Simply Authentic...Your Soul Voice is Calling. Express in the World What is Held in Your Heart: Part One

Express in the World What is Held in Your Heart: Part One

I used to be a finish-one-book-before-starting-another kind of gal. I’m not anymore. Often I like to have one fiction and at least one non-fiction book (more and more on my Nook) going at the same time. Now I prefer to spread my attention around a bit, yet focus on each directly while I am there. In fact, I am reading more books right now than I remember ever reading all at once before.

And I am struck by how the same theme keeps surfacing in different formats, by different authors. It goes something like this: Let your outer and inner lives be congruent. Express in the world what is held with love in your heart. You knew what you wanted when you were 7 years old; don’t let the world stop you from recovering and doing it now.

With all this richness, a four part series has presented itself! Here is part one.

In THE VEIN OF GOLD, Julia Cameron describes how she nabbed the title and concept from interviewing the now deceased brilliant film director Martin Ritt. Here is my paraphrase of what Cameron wrote: It was Ritt who directed NORMA RAE, the film that changed our impression of Sally Field from Gidget to an actress of depth and stature. Ritt had a theory about actors and brilliance. He called it the vein of gold. He said that all actors have a certain territory, a certain range, they were born to play, and that is their vein of gold. If you cast an actor within that range they will always give you a brilliant performance. As a writer-director myself, years afterwards, I found my mind circling back to Ritt and his theory. I saw evidence of its validity everywhere, and not just among actors.

I have noticed the same thing, within myself and in observing others. Some things we feel like we “have” to do. Some tickle our interest and we think we wanna try. Others we feel we “must”, or we aren’t truly living.

Should is how others want us to show up in the world—how we’re supposed to think, what we ought to say, what we should or shouldn’t do… Must is different—there aren’t options and we don’t have a choice. Must is who we are, what we believe and what we do when we are alone with our truest, most authentic self. –elle luna.

I send cheers and congratulations to all who choose to mine their inner vein of gold, who decide to live in the must.

Authentically Yours,

Laura