What happens when life changes, the house grows quiet, and we find ourselves alone with who we really are?

In this episode of The Spiritual Artist Podcast, CJ Miller welcomes harpist, composer, author, and Episcopal priest April Stace for a heartfelt conversation about solitude, creativity, presence, and personal transformation.

Following a divorce and her only child leaving for college, April found herself living alone for the first time. What initially felt overwhelming gradually became an unexpected invitation to rediscover herself. Through music, journaling, gardening, and a solitary train journey across the country, she began exploring the freedom of listening to her own desires.

April shares how these experiences inspired her seventh studio album, Aphelion, a musical memoir exploring solitude, loss, and the surprising ways distance can bring us home.

Together, CJ and April explore the difference between loneliness and solitude, the sacred practice of listening, and how creativity emerges when we stop forcing outcomes and become fully present. They also discuss April's experiences as a hospital chaplain, the transformative power of compassionate attention, and the importance of allowing ourselves to change.

About April Stace

April Stace is a harpist, composer, writer, Episcopal priest, and Associate Professor of Practical Theology at The General Theological Seminary in New York City. A lifelong musician, April has released seven studio albums, including Aphelion, an original solo harp album exploring solitude, loss, creativity, and renewal. She is also the author of several books, including White Knuckle Love: A Memoir of Holding, which draws upon her experiences as a hospital chaplain. Across her music, writing, teaching, and ministry, April explores how art can open us to mystery, deepen our attention, and help us feel less alone.

Explore April's music, books, and creative work:

https://www.aprilstace.com

Learn more about Aphelion:

https://www.aprilstace.com/aphelion

Want to learn more about CJ Miller? Check out his Spiritual Artist Retreats, 1:1 Personal Coaching, and Speaking Engagements at www.spiritualartisttoday.com. His retreats are designed to help you reconnect with your Creative Intelligence and express your true artistic voice. You can also find his upcoming schedule there, and his book, The Spiritual Artist, is available on Amazon.

What if becoming a better artist isn't about taking more classes, mastering more techniques, or learning all the rules? What if the most important thing you can do is simply keep creating?

In this Spiritual Artist pep talk, CJMiller shares a realization that came to him while painting: creativity naturally evolves when we give ourselves permission to explore. Through the story of another artist's journey and his own experience of feeling creatively stuck, CJ explores how frustration, experimentation, and even boredom can lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

Discover why your creative voice emerges through practice, why you don't need to know everything before you begin, and how trusting the Creative Field of Intelligence can help you move beyond judgment and rediscover the joy of making art.

Whether you paint, draw, sculpt, or simply want to reconnect with your creativity, this is your reminder: You don't have to get it right. You just have to keep going.

Learn more about CJ's Spiritual Artist retreats and workshops at https://www.spiritualartisttoday.com

Explore The Spiritual Artist by CJMiller, available on Amazon.

Want to learn more about CJ Miller? Check out his Spiritual Artist Retreats, 1:1 Personal Coaching, and Speaking Engagements at www.spiritualartisttoday.com. His retreats are designed to help you reconnect with your Creative Intelligence and express your true artistic voice. You can also find his upcoming schedule there, and his book, The Spiritual Artist, is available on Amazon.

Where does your creative voice come from—and how do you learn to trust it?

Playwright Drew Larimore joins CJ Miller for a conversation about intuition, spiritual guidance, and the mysterious process of bringing creative work into form. Drew shares how experiences with past-life regression helped him see writing as a thread running through his life and how he works with spiritual guides, meditation, and intuition as part of his creative practice.

CJ and Drew explore what it feels like to move beyond the analytical mind and into a more receptive creative state. They discuss the difference between channeling and automatic writing, how to discern which ideas are worth pursuing, the anxiety that can accompany the creative process, and why an artist's unique voice must first be embraced by the artist.

Ultimately, their conversation arrives at a larger idea: creativity isn't a frivolous pursuit. It can be a sacred journey.

About Drew Larimore

Drew Larimore is a playwright whose work explores family, identity, relationships, and the American South. His play Cannibals of McGower County premiered at TheaterWorks Hartford as the first work in his Southern Trilogy. His play Upstate was a Blue Ink Award finalist and winner of the Oxford Script Competition, and he is a former Artist in Residence at The Studios of Key West.

Drew is currently developing the next work in his Southern Trilogy, The Sterling Sparkler Savior, with actress Gates McFadden. He also writes about spirituality, intuition, and the creative process through his Substack, Made Manifest: On Creating.

Learn more about Drew and his work at DrewLarimore.com.

Want to learn more about CJ Miller? Check out his Spiritual Artist Retreats, 1:1 Personal Coaching, and Speaking Engagements at www.spiritualartisttoday.com. His retreats are designed to help you reconnect with your Creative Intelligence and express your true artistic voice. You can also find his upcoming schedule there, and his book, The Spiritual Artist, is available on Amazon.

What if your artwork isn’t something to analyze or fix, but something that can help you recognize yourself? During a recent Spiritual Artist Retreat in Santa Fe, I took part in an exercise I usually facilitate for others: physically walking a shape I had discovered in nature. What happened surprised me. In the rigidity of a stone and the delicate lichen growing across its surface, I recognized something about the way I move through my own life—and I felt that recognition in my body before I could completely explain it with words.

In this episode, I explore how line, shape, movement, poetry, and intuitive artmaking can reveal the patterns that make each of us unique. The purpose isn't to judge what appears or decide that something needs to be changed. It is to recognize what is here. From that awareness, we become at choice: we can embrace what we discover, change it, explore its opposite, or simply allow it to become part of our unique creative expression. This is the heart of my Spiritual Artist practice—creating the conditions in which you can recognize yourself through creativity and allow that recognition to leave its mark on your art.

Want to learn more about CJ Miller? Check out his Spiritual Artist Retreats, 1:1 Personal Coaching, and Speaking Engagements at www.spiritualartisttoday.com. His retreats are designed to help you reconnect with your Creative Intelligence and express your true artistic voice. You can also find his upcoming schedule there, and his book, The Spiritual Artist, is available on Amazon.

As artists, it’s easy to let recognition, rejection, awards, and sales tell us whether our work is “good.” In this episode, I share a very recent experience with a juried art show—one that stirred up all those very human questions about being seen, being recognized, and wondering whether anyone really understands what we’re doing.

But Spirit had another lesson waiting for me.

Our work isn’t validated because it wins an award, and it isn’t validated because someone buys it. We create because something happens when we’re truly aligned with ourselves—when we feel the rightness of what is moving through us.

Maybe creating isn’t really about other people seeing you.

Maybe it’s about you seeing you. You feeling you. That’s why you create.

Want to learn more about CJ Miller? Check out his Spiritual Artist Retreats, 1:1 Personal Coaching, and Speaking Engagements at www.spiritualartisttoday.com. His retreats are designed to help you reconnect with your Creative Intelligence and express your true artistic voice. You can also find his upcoming schedule there, and his book, The Spiritual Artist, is available on Amazon.

While working on his painting this morning, CJ was inspired by a message and decided to share it with his listeners. CJ shares his experience with his tremor and how it has formed a relationship between him and his art. It is only by accepting all of yourself—including those things you may consider shortcomings—that you can expand your creative expression. We bring our complete selves to the creative process.

If you’ve been avoiding creativity because of some perceived limitation, consider how you might continue creating despite it—or perhaps even because of it. CJ has learned to develop a style of painting that includes his tremor, and it has become part of what makes his work uniquely his own.

What is includes the tremor, your body, your circumstances, the paint, the unexpected mark—and even what comes back from the creative field. You’re not overcoming reality in order to create.

CJ also explores how we are in relationship with the creative field of intelligence. That’s right—we are constantly receiving guidance, messages, and feedback from the creative field. How we choose to respond is key. Do we move with the flow, or do we resist it? Either way creates an outcome, but one way empowers us.

Choose relationship. And watch your creativity grow.

Want to learn more about CJ Miller? Check out his Spiritual Artist Retreats, 1:1 Personal Coaching, and Speaking Engagements at www.spiritualartisttoday.com. His retreats are designed to help you reconnect with your Creative Intelligence and express your true artistic voice. You can also find his upcoming schedule there, and his book, The Spiritual Artist, is available on Amazon.

CJ explores the difference between deterministic computing, where instructions lead to defined outcomes, and probabilistic AI, which uses learned patterns to predict what is most likely to come next. And suddenly, AI begins to look surprisingly human.

How often do we do the same thing?

We bring our histories, assumptions, habits, and emotional patterns into a conversation and begin predicting what someone means before they have finished speaking. We formulate our response while the other person's mouth is still moving. Instead of responding to what is actually happening, we respond to what we expect to happen.

True listening asks something different of us.

For the Spiritual Artist, the practice is to align, listen, and then respond. To become present enough to notice when prediction has replaced perception.

Perhaps one of the unexpected things AI can teach us isn't found in its extraordinary capabilities, but in its limitations. By seeing the machinery of prediction so clearly in AI, we may begin to recognize the same machinery operating within ourselves.

And yes, Soma eventually calmed down.

Want to learn more about CJ Miller? Check out his Spiritual Artist Retreats, 1:1 Personal Coaching, and Speaking Engagements at www.spiritualartisttoday.com. His retreats are designed to help you reconnect with your Creative Intelligence and express your true artistic voice. You can also find his upcoming schedule there, and his book, The Spiritual Artist, is available on Amazon.

In this episode, CJ Miller explores how the overwhelming flood of information in today's world is calling us into a new stage of human development: The Age of Listening.

Drawing from Paul Baker's Integration of Abilities, CJ traces the evolution of human communication—from the Storytelling Age, to the Gutenberg Age of books and external authority, to today's Information Age, where knowledge is abundant but discernment has become essential.

Rather than simply collecting more information, CJ suggests that our greatest challenge is learning to listen intentionally. True listening is not merely intellectual. It includes the wisdom of the body, the heart, intuition, feeling, and conscious awareness.

Using his creative philosophy of Align. Listen. Create., CJ explains that creativity—and life itself—begins by first aligning with the greater field of Creative Intelligence. Instead of constantly telling life what we want, he invites us to become quiet enough to hear what life may be asking of us.

The conversation explores:

• Why information alone no longer leads to wisdom.
• How intentional attention can transform the way we experience the world.
• The difference between listening and defending our beliefs.
• Why intuition, feeling, and embodied awareness deserve a place alongside reason.
• How creativity becomes a practice of participating with life rather than controlling it.

Ultimately, this episode is an invitation to move beyond reacting to the endless noise around us and into a more grounded, compassionate way of living—one where we align, listen deeply, and create from the intelligence already flowing through us.

"The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear." — Rumi

Want to learn more about CJ Miller? Check out his Spiritual Artist Retreats, 1:1 Personal Coaching, and Speaking Engagements at www.spiritualartisttoday.com. His retreats are designed to help you reconnect with your Creative Intelligence and express your true artistic voice. You can also find his upcoming schedule there, and his book, The Spiritual Artist, is available on Amazon.