As some of you know, I love TED talks. Some of the best minds in the world speak every year at the TED (short for Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, and these talks are posted for free on the TED website.
This year, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love (which I admit I have not read) gave an inspirational and moving presentation on creativity and following your bliss. I had tears in my eyes at the end.
I’ve watched this before but it’s soooooo worthy of multiple viewings. Thanks for the reminder tweet!
This is beautiful. I love TED talks, but somehow missed this one! Thank you!
She was such an excellent speaker and introduced some really interesting thoughts on creativity. Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
Watching this has been at the corner of my mind for weeks…I’ve been bedridden with shingles (read: stress-induced!) and now I feel like I have been forced to watch it. I nodded my head like an idiot the whole time, and definitely had tears in my eyes at the end. This is exactly what I have begun chasing in the past 6 months, with dance and with illustration. It makes so much sense. THanks for sharing!
This talk moved me so much. I’ve been applying it to all kinds of work– the kind where I’m viscerally moved to create *something* and the not so spiritually rewarding where I show up and still manage to make some magic happen.
I loved this one as well. Criiiied!
I enjoyed the book certainly, and recommend it! It was great to get to know the “voice”, and makes me want to read the book again.
Thank you for posting this video, lots of food for thought!
This is awesome and you’re awesome for sharing it! If any blog is worth ready, its yours 
Thank you for posting this. I’ve been struggling to view dance and other creative endeavors in these sort of terms for some time now: to recognize that expecting genius to manifest is only going to disappoint me, that “my part of the job” as Elizabeth says, is to show up and put in my time.
What was interesting to me was — okay, this is going to sound kind of weird, but I spent several years intentionally submitting to my partner, which for me was an almost monastic, very contemplative and at times transcendent experience. Through these years I had a friend who sort of mentored me, and she helped me to see that the day to day experience of my submission was usually going to consist of things that felt less than ecstatically transcendent, that most of it was going to be clumsily navigating mindsets and ideas that were not joyful and serene to me at the time — but that this “mule” work was necessary for me to reach the moments of bliss because they are part of the same whole.
Anyway, this experience was where I first picked up the idea that it’s OK to do the same thing 99 times and have nothing huge click, become the divine the 100th time, and then the 101st time be back to normal again. Elizabeth’s talk resonated deeply with me because of that, and I really experienced the penny dropping.
By the way, my friend had a book she recommended that I never got around to reading (it’s on hold at my library right now, though). If you haven’t read it you might be interested: it’s called After The Ecstasy, The Laundry.
LOVE TED