The Prosperous Heart: Creating a Life of “Enough”

By Julia Cameron, with Emma Lively

Tarcher/Penguin
Our current world has tutored us not in optimism but in dread. Days and nights are often filled with grim “what if” scenarios that play and replay themselves in our minds, and if we don’t have our own such scenarios, a click of the remote will bring them directly into our living rooms, imported from wherever in the world they are happening.

What should we do? Julia Cameron, beloved creator of The Artist’s Way, has help. She blends her decades of experience in helping artists understand their creative process with sound financial tools in this new 12-week program, designed to enhance our awareness of what it is that we truly value and how we can use that awareness to create a richly satisfying and fiscally responsible life for ourselves, regardless of our bank balance.

One of Cameron’s many stories is that of a friend who had made — and lost — three fortunes. When he had lots of money, he was always anxious about losing it. “He did not have a prosperous heart, a heart that whispered to him, ‘This is enough; you are enough,’” she says, describing how he squandered his wealth trying to buy happiness, using “things” to self-medicate his feelings of unease. Wealth alone, it appears, is not the answer.

“So much of our mythology around money canters on the illusion that if we had ‘more,’ we would be more comfortable and more able to access our creativity. But creativity and prosperity are spiritual matters, not fiscal ones,” she says. “The tools of The Prosperous Heart help people to embrace the life they actually have, where they often find that they already have ‘enough.’” Cameron’s well-known “Morning Pages” are a powerful way to track our dreams, desires, disappointments, and successes; “Counting” helps us track how money flows into and out of our lives. Together, these tools can help us align our spending with our true values and finally experience the satisfaction of “enough.”

“The opposite of prosperity is not poverty. It is anxiety,” asserts Cameron. “When we are possessed of a prosperous heart, we do not act rashly out of anxiety. . . . We respond to life rather than merely react to it. Doing so, we find our lives are filled with choices.”