away from teaching/guiding/creating any new programs to dedicate myself fully to writing the first draft of a memoir. While it was a brilliant decision and I learned so much from that focused process, I also missed being in community.

Now that my big, beautiful first draft has been completed, I am taking the summer to rededicate myself to filling my cup creatively and expressing myself in ways beyond my memoir writing. I’m ready to rejoin the creative-contemplative community and I want to do this with you!

It would have been super easy for me to host another discussion of the classic version but when I found this new six-week version at my local bookstore, I knew that I wanted to read it and that I wanted to read it with other companions on the creative-contemplative path. I wonder if you feel as I do that doing things in a community of support can often help to show up more fully for ourselves?

If you are familiar with The Artist’s Way book, this new version integrates more than daily morning pages and weekly artist dates, or ways to deal with the inner critic. Cameron invites us to listen more deeply to the whole of our lives. Listening, as we know, is integral to creativity and true connection.

"If you have always wanted to pursue a creative dream, have always wanted to play and create with words or paints, this book will gently get you started and help you learn all kinds of paying-attention techniques; and that, after all, is what being an artist is all about. It's about learning to pay attention." --Anne Lamott

Chapters include:

Week One: Listening to Our Environment

Week Two: Listening to Others

Week Three: Listening to Our Higher Self

Week Four: Listening Beyond the Veil

Week Five: Listening to Our Heroes

Week Six: Listening to Silence

→ We start reading this new Artist Way book for Book Club on JUNE 23 for all paid subscribers of this newsletter and our first check-in is Friday, June 28 with our first Zoom Sunday, June 30.

THE LISTENING PATH: The Creative Art of Attention Book Club

SIX WEEKS
SIX EMAILS
SIX ZOOMS

(Easy breezy covergirl. Couldn’t help myself.)

We begin reading the book on Sunday, June 23 and we will check in by threads every Friday. Zoom calls are every Sun starting Sunday, June 30 at 1 pm PST/2 pm MST/ 3 pm CST/ 4 pm EST followed by 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28 and 8/4 for 60 minutes. The meetings run like a 12-step meeting where you raise your hand to share, have two minutes, and share your own experience, strength, and hope with the group. You don’t have to participate and every meeting will be recorded. You’ll receive a reminder and the Zoom link each Friday.

HOW TO JOIN US:

• Buy a copy of Julia Cameron’s new book, The Listening Path: The Creative Art of Attention, or check with your local library.

• Become a paying subscriber of Heart’s Content → This is how you’ll get the Friday emails and Zoom links each week. If you know someone who might be interested, please share this email. Just click the share button below.

“Now, in The Listening Path, she takes us into a completely different dimension of creativity: the ability to listen at deeper and deeper levels. As a lifelong student of the art of listening, I can tell you there is nothing quite like this book. I encourage you to read The Listening Path and make use of its life-changing gifts."
--Gay Hendricks, Ph.D. New York Times bestselling author of The Big Leap and Conscious Luck

a watercolor doodle from my journal

“An Artist’s Prayer”

O Great Creator,
We are gathered together in your name
That we may be of greater service to you
And to our fellows.
We offer ourselves to you as instruments.
We open ourselves to your creativity in our lives.
We surrender to you our old ideas.
We welcome your new and more expansive ideas.
We trust that you will lead us.
We trust that it is safe to follow you.
We know you created us and that creativity
Is your nature and our own.
We ask you to unfold our lives
According to your plan, not our low self-worth.
Help us to believe that it is not too late
And that we are not too small or too flawed
To be healed—
By you and through each other—and made whole.
Help us to love one another,
To nurture each other’s unfolding,
To encourage each other’s growth,
And understand each other’s fears.
Help us to know that we are not alone,
That we are loved and lovable.
Help us to create as an act of worship to you.

―Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

It has been decades since I first read this prayer.

All these years later, it continues to speak hope to me. Whether you create through words, images, movement, shapes, sounds, relationships, or any combination, may this prayer comfort you and connect you to the Great Creator and all of us who travel this road alongside you. Hope, creativity and contemplative action are antidotes to despair -our own and the cumulative despair of the world.

With loads of love, I pray blessings for your creativity and an activation of your hope. We have never been more needful of contemplative, loving, creative souls taking inspired action.

Let’s do this together.

xo Mary

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