wholehearted stories

https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1

Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club – open for enrolment now and kicking off December 2021

Free resources:

Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Other free resources: https://www.quietwriting.com/free-resources/

My coaching:

The Writing Road Trip – a community program with Beth Cregan – kicking off Jan 2022

Connect on social media

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writingquietly/

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terri-connellan/

About Kerstin Pilz

Kerstin Pilz PhD is a published author, former academic with almost 20 years university teaching experience, a TEDx speaker and a 200 RYT yoga teacher. She is currently completing her memoir Falling Apart Gracefully. Her previous publications include academic monographs and travel features in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and the New York Times and travel industry magazines. When tragedy turned her life upside-down, she discovered the healing power of writing and now teaches creative writing online and on multi-day retreats in her beautiful home in Mission Beach, Far North Queensland, Australia and in Hoi An, Vietnam, where she lives part time.

Kerstin’s website: www.writeyourjourney.com

Instagram: @writeyourjourney

Facebook: @writeyourjourney

TEDx talk on The Healing Power of Writing: https://www.writeyourjourney.com/kerstin-pilz-tedx-townsville-the-healing-power-of-writing/

or shortened version: https://youtu.be/btxVXcRDhqY

creativity podcast writing

Waking up in Love, Life & Writing with Penelope Love

December 5, 2021

Welcome to Episode 4 of the Create Your Story Podcast!

In this episode, I’m joined by Penelope Love, publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as author of Wake Up in Love and editor of my Wholehearted book.

You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

In this episode, we cover:

Penelope’s book Wake Up in Love
The process and experience of writing Wake Up in Love.
Collaboration on the writing journey
Love, relationships and life connections
Balancing writing and publishing journeys
Writing practices
Spiritual practice, Sadhana and Self-Inquiry
And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to this episode of the Create Your Story Podcast. This is the first one on interview episode which will be the predominant focus in the podcast so it’s wonderful to be stepping into the deep one on one heart-filled conversations that are what this podcast and Quiet Writing are all about.

Today I chat with Penelope Love, who you might remember featured in Episode 2 of the podcast as part of the first Wholehearted virtual book launch. Penelope received the long draft of my book and helped to shape it into the book it is. Today we focus on Penelope’s story more as well as your collaboration and touchpoints and it’s a magical interview.

But first, a personal update and something you might like to be part of. As I speak it’s the 5^th of December 20201 and the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club is now open for enrolment. This is a year-long, actionable, community read of my books, Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook. So it’s part book club, part group coaching and a transformative reading experience where you can do the work of transition over time with accountability and community, and make space for the deep shifts you desire.

We kick off with an orientation in mid-December ahead of a section by section read of Wholehearted together in 2022. So head to the Book Club links in the show notes transcript on Quiet Writing or the links in my Instagram bio, where I am @writingquietly to find out more and join us.

Payment is with upfront or via monthly instalments and 50% scholarships are also available to encourage participation and equity. I’ve aimed to make it as accessible as possible for those who wish to do this deep work with me as your coach. There’s a fabulous group f women gathering, so I hope you will join us for this journey and co-creative read of Wholehearted to make the transitions you desire in your life.

Now to introduce today’s special guest.

Penelope Love, MA, is a publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as author of Wake Up in Love. In 2000, her career launched in the editorial department of the University of Michigan Press, followed by Barnes & Noble, and the original publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul. As she expanded into book design, production and business management, it was a natural evolution into the role of publisher. In 2016, she founded Citrine Publishing based on a visionary publisher-author partnership. Penelope passionately supports people in writing the books that only they can write, while also sharing the memoir only she could write, about sexual trauma healing and marriage to her spiritual teacher along a united path of Tantra and Self-Inquiry, illuminating these essential steps on the journey to liberation.

Penelope holds a very special place in my heart as a friend and editor of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition. She is also author of the wholehearted story, ‘The Journey to Write Here’ on Quiet Writing. Today we will be exploring writing, editing, publishing, becoming an author, working collaboratively as part of our wholehearted journeys, the spiritual practice of self-inquiry and so much more. I am thrilled to share this conversation with Penelope with you.

Transcript of interview with Penelope Love

Terri Connellan: Hi Penelope and welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast.

Penelope Love: Hi Terri. Thank you for having me.

Terri Connellan: Thank you so much for your support of me, my book Wholehearted and Quiet Writing and congratulations on your book. Wake Up in Love being published earlier this year.

Penelope Love: Thank you. And you’re so welcome. It’s an honor.

Terri Connellan: So we’ve had lots of conversations about writing, editing, publishing, and so much more on our journey together. And it’s great to be able to share those conversations with others today. So can you tell people about what you do now, how you got to be here and your new book.

Penelope Love: Sure. Well, I’m an editor and a publisher and also an author. I recently walked through the pearly gates of authorship in January of 2021 when I published my memoir, Wake Up in Love after 15 to 16 years of writing and editing, and working on it. In that time, I was also running a freelance business. Prior to that 15 year period, I did get my start earlier in a career in editing and publishing in the book industry, working at the Chicken Soup for the Soul publisher, the original publisher that is, and they’re based in Florida, where I was living at the time.

And Wake Up in Love actually taps into that journey of leaving the corporate world when I found that I was editing books about changing a life, but I wasn’t really changing my own life. And when I started going into that deep dive of changing my life, that’s when my freelance career took off and I became skilled in not only editing, but designing, and then publishing books and then learning the business end of the publishing side. And over the years developed myself into a publisher.

Terri Connellan: Awesome. What an amazing journey you’ve had. That’s incredible. We’ve known each other for quite a long time online, but we really connected when I reached out with my 100,000 word draft of Wholehearted, which you received so beautifully, and you’re such a magical editor, so supportive. Could you tell us about your work as an editor and why you love editing?

Penelope Love: Editing is just like my heartbeat. I don’t know. It comes effortlessly and naturally, and I feel like it has to do with the way I grew up, patterns of hyper vigilance and being very conscious of what I was saying. And if it was going to make anybody mad or not mad, and also trying to predict what they were thinking. And that is a survival skill in a way. But when you become an artist, you turn your survival skills into creative forces and that’s what editing is for me.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. So you’ve worked on editing a long time, it’s been a longterm career for you?

Penelope Love: Yeah. You know, I didn’t get into it intentionally. When I was in college, I saw an editorial internship bulletin on one of the boards in the religious studies department. And I’m very interested in different types of spirituality and religion. And this fluorescent yellow poster just called to me. Interestingly it said, ‘seniors only apply’ and I was a junior and I still applied. I don’t know it was something in me said, why not? And I went ahead and applied and I ended up working for two years for this teacher who ended up being quite karmically connected.

Terri Connellan: And what do you love about editing? What’s so special for you?

Penelope Love: Well, it’s the relationships that I develop with the people that I work with. It is such a close, connected, intimate relationship. Editing somebody’s book, their book is an expression of their soul. It is their heart’s song playing to the world and I get to be a part of helping them shape it. It’s an honor and so much fun.

Terri Connellan: Oh, that’s wonderful. I’ve certainly experienced that as someone who worked in an editing partnership with you. So it’s a true gift. So thank you for sharing that with me. So at the same time we worked on my book, you were also completing your memoir, Wake Up in Love. So tell us about your writing journey of creating that book.

Penelope Love: Well, it’s funny, in the book, there’s actually a chapter about starting the book and it’s called The Book of Love. And I remember when I met my husband. Maybe I’ll just share a bit of backstory. The book begins where I meet my spiritual teacher, and then I marry him two weeks later. It actually begins a lot earlier in childhood, but it comes forward to this moment. And that’s the beginning of the writing.

And I sat down to write this book of love because I had fallen in love and I was married to him for probably about two or three months. And I just thought I knew absolutely everything about love. And I was 29 years old just hitting that Saturn return, you know? I was ready to take on the world as an author. And I wrote the introduction and then I didn’t really know what or else to write. And he looked at me and he said, well, maybe it’s because you don’t know what love is yet. And I’ll spare you my response, there was an expletive in it and it’s in the book, but I went ahead and became very angry. And yet I used the tools that I was learning from him along this journey, one of which is called the self-inquiry and I took this process inward. I took my anger at that thought that I didn’t know what love was inward. And I went on a journey that lasted about 15 years from the first time I put that pen to paper to write a book to the time it was actually published.

Terri Connellan: Wow. That’s amazing. So the writing over 15 years, what did that look like? Was it like lots of different periods of drafting and editing? Or was there times where you sat down and wrote a lot of the book? How did it work in practice?

Penelope Love: Yeah, in my case, it was a really cool mix of old journals that I’d kept during those years of my early Sadhana, Sadhana being a spiritual practice that you enter when you commit to a spiritual path under the guidance of a teacher. And so I had these journals from my early Sadhana, one of which I started writing on my first trip to India in 2004, when I had no idea, I was beginning to write a book. It was just writing my journal, writing my thoughts for that day. And I feel like that’s a lot like life. I think we don’t really know when our book is exactly being written because we’re just living our life.

And so there are these bits of moments in my life that got recorded in my journals that eventually became fodder for what became the book. We lived in Costa Rica between 2007 and 2010. I went through a period of trying again, to write this book of love. And in that time I was practicing the Morning Pages. So that became a tool and a lot of free writing and beautiful ideas coming out across the Morning Pages. And during that time, a local editor who was starting a magazine, asked me if I would write a column for the magazine. And that’s when I started to write some articles. And I did write about relationship because that was an obsession of mine. Ever since I was young, I was looking for a relationship.

There’s a karma to that too, at the same time, you know, it is one of those human desires. And at this point in my evolutionary journey, exploring relationship in an intimate context, it was the biggest step that I personally could have taken on the journey. So going ahead and, and writing about that process really brought a level of consciousness to it that I think would not have been present had I not had pen and paper. And that quiet time alone to explore what was happening in the relationship. And I applied these wisdoms to the articles that I was writing for the magazine and I got a great response.

It was a local magazine published in Santa Cedro Costa Rica between 2008 to 2009. And it was called Montaña al Mar. Everybody loved when this magazine would come out. People would come up to me in the grocery store and just give me a hug and tell me that they related to what I’d written. And it gave me a lot of encouragement. And I had another mentor of mine say to me, once, you know, if you write enough articles one day, you might wake up and realize you’ve written a book. So I think that time came around 2012, where I had written some of these articles in Costa Rica and I’d taken them also online. There were some websites at the time, sort of like Huffington Post-ish type of websites. And I was putting some of the pieces on there and yeah, those pieces that I created for those contexts, it started to look like I had the material for a quilt that could be a whole piece.

And I remember one day I took every single article I’d written. I wrote the title of it on a sticky note, and then I stuck them all on the wall and I arranged them in different orders. And that started to be the beginning of Wake Up in Love. It was a wall full of sticky notes at one point. And then I said, there’s some order here. There’s some structure, there’s a spine. Now let’s give it some legs. Let’s give it some arms. And over the years I started to become clear what pieces were missing, what pieces needed more fleshing out.

And there was one point , an editor pre-reader, beta reader read it. And I had written this whole book about my journey of sexual awakening through self-realisation, through the exploration of tantra, combined with Self-Inquiry. And I had written this whole book and the editor said, yeah, but I really could use a sex scene in here.

And you know, I was feeling most vulnerable about writing about certain topics, that being one of them. So when she asked for it, I knew it was time in the journey to put that forth into the book. And it actually was the crowning piece, even though it’s in the middle of the book. And that to me speaks a lot to the writing process. You can’t put things in a logical order at first. You have to let it be a wild, creative throwing. You know, some people say throwing spaghetti at the wall. One of my clients uses that term. And there’s some truth to that. There’s not an orderly process when it comes to some aspects of the creative process. And then there’s other parts of the creative process where that order is absolutely essential. And if you don’t have it, your projects won’t ever come to fruition.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I really relate to your story, having gone through my writing journey. And for me, it was a mix of sometimes having to stop, to integrate more experience, you know, to work out either what you’d written or what you’d lived and then to bring it all together into a new phase. So it’s sort of like an iterative process.

Penelope Love: Yeah. There’s most definitely that time of integrating in between. It definitely calls for patience and that’s real soul growth. That’s real important work that’s being done, even when it seems like no work is being done on the manuscript. And then of course, in the final stages of putting a book together and in the style that I did, where it was from pieces written over the years, was bringing it a sense of coherence to sound like, because it really is the journey of somebody’s awakening over the period of time. There’s some things sound very elementary in the beginning and they should, because that’s where the voice was at that point. But when you’re trying to stitch something together, that’s written over the periods of time, there’s a lot of editing work that has to go into making it make sense and keeping the raw parts raw on purpose and polishing up the polishing of some things that you were really just writing cause you needed to learn it yourself.

We call it like taking the preach out of the book. And I had an editor and she’d done the same thing with a book of essays she’d written on parenting and she said, you know, we were just busy taking the preachiness out of our book because we were preaching early what we needed to learn. And then when we learned it, it had been integrated and now you can take it back instead of telling the reader of the article or the essay, ‘you need to do this’. I could take it back to first person and say, oh, when I was going through this process, this is what I learned. And there’s a vulnerability in coming back to that first person perspective. It’s much more vulnerable than saying, ‘here’s what you need to do to have a great relationship’. This is what happened to me. And I had to go through this and I had to fail in these ways and I had to learn these lessons in order to have the successful relationship I have today.

Terri Connellan: I so relate to that from my experiences. And I guess it’s that ‘show, don’t tell’ too, isn’t it? Rather like showing what you went through rather than telling, like you said, this is what you need to do. I think that’s so powerful. So you’ve mentioned some of the challenges you came against writing Wake Up in Love. Is there anything else that comes to mind as particular challenges or insights you might share from your writing journey?

Penelope Love: Patience, I’ll echo that. It was a really challenging piece because the world began moving very quickly. 2004, there wasn’t even YouTube. I did a little research on that for my book actually, cause when I went home from meditation the first time when I met my husband that night and there had been this photograph of his teacher on the wall, behind him, Ramana Maharshi, and I needed to go home and Google Ramana Maharshi to find out, you know, what I was getting involved in. And I ended up searching only on Google and, you know, cause YouTube wasn’t really a thing. Otherwise I will certainly, would’ve gone to YouTube if I could catch a video of this man. So anyway, long story short, patience, the time. That dates me on how old I was or how young I was when I started writing the book and in the information explosion since then with social media and, you know, the proliferation of book publishing through print on demand, everybody seemed to have a book or a website or a blog and every time I tried to have one, it just wasn’t happening. It wasn’t coming together. It just wasn’t the time. There needed to be a maturing process that, the only way for a maturing process to happen is over time. So I couldn’t rush that one. And that was challenging because I really wanted to be an author like so many other people.

Terri Connellan: I relate to that too. And you are also an independent publisher at Citrine so I’m interested in how becoming a publisher has dovetailed with supporting or conflicting with your own writing, because it must’ve been a bit of tension in there. Working with books all day and then trying to write your own at the same time must have been challenging.

Penelope Love: That’s exactly right, Terri. And that was the thing, I was falling into that, ‘I’m helping everybody else write that book’ and when is it going to be the time that I dedicate to the message that I know is on my soul to communicate with the world and that took grace and patience again. Other types of challenges that come from just the sheer amount of information and really sorting through, you know, what is my message? What is my voice? What is my authentic knowingness? And how do I put that in words and sort out the other voices that are constantly coming into my mind all day, because I’m reading so much information.

So I did end up taking time off last year in the months leading up to the publication of my book. Another man was running my company and he did a wonderful job while I was on this sabbatical, even though at the time, the way it happened was, and I won’t go into the full details of the story, right now. But the way it happened was that I was actually really, truly believed I was giving the company away and that Todd was going to be running the company. And I was just going to be helping him and supporting him. And I truly had to believe it was completely out of my hands or I would not have let go. And it was so gracious the way it came back into my stewardship a couple months after Wake Up in Love came out. Then Todd said, I was only always holding this company for you. And I was like, wow, what a friend, what an amazing person. And he was one of the first authors published with Citrine and he has been by my side in every way. And I’m grateful for him. And not only him though, all of the authors were so supportive of that time that I needed. And even though they thought I was not necessarily going to be their publisher anymore, they supported me. And it’s that type of relationship that I’m even in this whole work for, that connection, that bond, that caring about each other. I think the publishing process holds up a microscope to that. It lets us really explore it and feel it and live it and know a quality of human relationship that I’m not sure you know, is possible in other types of contexts.

Terri Connellan: Hmm. Yeah. So what I’m hearing is that I guess it’s about holding your own space for your own story whilst holding space for other people’s stories and just how that, that whole tension gets managed and it makes sense to me that you would need in a way to step away so that you could sort of get space around your own story to bring it to life. Makes perfect sense.

Penelope Love: And it was wonderful too, because it was a luxury. I got to finally walk the talk I’d be talking for all these years that I knew in theory. And I knew it pretty intimately because my husband went through this process and so I was up close and personal with my husband and seeing what he went through as an author. And that was actually a big part of what played into the formation of Citrine Publishing was just watching the way that his publisher dealt with him. I want to create a company that treats authors the way I know they deserve to be treated and not the way they necessarily are treated in the traditional publishing world. Not to say that all traditional publishing goes that way, but a great deal of it is. There’s not that personal connection that I feel can be one of the strengths of independent publishing as I feel you’re experiencing right now with the kind press.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. For me, that whole writing/ publishing journey has been a real learning process for me, but certainly that relationship you have with both the editor on the way through, the publisher. I’ve been really honored with the kind press to have a very similar experience. It’s been great.

Penelope Love: Yeah. And it’s one of those things I think I may have even said this to you along our journey. It’s something that I often reflect on, you know, the first publisher with a printing press and the first author with a manuscript, having their conversation. What did that look like? Who said what to who, and you know, how did that go down? But I’d like to get to the essence of, look at, what a powerful partnership that was. And so every time I’m speaking with someone who has a manuscript, I try to harness that original creative energy of that, like archetypal conversation. How do we do something? You have a talent, I have a talent. How do we make it synergistically more than it is the individual parts alone.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And for me, it was a real journey in learning about collaboration with you and with Natasha from the kind press. And I reached out to you because I felt so lost, you know, with what to do with my book. I had created the draft. And then I got to a point, I had planned to self-publish, but I just didn’t know what to do and what step to take and I’ve come to realise writing is such a collaborative process. So is that your learning also, how do you see collaboration as part of the writing and publishing journey?

Penelope Love: Well, I feel like partnership is one of our greatest tools for evolution or heading towards self-realization. That collaborative opportunity to master our own communication because ultimately we are talking with nobody, but our own heart, our own self. And if we know that our outer world is a reflection of our inner world, then we can really use our partnerships in collaboration to master that knowingness and to realize who we are. And I feel like the writing and publishing partnership holds an extremely effective magnifying glass to that process. Because writing freezes everything in time and lets you look at it and notice it. And then if something is not quite right about it, you can edit it and you can change it. And so this freezing in time that writing does, it forces us to be clear with our words. And it ties into that self-realization that is in my own experience, the purpose of being alive.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. And I think there’s often that view that writing is a solitary process. But the moment it really all fell into place for me was when I wrote my acknowledgements and there was this cast of many, many people who were involved in the writing process and all the inputs. And is that how you feel too about it? We can feel like it’s a solitary performance, but it’s so not.

Penelope Love: I love that you’re saying that because it’s really making me think about it and reflect on my own experience. And it was those times when I was trying to be the writer in the cabin in Costa Rica, you know, Walden, my own personal Walden Pond, creating for myself, that I was struggling the most with writing. But when I was living my life and having the daily stresses of running a business, those precious mornings or couple of hours. Sometimes I do my morning pages at night. But I didn’t call them Morning Pages. I would call it my Nocturnal Journal. And I went ahead and when I found those moments, that’s when life is happening all around me and I was dealing with people and that gave me not only material to work with, but emotions and feelings that could come through on the page.

You know, I don’t think writing can be done in a vacuum. That said, there’s a paradox for everything. And sometimes I really do need that solo hermit time to get something exactly the way I want it to be. So I think it’s balance.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I agree. I think that’s what I’ve learned from my experience, but it certainly shifted my stereotypical view of the writing process.

Penelope Love: Yeah, maybe that taps into sort of that patriarchal view of like the solo man in the cabin and Walden Pond, writing. And to not deny the beauty of those manuscripts and those publications just, I mean, there’s some awesome literature. At the same time, that image that gets perpetuated in culture, I think we’re really challenging that now with our new technologies and our new capacity for relating with each other, and we’re able to explore more of the collaborative aspect of writing and the power.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And so part of our collaboration too, has been through you sharing a story on my website and my blog as part of the Wholehearted Story series, which some people might be familiar with. And your story in that series was called The Journey to Write Here, which is about your calling as a writer, your relationship with writing over time. So what writing practices have supported you and have evolved over your time as a writer?

Penelope Love: Yes, Morning Pages, of course. I could sing their praises every day and never get tired of it. They are just such a wonderful, wonderful tool from The Artist’s Way and Julia Cameron, I’m sure your listeners will be familiar with that already. And then free writing. So like there’s nothing like a good free-write. But, that said, I also had another contrasting practice to that, and that would be writing for publication. I think, setting some goals to write for publication started to give order and structure to the free writing and Morning Page chaos that would be upon my eight and a half by 11 line paper in the morning. Because I would start to take the golden nuggets out of those ideas and start to shape them and polish them for publication. And as I alluded to earlier in the interview, when I spoke about writing for the Montaña al Mar magazine, in Costa Rica, that was my first experience of giving structure to those ideas. And it was so helpful. Because now we’re walking that balance out of the writer solo in the room and in the collaborative environment.

And then when you write for publication, that is another key piece, I feel, of practicing. Your early publications won’t be as good as your later ones. I mean, never say never because you could have a really, really awesome first time that you tried to do something like a lot of artists do. And then, you know, then the doer will kick in and the one who wants to try to do that again and try to make it as good as the first time. So we see that with a lot of musical artists. It’s almost more easy to hear in music than it is to see in writing, but it happens in all craft when you first start something, that one who’s trying so hard to be the writer isn’t there and the writing flows, and then the more you practice.

And it’s the same thing with meditation. That happens with meditation too. Sometimes the first time people come to meditation, they will have great, deep profound meditation. And then they’ll start trying to meditate. And that’s when it becomes a more restless experience until you learn to consciously tune out the the doer.

For me, that has been my spiritual practice of Self-Inquiry, using what I learned from my husband, but which is a lineage from Ramana Maharshi in India. And if anybody wants to look up that teaching, it is really profound. And the reason that I got hooked on it is because of our mutual friend Carl Jung. Carl Jung wrote a forward to Ramana Maharshi’s book. And I write about that in Wake Up in Love. I write about how I was very uncertain being a Catholic raised woman to go to a meditation class and start taking instruction from a man in a dhoti. But at the same time, when I read that Carl Jung had written the forward to Ramana Maharshi’s book, I said, you know what, I’m going to give this guy a chance.

And so the Self-Inquiry practice of taking any anxiety I had inward, including the anxiety of ‘I need to write. How do I write? This needs to get done.’ You know, ‘I’m not a writer yet’. Well, who thinks that? I do. And then I was able to be like, oh, I’m not the one. If I’m aware of the one who wants to be a writer, am I that? No, I have to be something so much vaster so much greater, so much beyond words.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Two things come to mind for me, from what you’ve just said. First is that writing for publication can be a really important part of our process. So for me, blogging filled that that way of writing. And I started a blog in 2010 for exactly that reason. I think it helped me to work out what I wanted to write and how I want to write it. So that was an important part of my writing for publication journey.

Penelope Love: Yeah. That’s beautiful. And I think blogging has definitely filled that… I’ve never formally read it or heard it stated anywhere that there’s a sort of like structure or balance you need to hit as a writer to develop your craft. But you know, maybe in our conversation here, we’re coming up with a sort of template that people can use, which is, make sure you’re doing some free writing or Morning Page styles and make sure you’re also doing some structured writing for publication. And that will help you develop your craft into a well-rounded craft.

Terri Connellan: I love that. And the other thing that came to me from what you were saying too, is that it’s a continuing sort of self-development, self-growth such as you went through with your meditation, which is about the mindset of writing too, isn’t it? It’s about , how we see ourselves as a writer and how we respond to our calling, which I think you’ve mentioned a few times today as we’ve spoken. Yeah, just so important.

So this is the Create Your Story podcast. So a question I’m going to ask people each time on the calls is how have you created your story over your lifetime? For me ‘create your story’ is that idea of being active. Active self-leader, active creator in our story and the decisions we make, turning points. It’s a big question. I know, but just what pops up for you around, how have you created your story over your lifetime?

Penelope Love: How fun to dance with you in this question, Terri especially knowing that this will be the podcast question that everybody gets asked. It’s beautiful one. You know, I think I struggled the most when I tried to create my story. And we could look at that literally with the years of struggle that I experienced in trying to write my memoir and get it to a publishing point prematurely.

And that was really, really painful. It started in the book in Wake Up in Love when I said I’m going to write my book of love and my husband questioned, maybe I wasn’t ready yet. And that was my first time turning inward with this process, but that was not the only time I had to turn inward about the idea of wanting to have my writing out there in the world.

And when it wasn’t happening, I’d really have to take it back inward to that question of like, who’s doing the writing, who is the creator of my story. And when I merged with that which is creating the story through my meditations, then I could become the instrument. Like the body mind Penelope could become used and played as an instrument in order to write and show a story and show one perspective of the human experience.

So I would say that’s how I created my story, but really without creating my story, with surrendering to that, which is creating the story.

Terri Connellan: Oh, that’s so beautiful. Yeah. And I think that it’s often that tension again, we’ve used the word tension a lot, but life’s a lot of tensions between what we want to do. And then also allowing, like that, being/ doing tension too, isn’t it?

Penelope Love: Yeah. I love the word tension. You know, I used to be so afraid of the word tension and you know, my counselors and anxiety. And I mean, I can’t believe I didn’t even touch on this yet. Although I did a little bit with the idea that editing is a great outlet for the type of hypervigilant upbringing that I had, but also OCD. I had OCD and depression and these types of things that create a lot of tension in one’s life. But when you look at even sexual energy, that leads to orgasm is full of tension. And like, I love tension because when it releases, it’s freedom. And so why should we fight with tension? And when we stopped fighting with tension and we actually are able to find the joy, the peace, the bliss, the orgasm, a lot easier. Yeah.

Terri Connellan: That’s wonderful. Yeah. I think that’s great. It’s about that, again, reframing of what we go through and just shifting our mindset to, to embrace something rather than fighting it all the time. So I think that’s a valuable insight.

Penelope Love: Yeah. So I’m happy we played with the word ‘tension’ today and I love it. And I don’t even mean to take the tension out of tension. Well, you can’t, but the idea is like if tension is there, let it be there. Like enjoy it because it is part of the human experience to love, to relish, to be like, frustrated that something’s not coming to terms yet or coming into being yet, because you know, when it does, it’s going to be so much more joyful than you can ever imagine. And that I know from publishing the book.

Terri Connellan: I can relate to that. I can relate to that too. The many times I nearly gave up because of that tension. And I think it’s that sort of pushing through and that Yeah, that just desire for completion and commitment to ourselves is really important.

So, you know my book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition very, very well because you’ve been on an intimate journey with me and you know about some of the tips that I recommend, but what are your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, especially for women.

Penelope Love: You know, it’s an honor to be asked that question by the woman who wrote the book on wholehearted leadership, because I’m like, Hmm, what else could I add to that book? Or what else could I add to that body of wisdom? And I’ll have to reach back into my early experience of Sadhana again, spiritual practice. And I make reference to this in Wake Up in Love as well. I was given a tool by my teacher called the conscious daily planning sheets. And that is a process of setting your daily agenda with intentions. So you’re not only writing down what you have to do, but the feeling of completion or the feeling of connection that you want to have when you’re doing those activities.

So you’re spending your time at night, doing your daily agenda for the next day. And you’re practicing those feelings before you go to bed and you’re taking them into sleep with you. So that the next day, when you wake up and you go through your day, your day’s already played out in your subconscious mind as you’ve been sleeping and it becomes the way you wanted to feel the night before it starts to happen and unfold in an effortless way.

And the practice of this daily sheet actually ultimately removes the doer, the sense of doership or volition, from your daily activities. And that’s where you find a sense of surrender and freedom and more creativity in your life when you practice this. So in addition to the daily agenda part of the sheets, it has a daily review where you’re looking at, and as a Virgo, you’ll love this, a checklist. Did I exercise today? Did I do conscious reading? Not only reading, you know, the tabloids, but did I read a book by an awakened Sage? Did I let that highest consciousness, Rumi poems, did I let those poems slip into my heart today?

Did I eat consciously? How present was I when I was working? There’s a whole checklist on these sheets. And there’s also a walkthrough of the self-inquiry and it’s broken down into the questions of the process that eventually becomes an automatic happening as you practice inquiry. But the sheets are like training.

So they go through each of the steps of the inquiry and you will take anything that made you upset during the day. And you would use the self-inquiry process with that to get behind the sense of I that has the problem and to find the solution. And then to go in forward into the communications you need to have with the people who were involved in the upsetting situation to clear the space and keep the space clear so that you can move forward with your life in a productive way.

And so these sheets, they took about an hour to do every night. And then at the end of the month you’d have 30 sheets. And you would take a log of all the things that upset you and you would write them down again. And you could look and see, do I have repeating patterns of upset? Are things continuing to upset me? Because if they keep coming up, you know what, you’re not getting clear. You’re not taking that inquiry piece all the way home. And so it was a really beautiful process that I was given by Nick, my husband, my teacher. And in the context of the conscious living center that we had, and everybody who lived there did the sheets and you know, the communal center where we lived, this came in really handy because in our communications with each other, and if something upsetting happened during the day, we would resolve it right then in there. And if it wasn’t resolved on the spot, it was at least resolved by the end of the day, before we went to bed and those problems were not carried forward into the day. And it created an efficient and beautiful and loving organisation. And I feel I applied those skills that I used and learned, the muscles that I built from the sheets, in my life. And that was a very wholehearted practice for me that I did for many years. And I affectionately now call them the holy sheets because the idea of doing and cataloging all of these things about your everyday. It takes somebody with a dedicated mind, who really wants to wake up to the truth. But when you commit yourself to that process, there’s no limit to what’s possible.

Terri Connellan: Well, thank you for sharing your practice with us and something that’s been honed over a long period of time too which I’m sure has made a huge difference to how you live and how you create your story. So thank you for sharing that with us.

You just spoke about poetry. Is there anything you’d like to read us from Wake Up in Love before we close?

Penelope Love: Sure. You know, my book is a tapestry of poetry and prose, and it’s funny, I didn’t know I could write poetry until we started, I hopped on Instagram about 2014 and you know, there’s some newsletter and I got an account and people started posting the challenges and I started taking photos with my phone and then these little beautiful ideas would come to me as I was taking the photos or looking through my photo album and they started to come to me as poems. And I taken poetry in college. I got a C, and I was pretty much a straight A student and it was really upsetting to me that I had gotten a C in poetry. I had to get that doer taken out of the way. That one who thought it was writing the poetry and just allow these, these ideas and words to come. And so it was a very beautiful addition to the book that came later that had I published the book three or four years into the writing, it would not have the poetry dimension.

I’d love to share one. And I think the best one to share is, this one is called, Take a Backward Bow.

All the exploration is preparation

for the moment the wind blows just so –

you forget everything you know

and fall in love with the endless show

as you take a backward bow

to the miracle of how

The One you’ve been looking for

finds You

and the exploration begins

anew

Terri Connellan: Thank you. That was just magical.

Penelope Love: I love that one because it’s not only about meeting a soulmate in life, but it’s also about the creative process and ultimately about meeting yourself.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Thank you. So I thoroughly recommend to people to seek out Wake Up in Love. We’ll put the links in the show notes. Penelope, can you tell people where they can find out more about you, your book and your work online?

Penelope Love: Yes. Sure. I have a website that is accessible through PenelopeLove.com and I am also active on Instagram. My username there is @penelopelovely

Terri Connellan: Wonderful. And it’s been such a joy to connect with you over many years on Instagram, as the editor of my book and and through our blog writing together. And, just so many beautiful conversations. It’s been such a joy to share those with others today. Thank you so much.

Penelope Love: Yes, Terri, thank you. It is a joy to add to our body of conversation and I look forward to many more years of our friendship going forward.

Terri Connellan: Thank you.

Links to explore:

My books and book club:

https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1

Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club – open for enrolment now and kicking off December 2021

Free resources:

Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Other free resources: https://www.quietwriting.com/free-resources/

My coaching:

The Writing Road Trip – a community program with Beth Cregan – kicking off Jan 2022

Connect on social media

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writingquietly/

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terri-connellan/

About Penelope Love

Penelope’s Blog: https://www.wakeupinlove.com

Citrine Publishing: https://www.citrinepublishing.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/penelopelovely

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/penelopelovely

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/penelopelove

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/penelopelove

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/PenelopeLove

Subscribe to Penelope’s Love Life Column: https://wakeupinlove.com/subscribe

creativity podcast

Developing an Artist’s Life with Lynn Hanford-Day

December 28, 2021

Welcome to Episode 7 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Developing an Artist’s Life.

In this episode, I’m joined by Lynn Hanford-Day of Sacred Intuitive Art – a visual artist working with sacred geometry, mandalas and Islamic patterns and a coach and psychotherapist.

You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

Challenging transitions
Moving on from difficult times
Developing an artist’s life
Lynn’s art business & practice, Sacred Intuitive Art
Balancing corporate and creative living
Patterns and spirals in art and life
Manifesting & discipline
Living wholeheartedly & in the moment
And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 7 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 28^th of December as I record this and we’re in that lovely liminal time between Christmas and New Year with an opportunity to reflect on what the past year has taught us and the chance to plan and set some intention for 2022. I’ll certainly be making some time for past year reflections. My word of 2021 is Author so it’s been wonderful to step into that space and publish my Wholehearted books. And I’m crafting up new year intentions around my 2022 word of the year which I will reveal soon. Stay tuned!

I’m thrilled to have my friend Lynn Hanford-Day join us for the podcast today.

Lynn is a visual artist working with sacred geometry, mandalas and Islamic pattern. Lynn is also dual qualified as a coach/psychotherapist and works with women in transition who are seeking meaning, purpose and wellbeing. Lynn is especially interested in creativity and intuition, positive psychology and strengths, helping people to access and express their inner wisdom. Lynn helps women discover clarity and confidence, path and purpose.

Lynn and I met via our mutual interest in creativity. You might remember Lynn from Episode 3 and the Wholehearted Virtual Book Launch. Lynn has also written a Wholehearted Story for the Quiet Writing blog called Breakdown to Breakthrough which I also draw on in my book Wholehearted as Lynn’s story resonated with mine in so many ways. Lynn’s wholehearted story tells of how she moved from burnout and a corporate HR career to working with sacred geometry and crafting a multi-faceted career as artist, coach and facilitator working with women in transition and organisations going through change.

And that’s what we chat about in today’s episode: that transition, Lynn’s creative journey to developing an artist’s life alongside her corporate career, art and creativity as a source of healing and growth and intuitive ways of living, working and creating.

A reminder before we head into the podcast about the two programs I’m offering to kick off 2022.

If you’re looking for community, support and accountability for living a more wholehearted life, join me and a fabulous group of women gathering for the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club to read and work through Wholehearted together through-out 2022. Part book club, part group coaching, it’s a gentle and focused way to keep wholehearted living front of mind and make progress to the transitions and transformations you desire in the coming year.
If you’re looking for community, support and accountability to get writing done in 2022, join me and Beth Cregan for a Writing Road Trip. We begin with a free challenge in late January on your writing identity and then shift into a 6 week course looking at your writing road map and then come together for a 6 month community writing program where the writing gets done in earnest together and with support.

So now let’s head into the interview with the lovely and inspiring Lynn Hanford-Day!

Transcript of interview with Lynn Hanford-Day

Terri Connellan: Lynn, welcome to the Create Your Story podcast and thank you for your connection and your support of Wholehearted and Quiet Writing.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Hi Terri. It’s really good to be here. I’m feeling a bit nervous, also excited. So I really appreciate the offer and the invitation to take part.

Terri Connellan: It’s a great pleasure to talk with you today and to explore more about you and more about your work in the world to share with others. So we’ve connected in many ways around creativity, wholehearted living, art and writing and so much more on our journey together. So it’s great today to be able to share some of those conversations that we’ve had more publicly and with others. So can you provide an overview about your background, about how you got to be where you are now and the work that you do?

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. I’ve got a corporate background. I’ve spent some over 30 years working in human resources and 25 of those years at director level. And I’ve been in work for 40 years cause I’m 61 now to my horror. But art came into my life in 2014. So in parallel with becoming self-employed, I’ve also developed a life around being an artist. And that’s obviously what we’re going to talk about more as we go through the conversation today, but I’ve got this mix of corporate work and non corporate work.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. So very much like me, you’ve had that shift in midlife from one life that was going down one path and another life, but both of us heading towards more creative living. So we’ve both shared that major transition from long-term career, yours, as you said, in the case of corporate HR to that more creatively focused life. So can you describe what that transition has been like for you? How long it took and what the main turning points were for you.

Lynn Hanford-Day: I covered some of this on the guests blog post I wrote didn’t I, which is, I think about three years ago now, Breakdown to Breakthrough. So in 2013, I had a breakdown. I didn’t work for a year and a half. Some of the impacts of that time were quite catastrophic because I did lose my job. There was no way I could continue working beyond the kind of paid period of sick leave. So we agreed that I would leave and then I run out of money.

So I sold my house in order to get hold of some of the equity that was left in that, which wasn’t huge. And as I came through the other side of that, I became self-employed because I knew I needed to change the way I lived. I recognized that I was my job and how unhealthy that can be.But it was also the . Way in which I could earn a living. So I turned to consultancy and executive coaching and interim management, which is a kind of form of being an agency temp. So I did that, but what had entered my life while I was unwell which was kind of unexpected, but it was also the path forward. It was part of the breakthrough story, this unexpected arrival of creativity in my life.

I started playing around with various courses. It actually began with coloring books. And I got into some online art courses and I was always fascinated by mandalas and patterns. So I tried to find a class and I couldn’t. So I bought a book from Amazon and a pair of compasses and started playing. And it was in 2014 through some serendipitous events that I then found a school in London called the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts which actually teaches a master’s program based on geometry that people can work with a huge range of medium. So it could be stained glass or it could be painting, or it could besculpting, or marquetry all kinds of things and they run public courses and that’s where I began to immerse myself in this practice.

So I’ve had a thread alongside my ongoing corporate work that’s been developing my creative process and becoming an artist which surprises me even now that I would ever describe myself in that way. I hadn’t touched paint since I left school, so, you know, over 30 years ago. And it keeps me sane. It’s really important to me now.

Terri Connellan: That’s just such an amazing story. And I know you’ve moved to the seaside and are working as an artist in a more full-time capacity?

Lynn Hanford-Day: It’s not full time. My work kind of flexes. It’s feast or famine as most people would say when they become self-employed. So it is something that I tend to do on a weekend or some in the evening if I’m doing some full-time work in an organization, but more recently I completed a contract at the end of March and over the last six months, I’ve given myself quite a lot of time and space to what I call faff. So I’m earning my degree in faffing and spending a lot of time walking by the sea and making the most of this lovely place that I moved to two years ago.

And I also thought, oh, I’m going to paint every day, which I haven’t, because it’s been summer time here so I wanted to get out of the house with the ending of lockdown and just experience nature and some fresh air. So the arts kind of comes and goes, but in the last couple of months in particular, it seems to really taken on a life of its own again.

So I was super excited a couple of weeks ago to become part of a new gallery that’s opened in the town here in Eastbourne. They had an open evening last week where it was for all the artists being represented. I met a heap of other lovely people. So I’m really excited about seeing my work properly hanging on a dedicated wall space.

So that’s really good. And the Instagram followers that I’ve got just keeps on growing. And that’s gone a bit wild in the last two or three weeks as well. Where a particular new piece that I’ve been posting seems to have attracted a lot of interest and gained about 200 followers in three weeks. Where’s this all coming from?

Terri Connellan: That’s fantastic. And it’s been wonderful. We’ve been connected for quite some time now watching your journey over that time and how you’re managing to shift into what you love to do. And as you say, flexing, as we all have to do with income and balancing creative living with resources and with freedom, creative freedom as well. So that’s wonderful.

So you mentioned your Wholehearted Story on Quiet Writing, which you shared about your journey from breakdown to breakthrough. So what did you learn from moving through and on from such difficult times?

Lynn Hanford-Day: it was such a pivotal. It wasn’t a moment. It was a protracted period of time. And what, what happened for me is during 2012, I had begun to feel very, very tired. And I can remember at Christmas time, a meeting of the leadership team at work and saying, I feel like I’ve run into a brick wall and I’m really looking forward to… I was going to take the full Christmas through to new year break. And I returned to work something like the 6th or 7th of January. So I did a day back at work and the following morning I couldn’t move. So my body decided for me and so it was a really serious message of like, you have got to stop so physically I was stopped. I saw my GP. I worked with a counselor. I was on antidepressants and my counselor was also a mindfulness teacher. So I got obsessed with the notion that meditation is good for you. But she was a very wise woman who said, what you need to do is learn to relax. You’re actually not capable of meditating right now. She kind of did demonstrate that to me. She gave me a CD, which I just found impossible to listen to. So that got put to one side.

I was in denial for probably three months probably through to Easter time that I was actually ill. I kept telling myself I’ll be back at work. I’ve got the budget to do. I never did go back to work ever. So during that time it was almost a gift and I was very aware of kind of going very, very deep within. Once I was able to concentrate a bit better, I did start to return to some books about Jung. This is one of our other connections, around Jung and types and archetypes.

And so there’s an expression from Carl Jung about having an unlived life. And I got a real sense that that’s where I was at, that I had become my job. I was very overly identified with it and that there was an opportunity here to explore who I was in the world, beyond my job. As I started to recover, to have the energy, to think about what do I want to do in the future.

And part of that was also the time spent painting and playing, giving myself a lot of time to play and also visiting Ireland. A dear friend of mine had moved to Ireland in the middle of 2012 to retire there with her husband she’s on the west coast, on the Dingle peninsula, right at the end of the peninsula.

And I stayed with her many, many times. And that space was also very important space because of the nothingness of it. And it was just a very magnificent seascape and very barren land, which was also incredibly beautiful, but I loved being able to just sit in my car to protect myself from the incredible winds that they get. It really blows a gale. But I loved the sense of the wind and being sat in the car and just staring off into space. And I think that was important time as well. So that transition was, I think, made up of many threads with an inner journey, support from medical professionals and medical help, support of friends, time in Ireland and this kind of emergence of creativity and the willingness to encounter my own intuition and what my heart was saying. So it was a soul journey. And I think there are many wise people who do describe breakdowns or severe episodes of depression as the heart seeking to speak. And I love the expression about being depressed to be rewritten as the two words, deep rest. Hmm. And that’s what I needed was deep rest. Cause I had incredible burnout and the feeling of just turning to ash. So little left in terms of energy.

Terri Connellan: You describe that beautifully, that challenging situation in that image of turning to ash, which really resonated with me too. Just what I’m hearing you say, what I’ve experienced also through my own experiences, which are not the same, but have some similar hallmarks and milestones is that loss of identity or that having to reshape identity. Because I think too, particularly when we’re invested in one path or in work, our identity gets very stitched into that. And then when we need to recalibrate it or something happens and we’re unable to continue down that path, I think that emptiness you describe and that space is often what we need to work with to regather ourselves and collect ourselves and redefine ourselves.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Completely. I met with a friend yesterday and we got into a conversation about unraveling and I know you and I think connected through Susannah Conway. One of her online courses is about unraveling the heart. And it’s a wonderful word. And talking with my friend and also other people through working as a coach, I think there are so many people, before COVID and particularly in a post pandemic world, who’ve got that sense of unraveling.

And once you’ve identified various threads, the opportunity to reintegrate: what do we want to now make of ourselves and this moment going forward? Yeah, unraveling transition. There’s a lot of it about. Isn’t it? The whole world planet is unraveling.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yes. When you think about transition, the way I’ve been thinking about it, just in the context of my book Wholehearted, it is the individual journeys, but also now we’re in the context of a global transition as well. So it’s multilayered.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Totally. Yeah.

And I love that word, wholehearted. I know when I first got to know you and got your newsletters and you’d created the wholehearted blog. There was something about that word that really spoke to me. So hence participating as a guest blog writer cause I really wanted to spend time asking myself what a wholehearted life looked like as I came out of this kind of space of falling apart, unraveling. I think it’s more than a word. And to really inquire into: what does it mean to be wholehearted? And what does a wholehearted life look like now?

Terri Connellan: Your contribution and the contributions of others to that blog series has been so powerful because every woman has bought their own story and has also found in the writing of that story and the thinking about that story, what it means for them. So I’ve been really grateful for that for opening up my own insights. Each story seems to open up the opportunity for other women to think about it differently too.

Lynn Hanford-Day: It does.

Terri Connellan: So tell us more about sacred, intuitive art and what you focus on in your artwork.

Lynn Hanford-Day: I kind of fell into a niche without realizing it. So as a child, I loved Spirograph and making spirals and flowery patterns. And I loved kaleidoscopes, labyrinthes, mazes, that kind of stuff. But as I went through my childhood and adolescence, I would love coloring and messing about with paints but I never embraced it as a potential way forward as a career.

I wanted to be a doctor or a teacher, so art didn’t really feature, but I have always loved mandalas and particularly Tibetan Buddhist mandalas. And I guess I’ve always been fascinated by pattern. So right through to my thirties, I was a knitter. So I was more into textiles. And so I would make Aran patterns, Fair Isle patterns, lacy jumpers made of mohair.

So it was still, always about the pattern. So I think that’s something that’s within me. And in the corporate world, in terms of organizational change and organizational systems and group dynamics, a lot of that’s about patterns of behavior. And I trained as a psychotherapist along the way like you do. So I qualified in 2008 with a lot of that was about the repeated patterns of our own behavior, where they may originate from whether they’re helpful or hindrances. There’s always been something about patterns. And, so when I really fell into art, well, I think it came and claimed me, what I was really finding myself doing was drawing circles. And one of the teachers I was with asked me why I kept drawing circles.

I said, I’ve no idea. I like circles. So I thought maybe I’m just going round in circles. Maybe it was some kind of metaphor for where I was in my life and she just said, it’s a really ancient symbol. So perhaps it’s worth exploring. I do prefer circles to squares. We all have our preferences. So as I discovered the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts and started doing some classes with them, it just spoke to me so much and the underlying symbol and meaning of circles, triangles, squares, curves, or straight lines and so on. I never thought I’d be talking about geometry, but I don’t really do it for the math. I do it for the underlying meaning. And it’s possible to look at any pattern and say, that’s a lovely pattern. I like it. Or I don’t like it. But what really stirs my heart is the origin of pattern and where it’s come from and the meaning of square and circle is consistent across all traditions, whether it’s Islamic or Buddhist or Celtic or north American.

So the circle represents heaven and the square represents the earth and they are brought together to bring heaven on earth. And then there’s many, many other layers of meaning depending on the pattern. That excites me so much. I created Sacred Intuitive Art as a means of sharing my work. I started to put my work on Instagram because I wanted to have a kind of digital gallery that I could see the progression of my work. I wasn’t on it to deliberately sell my work. It wasn’t the conscious reason.

But that’s what grew, and the name, I mean, how do we invent names? It was sacred from sacred geometry and intuitive arts, because the other thing I got into quite early on was intuitive and expressive arts, which I discovered was an actual ‘thing’ for people who aren’t artists and it’s actually quite abstract work. And I was kind of doing both. And as I built up my own geometry practice, I wanted to combine them. There’s a big theme for me in life about integration. So what I tend to do is use layers of color in the background and then place a geometric pattern on top of it. And that’s how I’m playing with color and shape and form.

And my Instagram account, I was heading towards 1700 followers now, and I’m like, gosh, and I sell most of my work through Instagram. I had a website built in about 2016 and then I didn’t pay much attention to it in the last two or three years because my mom died and then my dad died and I got preoccupied with other personal matters.

So I came back to it this year and had it rebuilt. So that went live in August.

So it’s the new website, which I’m really thrilled with because was just like, gosh, it’s all my work. I know you write about having a body of work. So doing the website was really revealing as to just how much I’ve done. Not all my work is on that website but it was a moment to reflect and take stock and to see that transition from my early work to what I produce now.

Terri Connellan: That’s been the most incredible journey and, two things. I love that thread of that love of patterns through all different aspects of your life and your artwork, and also your personality, through your workplace and the sort of modalities that you’ve focused on and the tools that you’ve used.

And then, secondly, just how wonderful it’s been watching you share your artwork and also your process. I think that’s probably one of the things I know I love and people love on Instagram and through websites is seeing the artistic or the writing process, going through it and being able to almost participate in that process as well as seeing the beautiful art created. And your new website is just stunning, so congratulations.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Thank you. Yeah. I love listening to other artists describe their process and seeing the work in progress photos and I actually began selling my work through mind, body, spirit shows. So I would have a stool and display my work. And that was such good fun. And what I learned is people are really interested in who you are as an artist. How did you get to do this? And also people are really interested in the story of a picture. Because for many people, this creative process is alien. We lose it, usually through school. I think schools have got a lot to answer for, in how we take creativity out of childhood. It’s such a shame.

And then as adults, we become fascinated with people who have this creative intention as part of their life. So I just got to the stage of thinking, well, I love watching other people paint. Isn’t that weird, but I love watching paint dry from all the people and seeing howthey go about it. Why not do that myself and just talk about what I’m actually creating.

I end up having some lovely online chats through Instagram, with people who are curious and want to ask a question or give some kind of reflection on the work. That’s so enjoyable.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And I think Instagram is such a great medium for that too. Isn’t it? It’s the instant side of it and the fact that it’s visual as well as the ability to have conversations. It’s fantastic. So we both love spirals, the spiral imagery and the mandalas you feature in your work. And they also feature in my Quiet Writing logo, which has the nautilus with the Fibonacci sequence and the cover of my book Wholehearted features that. So just thought it might be nice for us to just have a chat about spirals. What is it that about spirals that attracts you or attracts us generally to them do you think?

Lynn Hanford-Day: I’m not sure, Terri. I know I’ve always loved them and there’s something about the movement towards the centre. And there’s also something about the movement that’s contained within a spiral as well, so there’s a kind of energy and the vibration in a spiral that attracts me. And then you also get enormous metaphors around how we spiral through life. So it gets a kind of cerebral level. I find that fascinating and also very true, but spirals they’re so easy to draw. You can sit doodling spirals, which I frequently do and then we get people on the beach here where we have a lot of pebbles and people go and use the pebbles and make spiral patterns out on the beach or build a labyrinth from them. And so I think there’s something really deep rooted in the psyche over millennium about a spiral. So what calls you? Cause I love the Fibonacci sequence as well and the whole kind of Ammonite shell and the Nautilus.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I definitely feel drawn to them. And for me, for my business, for Quiet Writing and for the book, it’s that idea of repeating lessons, like going over the same ground. And I’m drawing a spiral with my hand as I’m talking, which doesn’t really work on the audio waves, but, that idea of spiraling, but often it’s as we’re learning and going through life, we’re repeating lessons and often because of how we’re wired or how we brought up, it’s often similar lessons, but we’re often repeating them but learning at a higher level. So that idea of Wholehearted and the work that I do is about that idea of creating our story and building our wisdom through all the things that we go through, but learning and going deeper. But it’s also like going higher and often we’ll find that there’s that repetition of patterns or of learning and behavior or the same thing cropping up and you think, well, there’s that thing again? You know? Yes. How, how have I dealt with that, but what resources do I have? How can I do this better? So I think to me, it’s a very integrating , you mentioned integration before, so that idea of how we seek to be whole, I think that’s what it’s about.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. Yeah. And just listening to you describe that, I’ve got the image of the spiral staircase. So you can have a spiral as kind of flat on a piece of paper or make one in the garden, out of shells or something.

But if we turn it into that kind of 3D representation of how we spiral through life we can move up another level and another level and still see what was beneath. And see the repetition or the similarity, and then look up as to do I need to build on this repetition in order to move wherever we’re seeking to develop in our self leadership or other aspects of our life.

Terri Connellan: I love that. And I love spiral staircases too. So for people at the beginning of such a journey or feeling of being a bit stuck or lost or going through major turning points but wanting more creativity or a different life, what advice would you offer from your experiences about that really tough time going through that big transition?

Lynn Hanford-Day: I would say, be willing to sit with the discomfort. Whether or not, it’s a breakdown or some kind of severe illness or some other aspect of crisis that happens to, I think most of us at some points in our lives, they are deeply distressing, uncomfortable periods of time, and in a world of busy-ness and doing, then to sit in opposition, to busy-ness and doing, and the impulse to find the solution. I certainly felt that, you know, and I felt that I’ve got to get back to work and obviously money is a feature of that. But what I’ve learned since then, and over the years since is, there is a message in the discomfort.

And if we don’t slow down, then we don’t always get that message. Hence the repeating patterns. Cause it comes back to bite us on the bum in some way. Yeah, I think that’s how I would sum it up and use help if necessary to kind of stay in that space. So whether it’s through a therapist, trusted friend, a coach, I know you do coaching too. And I do as well. There are people and spaces and places available to give yourself that time. And even if it is only an hour a week with a therapist or a couple of hours with a coach, it can be so valuable just to allow something to emerge.

Because I’ve found that the heart will often speak in a whisper and we need quietness to really connect with that. Some people managed to do that through meditating. I do it through painting. I suspect yours is through writing, but to find something that allows us to connect inwards and listen to that voice inside, no matter the discomfort that’s going on around.

Terri Connellan: No, that’s very wise and hard won insights. So, yeah. Thank you for that. And when we had the virtual launch and we had a chat about a similar theme, we talked about living with uncertainty too, which I guess is part of that discomfort. I talk in my book about the William Bridges change management model, which I know you’d know from your HR work as well, but that idea of that messy difficult middle, which feels so uncomfortable and uncertain, but it’s also where the great potential is too.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah, completely. That word transition, we use it for giving birth, don’t we? So we know that transition’s painful. But we have to go through it.

Terri Connellan: And I think your point about support too, is absolutely critical because that’s the other thing I’ve found and I know you’ve found going, one, they’re difficult, incredibly difficult journeys. And it’s about identity, as we said earlier, which can be quite unsettling and then it also can feel quite lonely. Cause it feels like now no one else has been through this type of thing. But when, as we’re talking now, often you find people one step ahead or have been through or have the strategies for dealing with people who have been in such moments of difficulty in crisis, and it’s important to reach out. So that’s a great reminder.

So, a question that I’m asking each person who comes on the podcast is how have you created your story over your life time?

Lynn Hanford-Day: How have I created my story? Haphazardly, organically. I’ve kind of gone through life in a fairly opportunistic way. I’ve not consciously set out to have this or be that or live somewhere. I know some people do. So I guess what I’m saying, I’m not particularly goal-focused. Maybe I should be, I don’t know. So I’ve created my story, particularly in the last 10 years or so often by looking back to notice the threads and the patterns, particularly in approaching my fifties and then approaching 60, which horrified me. How the hell did I get here and why am I still asking the question, what do I want to be when I grow up? it doesn’t ever seem to go away. So I guess I’ve created my story backwards. Which is curious, actually, in talking now with you about this. There’s a lot of people would say look forwards and coaching is very much about forward focus and forward momentum.

And I suppose it’s in the last three or four years, since my mum died and then my father died and then moving to Eastbourne which was two years ago. That was actually much more deliberate and much more focused around intention. And after my mum died, it was also a year in which three friends died of cancer. And I think that death does put us in contact with life and often leads us to reflect on, oh, well it could all be over tomorrow because actually, yes, it could be. None of us know. And as I’ve become older and got bigger and bigger numbers for my age, the realization that time is passing. So how do I want to live my life? And what does a wholehearted life look like for me at this moment in time? And what do I imagine myself doing when I’m 65 or 70? If I’m given that time, what do I want it to look like? So I’ve become much more conscious. And one of those desires was to have an art studio by the sea. So I’ve managed to move to the seaside two years ago and I still do my arts from home. Finding an art studio has proved to be quite elusive, but I’m lucky that the work I produce can be done from a table in the kitchen, which is what I do.

Terri Connellan: Wonderful. Your story makes me think of, in the writing circles, some people outline, plan ahead and are fairly goal focused and there’s others who… they talk about plotters and panters and the pantsers fly by the seat of their pants and are more organic,

But there’s often a point in a draft of a book where they’ll do a reverse outline and the people who have that tendency and stop and then go back and make sense of what’s happened to then work out where to go next. So it sounds very much like your story has been created that sort of way, which is wonderful.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah, I guess I am a kind of here and now person. I’m opportunistic. The other thing I’ve learned particularly in the last six months is I am quite good at manifesting. So I need to be careful about these thoughts. It says, wouldn’t it be good if because literally it arrives the next day. I was like, oh my God, no, not yet. Not now. I’m not ready.

Terri Connellan: That’s wonderful.

Lynn Hanford-Day: That tells me there’s something about alignment and noticing opportunities and so on. So yeah. Be careful what you wish for. But watching you go through the process of writing your book, which, I remember you starting that a few years ago.

There are some things we need to work at and have a discipline around to manifest, the creation of a book or the creation of a painting, whatever it might be, find our dream home. We need to stick at. Sometimes it’s not always going to come immediately.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Often, and it’s a nice mix between the two when it works well, as we’re manifesting, we’re setting the intentions, but we’re also putting the work in, getting the skills, which is obviously part of your artistic journey, and my own writing one and putting in that hard inner work too. That’s the other thing in your story and mine is that it’s the showing up to the page and the showing up to life is also because of doing that hard inner work over time and going on retreat, learning new skills and moving through that discomfort as you talked about earlier.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. Completely.

Terri Connellan: So you’ve read my book, I know, you kindly me some wonderful advance praise which is much appreciated. So you know about the wholehearted self-leadership tips there. So what are your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices for women based on your experience to add to my body of work?

Lynn Hanford-Day: I come back to that, building on what I said about sitting with the discomfort, that there is, I think something here about the importance of paying attention to your inner weather. And noticing what brings joy as well as what brings discomfort. We’re kind of wired for negativity as a species because it’s there to protect us and to serve us. Yet, for myself, again, it’s only in recent years that I’ve really paid attention to what brings me joy and pleasure, playfulness, contentment satisfaction and so on. And some of that is through the world of work. That as a workaholic in recovery that it’s been about paying attention to: where does joy come from beyond the workplace? Cause you know, I’m not going to be prancing around as an HR director for the rest of my life. I don’t want to. So where does it come from? And then to give yourself the time to do it, if it’s a thing that you do, or if your joy comes from sitting, staring at the sea for an hour, which is what I do. Then I allow myself to do it. So there’s something about the allowing as well.

Terri Connellan: Hmm. That’s beautiful. Thank you. And as you were saying that beautiful list of words, of, joy and fulfillment and that beautiful list that you shared with us, I was feeling all warm inside that just tapping into the more positive aspects of life. I think it’s so true. And often they’re very simple. Like it’s just that a cup of tea in the sunshine and for me swimming is a big source of source of joy. And a lot of that is about just being in the moment.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yes, it is. And this is where mindfulness practitioners are constantly encouraging us to be is in the here and now and in the moments. And I’ve learned the truth of that. It’s really powerful. And to just step outside, literally to go into nature or to step outside the busy-ness of the day and it doesn’t need to take up huge amounts of time either. We often say we can’t do that. Haven’t got time. I have given myself the discipline of doing it. And some of that happened in the first lockdown because I do live literally across the road from the sea. And it came from a suggestion from a friend because I post lots of pictures of the sea on my Facebook page with friends. And she said, why don’t you turn it into a potential installation piece, which I haven’t done, but I then took a video of the sea every day for three months.

And I was working during lockdown. I was working from home doing my HR-y stuff, but having that commitment to literally go outside no matter what the weather was. Cause it began in March so we get quite a lot of storms. It was to just stand there and take a 30 second video. And that turned into, go for a walk, go sit by the sea, go meditate by the sea.

Terri Connellan: Powerful practices and easy habits to get out of and easy habits to get into too. So that’s a great reminder to everyone listening. Well, thank you so much for your time today, it’s been such a beautiful conversation and so many layers and great things to draw on from ourconversation today. So thank you for sharing so much of yourself and your beautiful work. So if you can let people know where people can find more about you and your art and work online.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Thanks, Terri. Thank you so much. It’s been a lovely conversation. Yeah, people can find me on my website, which is SacredIntuitiveArt.com and also on Instagram. And my Instagram handle is the same name. So it’s @ sacredintuitiveart

Terri Connellan: Thank you so much. It’s been a great joy speaking today.

Lynn Hanford-Day: Yeah. Thank you, Terri. Go well.

About Lynn Hanford-Day

Lynn Hanford-Day is a visual artist working with sacred geometry, mandalas and Islamic pattern. Lynn is also dual qualified as a coach/psychotherapist and works with women in transition who are seeking meaning, purpose and wellbeing. Lynn is especially interested in creativity and intuition, positive psychology and strengths, helping people to access and express their inner wisdom. Lynn helps women discover clarity and confidence, path and purpose.

Lynn’s art can be seen on her website at www.sacredintuitiveart.com.

You can also connect with Lynn via Instagram and email lynn.hanford-day@sophrentos.com

Links to explore:

My books:

https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1

Free resources:

Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Other free resources: https://www.quietwriting.com/free-resources/

My coaching:

The Writing Road Trip – a community program with Beth Cregan – kicking off Jan 2022

Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club – open for enrolment now – join us for 2022.

Connect on social media

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writingquietly/

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terri-connellan/

creativity love, loss & longing podcast

Creating, grief coaching and pro-ageing with Valerie Lewis

January 13, 2022

Living a creative, easeful and positive life after loss

Welcome to Episode 9 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Creating, Grief Coaching & Pro-Ageing.

I’m joined by Valerie Lewis, Grief & Loss Coach, Lifestyle Model, 60+ Pro-Ager and Creative Dabbler.

We chat about creativity as a central life value and practise and how it helps in so many ways including dealing with grief and loss. And about being a grief coach and 60plus pro-ager!

You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

In this episode, we chat about:

Life after tragedy
Embracing creativity
Choosing not to climb the corporate ladder
Dealing with loss
Making transitions later in life
Grief coaching + supporting others
Creativity + intuitive art
Being a 60plus pro-ager
Becoming a model
And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 9 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 13^th of January as I record this and suddenly we are nearly mid way through January! we’ve had a lot of rain here in Sydney so it’s humid and the gardens are going wild. But I’ve been able to swim and enjoy the mid-summer temperatures. I’ve also been reflecting on 2021 via Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year 2022 Workbook this week and also reflecting further on my 2022 word of the year (to be revealed soon). Plus I’ve been planning and preparing for the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club where we focus in on Chapter 1 of Wholehearted and the Companion Workbook next week together. As well as preparing for The Writing Road Trip with Beth Cregan which kicks off with a free challenge on 31 January. So there are lots of exciting new things this year and I hope you’ll join me in one of these offerings! Links in the show notes on Quiet Writing at QuietWriting.com/podcast and find the link to this episode.

I’m thrilled to have my friend Valerie Lewis from Visualise and Bloom join us for the podcast today to chat about Creating, Grief Coaching and Pro-Ageing.

Valerie Lewis is a multi-passionate 60plus pro ager. Through grief coaching and personal growth facilitation, she supports and empowers those who are lost and confused with the direction they want to take following a significant life event that has impacted them and their sense of self. Her interests include being an intuitive reader, Reiki and crystals practitioner and avid creative dabbler.

Valerie and I met through a project of a mutual connection Julia Barnickle, ‘What if life were meant to be easy?’ Sadly, Julia passed away early in 2021 as a result of metastatic breast cancer. We connect today remembering Julia and with gratitude to her for connecting us. And it’s fitting that we remember Julia’s message of living a creative, easeful and positive life even in the face of or after difficult circumstances, as this is the focus of the conversation today.

Valerie has been a coaching client in the Sacred Creative Collective group coaching program. We share many similar experiences including moving through deep grief and our passions – including a love of creative expression in many forms and intuitive practices such as tarot as important self-leadership tools.

Today we speak about creativity and how we respond and learn to move through tragedy, loss, deep grief and challenging transitions including ageing. We have fun in this conversation but we also traverse some tragic and sensitive topics so I wanted to let you know this upfront. We consider creativity and intuition as sources of healing and growth and how they support us in making life transitions. Valerie’s story is an incredibly inspiring one especially around how she creates as a central focus and value, has become a grief coach supporting others and is a passionate 60-plus pro-ager.

So now let’s head into the interview with the wonderfully inspiring, creative and multi-passionate Valerie Lewis!

Transcript of interview with Valerie Lewis

Terri Connellan: Hello, Valerie. And welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast. Thank you so much for your connection and for your support of Quiet Writing.

Valerie Lewis: Thanks for having me, Terri. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Terri Connellan: I’m so looking forward to chatting with you today. We’ve connected in many ways around creativity, transition, grief, coaching and more. So it’s great to be able to share conversations on those topics today with others. Can you start us off by providing an overview about your background, how you got to be where you are and the work that you do now?

Valerie Lewis: Wow. Where do I start? Well, I’m originally from the north of England, south Yorkshire, and I moved to London, in the late eighties, following the loss of my only child, my daughter, through manslaughter and the resultant breakdown of my marriage to her mentally ill father. As you can imagine, that was quite a traumatic time. So I would say, that was the main reason why I moved to London basically to start a new life cause I thought, well, I’ve got nothing to lose. And before my daughter died, I had instigated starting a degree because I left school with minimal qualifications.

So it was almost like something that I needed to prove to myself. So I had embarked on the initial stages of the degree. And then after my daughter died, the tutor that I had at the time, he was very encouraging. He said, well, why don’t you apply to one of the universities or polytechnics as they were called. And study that way rather than doing it as I was going to do through the open university. In those days you received the manuals through post and then you do your assignments and work and then send them off to the tutor to mark.

So I applied and I was accepted at Middlesex Polytechnic and ended up moving down to London to do my four year degree. And, in some ways that helped me, that was a tremendous help. It gave me something to focus on and channel my energies in. And it was whilst doing the degree, a friend brought me a book. I made friends with three women at university, and we’re still friends to this day. And one of them brought me a book called Feel the Fear and do it Anyway. And you could say that started the journey of self discovery, self-development, finding out more about who I was.

Life continued. I got a job. One of my sisters had already moved down. My other two sisters moved down and then they eventually ended up moving back with their families and to buy their own homes because it was cheaper in Sheffield. And I’ve remained in London as has my youngest sister. Through that time, I worked and there was a point at which I think it was in my mid thirties. I don’t know if you want to call it a quarter-life crisis or something. Cause I worked with engineers as their admin officer and I remember looking at them absorbed in their work. And when it was time to go home, I used to think, aren’t they going home? They just seemed content to stay there in the office.

And, I just remember thinking, I don’t want to do this, you know, thinking, well, where do I want to go? I did a post-graduate course, the Diploma in Management Studies, because I thought I’m in an administrative field. Maybe that’s the direction that I want to go in. And I remember thinking to myself, well, I don’t want to trap myself. I don’t want to just focus on this. And I think it was through reflecting on who I was. Where did I want to go? I remember thinking, realizing that actually I needed to be creative because that was what fed me. And, I’d kind of neglected that. I’d always been creative. I kind of like neglected that because I was studying and basically adapting to life in London.

And so I started getting back into being creative, making cards. Then I discovered salt dough modeling and got into that. And one of my other sisters she’s quite creative too. So we used to get together and, when her children were young, the schools would have craft fairs. So we’d book a stall and we’d have maybe have a table together. She’d make her own stuff and I’d make my stuff.

And I thought I enjoy this. I thought I don’t want to be trapped in a job where I’m working all these long hours. I want to have some time away from that, where I can do some of the things that I want to do. That’s basically how I’ve been throughout the past 30 years if you like.

Sometimes I felt a bit conflicted about it because you see your colleagues climbing the ladder in one of the fields they’re in. And obviously earning more money. I did get a promotion. I went for promotion and my pay jumped quite substantially. And I felt comfortable with that because one of the things I realized after my daughter died, I remember thinking to myself, you could have all the money in the world and in some ways it’s kind of meaningless if people that you care for are not here anymore. So in some ways I’m not materialistic in that sense. I like to have nice things. I like to wear nice things. And I like to be able to have my books around me and makeup and eat nice food. But having a lot of money is not my main goal. Feeling fulfilled is more important to me, more meaningful to me. Does that make sense, Terri?

Terri Connellan: It does. Absolutely. So, thanks for that snapshot of your life over many years, and what’s important to you. I think that what comes through strongly is your values and how you want to live your life. So we’ll explore more about that as we go through our conversation today. So thank you for that. So we’ve both shared a major transition in your case from corporate life to a more creatively focused life. So can you describe what that transition’s been like for you and how long it took and the main turning points?

Valerie Lewis: That happened last January. In some ways I saw it coming because for the past few years at work there’d been lots of changes, the constant restructuring. My role, if you like became less than what it used to be. It got less stressful. Certain aspects of it, the nicer bits, if you like, the more creative bits of it were taken away and given to another department. And I remember thinking, me and my colleagues thinking, this is strange, something’s going on in the background, you know? And, the restructure that they had before we were told our jobs were going to be moved up north, it happened with one of the teams. They were restructured. And, I think a couple of people were made redundant and the other team basically transferred up north. So that’s why the two people were made redundant from that. And we thought, well, this is odd, if they’ve moved part of our department up north, what does that mean for us?

So in some ways it was almost like you think it’s going to happen at some stage. And, I actually welcomed it. So when it came, it wasn’t a complete shock.

I wasn’t devastated because I thought, oh, I’m approaching 60. I think it’s time. It felt as if it was time for me to be doing something different, something more meaningful, something that I had more control over. So the only thing that I knew that I would mentally have to adjust to was the lack of consistent income. Because obviously, when you’re working, you’ve got an income coming in every month and you know how much is coming. But if you’re not getting that income, you’ve got to create it yourself. So I knew that would be a challenge, but I thought, well, I’m up for it.

Terri Connellan: Excellent. So, sounds like you knew the transition was coming, so you had some time to mentally prepare and perhaps practically prepare for it. And I think that helps too. Certainly for my own transition, it was quite similar. I could see that writing was on the wall. You could see things were coming. And, for me, I started to make a plan for what my life might look like when that time came. So I think that helps as we move through and change. It’s interesting you mentioned that you made that conscious decision in your thirties, not to climb the corporate ladder so that you had space for creative interests. So how do you feel about that decision now? Was that a good decision?

Valerie Lewis: It’s hard to say. I mean, other people might, well, I don’t think anybody else sort of really looks at it. It’s more about me, isn’t it? There are occasions when I think, oh, maybe if I’d stayed in the job and become this, I might’ve been head of this. And then I think, no, this is the road I chose, you know, so I’m happy with it. And in some ways doing a lot of the things that I’ve done feeds into what I’m doing now.

Terri Connellan: So tell us about what you’re doing now.

Valerie Lewis: I certified as a coach. I’ve been jewellery making. So in some ways I’ve had a taste of self-employment, even though I was employed, if that makes sense and earning little bits of money, pockets of money. So it’s not something that’s totally alien to me. I think that I can use my creativity in my coaching, and in other ways to help me achieve an income.

Terri Connellan: I often talk about Elizabeth Gilbert’s line about the long runway, where we’re preparing along the way, perhaps many years before for what we end up, wanting to do that’s important to us. Does that relate to you?

Valerie Lewis: Yeah, I think so. I don’t think you realise it at the time. Do you? Because I look at other people, I look at my sister, for example, who’s an executive coach and she climbed the career ladder. And when she was made redundant, when she started to think about what it was she could do, she realised that one of the things that she’d enjoyed whilst she was employed was coaching others. So she’s taken that aspect and also got trained, did a Masters in Coaching Psychology. And is using that and drawing from her skills in a corporate or in the civil service, if you like. So I think we do draw on our skills, I’m sure in what you’re doing, you’re doing the same, aren’t you?

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And as you were talking, I was thinking of my own experiences and your sister’s and your own, there are threads that we value that we go back to over time. And often as we’re getting older, we start to stitch them together in different ways. And I think that’s a really exciting part of our journey. Fantastic. So do you want to tell us about what your life looks and feels like now?

Valerie Lewis: It’s kind of like, I’m more in charge of it. Self-leadership that word that you introduced me to. I feel very much my own person. There’s a sense of freedom, if that makes sense. I’m much more at peace with myself. I feel as if I’m more in tune with my own values and I’m not going into work and having to do things that conflict a little bit with how I think or feel.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. So you really have put into practice the things that are important to you, that self-leadership, creativity, embracing who you are. It’s been a real joy to connect with you and to learn from you too and share our experiences as we’ve moved along our road.

So you mentioned, earlier about the tragic death of your daughter and only child and your Wholehearted Story that you wrote for Quiet Writing, The Silent Whispers of my Mind, you share your story and what happened, the impact upon you. Can you explain or share with us what you learned from moving through and on from such incredibly difficult circumstances?

Valerie Lewis: At the time, I wasn’t sure about what I’d learned and I remember sort of thinking. Am I strong? Am I coping with this? And it wasn’t until I volunteered with, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children? I volunteered. They have a helpline, the child death helpline. I think it might be called something different now. But I applied to volunteer for that as a bereaved parent. And it was offering emotional support to basically anybody who was impacted by the death of a child, whether they were the parent, the grandparent, the aunt, the teacher, whoever. Perhaps they were feeling upset or traumatized. It was a free helpline, so they could call the helpline and just pour out their feelings.

And we were there as a volunteer to listen and it was through listening to their stories, it made me realize that I had come a long way and that I was actually quite resilient and emotionally strong.

And I learnt that, I mean, it’s a bit cliche, that there are more questions than there are answers and that sometimes we just have to accept that we can’t know the answers to everything as hard as it is. Because that used to probably torment me in the early days. Why, why, why? And there were certain answers that satisfied me so much. And then I’d want to go beyond that and think, well, no one can tell me why.

I know why she died. I know what was wrong with my ex-husband. I know those sort of medical reasons why. But in the bigger scheme of things, it’s almost like well why was it her time? Why did she go then? And I don’t think anybody can give me an answer to that. So I’ve had to learn to accept that’s just how life is, we don’t know when we’re going to go. Sometimes we have signs, like if you’re ill terminally ill, then you know, but you don’t know necessarily why you became terminally ill, what led up to that? So there’s lots of things that we don’t know, we will never know. And we can’t know. And we just have to come to terms with that or else we’d go mad.

I’d also learnt how important it is to have a wall of support around you. It’s so important because, I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here with the helpline when I say that there were people who didn’t have that support. And they were really struggling. They had no one to turn to apart from the helpline and I think just knowing that there are people around you can help to keep you, make you feel emotionally supported. And sometimes in the practical sense as well.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. I think the points you’ve raised are just so important particularly that what we learn or the experiences we go through, grief is really a journey over time. That’s certainly something I’ve experienced with the grief that I’ve experienced in my life. And I think you conveyed that beautifully in The Silent Whispers of my Mind. Just that horrible shock when something as terrible as that happens and how we start to make our way through the early days. And then over time. You talk about from fragmented to wholehearted. Yeah. So, thank you for sharing that. And I think the fact that you were able to volunteer to help others helped you realize how much you’d learned is a really powerful story, too.

Valerie Lewis: Thank you. And something else that I learned was that really there’s only, you can decide what your values are. Because I think sometimes when we go through difficult times, it does make us reflect on what’s important to us or not. And really no one else can decide for you.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely.

Valerie Lewis: Have you found that to be?

Terri Connellan: I have. My brother passed away tragically. So, I went through a difficult time and that’s the time that I went back to my creativity, which is my number one value similar to you. And I think the loss of someone so special and so loved and in tragic circumstances, particularly, yeah, it does. It just makes you go back to those places and I think you look at your life in a different way.

So in your work that you do now, you take those experiences to coach others, which is really beautiful that you’re able to take the hard won learning and experiences that you’ve had to be able to support others. So can you tell us about your coaching in this area and how you support people experiencing grief?

Valerie Lewis: Well, grief coaching, if you like, would be seen as a niche or a specialization within life coaching. I think it’s quite new. It’s basically aimed at individuals who’ve experienced loss, whether it’s a death or non-death related and need support and guidance on their grief journey. As you know, coaching is about moving forward. With grief, you’ve got that additional aspect of somebody who may be still going through the various stages of grief. They may still be a little bit hurt, a bit angry, in disbelief.

So grief coaching is also providing practical support using many of the same coaching tools, common to life coaching, as well as providing emotional support through creation of a safe and supportive space for the client to feel that they can heal And that they can express their feelings around grief without judgment.

So there’s a similar way. It is coaching but what I found is that in terms of goal setting, they’ve got to be gentle goals. Very small goals. They may have a big goal, but really with a lot of people who are going through grief, it’s just creating small goals to help them get through the day.

And I find that self-care comes into it quite a lot. So that’s one of the areas that I have tended to focus on with people going through grief. What can they do to be compassionate with themselves, to love themselves, to nurture themselves? What little steps can they take and turn those into goals and actions until they feel strong enough to tackle the bigger goals.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. So that’s a real form of that self-leadership we talked about before is taking control or taking care of what you can in a very traumatic, often very traumatic situation. And what’s the pathway to grief coaching, obviously personal experience of grief is…

Valerie Lewis: Yeah, personal experience and I came across the Institute of Life Coach Training. They’re an American organization. I came across them a couple of years ago and thought about it and then put it from my head like I do with a lot of things that are intuitive and I kept getting pulled back to it. And in terms of thinking about what niche I wanted to focus on, before that I’d looked at working with women who were midlife and who were looking to reinvent themselves. But then I started to think, what can I do with my experience of grief or what I’ve been through? And this is where I discovered this course on the internet and it kept coming back to me. I think it was once I knew that I was going to be made redundant, I decided right, I’m going to sign up for this course.

Because I just felt that I needed some structure. I needed some support around that. So, I mean, I thought I’d been through my own experience, but I need this extra. You know, how do you coach somebody? But as I said, we draw on very much the same sorts of tools as we do as we use in life coaching. It’s just this other additional element of supporting somebody, being there, and creating this safe space for them. And knowing that you’re going to be dealing with somebody who might be a bit fragile and also knowing within that when to refer somebody, , when to be able to say, well, perhaps this person needs more than what I can actually offer them. And it’s counseling that they should be receiving or need to get in touch with.

Terri Connellan: It’s very important work. And I think for many of us, the life experiences, what happens to us, the skills we gain, insight we gain is often what we channel into coaching isn’t it? It’s often a challenging journey, but I think the wisdom that we gain from our experiences, the insight and the tools that we develop are so important to pass on to others. So it’s great that you’re doing the work in this area that will help so many people.

Valerie Lewis: Thank you.

Terri Connellan: So creativity, obviously a very important part of your world. It’s been a touchstone for you over time and more recently you shared in your piece, The Silent Whispers of my Mind, how intuitive abstract painting has been a big part of your journey. So how has creativity been a source of growth, expression and insight for you?

Valerie Lewis: I would say, I’ve been creative in some shape or form ever since I was a child. I think it’s just a natural part of me. It’s something I turn to whether I’m happy or sad. It just helps me. I find that being creative is something I can lose myself in. Whether this taps into being an introvert, I don’t know. But I like to sometimes go into my own little world and shut out everything else that’s going on around me. And I find that obviously you can do that when you’re working on a piece, you’re doing something creative.

And I often find that in the act of being creative, and it’s silent around you, or you might be a person who likes music playing, you can ruminate, you can think, you can think more clearly. And if something’s bothering you, sometimes you find that the answers come to you.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I’m sure it can be the same for introverts and extroverts, but I think introverts definitely draw energy from that time alone and that creative space. So yeah, it sounds to me your personality type, which I know is introverted. INFP – you have a preference for introversion, intuition, feeling and perceiving. It would make sense that a tool like creativity, whether it’s painting or jewelry or some of the things you’ve mentioned provides a vehicle to create a quiet space where you can energize and make sense of things.

So your intuition is also something you share a lot about in The Silent Whispers of my Mind. What I found fascinating in that piece is how you tracked through learning to listen to your inner voice over time. So can you share us with us more about learning to listen to your intuition and how it’s guided you? Cause it’s not often talked about, is it, intuition?

Valerie Lewis: No, it’s still something that I find hard to articulate because it’s abstract, isn’t it? You know, you can’t see it. And it is different for everybody. You know, you look back on things and you think, well, what helped me, and then it’s just being aware that there were certain times when I seemed to know what I was doing, I felt as if I was actually being guided And I suppose some people might say you know, it’s God. And I think, well, it could be God and then over the years, having different experiences when you think that’s what they call your intuition. Like a silent voice or a sense. It’s like your body knows the right thing to do. Something’s baffling you or confusing you, and you’re weighing the pros and cons and then out of the blue, when you’re doing something totally different an answer comes into your head or you’re doing something and you get a reaction in your body.

And it’s through experiencing that. And then learning when I experienced that, that means I’ve got to listen to that. And just learning to be aware of those sensations. It’s learning to be quiet and still, and just being in the moment. And I think being creative helps you do that. I’ve heard people say that running, for example, does that for them, you know, going for a run, clears the cobwebs away and they’re in that moment. And maybe if they’ve had a problem they’d been churning turning over in their heads, they’re getting clarity in that moment.

So there’s definitely something to be said about learning to be still. Shutting out everything else around you and really being in that moment. So for me being creative is like a kind of mindful meditation. And I suppose in some way that that’s where the abstract art came in and that was kind of a mindful meditation. I don’t know what I’m going to paint. I just have these paints in front of me and I start doing shapes and ideas come to my head. Oh, that represents so-and-so. That means so and so, but initially I might not know what it is. I want to get down on paper.

Terri Connellan: I think it’s fascinating that abstract intuitive art was what you were felt very drawn to. It’s obviously something that has called you over time. And when you describe your creativity, the power of it, intuition, it seems to bring all the pieces together. So that’s perfect.

I love that you described yourself as a 60 plus pro ager, Valerie. That’s great. I love that term. What does that mean for you? Tell us a bit about that.

Valerie Lewis: I think for me as I approached 60. I thought my gosh. Am I still middle-aged? And then I actually had to Google it to see what years middle age encaptured. And I thought, well, I’m at the tail end of middle-aged. And it was like looking at older relatives around me and thinking, there’s a part of you, that’s a little bit fearful about getting older and that term to me, it helps me allay those about being over 60 and getting older. It’s about me accepting that, yes, I am getting older. I can’t hide that and really, I don’t want to. I think it’s something to actually be proud of, because not everybody, you know, my daughter died at seven. She didn’t make it to 61. My mum’s mum, I think she died at 63, my mum’s 84 so it’s actually something to be really, really proud of.

And regardless of what society says, I think we’ve got more freedom. We’ve been allowed the opportunity for more self-expression than our parents’ generation, if you like. And I think we should take advantage of that to the full. We should create our own rules, dress, how we want to dress. If you want to dye your hair, dye it. If you don’t want to dye your hair don’t. And live life as fully as you can, within your capabilities.

I look around me and there’s people my age and a bit younger having hip replacements and, and dying from cancer and things like that. So I think to myself, life’s short. I think you’re just aware of your own mortality when you reach this age. So you think to yourself, I’m not just going to sit here and sort of accept that I’m getting older. I want to live my life. And so being pro age, it’s about accepting that you’re a certain age but not letting that age, define you or defeat you.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Yeah. And I was fascinated to hear that you did what I also did recently, which was look at middle age and the span, because I was asking the same questions recently because I just turned 60 not long ago. I was thinking, oh, am I still middle aged? Or am I old age now? Or what am I? And I did the same thing.

I was fascinated to find that I could see middle-aged, which is that point. And then there didn’t seem to be a term so much for after. So yeah, I do like that pro ager. I was listening to a podcast, The Magnificent Mid-life Podcast, and there was a guest on there who talked about being age-full, which is nice too. I love that. And, I certainly agree with you about celebrating all that, we’ve learned the sharing of that with others, which in your journey is really important. So yeah, I love your attitude. It’s fantastic.

Valerie Lewis: This is where the modeling comes in.

Terri Connellan: Yes I’ve seen on Instagram. Is that a new career for you?

Valerie Lewis: I wouldn’t say it’s a career, it’s a form of income but it’s another form of being creative if you like.

And it’s also about in a way me celebrating, being the age I am because if you look back 10, 15 years ago, who would have thought that somebody in their sixties will be doing modeling. But I think there’s more of us reaching a certain age. And I think companies are appreciating that their customers want to see a greater representation of people who look like them.

And so this is the right time for me to be doing this because I am not what you would call sort of fashion model. I don’t look like a fashion model. I’m not the right height. I’m not the right build for it, but I might look like somebody who you’d see in the street or your next door neighbor. So that’s basically what I’m doing. Lifestyle modelling and it’s quite fun. It’s something different and it’s fun.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. The pictures you shared on Instagram. I was just blown away. I found it so inspiring. It was fantastic to see. So yeah. Be interested to hear more about it as you get more into your modeling.

So there’s a couple of questions that I’m asking all the guests on this podcast, being the Create Your Story Podcast. It’s a big question, but it’s really just seeing what comes to mind from the question. So how have you created your story over your lifetime?

Valerie Lewis: That’s an interesting one. It’s almost like there hasn’t been a rule book to follow. So in many ways circumstances have shaped some of my story. And other aspects of my story, I’ve taken charge and shaped myself. For example, not climbing a career ladder when that’s something that society expects of you, if you like. I chose not to do that.

Some of the creative things I’m doing, such as modeling and what is interesting is meeting other people who are of the same age group, who have decided to do that as well and thinking, well, you know, this is fascinating.

So my story has been shaped by I suppose obviously my parents and people of their generation, my upbringing, being a black person in a mainly white society. That’s helped to shape it. Being a female. In two of my jobs, I worked in a more male dominated environment.

And also the circumstances I’ve been through have helped to shape my story. And also I think I’m a little bit eccentric and I’ve got a strong streak of independence. There’s always something in me that slightly wants to dance to my own tune. So that’s helped to shape my story. I’m still continuing to shape my story.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. That’s great. It’s lovely to hear all the different aspects that have shaped you, your personality, circumstances and how you’ve responded to them as well. Thank you for sharing that. So wholehearted self-leadership is obviously part of creating your story and a key part. And I’ve shared some tips in my book, but I’m interested for people on the show to share their top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, especially for women. So what comes to mind for you as the top tips?

Valerie Lewis: I think the main thing that I would say is work on being true to you. Who are you, or who do you want to be? And that might mean a lot of self-reflecting, digging deep within yourself. I would say a good starting point is looking at your values. What are the things that make life meaning to you or could make life meaningful to you? The values that you hold – are they yours or the values of others? What do you dislike about yourself or what do you dislike about other people? Ultimately, are you living your life for you or for others?

And I think that sort of question becomes more important the older you get, especially as you reach middle age. Maybe if you’ve had a family and your life has been focused on your family, I think you can lose yourself, whoever you were. So at some point, I think most of us, you start thinking about who am I, what am I here for? What gives me joy? And that’s where the self-reflecting comes in. And as I say, looking at your values, I think that’s a good starting point because your values change over time, don’t they? And you might be holding on to things that are not helping you anymore. It’s dragging you down.

Terri Connellan: I think that’s great. I think that question about it with your living your life for yourself or for others and sometimes it’s that overlay of family with its family values, cultural values or corporate values, it’s almost like we have to clear them off sometimes just to work out what’s important for us. I relate to that, like a clarifying process. Beautiful. I love that. And that idea of working on being who you are, who you want to be, and what gives you joy, I think a beautiful tips too for women to take to heart. So, thank you so much for our conversation Valerie today. It’s been so heart-warming, so inspiring and a lot of fun. So thank you so much for sharing your story. Can you tell us where people can find out more about you and your work online?

Valerie Lewis: Okay. My website, Instagram and Facebook under Visualise and Bloom. And LinkedIn under Valerie A Lewis and people can sign up to receive my periodic newsletter. I say periodic because I’m not one of these that sends out a newsletter every month. It’s more like once a quarter. So, if they sign up for my newsletter on my website, I’ve just created a guided meditation. They can receive a free downloadable copy of it. It’s called the Violet Cloud Guided Meditation for Difficult Times.

Terri Connellan: Perfect. That’s a beautiful gift for people who connect with you. So, we’ll pop all those links in the show notes. I’ll also make sure the link to your wholehearted story, The Silent Whispers of my Mind and the piece you shared on creative transition too is there.

Valerie Lewis: Oh, it’s been a pleasure, Terri. Thank you so much.

Terri Connellan: Thanks so much Valerie.

About Valerie Lewis

You can connect with Valerie at her website Visualise and Bloom or via Instagram @visualiseandbloom

Newsletter sign-up: Blooming news + free guided meditation

You can also read Valerie’s Wholehearted Story, The Silent Whispers of my Mind and an interview with Valerie on her transition journey: Sacred Creative Stories of Transition.

Links to explore:

Book Club: Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club – open for enrolment now, closing soon – join us for January 19/20 book club start.

My books:

https://www.quietwriting.net/wholehearted-chapter-1

Free resources:

Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Other free resources: https://www.quietwriting.com/free-resources/

My coaching:

The Writing Road Trip – a community program with Beth Cregan – kicking off Jan 2022

Connect on social media

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writingquietly/