Aligning With Your Creativity and Being the Author of Your Life with Cris Ramos Greene
Cris Ramos Greene, Spanish American writer about travel, relationships, and Miami culture, and author of Embrace That Girl*, joined me for a conversation on writing being her vocation, a gift always meant to do good, overcoming the fear of just starting without having to know it all, spirituality in the creative process, and what she learned while writing her book. She also takes us through what it was like to discover her calling, embrace it, and put it to practice.
Who is Cris Ramos Greene?
She's a Spanish American writer whose writing about travel, relationships, and Miami culture has been published in Thought Catalog, The New Tropic, BuzzFeed Community, and Modern Brown Girl. After working for several Miami-based advertising agencies specializing in reaching the Hispanic market for clients like Dunkin Donuts, the US Census, and Ford, Green switched gears and forged a career in Miami's dynamic art world.
She's a perfect example of someone who's tapped into her creativity. Cris lives and works out of her cozy mountain home in Bryson City, NC where she is accompanied by her husband Jaime and pups Bo and Mia. She can be found sipping wine every weekday at 5 pm on her porch.
When Ideas Come Courting
Cris is the author of Embrace That Girl* and describes it as a “love letter to myself in my 20s, I had a really tough time accepting myself.” But she always knew she wanted to be a writer, for her, it’s even more than a career, “it literally feels like a vocation for me. And even that was hard for me to accept.” Much like many of us, her 20s were full of mistakes and missteps that are embarrassing and impactful even now. Her book begins and ends on “the eve of my 30th birthday,” and she describes it as a love letter because she was able to look at those mistakes with the feeling of empowerment and knowing “that I am thriving, because of those things, not in spite of those things.”
Our gifts should also be our passions, our forms of personal self-expression. Writing is both Cris’s gift and her coping mechanism, “I don't know what I'm doing or what I'm feeling unless I write it down.” But we also have an obligation to use them to try to help the world or those around us. Women, in general, struggle with how much of our stories we feel like we can really share. Cris struggled with this while she was writing Embrace That Girl*, “I changed people's names, but really, it's a story about my life and that involves other characters. So before I went to write this, this story, my story, I got really clear with myself on what I felt was fair to share. And I feel like I should be able to talk about my experiences and what shaped me as a person.”
We live in fear of offending other people, but we should be able to tell our stories. “However, as a big asterisk I also feel like my own personal code of ethics and morals was that I wasn't going to write about any situation that I wasn't feeling like I processed it. And I was coming from a place of authorship.” Cris looked at her stories as experiences that impacted her or hurt her but was able to do so without pointing fingers at anyone.
Women tend to dance around just to fit within parameters. But when it comes to creativity, you have to kind be of breaking those boundaries a little bit. As you’re reading or listening, is there something you know you want to create, but maybe you just haven’t been brave enough to it? So how do you know I’m meant to do this and I’m meant to create this? For Cris, we always “have the answers inside of ourselves. And if we all listen in, we've been probably getting subtle and maybe not so subtle intuition and clues from our higher selves, the universe, you know, whatever you subscribe to.”
Maybe you’re listening to a podcast and something catches your attention and it stays with you and continues to call out to you. Or maybe it’s something that’s just kind of listening. So if we can be quiet, and we can “listen, we know that the work is calling us. I'm actually getting this from Big Magic*, as like an idea who's courting you. When you're getting rewarded, you know, when you're having the thoughts like, that would be really cool and it's really exciting. It almost feels like being in a new relationship where you have all these possibilities. I think that we get courted by ideas often. And we know when it's happening, that's what I think people should pay attention to.”
And then we get to the hard part: deciding. Cris thinks of it as going into “contract with an idea,” now that she is more in tune with herself and her creativity, she listens to the “ideas that are courting me. And sometimes I don't have time for that idea right now, but I don't want you to go away. The way Liz Gilbert describes it in Big Magic* is ideas as their own individual entities. And if it's not going to manifest through you, it'll sort of float in the ether and land in someone else.” That’s why you might have had those moments where you feel like someone else wrote the book you wanted to write. Or someone has the same idea at the same time that you do. So listen and take that chance, ideas can be fleeting, especially when they come to you in busy moments when you can’t write them down and then you forget them. “Listen to your intuition. And take advantage when those ideas are courting you to do it. It's your calling.”
So what if you want to write a book? Do you need some kind of mechanism already in place? Or should you just start? Cris says your intention is the most important thing, not just in writing a book but in a lot of things “that you want to accomplish, it's legitimately 1 to 10% mechanics. So the how to write a book, how to do this, it’s about 90 to 100% your intention and determination to do it.”
She had never written a book before Embrace That Girl*. She had experience in writing advertising and blog posts, but those are nowhere near the same thing as writing a book. But she just “dove in and started writing my story. And then, over time, I also began to do research on how to tell a better story. But it is just so much easier to get that first crappy draft, even if you're a terrific writer. It's so much easier to take a break, step away, read a book on how to write a really great story, and then go back to something that exists. And then infuse that new knowledge that you have with the passion that was put on the page in the first place.” If you have an idea now, start now, write it down, make a plan. If you just keep reading books and watching videos on HOW to do it, you’ll never actually do it.
Being Open to Trying Whatever
Growing up in Miami, Cris was surrounded by a community that practiced an Afro-Cuban religion, Vidia. Her family didn’t personally practice it, but she always saw it around her. Vidia is “essentially a melding of Christianity, but it has mysticism in it. There are different deities. It was born in Cuba, from people that came from Africa, but then also the Spanish people that were there, and clearly at the time instilling Catholicism. So now it's like this kind of weird mix that a lot of Cuban people now practice in Miami.”
In her twenties, Cris went through a couple of “ruts” that lead her to eventually deciding to just try whatever as a commitment to herself. She reached a point of “surrender, where I just became really open-minded and thought, I'm going to try it. So, I went to a tarot card reader and I got my cards read. It was basically to take a shower and it was supposed to be symbolic like showering away bad energy. I put my perfume in a bowl of water, which I was indicated to do. And then all I was told to do was you're going to take this bath, and you're going to wash away what you don't want. And then you're going to walk out renewed.” At the time, she was pretty skeptical, but she was told that there was no point in even doing it if she didn’t believe it, so she decided “I'm going to make this a symbolic washing away of all of the things that are holding me back, which have been mostly myself. All of the stories that I'm making.”
But her takeaway from the experience wasn’t all that great, so she decided to try Vidia. “ I simply believed. I was like, okay, you know, what, why not, this is gonna work. And then things in my life genuinely started falling into place in a very quick time after that. I just feel like it probably had a lot more to do with my belief. You know, it was like, this is just a talisman, this bucket. It could have been whatever, it didn't matter. I believe that when I put the bucket over myself, and I came out that things were going to be different and that I had watched something bad away. And it was my belief, in my honest opinion, that made that so. And also I don't judge anyone anymore, because I'm like, you do what you need to do.”
The Magic in the Creative Process
Even now, Cris is having conversations with herself about her beliefs in the world of spiritualism, with her “my place in the world and how I see existence even and so I feel like where I'm at is somewhere in the middle.” Cris mentioned earlier that mechanics is only 1 to 10%, but that does not mean that it’s 0%. You can manifest or pray or say affirmations, but there still has to be some type of “committed action. But I do believe that there is magic. And so I think in that sense, I might be a little more woo, but still pretty pragmatic. But I do believe in magic, and I feel like as a creative, that's what has been rooting me.”
Creativity and the creative process are otherworldly, it’s “really spiritual. And I think any artists will tell you this, no matter the discipline, we're touching on something that is divine.” The way your ideas and inspiration come to you and blossom and then one day you sit down and “everything flows out of you in a way where maybe it even feels like did that flow through me? Was it mine?” But some days those ideas and that flow don’t show up, even if you do. But “that and that unpredictability. That's the magic part. And the part that I can't, I can't really fully explain.” With creativity, there is that magic but we still have to show up and do the work. We can’t just write those affirmations and goals and then meditate on them, there’s still work involved, and “inspiration finds you when you're showing up to do the work.”
Finding answers and seeking guidance all starts inside of you with the decision “the firm, genuine, I feel it in my bones, not just intellectually want it and understand I need it, but I'm not really being it. That decision is the most important thing. When you're when we make that for ourselves, I honestly think the right books fall off the shelf, especially if we're willing to be open.” And yes, that decision can be difficult or “get you stuck,” especially for the “go-getters,” but “that decision that you make will create mountains and ships more than if you're simply going through the motions, but you don't genuinely believe it.” Cris has always had a desire for self-development, but it was the firm decision to “get myself out of that hole, to be the best version of myself and really start making the changes in my life that I wanted to see,” that opportunities to do just that started popping up. She attended her first self-help seminar when she was thirty because a friend had taken it and she had “noticed some changes in her.” She went to see a psychic because someone at work suggested going during a lunch break, and normally “I'd tell you no way, this is crazy.” So making that decision automatically triggers “something in the universe. I think we're in a web, in my opinion, we're all connected to each other.” And with that decision comes the freedom to be as open-minded as possible to just trying things and seeing what happens, “what's the worst that could?”
Remember You Can Do Things
For Cris, writing her book was a huge milestone, and the biggest lesson for her was that she “can do things. I lived my life by these little agreements that I made, that I couldn't finish things, that these things can happen for other people, but not me.” When she finally finished the book, the moment was somewhat underwhelming because she realized that she had spent so much time living in that fear that she created for herself, but she was capable of it the whole time. “And I now try to remember that lesson, as I want to do the next thing in my life, I remember that I can do things”
Cris wrote Embrace That Girl with who she was in the moments that felt like “it feels like I'm running this race that I can't beat ever,” in mind. She wanted it to be the book she would have wanted to read in those moments that she felt like “everyone's always ahead of me, and they make it look effortless.” She wants readers to feel like they aren’t alone. To feel like God, and “God” is different things for different people, “always has your back. And it's true that if you are simply yourself and you show up in you relax, then things come to you. But also acknowledge your very powerful role in co-creation.
It's not all God, God is there, but we're here to have a human experience. And part of that is us creating those experiences for ourselves.” We are so much more powerful than we think, we have control in creating “every single circumstance in our life.” That lesson has changed Cris’s life and she hopes that Embrace That Girl provides that spark or that shift of “maybe I am creating this. I mean, that would just make my entire life, it would make it worth it, if even a few people got that feeling from the book.”
To listen to the full conversation click the links beneath the main photo to listen on your favorite platform!
Affirmation
I intend to embrace the creative energies around me and bring to life the ideas that are courting me.
Links From the Show
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