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transcending transition

New life, new wings, new opportunities – making the most of it

June 11, 2018

We are more than the sum of our wounds.

Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted

new life

A Quiet Writing deep-dive Tarot Narrative each Monday to share intuitive guidance, wisdom and insights from aligned books – for the week and anytime…

This week: new life, new wings, new opportunities + making the most of them

Theme for the week beginning 11 June

The underlying theme for this week to guide our overall focus is from Lisa McLoughlin’s Life Design Cards deck – #18 Produce no waste.

After last week’s message – Taking a leap of faith with structure + the gift of surprise  – this week is all about moving more fully into that new life. If you’ve been following along with my daily Tarot Narratives (now on IG stories @writingquietly), you may have  noticed the Five of Cups popping up a few times (3 times in the past 8 days!) accompanied by the Eight of Swords in one instance. All of that seemed to be about not getting lost in disappointment or grief, in what could have been or what has been lost.

This card, “Produce no waste”, helps us to reflect on where we might be losing energy, effort or time as a consequence of what we’ve been through. What habits has it led to? Have we become adept at putting things off instead of actually doing them? Are we wallowing in something rather than moving on?

new life

Advice from the Life Design Cards Guidebook for #18 is:

Explore your use of time. Establish what needs to be maintained in your life. Scrutinize your perceived priorities. Look out for signs of procrastination. Is there anything else being wasted?

What can we waste: time, opportunities, connection, energy, resources, space… so many things.

Today’s narrative, led by this card, encourages us to see where we are moving to and how we are moving there.  We are looking ahead rather than behind to check we are making the most of the opportunities of this new life.

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 11 June

new life

Tarot Narrative: 

You’ve come a long way through and out. Take some time to celebrate but reflect also on what you can do with this time, your resources, what you’ve built so far. The unfamiliar beckons as a way of taking yourself, your creativity and projects into a new life with new wings guiding you to a higher space.

Cards: Six of Wands and Nine of Coins (Pentacles) from the Spolia Tarot and #50 No Place Like Home in protection (reversed) position from Wisdom of the Oracle.

Moving on and into new life ways

Last week we had the Emperor and Seven of Wands encouraging us to take some risks and a leap of faith in our creative projects. The Emperor especially prompted work with structure and an overall plan or in Jung/Myers-Briggs terms, some Extraverted Thinking – some frameworks and order.

I don’t know what your week was like this past week but I achieved some major goals. This included some that had been begging to be finished for a while. I just had to put a bit of structure in place and do the work and, voilà, long term goals were achieved.

I’m feeling pretty good about that but as this week’s narrative asks us, what does that moment of satisfaction and achievement bring with it? Is it time to sit back and do less? Time to celebrate and kick up our heels? The Six of Wands and Nine of Coins combine with a strong message this week to say: yes stop, have a quiet celebration but keep moving. Appreciate how far you have come but it’s also time to keep doing and seeing what the next steps are. 

six of wands

Where will you go with your new set of wings?

The Six of Wands from The Wild Unknown Tarot sums up the message of this card so well:

The obstacles have been relentless, but now is not the time to look back upon them. The more pressing question is: where will you go with your new set of wings?

Whatever you have been through recently, it’s time to look forward. It’s an opportunity to celebrate and recognise the wins, in case you missed noticing them. But then to see where they will take you.

The ‘No Place Like Home’ card from the Wisdom of the Oracle deck has turned up two days in a row in the same position – protection or reversed. This card in this position counsels us not to get too comfortable and not to sit on our laurels. (Note also the laurel imagery in the Spolia Nine of Coins card!) Especially if we have been through a tough time, it’s easy to develop the habit of putting things off. We are encouraged via the Wisdom of the Oracle for this card to do something different and find a new path:

Choose something unfamiliar and trust that there you will find a new normal that supports your spirit.

new life

This image via pexels.com

Book notes: New life and moving on from pain

It is true that we have to do a good deal of inner work before we have anything meaningful to offer the world; it is true too that we must recognise our wounds and incorporate them into the ground of our becoming. But we need also to stop licking them. We are more than the sum of our wounds.

Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted

The initial theme card about focusing on producing no waste suggested a focus on wasted time and other resources. It’s a fine balance between moving through pain to new life and getting lost on the way. It might be getting stuck in the habit of loss or disappointment. This means we can lose energy in negative ways rather than channelling it into the positive.

It could be getting carried away with celebrating our successes and missing the next opportunities. Perhaps it’s taking the safe way instead of the unfamiliar, the “exquisite risks” that last week’s message also suggested to us. We might choose heading home instead of the opportunity of a new adventure.

new life

How can you move into new life in a new way?

So how can you move into new life in a new way, making the most of new opportunities?

The Six of Wands and Nine of Coins are both positive cards: we are rising up, feeling a sense of victory. We are finally feeling self-sufficient, independent, achieving creatively. But what are the next steps? There’s a sense of needing to do something different and unfamiliar to ride this new wave with optimism.

I’ve made big leaps in the past week or so. I’ve finalised my Jung/Myers-Briggs Personality Stories personality assessment, ecourse and coaching package. I am currently testing it with some fellow life coaches and a friend who is also a Myers-Briggs practitioner. Then I’ll be able to fine-tune it with feedback and release it more widely. After a long-term investment in my skills and this project, I’m ready to step into it. This week’s narrative is encouraging me to think a little differently with how I work now I’ve reached this point. Where am I going with these new wings? Am I wasting time and energy anywhere? Am I aligned? Am I making the most of what I’ve created?

Tips for moving ahead with new life opportunities

Here are some questions and tips for moving ahead with optimism into new life opportunities. Take time to reflect and journal on any that catch your attention:

  • aligning your time: Where are you wasting time? Where have you developed habits from another time that aren’t serving you now?
  • do things differently: As the saying goes, if you always do what you’ve done, you’ll always get what you’ve got. So how can you do things differently and embrace the unfamiliar in your work? What course or book might help you break new ground? Or where can you move ahead without any courses or books, instead creating your own?
  • notice where you are stuck: Where are you doing things because you’ve always done them that way? Check in and see if it’s still serving you.
  • the “new normal”:  Which parts of your life feel like the “new normal” you want more of? In getting to this new phase, what helped you? Who helped you? How can you do more of that?
  • go outside your comfort zone and natural preferences – This was mentioned last week but the unfamiliar keeps popping up as a source of new opportunities now. Do the opposite of what you normally do and see what arises for you! Go to an event if you are introvert. Stay inside and explore your creative thoughts more if you tend to want to go out a lot.
  • let go: There is an element of letting go of the past and other attachments in all of this too. This post with some great quotes on letting go just popped up so sharing it with you.

new life

Thoughts for this week

Celebrate where you’ve got to – all that hard work and vision over time. But don’t lose the momentum and keep focused on the new. Reframing and resetting offer wonderful opportunities for rising even more strongly now.

Love to hear your thoughts!

I’d love to what this message of moving ahead with a new life, new wings and new opportunities sings to you! All best wishes for a week of celebrating how hard we’ve worked but also moving ahead into a new normal with an optimistic mind-set.

May you find that taking a few moments to celebrate and reflect brings new opportunities and new ways of working. And let me know what you think of this post and this weekly Tarot Narrative!

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You can work with me to help tap into that inner wisdom and magic guidance. Free 30-45 minute coaching consults chats are available so please get in touch at terri@quietwriting.com to talk further. I’d love to be a guide alongside to help you conduct creativity and magic with spirit and heart in your own unique way. And to help you ignite the psychological links in your passions!

You can download my free 94-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below.  You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

You might also enjoy:

Finishing on a high note – closure, letting go and moving on

Movement, stillness and navigating challenging times

Your body of work: the greatest gift for transition to a bright new life

Butterfly feature image via pexels.com

inspiration & influence intuition

Alchemy and conducting magic with spirit and heart

February 26, 2018

Our small lives, which so often can seem random, or meaningless, are actually an organic part of the cosmos.

Rachel Pollack, Tarot Wisdom

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A Quiet Writing deep-dive Tarot Narrative each Monday to share intuitive guidance, wisdom and insights from aligned books – for the week and anytime…

This week: alchemy + conducting magic with spirit + heart

Theme for the week beginning 26 February

The theme for this week to guide our overall focus is from Lisa McLoughlin’s Life Design Cards – Journal ‘Dear Nature…’

alchemy

I always draw the theme card first to set the key message for the week. At its core, this week is about connecting with ourselves through the alchemy and spirit of nature. When life gets a bit crazy, tuning into the magic of the sea, the bush and the sky is the perfect way to get answers. As I have moved through my transition journey, I’ve spent time sitting on the beach, journal in hand. It’s time to get back to this practice now and listen to the wisdom of nature, spirit and ourselves.

This is a great week for finding quiet space with a book and a pen and connecting with the cosmos. Advice from the Guidebook is:

Receive advice and guidance from the natural world.

We are encouraged to write a letter to Nature voicing concerns, asking for advice, to then walk and notice anything that comes to us. And then to allow Nature to respond by writing a second letter once home.

This is such a wise way to engage with nature and open ourselves to the alchemy of wholeness. Writing in nature is one of the simplest acts of connection. But how often do we do it? It’s so easy to get caught in our offices, our homes, our cafes and forget the magic that happens when we open ourselves to the natural world and its gifts.

Whether it’s finding shells that shape speak to us, stones that we can hold to ground ourselves, or feathers that seem like messages on our path, being open to these gifts can help us gain insight and meaning. The sheer act of opening up to a blank page in a quiet space in nature is a way of opening up to ourselves and seeing what the universe provides as an answer.

So the guidance this week is around the alchemy of being receptive to the elements and wisdom of the universe. We are actively encouraged to engage with this practical magic with book and pen in hand.

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 26 February

alchemy

Tarot Narrative: 

You might be focusing on all that’s not perfect or right just now. Or maybe you’ve learnt through habit to think in terms of loss, feeling poor or less than. But you are standing like a magician posed between the earth and sky, conducting creativity like alchemy. Get out into nature and ground yourself like the conductor you are. As you manage change on many fronts, know that connecting yourself with joy and spirit through the elements – wind, water, earth, warmth – will yield solutions and magic as you co-create with forces beyond you.

Reading notes

Cards: Five of Earth (Pentacles) and The Magician from The Good Tarot and #12 A Change in the Wind in protection (reversed position) from Wisdom of the Oracle.

Book notes:

Our small lives, which so often seem random, or meaningless, are actually an organic part of the cosmos. This is one of the great teachings of the Tarot, and ultimately one of the reasons we do readings – not just to find out information, or to seek guidance or self-knowledge (all of which are important) but also to demonstrate to ourselves that the universe is not broken pieces. Things connect.

Rachel Pollack, Tarot Wisdom (p. 34)

This reading and narrative sends strong messages about connecting with the alchemy and wisdom of the universe. Rachel Pollack in ‘Tarot Wisdom’ emphasises that The Magician is a card that is auspicious especially for writers and other creatives “for it symbolizes creativity itself.” The Magician is the card that I have chosen to symbolize the alchemist creator spirit of Quiet Writing. So it was exciting to see it arrive today in this first week of beginning a new phase of my creative journey and business, free from my former work role and fully embracing my body of work in transition.

Today’s narrative reminds us that though we might find ourselves having a habit of focusing on what is not right or not done or over the next horizon, we just need to still ourselves in nature. Connecting the inner and outer especially through writing in nature are highlighted at this time.

alchemy

Dealing with a habit of loss

The Five of Earth from the beautiful ‘The Good Tarot’ deck reminds us that reminds us that we can get preoccupied by “the illusion of lack”. It also mentions “overlooked treasures.” I have included the Rider-Waite version of the card too in the tarot flat lay so you can see the visuals there. It is all about difficulty, feeling in exile, out in the cold, or like we are seeing everything through a glass half empty lens.

My journey through transition and leaving the organisation I have worked in for 30 plus years has certainly had overtones of just this feeling. With my job deleted and becoming redundant, it’s been easy to feel like I’m out in the cold and focus on the negative. This can happen with any experience of change – change of location, relationship or job. All can have elements of feeling shunned, undervalued, less than or just plain nostalgic for how things used to be. With all of this melancholy, we can miss fully embracing the treasures unfolding under our nose.

The Good Tarot ‘Five of Earth’ reminds us through its beautiful imagery that the answer is to ground ourselves in the earth, in nature, connected to the magic of nature and the beauty of the world. As the Fountain Tarot puts it for this card:

From a place of quiet you can assess what is truly imprtant, learn from what the moment is teaching you, and determine what resources are actually at your disposal.

Just as last week’s narrative focused on blossoming, this week’s theme is about the alchemy of connecting with nature to work out our magic.

Alchemy + conducting magic

The Magician reminds us of the importance of partnership with spirit and gaining a broader perspective of our efforts. Just as the habit of thinking in terms of loss can cramp our vision, so can not opening ourselves to spirit. Again, the Rider-Waite imagery for this card is valuable in reminding us of how we can be a conduit for creative magic through being receptive and grounding ourselves.

This card shows us that we need to be reaching up to alchemy, to spirit and the power of the universe, to the magic of synchronicity. At the same time, we need to be grounding ourselves in nature and the elements, represented by the items on the table at the Magician’s disposal. The Magician is like an orchestra conductor as he stands between spirit and nature, connecting them. So too we can be conductors of magic as we open ourselves to spirit and inspiration, especially from natural sources.

Sallie Nichols in ‘Jung and Tarot’ talks about the Magician in terms of synchronicity and how we can open ourselves to increasing chances of meaningful coincidences at peak times:

It is our inner Magician, of course, who is responsible for these miraculous eruptions of the unitary world into our everyday world of space and time, cause and effect. (p62)

alchemy

Alchemy + connecting things

The Magician’s art of alchemy is about connecting things, especially between the inner and outer. So we might be outside in the elements, gathering thoughts in our journal as we connect with nature and notice gifts in our surroundings. Or we might work with tarot and oracle cards for guidance and wisdom as a way of engaging with spirit and connecting with our inner wisdom. Synchronicity might be a visitor as we tune in for signs and symbols especially at times of change.

Alchemy and making connections to transform them positively is a key theme this week weaving through all of the cards. Sallie Nichols shares in ‘Jung and Tarot’ that:

Magic is sometimes called the science of hidden relationships.

She says Jung identified through research that “hopeful expectancy” is an ingredient in common in many magic, miracles and parapsychological events. We need to embrace the “archetype of the miracle” at this time instead of the stories of loss, lack or poverty we might have told ourselves.

It’s time this week to channel our inner magician, get our conducting wands of spirit and creativity out that just might be in the form of a pen and book. And seek natural environments that will open us up and renew us, rather than shut u down.

This is a great week for alchemy and conducting magic with spirit and heart. 

Look to see where you might be working out of a perspective of loss, comparison or lack and see where you can conduct your own magic. Get out in nature and write. Don’t be afraid to use the tools that work for you, being unapologetic. Embrace what you love. You too could have a desk like mine 😉

alchemy

Love to hear your thoughts!

I’d love to hear if you are feeling these energies around alchemy and conducting magic with spirit and heart, especially being in nature to help connect our inner and outer worlds now.

  • Where have you developed the habit of thinking in terms of loss or lack?
  • How are you making time for connecting with the magic of nature?
  • Where are you practising alchemy and where could you deepen your practice?
  • In which areas are you holding back because of fear or other’s opinions?
  • How can you conduct magic in your writing or other creative work?
  • What stops you feeling that sense of alchemy and magic?
  • How can you be more magical in your approaches to life?
  • Where can you be more receptive to synchronicity or meaningful signs?

All best wishes for this week of being out in nature and writing, conducting creativity with the aid of the cosmos and grounding ourselves with the wisdom of the earth. I hope that you find meaningful connections, alchemy and synchronicity arising as you create this time and space in your life.

May The Magician guide you in conducting creativity and connecting with spirit to guide your path especially if it’s a time of big change. And let me know what you think of this post and this weekly Tarot Narrative!

alchemy

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You can work with me to help tap into that inner wisdom and magic guidance. Free 30-45 minute coaching consults chats are available in February and March for a May coaching start so please get in touch at terri@quietwriting.com to talk further. I’d love to be a guide alongside to help you conduct creativity and magic with spirit and heart in your own unique way.

You can download my free 95-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below.  You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

You might also enjoy:

Exploring magic as the heart of creative inspiration

Your body of work – the greatest gift for transition to a bright new life

Joy – 18 inspiring quotes on enjoying what you do and love

Secret superpowers for creative energy and inspiration

Creating essential intent and making the right choices

Creative practices in my tool-kit to make the most of this year’s energies

How I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention to make the most of this year

creativity inspiration & influence

Joy – 18 inspiring quotes on enjoying what you do and love

February 16, 2018

Joy

Joy is my word for the year for 2018. Here are 18 quotes about joy, spirit and soulful work sparking my year. I hope they inspire you too.

Choosing a word for the year is like deciding on a destination for how you want to feel but not knowing how it will play out. It’s like setting an intention for feeling the tone of the year with no plan for the details. Inviting the energy of a word into your life, you wait to see how it unfolds and manifests.

PASSION was my word for the year for 2017. It was such an inspiring way to get back to what I love as a guiding force in my life. I shared 17 quotes about passion about the driving energy of doing what you love. Last year was a challenging journey which took me back to the heart of what I love as the map and soul of its next steps.

I discovered passion was about feeling your authentic heart, in my case writing, and getting it into its rightful place in your life. It was about following my intuition more deeply and finding a vision that went beyond the everyday. Moreover, it was a guide for transition in a year of crossing over to a new place, sensing potential, seeing opportunity and knowing how to combine my skills in new ways. It was about learning to play bigger and weave all that has happened to me into a book, a new way of living, a new career, a creative life. In there also was an understanding of my uniqueness, the elements that combine as passions within me. As Meryl Streep reminds us:

What makes you different and weird, that’s your strength. 

Finding joy

So in turning the corner into 2018 after a challenging time, joy was beckoning me. Sometimes you can take a while to work through your word for the year; other times it arrives, more obviously and insistently. And then there are synchronicities also, like the card my daughter gave me for Christmas. It was a beautifully crafted message of JOY made from handpainted Egyptian papyrus. This sealed the deal perfectly.

As often happens with your word of the year, you have a sense of its meaning but a deeper dive yields surprises and connections. And there is serendipity and further synchronicity too.

This week via an inspiring webinar on Energy Matters in Coaching with Meg Mann I was introduced to the work of David R Hawkins. In particular, we were shown his map of the scale of consciousness as we progress through achieving greater levels of consciousness. And my eye zeroed in on JOY sitting right up near the top described by way of self-view as “complete” and emotion as “serenity”.

David R Hawkins says of the energy of this phase:

As we move up towards this level, inner joy, quiet, and inner knowingness begin to take place. Within this energy field, we connect with something that is rocklike and ever present.

So this year’s focus is no lightweight endeavour but one that has enormous potential to calm and ground me. I knew choosing joy this year was always going to be a challenging task and this scale just helped highlight this.

Being unapologetically joyful

As part of a Goddess Roadtrip Sydney workshop recently on ‘being seen’, we were asked by Jade McKenzie to stand up and say to the group what we were unapologetically going to be this year. Given my focus for the year, I chose “joyful”, but when I stood up to say the words “This year I will be unapologetically joyful…”, I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. I was so mired in grief after the very recent loss of my mother. Eventually, I did say the words with the support of a room of beautiful women who held space for me, quietly, as I got there. But in this moment, I realised the intensity and depth of exploration in this journey of learning about joy this year. In part, it’s about allowing the juxtaposition of grief and joy in my life, something that can seem an uncomfortable fit just now.

Joy

Quotes about joy

I love quotes. The distilled wisdom of others in the form of words we can hold, repeat, learn from and reflect on is a balm and portal for me.

I found the 17 quotes on PASSION last year were a place to start from, a way to begin to explore the terrain of what it meant. Frequently, I returned to those words as I did to the Pinterest page I created on PASSION. Both are great ways to unravel the multiple meanings and nuances of words as we seek to explore them in our lives.

So to commence my exploration of JOY in 2018, here are 18 quotes about JOY to begin to tease out its contours and character for this year’s journey. I hope you find some inspiration for your journey this year.

“We cannot cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live in joy.” – Joseph Campbell

“If all you did was just look for things to appreciate, you would live a joyous, spectacular life.” – Abraham-Hicks

“Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” – Lao Tzu 

“The body heals with play, the mind heals with laughter and the spirit heals with joy.” – Proverb

“Feelings are just visitors. Let them come and go.” – Mooji

“Joy comes to us in ordinary moments. We risk missing out when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.” – Brene Brown

“Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.” – Anne Lamott

“Strive not to get more done, but to have less to do.” – Francine Jay

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.” – Maya Angelou 

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” – Rumi

“Your joy is where you locate your white hot Truth – your pure-burning is-ness, from where you have the creative power to turn thought into matter.” – Danielle LaPorte

“Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.” – Marianne Williamson

“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” – C. S. Lewis

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.” – Annie Proulx

“Don’t wait for everything to be perfect before you decide to enjoy your life.” – Joyce Meyer

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” – Oscar Wilde

“JOY is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the street, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.” – David Whyte

Do read the whole David Whyte’s beautiful meditation on JOY from which these words come. It is pure magic. They are such a balm for the soul. It seems like much of this work on joy is about spirit, inner stillness and soul, quiet writing perhaps. I welcome joy in as we venture forward together getting to know each other in a deeper way this year.

Share your thoughts

Which is your favourite quote from these ones? Or do you have another quote or thought on joy that inspires you? What does joy mean to you? Would love to hear – share your thoughts in the comments!

Keep in touch

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Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. There are regular posts on tarot, intuition, influence, passion, creativity, productivity, writing, voice, introversion and personality type assessment.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

You might also enjoy:

How I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention to make the most of this year

The unique voice of what we love

Exploring magic as the heart of creative inspiration

Joy

Image of me above by David Kennedy photography with thanks.

inspiration & influence reading notes

“You are the authority on you” – a review of Danielle LaPorte’s ‘White Hot Truth’

April 4, 2017

white hot truth

 

“I’m a seeker who writes about what I find. And maybe, on just the right day, I can help you flatten your learning curve. If I’ve got anything to say, it’s this: you are the authority on you.”
Danielle LaPorte – White Hot Truth: Clarity for keeping it real on your spiritual path from one seeker to another

I am a huge fan of Danielle LaPorte. I love her clear, crisp, grounded, heart-filled way of talking and thinking. Her work is concurrently suffused with spirit and light whilst being grounded in experience and day to day living.

She speaks directly to my heart, and I’ve been listening for nearly 10 years now since I first came across her work when I was somewhat completely brought to my knees with the open-hearted surgery that is grief.

Back then, Danielle’s web-site was called White Hot Truth, something I needed at a time when each day had the consistency of mud I tried to swim through. “Yes, I’ll have some of that ‘White Hot Truth’ please“. I read and followed, a gentle disciple of the heart, as Danielle spoke to me of hope and self-compassion.

I’ve since followed her work and when I saw that White Hot Truth was coming back in another form as a book, I signed up to read ahead, review and be part of the ‘White Hot Truth’ launch team. I knew from experience this would be something very special, a honed diamond sparkling its message for me and others to catch.

The light in White Hot Truth

White Hot Truth is this diamond, each chapter a facet of light, grounded in a memoir-kind of reflection, distilling experience that heads straight for the heart. I alternated between reading on-screen and listening to Danielle’s voice via the audiobook. This made the reading process all the richer as I shifted between my voice engaging directly with the words, and Danielle’s voice reading her own.

The book traverses so many realms – it’s deep and wide but its terrain is clear and sweeps away any barriers to understanding in its path. The essence of the book is to become aware of the lies or unhelpful blocks that may have found their way into our trusting hearts including the “really big lies” of inadequacy, authority and affiliation. And to recognise that we are able to take in so much influence and so many ideas and still be the authority on ourselves, the one to make the decisions with wisdom, the one to set boundaries with an open heart.

Some quotes from White Hot Truth

Danielle draws from wide sources to find the most perfect quotes to place strategically. And then sprinkled through like stars sending their energy through the text, there are Danielle’s own quotable quotes and truthbombs.

A few of my favourites of so many I have highlighted:

On flow: “It was too much flow and not enough restraint. I was a river in need of some riverbanks.”

On forgiveness: “The heart runs on its own clock, untethered from calendar days or years.”

On self-help: “The best self-help is self-compassion.”

On approval: “Working for approval takes up a lot of energy, and it can be a huge distraction from seeing the gifts that you already hold in your hands.”

Wisdom, paradox and authenticity in White Hot Truth

A key piece of wisdom threaded through-out is that of paradox. White Hot Truth shows how with clarity, you can take both perspectives and find a path. For example, you can lead with your heart and your head. You don’t have to choose. How many of us have shut down one side of the equation because we fear losing the other, when really it’s a false dichotomy. I know I have. This book opens up paradox as a kind of wisdom.

I read White Hot Truth concurrently with Marrow by Elizabeth Lesser. In Marrow, Elizabeth talks about ‘Authenticity Deficit Disorder’, how we tiptoe around those things we really want to say or be, those things that really matter as we go through our days. It seems that sometimes it takes a tragedy, serious illness or terrible grief to make us go there to the marrow. And even then we can manage to side step it.

In White Hot Truth, Danielle speaks directly, supporting us to honour our authenticity and love who and what we are. She encourages us to recognise where we may have inadvertently blunted our ability to cut through. She shows us how to speak up without fear, through being a voice and model for how to speak up.

Being real and who we are as influence

Mark Nepo in The Book of Awakening talks about the energy of being real, of ‘mana’, of the extraordinary power of being who we are to influence others:

In this way, without any intent to shape others, we simply have to be authentic, and a sense of ‘mana’, of spiritual light and warmth, will emanate from our souls, causing others to grow – not towards us, but towards the light that moves through us.

White Hot Truth made me smile with recognition and more than once, I held my heart as my eyes filled with tears as something broke through, probably self-compassion.

At times laugh-out-loud funny, other times shocking and sobering, it’s a ball of bright authentic light offered as a guide from one seeker to another to illuminate our path. I’m so grateful for its warm and passionate influence. Like ‘The Hierophant’ card in tarot, this book is a teacher and a reminder that:

….we are not alone; we can actually take someone else’s advice and methods and recast them to meet our own needs

Playing with Symbols, Monicka Clio Sakki

In fact White Hot Truth encourages us to do exactly that and for you to be the authority on you. I know it will shape and guide my own inspired path now and for years to come.

Review and Publication notes:

White Hot Truth will be published on 16 May 2017 and is available on pre-order. Because I am part of the White Hot Truth Launch Team, I got the advanced digital copy. You can get a chance to listen to the book before it’s in stores with the free audio book. Find out how here: daniellelaporte.com/whitehottruth/

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You can download my free 95-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below.  You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

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You might also enjoy:

Influence, gratitude and choosing to shine – Danielle LaPorte

 

20 practical ways of showing up and being brave (and helpful)

Intuition, writing and work – eight ways intuition can guide your creativity

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Healing with words of gold: The Empress, Kintsugi and alchemy

March 24, 2017

kintsugi

When we draw the Empress, the time has come for change and renewal in the sense that it is the right moment to dare to come out with our ideas, plans and insights.

Tarot as a Way of Life: a Jungian Approach to Tarot, Karen Hamaker-Zondag

The Empress connects us with this new dimension of awareness; for is it through her intuitive understanding rather than through masculine logic that the spirit leaps forth into outer space to connect with celestial insights.

Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, Sallie Nichols

The Empress – Part II

This is the second in a two part series on The Empress tarot card which has been appearing lately in various guises. These posts explore The Empress, her powers and how she is showing up for me right now as a guide.

In the first post, The Empress: vision, creativity and patience, we explored her appearances recently in tarot spreads and the symbolism of The Empress in various tarot decks as an insight into her meaning.

In this post, I’ll be sharing thoughts and intuitive writing on the messages of the Empress to help channel growth in creativity and healing at this time.

Activating heart energy

I’ve been working with gifted channeller and intuitive healer, Amber Adrian for the past six months as part of a transition process to focus on creativity as a way of life. Amber’s Activate program is about switching on your wisdom, power and light more, especially (for me) around creativity.

It’s all about connecting with our higher selves, integrating what needs to be integrated and showing up with what we learn and experience. It’s powerful and healing work, hard to describe, but my role it seems is to put my experiences into words.

In a session recently, guides stepped through for each of us with a message. For me, the guide was a woman with red hair, goddess-like. She was there to help me connect with my heart. She put her hand over my heart. With gold from her palm, she filled in any wounds with gold, so it was like my heart was made new again. She released shadows and energies, removed cords from my heart and filled the holes left by my heart wounds.

And she gave me a special message:

 Your heart is ready, put it on the page.

I am not sure who this goddess or guide is, but I am feeling the energy of both The Empress and Pele, goddess of fire and irrepressible passion who is guiding me this year. I’m feeling the power of both as they appear around messages of vision, creativity and passion. They are a couple of mighty female consorts with transformative energy I can tap into and channel creatively.

The empress

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My superpower – writing

The guides in this Activate session also came forward with messages around our superpowers: how we want to be seen as we truly are. This included messages around learning how to mother and care for ourselves.

When anyone has ever asked what my superpower is, I would (and will) always say it’s writing. It’s a strength I rely on for so much: in my work role, in my personal life, strategising ideas, processing pain, capturing beauty and sorrow to experience, move through and on. It’s helped me navigate so much and words are my life-blood and heart.

So it was with a smile of recognition that I heard the words from Amber that the guides were activating channelling gifts as they come through writing. The gift being activated, once I cycle through some layers of self-care, is an ability to sit down and receive writing as a divine conduit to words – “beautiful, entertaining, what’s needed in the world.”

I am blown away by this but it seems right. It means opening up through resistance and fear to this and I note also, requires actually sitting down to write. Important.

Later we are encouraged to let our guides show us where they would like to connect and how – for example, ceremoniously, through exercise, afterwards, when you sleep. Journalling is a way we can do this, asking guides to speak to us or come through as we sleep.

In this spirit work, we need to flex and move through our own paths. The guidance and support is to be accessed. It’s a gift we need to learn. We are reminded:

It’s a muscle like anything else.

Like a muscle, we need to use it.

light person fire

Message in a Bottle

The next day while all this is settling, I receive the ‘Message in a Bottle’ card from The Wisdom of the Oracle deck, in protection position (reversed). This card is all about communication and signs from spirit and guides pointing to your highest good. In protection position, it’s saying:

Don’t ignore the signs. Spirit always has your best interests at heart and will draw your attention to what you are overlooking.

With its image of a telephone in a bottle, there’s a sense of messages coming and not being able to get them or read them. The Wisdom of the Oracle guide book says this is also about allowing yourself to “become fluent in the language of symbols, oracles, and omens.” But in protection position, it’s about maybe not acknowledging signs because they don’t fit our world view. We are tending to want them as we want them. Or we are missing them altogether.

So I’m listening, opening up and working to become fluent in this language of guides, signs, symbols and intuitive writing. It’s natural ground in one way, but the signs are flagging a richer and deeper connection with spirit and channelling of words.

This is welcome but there’s that resistance I can feel around what this means. Channelling, for example, is a concept I am not entirely comfortable with and it seems a big step into an unknown world right now. In my mind, are the inevitable thoughts of “What will (insert anyone you like) think about this?” with all the dark power and shadow that such fruitless thinking can muster.

message in a bottle

Night thought visits

I head to bed with an open heart, inviting guides to speak to me in the night as this seems to be the way I am currently receiving information and inspiration.

In a wonderful interview on The High Priestess podcast, Julie Parker speaks with guide and psychic, Helen Jacobs, about intuition in the most down to earth of ways. This was such a balm for my soul at this time. They discuss how the way we access intuition and information from guides is different for everyone. And it can also change from time to time for each of us. Talk about keeping us on our toes!

The way my intuition and guides seem to be speaking to me now is through what I call night thoughts. They are words, symbols, signs or lines of songs that come through clear as a bell when I wake in the early hours of the morning.

So I wake in the night with wavy haint blue lines that I know from the Spirits card in Marcella Kroll’s Sacred Symbols deck. I know it means that spirits are calling offering wisdom and help. I draw the wavy lines with my finger in the air as I can feel them so strongly.

spirits

I look at the time and it’s 3:13am. Those numbers speak to me too – I’ve been noticing lots of number sequences lately especially 111, but this sequence 313 seems significant so I take note.

I know I will need to get up and write this down so I don’t forget. And I know I need to write. Here is an opportunity to harness the spirit of guides and channel any messages, despite my uncertainty about this. It’s a gift, a present, a presence and a guide. It’s there for me to access and it’s there to help me channel love and light. It’s not all about me it seems.

Journalling night thoughts

I have a Night Thoughts journal – I’ve had it for a while – and I capture all the thoughts that come in the night there. They are so rich. I open the journal and I write this message:

I’m waking you in the middle of the night to say I’m here, spirit, 313, helping you to see and hear the signs that come to you. Ask and you shall see. You need to ask.

(I then insert three of the Spirits wave symbols as in the card above)

The Empress, orange cloak, golden hair, is guiding you. Plant the seeds, heal the wounds, feel the gold inside the cracks, go there. It’s a gift you’ve always had from very young to see and feel the cracks and fill them with gold. The gold in your heart is what can help heal others’ cracks and wounds and your own.

You’re called to help heal, to hold the hands and hearts of those who hurt. In many ways, like a kindred soul, standing in healing, standing side by side, in the trenches of the heart. But healing with words of gold, from your pen and from your mouth.

Number 313

Afterwards I check about the number 313. And what I read again blows me away. Joanna Walmesley of Sacred Scribes explains in this post that it’s an angel number:

Angel Number 313 is a message from your angels that the strong connection you have with the angelic realm and the Ascended Masters is assisting you with staying positive, light and optimistic about your life…It is time to live your truths and express yourself with clarity, purpose, passion and love. Be a positive light to others.

I’m encouraged just like the ‘Message in the Bottle’ to pay close attention to intuition and inner wisdom, that guides are there helping me with the next steps along my path.

313 is made up of the attributes and vibrations of 3 appearing twice. Then I recall that 3 is The Empress’s number also, she who has appeared twice recently in my tarot readings, with 3 linked to creativity, self-expression, talents and skills. Number 1 is about self-leadership, intuition, fresh beginnings and approaches – all in line with The Empress and her messages of creativity, intention and patience. I love the term ‘self-leadership’ and this number emphasises that:

 we create our own experiences with our intentions, thoughts and beliefs. This makes 313 the number of optimism, enthusiasm, communication, creativity and expansion.

Kintsugi

After all this beautiful light and energy that has flowed from The Empress appearing in various guises, I keep reflecting on that palm of the hand holding my heart and filling it with gold. It feels so warm and positive. I know that sense from somewhere.

Then I remember the Japanese art of Kintsugi (or kintsukuroi). A representation of the idea of wabi-sabi, it’s a method for repairing broken ceramic pieces with a lacquer mixed with gold or other precious metals with the philosophy behind this:

to recognize the history of the object and to visibly incorporate the repair into the new piece instead of disguising it. The process usually results in something more beautiful than the original.

In a piece on kintsugi, wabi-sabi, the beauty of scars and her son’s repaired heart, Amy Basken says:

kintsugi pieces are prized precisely because they have been broken. They are said to be more beautiful, more unique, and “stronger at the broken places” (to quote Ernest Hemingway)

I’m feeling like my heart is a vessel, a sacred object, cracked from wounds and hurts but healing. As I reflect, I realise there are 3 significant times in my life when my heart fractured and hurt intensely with deep grief, loss and pain.

I feel my heart wounds fill with gold and heal. I’ve had enough suffering from these wounds for now. I can move on. I can communicate the lessons and emotions to help others heal, to feel they are not alone or to acknowledge and honour these feelings as part of moving on.

How often do we hide these wounds and experiences with a sense of shame instead of realising they are what makes us strong, beautiful and able to support others with what we have learned.

Not that we would ask for these experiences. But if they happen to us, Kintsugi and The Empress remind us that breakage and repair, wounds and healing, are natural, not something to be concealed but there to be held up to the light with love. And love mostly for ourselves.

Seek and you shall find…one layer of Truth at a time. Every experience we have in life, even the missteps, and especially the bliss, is a step closer to that sacred radiance. We are all waking up in the same direction.

Danielle LaPorte White Hot Truth: Clarity for keeping it real on your spiritual path from one seeker to another (forthcoming May 2017)

Alchemy: the power to transform things for the better

I leave the draft to this point overnight, asking for guidance to clarify and make sense. The words that come in the night are:

This is alchemy, you are experiencing alchemy.

Yes, I realise, that’s it. Alchemy: the power to transform things for the better – that would be a relief and something I can work with, a healing thing for me and others. I relax suddenly, snuggling into the warmth of my loved one and cuddling my little stuffed bear in the dark, smiling. I relax into this knowledge, this beauty, and lean into its wisdom, embracing whatever is to come.

Thought pieces

You can learn more about Amber Adrian and her brilliant work in activating creativity and healing at AmberAdrian.com – she is also a fan of stuffed animals and is the most beautiful writer.

Dee at Archangel Oracle – Divine Guidance explores The Message in a Bottle card in more detail. These thoughts resonate on becoming fluent in reading signs and symbols.

For more reading and beautiful visuals on kintsugi and its processes visit:

Kintsugi: the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery

Kintsugi: the art of broken pieces

Image acknowledgements:

  • The Empress card is from the Sakki Sakki tarot deck; others as noted in the text
  • Other images from pexels.com and used according to licence with thanks to the creators.

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You might also enjoy:

The Empress: creativity, vision and patience

Dance to a new beat – Full Moon in Virgo

inspiration & influence intuition music & images

Lyrebird – spirit animal for Quiet Writing

February 16, 2017

This post is about the lyrebird, its meaning and why it is the spirit animal reflecting the heart of Quiet Writing.

lyrebird

Lyrebirds run across my path

Each day I drive through bush to the top of the hill through national park with rainforest pockets and waterfall rock faces. The road opens up at times to a cathedral of trees and sky. I sing to music or listen to podcasts on creativity and writing, finding minutes to express my self before a busy work day.

On many days I smile, as a lyrebird, tail down making a sleek black figure, darts across the road into leaves and bush. On some occasions, I’ve seen two lyrebirds in one trip. That’s when I feel especially blessed by lyrebird magic.

I wonder at its meaning. I don’t recall seeing the lyrebird in any spirit animal guides I’ve read, being an Australian bird. I’m sure it’s there somewhere. I know I will need to look into Aboriginal stories too. I commit to doing that silently. But when I get on the train for the commute to the city, I decide to start with an intuitive write of what the lyrebird might mean.

Intuitive thoughts on the lyrebird

This is what I write:

I think it means spirit, like a sprite, a visitor of wisdom saying “You are on the right track. I’m running across this road right now to tell you that.” Like the rainbows I’ve seen in the past that wrote whole narratives of my life in the sky for me to read, it’s so explicit and timely.

I think it’s a muse: a muse of Australia, a lyre, a stringed instrument, playing like a voice, saying: Tell your story, sing your song, be your voice, the sacred creative voice that you are and want too be. Tell the stories of those who did not have a voice, help those who want to have a voice to tell their stories. The suffering, the struggle, the resilience, the spirit there that teaches us.

I think it’s about hearing the voices of others, listening, absorbing and maybe sometimes referring, quoting, ‘mimicking’, singing and trying out others’ voices to find my own voice. Knowing that the uniqueness of my voice is from all these influences and experiences, my voice a conglomeration or filter, a series of lyrebird calls, the synthesis.

It was great to write out my intuitive feel of the lyrebird before seeing others’ thoughts on the lyrebird and its meaning.

About the lyrebird

The lyrebird is a ground-dwelling bird found on the south east coast of Australia. The male has a tail shaped like a ‘lyre’ or harp. The male combines the display of his beautiful tail with extensive songs and mimicry to lure the female. The female lyrebird is also skilful in being able to mimic.

lyrebird

The birds are capable of mimicking just about any sound including chainsaws, cameras, human voices and car sirens. However they usually focus on the sounds of other animals and birds. The voice of a lyrebird resounds through the damp, tree-ferned gullies and valleys where it mostly lives. You can often recognise its presence by a series of different types of bird calls in quick succession.

The lyrebird’s syrinx or voice box is the most complex and sophisticated of any song bird. It has three instead of the usual four voice box muscles which gives flexibility. The birds are shy in nature. They are an ancient bird, with the earliest fossil records from about 15 million years ago.

Check out this brief video from David Attenborough to see the lyrebird in action. I’ve included a few more links below because they are so interesting!

The lyrebird – what others say

I find that many have documented the lyrebird and its meaning including some Aboriginal Dreaming stories. Here are the key messages of the lyrebird honed from online sources integrated with my own thoughts:

1 Creating a unique song letting other voices move through you

The lyrebird encourages us to create our unique song, especially via other influences moving through us and making them our own. We are the unique collation of what we love and what we have experienced. Our ideas connect and integrate with the ideas of others in ways that only we can orchestrate.

Lyrebird reminds us that one of the reasons we are unique is because we can choose to create something new from the old. It is time to create our own unique song, if we do not have one, and it is time to strengthen it, if we do.

from: Animal Energies – Lyrebird by Ravenari 

Another way to think of this might be as ‘collage’ as Austin Kleon does:

Next time you’re stuck, think of your work as a collage. Steal two or more ideas from your favorite artists and start juxtaposing them. Voila.

The unique way we choose and combine ideas is in itself an act of creation.

2 Listening to the true meaning of ourselves and others

The shadow aspects of lyrebird are about letting our true voice out, being comfortable and facing our fears. Connecting with our feelings and influences will enable us to find our true voice. 

Lyrebird encourages us to really listen beneath the surface. Just as lyrebirds make calls that include car alarms and bird songs to attract their mate, the lyrebird teaches us to see behind words and actions to the real meaning.

I’m currently working on life coaching. Learning to truly listen actively and with curiosity so we can gauge what people are really saying is a critical skill. This relates to lyrebird spirit:

Lyrebird gives us this power to see the truth in what a person is saying, no matter how they are saying it.

from Animal Energies – Lyrebird by Ravenari

3 Listening to and channelling spirit

Linked to #1 above is the idea of the lyrebird symbolising letting spirit and ancestors flow through us. 

As Carl Jung reminds us:

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.

Lyrebird also encourages channelling. It might be via mimicry and new combinations as in #1 above. Or it could be working with spirit guides, ancestors and animal energy to help us find truth and meaning. Lyrebird is a link to ancient and ancestral voices, with a voice beyond time.

4 Valuing quietness and encouraging peace

Finding sacred places and practices to enable this connection is something that lyrebird spirit encourages. We need to find quiet places so we can listen to the true meaning within. Lyrebird particularly encourages expression of what we find out loud in some way.

Just as the lyrebird’s habitat is often secretive and hidden, so we need to go within to find space to reflect and gather. This is valuable for introverts especially as they draw energy and insight this way.

With their ability to speak in other ‘languages’ or voices, lyrebirds also symbolise peacemakers. In an Aboriginal Dreaming story, Lyrebird is given the role of the peacemaker in the first great dispute between all creatures:

As a reward, the Spirits gave Lyrebird the ability to be the only animal able to communicate to all the other animals. The other animals were punished by losing this ability, and Frog, the cause of all the trouble, was given a croaky voice to replace his once beautiful voice.

From Native Symbols info

5 Keeping sacred spaces clean and decluttering

The lyrebird also encourages keeping our sacred spaces clean so that we can create a clear space for spirit, influence and voice. Lyrebirds are elegant and tidy, scraping leaf litter and dirt to create a beautiful space within the forest to attract a partner.

This can be seen as a metaphor for attracting energy and creativity in our lives. The decluttering, the scraping away, can be physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. It’s essentially about getting clarity in our lives. This might be around issues of grieving and letting go of what no longer serves us and is weighing us down.

6 Being a teacher to help others to find voice and sing

Another Aboriginal Dreaming story links a few of the above strands together around teaching voice:

…there was a stream in which little bubbles contained spirits.  One spirit wanted to become real when he heard Lyrebird’s beautiful song.  While singing, Lyrebird noticed this bubble moving and dancing in rhythm with his voice.  The Great Spirit told Lyrebird to remain singing until the creature was born.  Finally, and it took Lyrebird time, effort and concentration, out popped a little green frog.  Lyrebird’s purpose was then to teach this creature to sing.

From Native Symbols info

The spirit of teaching others to find their voice is another message of the lyrebird. The Dreamtime story suggests that it is through singing our own song that we help others come to life. This might take ‘time, effort and concentration’ and it may feel like we are not getting anywhere. I think of blogging, and how we can feel like we are howling into the wind. Or how when we are creating larger pieces of work that need crafting over time, it feels like they will never be finished. When sent out into the world, our creativity can help others in ways we do not even realise.

7 Symbol of the bard

The lyrebird is also seen as a symbol of the bard and of our poetic souls. It has a long repertoire of different songs and uses auditory memory to learn these songs and string them together. The lyrebird is a symbol of poetry, song, auditory skills, a love of language and poetic inspiration in all of us.

Lyrebird and Quiet Writing

So for all these beautiful reasons including its appearance many times running across my path, I have chosen Lyrebird as my spirit animal for Quiet Writing. Or rather Lyrebird has chosen me.

The value and skills at its heart are:

  1. Creating a unique song and letting the voices of others move through you – acknowledging and working with our passions, influences and the voices of others to find our uniqueness.
  2. Listening to the true meaning of ourselves and others – working in a process oriented way to get to meaning and voice – through understanding the self, listening and writing.
  3. Listening to and channelling spirit – working intuitively to listen to and access spiritual energy including archetypes, symbolism, tarot, oracle and healing work.
  4. Valuing quietness and encouraging peace – knowing that quiet places and quietness within are sources of strength and peace to be valued, celebrated and cultivated. Introvert preferences and skills such as introverted intuition are especially vehicles of vision to be strengthened.
  5. Keeping sacred spaces clean and decluttering – working to clear space for the new by clearing out the old and unnecessary. There’s a spirit of being open and a work in progress where coaching, writing and other intuitive skills might clear energy and make way for the new.
  6. Being a teacher to help others to find voice and sing – Quiet Writing has at its heart the focus of helping people find their voice in the world. Whether it be career or creativity, the aim is to help people find expression to be able to sing their unique song, loud and clear.
  7. Symbol of the bard – Quiet Writing is fuelled by a poetic spirit, by words and a love of language as a form of expression. Writing – both process and product – is a tool to self-understanding and self-expression that helps us connect with ourselves and others.

So I am so glad I paid attention to the lyrebirds running across my path. I’m so happy too there were resources available to help me understand further including Aboriginal Dreaming stories. This combination of intuition, research and thinking is valuable.

I can summarise this manifesto of sorts now but it’s taken time to coalesce and is still evolving. That first piece was written on the train nearly 6 months ago now. I am grateful for lyrebird energy focusing my attention and pointing out the signposts so I could bring them together. This vision for Quiet Writing is something I likewise offer in focused attention to you as we move into the future.

Thought pieces and acknowledgements 

Austin Kleon’s 25 quotes to help you steal like an artist captures thoughts on collaging and coalescing influences. This includes the Jung quote above. I love this way of thinking about influence and uniqueness. We are our own curated version of our passions, experiences and ways of expressing. I believe though that we should acknowledge our influences and sources and make them explicit. This enables others to share in them and learn from them in their own way.

Lyrebird videos: Do watch some of them, so beautiful and fun, some wild and some captive birds, but all fascinating:

Lyrebird song – Stephen Powell Wildlife Artist

1963 CSIRO Superb Lyrebird footage

Lyrebird Song 

Lyrebird in Australia talking to an Englishman!

My thanks to these sites and books for their insights on the lyrebird to integrate with my own intuitive insights:

Animal Energies – Lyrebird

nativesymbols.info – Lyrebird

Lyrebird medicine – your spirit has a voice beyond time

Australia – Aboriginal Dreamtime

Readers’ Digest Complete Book of Australian Birds

Image acknowledgements:

Images used under Creative Commons licences with thanks to the creators:

Superb lyrebird photographs from CSIRO Science Image (awesome image bank!)

Photographer : John Manger

Lyrebird as Totem by artist Ravenari via Deviantart

Keep in touch + read about the 36 books that shaped my story

You can download my free ebook on my literary lineage and the 36 books that have shaped my story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below.  You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type developments, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

You might also enjoy:

36 Books that Shaped my Story: Reading as Creative Influence

Being ‘Fierce on the Page’ – a book review

How to know and honour your special creative influences

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