Hello there, I am Fern Cotton and this is Happy Place. The podcast offers practical advice

to help you look after yourself and those around you. Today I'm meeting Julia Cameron.

Perfectionism is a stalling device. We find ourselves wanting to do something perfectly

and we deny ourselves the right to attempt something. We deny ourselves the right to take

what we might want to call a practice shot and what I find with perfectionism is that it

creates great sorrow. Now Julia is the best-selling author of more than 40 books, 40, both fiction

and nonfiction. She's a poet, a songwriter, a filmmaker, a playwright, honestly the list of

things she's achieved is absolutely incredible. As a listener of this podcast though you might

know her best as the woman who wrote the artist's way. I talk about this book all the time. I've

used quotes from it when I've been into other people, I've used techniques from it to improve

how I work. I'm pretty obsessed with the book. I've read it twice, it's amazing. You might already

know that I've been getting back into doing my morning pages which is where you write three

free hand pages as soon as you get out of bed. We'll talk more about the purpose of those pages

in this chat today. Now we also touch on prayer, which is something that comes out of Julia's

new book Seeking Wisdom. I've been really delving deep into the world of non-religious prayer recently

so find it a really helpful tool to feel connected and to feel supported I guess as well and to just

sort of air stuff that's going on in my head. I found it really therapeutic so you're going to hear

more about that today. Also I do mention this in the chat but Julia throughout her books uses the

word God. If you are not religious do not let that put you off she uses it in my understanding in a

non-religious way but you can use any terminology you like or you might not have found the right words

for you and that is also absolutely okay. I like the word universe, I don't mind higher power,

I'm still figuring it out too so worry not about semantics. Now if you're a regular listener to

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