Meet Julie

I like to make things up.

As a child learning piano –that meant playing scales that were the length of the keyboard–not just seven notes. My teacher remarking: “No one else does that”….(curious)

As a singer songwriter in my 20’s/30’s– that meant writing all original songs-no covers. I swear I just didn’t have it in me to learn someone else’s song enough to make it my own in a new way. I need that blank page to start with.

As a coach, it means I’m not interested in having the “right” answers or telling you what to do. I’m much more of a midwife than a consultant.

As an intuitive painter it means I hate regular art classes. I live for the painting moments that just happen–mysteriously, spontaneously, just showing up, flowing through me. So I am constantly connecting with something I like to call “bigger”.

I do much better in “bigger” spaces. Bigger to me is: spirit infused, spontaneous, alive, a moment that includes me but is more than “me”. I know when I’m connected to “bigger” because I can feel it in my physical body– a direct line to the natural world and the space between things.

I’m a recovering thinker. If thinking my way through life would have given me the freedom I was longing for, I might be a lawyer right now. But that’s not how things worked. My straight A’s brought me headaches. It has always been those little moments of creativity and intuition that have pointed me towards my joy.

When I was 19, suffering through a disappointing experience as a political intern in Washington DC (A good idea that I “made happen”), I found myself sitting on the floor making construction paper collages, all by myself. And something changed. Deep inside I felt a life line. And it is still there.

In West Berlin in the mid eighties, taking a year off of U.C. Berkeley, I turned to drawing with crayons. I drew my face, my self portrait (again, sitting on the floor). Rough, crude, elementary. These drawings MEANT something to me….i still have them.

In 1989, one of the lines in a song I wrote just after leaving San Francisco and arriving in New Mexico— partly grappling with the path of heart I had just chosen—was: “Committed to stay, I decided to leave. Not to worry that’s not for me… Taking a big step, leaving a small one, cause something good is coming with me….” (I’ve included a recording of this song, below, just for fun)

Over and over again I have had to let my “good ideas” go and follow the ones with that good feeling in them–that open doors.

So perhaps you could call me a freedom junkie. Or a recovering thinker. Or even a warrior princess (just kidding), but mostly I continue to learn what it is to be who I truly am. Underneath everything I do in the studio is this prayer–to be who I was born to be.

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