The third of Julia Cameron’s 10 basic principles is this:

“When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the creator’s creativity within us and our lives.”

I love this because it suggests that the “great creator” is within each and every one of us. I have big dreams for myself (as should you), but I frequently experience feelings of discouragement. Although I am conscious of all the support I have in my life, sometimes it’s hard not to feel alone.

Please ponder the following image:

You’ve been plopped all alone in the middle of a vast ocean. This ocean is the only thing which stands in the way of you achieving your dreams and satisfying your ambitions (ie. reaching a shoreline that you cannot see). You kick your feet as hard as you can for what feels like hours and hours. After awhile you stop, certain of your progress (considering all of the effort you have just expended). You look around and are discouraged to find that you haven’t moved at all. Despite all of your hard work, you’ve only been treading water.  Exhausted and desperate you call out to the creator: “Please! Show me the way.” No one responds, but then it suddenly dawns on you  to lay on your back, so you do. You close your eyes, and give your body and soul over to the power of the ocean, allowing the waves to take you wherever they please.  2 hours later you open your eyes and realize that you can see the shore now. You also realize that the tide is working with you, not against you. You realize that you can actually build up momentum in your strokes, if you permit the achievement of your goals to be easier than expected. The ocean wants you to succeed. You are not alone. You are never alone.

I firmly believe that there is a power that exists  in this universe, a power that can be utilized if you let it… if you trust it. I think that this is what this principle is talking about. We live in a world with nearly 7 billion people. It’s no wonder that so many, including myself, feel insignificant, small, or like they don’t matter. It’s overwhelming to consider the amount of people trying desperately to achieve their dreams, and discouraging to think about the competition you face in your own journey. Why should you achieve abundance through the perusal of your passion, when you’ve encountered 20 individuals who have been doing it (whatever that thing is which makes your heart sing) for longer than you have, and have yet to reach any significant level of success. I would argue that the reason those “other people” have yet to make it, is because they have become preoccupied with the competition and the alleged “difficulty” they have convinced themselves is real. By embracing this principle, you must throw away all of your previous conceptions of success, and allow for the possibility that you can be an actor, singer, dancer, writer, or whatever, for no other reason than because you love it.

Allow for the possibility that genius exists inside of you. Perhaps you are the next Meryl Streep, Picasso, Virgina Woolf, Terry Fox: these are/were all just people after all. They are people who acknowledged and embraced the greatness inside of themselves. I believe that we are all geniuses in our own way, and we need only to believe in ourselves for that power to begin to move through us, catapulting our life in a direction we never thought possible.