Paula Walker

"My name is Paula Walker, and I'm a filmmaker. I'm a director, and I started my first film wanting to dance. My grandmother, who's also been part of my guidance, a Black lady who was a school teacher, she gave me $6,000 in a paper bag to match Warner Brothers' money. That's how I started my company, Stradle Films, and we went on to make millions, but it all started from that paper bag that she gave me."

"It hasn't been easy. I've faced many challenges, many dark things, many things that make me go why me, why am I facing this challenge? But as you keep facing challenges, and you have to get up and move forward, and you want to keep your light, you start understanding that there is a home base that's internal, that's inside of you, and only you can find it and only you can hold it."

"Your purpose, you might know that you want to be a painter, but finding your voice as a painter is not easy. It's a process of cultivation, and that process of cultivating yourself as a human being involves all the things we need to cultivate, like sensitivity, consciousness, a sense of beauty, and then going deep inside to see what the soil is, what's inside of you, and then putting that out over and over again. A lot of times, when you have a unique voice, you're going to be rejected. But once you get it, once you get your destiny and your voice, you have it, and no one can take it away from you."

"After numerous disputes and failures, and trying to be a warrior and losing so many things, I had to make a choice. Which door did I want to live in? Do I want to live in the door of fear, suffering, and pain, or do I want to live in this world where I feel more vital? I had to learn that it didn't matter if I wanted or not. I could still be in this place. I could choose to be in this place as much as I wanted to. That's what I'm working on now."

"My aunt, I had an old aunt, and I think the first time I really tuned into it, she was really old. She would take me to the grocery store, and we would pick out fruit, like watermelon or melons, and she would have me smell it. Slowly and surely, you would be able to get to the fruit and smell which one had the sweetest taste. That's source. There's source. There's vitality. She would say, smell this, smell that. You develop your sense of smell, your sense of connection to the Earth. You sense the time, you hear the wind. You start with nature, and then suddenly, you feel this vitality inside of you. You turn off your mind, and the more you turn off your mind and listen to these internal things around us, the more it comes to you."

"The advice I would give to somebody looking for their heart and their path is to sink deeply into themselves. I think we don't have feeling in this culture. We don't feel our way into things, we think our way into things. But to find your path and define your purpose, you have to almost break away a little bit from the world. You have to go back to what inspired you. I always say, go back to what inspired you. Go back to the thing that sparked you, what was the thing that made you want to be a filmmaker, dancer, painter, or singer? What was the moment? You follow that, it's like your ancestral seed."

"My grandmother, who's also been part of my guidance, a Black lady who was a school teacher, I asked her for money. She gave me a certain amount, but I needed more. She asked for my business plan. I did my storyboards and laid out everything I was shooting, and she gave me $6,000 in a paper bag to match Warner Brothers' money. That's how I started my company, Stradle Films, and we went on to make millions, but it all started from that paper bag that she gave me. I said, Jeff, I want to direct, and he said sure. He gave me a track, and I found a producer, and we made this video. Pina Bausch was one of those pivotal people that influenced me as a director, as a filmmaker."

"Dance has been the constant road, my path, and then it took me to filmmaking and writing stories, always through that lens. There are things you can do, like dance, that help me. When I'm in class, I feel like I'm just tapping into Source, like I'm just plugging in, like an iPhone, like bam, I'm here. I had to slowly learn how to turn off that critical voice and feel the music, go to the heartbeat, the pulse of the music, and turn off my critical voice. Say, okay, I'm going to make a mistake, but I'm going to do this from inside of me, from my own source, from my own feeling. In that way, I slowly started to learn how to put things together and keep my own self alive."

"By living in my purpose and by living in my calling, I feel like I did have an effect on the people around me, but I have to say it's taken me almost my whole lifetime to have the confidence and to be able to do the internal work. It hasn't been easy. I've faced many challenges, many dark things, many things that make me go why me, why am I facing this challenge? But as you keep facing challenges, and you have to get up and move forward, and you want to keep your light, you start understanding that there is a home base that's internal, that's inside of you, and only you can find it and only you can hold it. It's taken me my whole life, and I don't feel like I've written it to where I wanted to go, but I'm still writing it, I'm still here."

"When I'm talking about Source and finding your alignment, I can explain it as feeling like you've found home, like you've found your home inside of yourself, this thing that you carry that's your home base. What I want to say about being in alignment is that once I found that alignment, being out of alignment did not feel good. It felt so bad. It felt so wrong. Being in alignment felt vital and alive. It felt like I was electric, buzzing like a bee. I started cultivating and working to be in that place because even if things don't go right in the world, I can be in that place. You are so alive. You feel the direction, you feel where you have to go, you know what you have to be. You're just happy. It's like bubbles, it's like bubbles that are going, or it's like a circuit, like energy, pure circuitry going through you."

"I remember I was in Italy, standing around, there was a dance event. I went with my husband, and it was Pina Bausch, and it blew my mind. Years later, I was standing in New York, getting out of a meeting, and I saw a sign that Pina Bausch was performing. I got in a car and said, take me there. She was performing that night at that moment. I jumped in the car. It was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The performance had already started. I ran up the stairs and got to the place. The box office was closed. I knocked, and the guy came out. He said, the show has already started, all the tickets are done, there are no tickets. I said I came all the way from Los Angeles to see this. He gave me a ticket, said it would be front row. It was the last time she performed. She died right after that. I think about that experience and that time often. I feel like because I was guided to that last performance, it was guidance telling me that I was being guided by spirit, something higher, to give me the richness of her and the world that she had created."

"Your purpose, you might know that you want to be a painter, but finding your voice as a painter is not easy. It's a process of cultivation, and that process of cultivating yourself as a human being involves all the things we need to cultivate, like sensitivity, consciousness, a sense of beauty, and then going deep inside to see what the soil is, what's inside of you, and then putting that out over and over again. A lot of times, when you have a unique voice, you're going to be rejected because what we're taught is basically to make things as a product. Marketing yourself and finding a niche is different from finding your voice, and the voice is something no one can ever take away from you. It's a deep cultivation. As a commercial director, I found a voice, I found a style, but in commercials it becomes so much more about following something that's already preset. That was a very tricky period for me because I felt like my voice was being shut down, curtailed, lessened. But once you get it, once you get your destiny and your voice, you have it, and no one can take it away from you."

"I think it's very important. I knew when I was six years old. I was taken to a dance class, and I felt like I was where I needed to be. I remember I was dancing, and it felt like something opened up from above and hit me like a ray, a shaft of light, and I just knew I was supposed to be there. I remember I was in the Augo Flicker School of Ballet, practicing for a recital. I was six years old, and I really wasn't sure I was supposed to be there because I felt like I was not skinny, not white, not blonde, not pretty. But that shaft of light told me that I was supposed to be. It was hard, really hard. My parents didn't want me to dance. I immediately got in the car with my mom. She was a writer and very aware of a lot of things, and I just said I wanted to come here every day and study. I had my mission statement that I wanted to be a prima ballerina. My parents were really concerned. My dad was a doctor. They tried to block me from going. I remember we had a recital. I was put in the front row and I made a mistake. My mom had the teacher tell me that I wasn't suitable for ballet, and it broke my heart."

"There is guidance that we have if we can tap into it, if we can believe it. That spiritual alignment that everyone is talking about, we have to share with people, it's real, it does exist. I feel like I've been guided as a Black woman, and even though there have been defeats and serious setbacks, my guidance never leaves me. It's my North Star. That's how we have to live. The documentaries I've done, one Spirit took me to Haiti, Spirit took me to Selma, Alabama, where I'm from, where my family was from. It's like you're riding a wave as opposed to fighting a wave. Now what I'm learning how to do is to keep it going and to keep moving things forward. It doesn't feel like work anymore because I just go to Spirit, and all these things that have been inside of me just bubble up, and I go."