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Intuiting, Channelled Writing & Connecting with Natasha Piccolo

January 20, 2022

Becoming an author, writing intuitively and connecting with others.

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Welcome to Episode 10 of the Create Your Story Podcast on Intuiting, Channelled Writing and Connecting.

I’m joined by Natasha Piccolo, Mama, Author, Speech Pathologist, Life Coach and Small Business Owner .

We chat about Natasha’s soon-to-be-published book, The Balance Theory and how it was written in a channelled way. And Natasha’s multi-faceted life and the threads that connect it together.

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:

  • Following your intuition
  • Writing The Balance Theory
  • Channelled writing
  • Knowing when a book is finished
  • Dealing with loss
  • Being in balance
  • Healing our inner child
  • Connecting as a core value
  • Multiple life roles and how they connect
  • Mental health challenges + learning
  • Practical self-care tips
  • And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to Episode 10 of the Create Your Story Podcast and it’s the 20th of January as I record this. We’re enjoying pretty much the heart of summer here with magical swims in silky water and many fish swimming around us. It’s truly joyful!

I’m excited to have the lovely Natasha Piccolo join us for the podcast today to chat about Intuiting, Channelled Writing & Connecting.

Natasha Piccolo is a mama, small business owner and author. She is always up for a good chat as her main work roles include clinical Speech Pathology and coaching. Her business, Resonate Holistic assists clients to facilitate healthy communication across the life span. Her first book, The Balance Theory is out in March with the kind press. She has recently contributed to This I Know Is True – a collection of stories to inspire community progress alongside 18 other women in the health and wellness space. Natasha hopes that her words motivate others to live a life that is consciously aligned.

Natasha and I met through Instagram and as fellow authors in the kind press community. It’s been wonderful watching Natasha’s journey as a writer and author, and we discuss writing her book The Balance Theory as an intuitive and channelled writing process over 10 years which is fascinating. Natasha has many strings to her bow and we chat about the common threads of these roles and passions in her body of work. Natasha also speaks about her mental health challenges, the difficulties and the learning and perspective they provided over time. Natasha is a wise young woman with much to share so enjoy these insights and the very practical tips provided.

In my writing and coaching life, this week I’ve enjoyed working through Chapter 1 of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition with the Book Club group that has formed. The ability to work through Wholehearted with a group of women focused on transition is a real joy. There’s nothing like working through a book you’ve written in a practical way with women applying the insights. A coaching and reading community program that will be offered on a regular basis, consider joining in for the next round.

The other focus right now is The Writing Road Trip Free Challenge I’m hosting with my friend, co-writing buddy and brilliant writing teacher, Beth Cregan. The challenge starts on 31 January with 6 free 30-minute workshops over two weeks. So, sign up for our mailing list now. We’ll be sending out the Challenge information this Friday (21 January) with a link to our private Facebook group and the Challenge Workbook. We are going to have so much fun, and you’ll be inspired to engage with your writing plans and writing self in new ways. Plus connect with others also focused on writing. So, if writing is a priority for you in 2022, join us. Links are in the show notes. Head to quietwriting.com/podcast and click on Episode 10.

I also shared how my word of the year is NOVEL and what that means over on Instagram @writingquietly if you want to check that out. It’s a mix of excitement and a little fear as often happens when we step up into a bigger or different version of ourselves. I look forward to sharing more about that with you in 2022.

So now let’s head into the interview with the wise, intuitive, multi-faceted, creative Natasha Piccolo!

Transcript of interview with Natasha Piccolo

Terri Connellan: Hi Natasha. Welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast.

Natasha Piccolo: Hi, it’s beautiful to be here.

Terri Connellan: Thank you. And thank you for your connection and your support of Quiet Writing.

Natasha Piccolo: Thank you. You’re a beautiful inspiration. So I’m more than honored to be here.

Terri Connellan: Ah, that’s wonderful. And I’m so looking forward to our chat because you too are a fantastic inspiration. And we connected around writing and publishing as fellow authors in the kind press, which is very exciting. It’s been wonderful to watch your growth as a writer and an author. So, can you provide an overview of your background about how you got to be where you are and the work you do now?

Natasha Piccolo: It’s a beautiful, big question. I’m a wearer of many hats. Professionally and clinically my role is a speech pathologist, with a life coaching context as well and that’s shaped so much of my worldview. But then on a personal level, in terms of being an author, an upcoming author, that’s just, I think, innate to who I am. So I’m now 30 and I’m at a point in my life where these two beautiful worlds are starting to come together and here we are. I’ve followed nudges. I think that’s the best answer here is that I’ve just followed the intuitive hits and I’ve created this union of who I am at the very core with my external roles. And I wanted to write it all down and tell some stories.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful, what a beautiful blend. And it’s amazing that you’ve been able to bring so much together at the age of 30. And particularly as you say, following your intuition that’s very wise. And I think something that often takes a long time to develop. So congratulations on following your intuition. I think that’s a great skill.

Natasha Piccolo: Thank you. I think it’s something that I didn’t really realize I was doing until probably the last three years when I really did have a big spiritual awakening. And I realized the whole time I was being guided by nudges and that was coming through in the form of meditations. And I thought, hmm I think this little voice has always been here. It’s intuition. That’s what it is.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, absolutely. It’s amazing. You might’ve heard of the Wholehearted Stories that are on Quiet Writing and women tell their stories. And it’s amazing how intuition features as such a strong theme of women of all ages particularly when they’ve had a big transition, like a turning point or when they’re going through difficult times. It’s just fascinating how intuition pops up as a theme.

Natasha Piccolo: Absolutely. I always liken it to the inner child voice. So when I think about it, the childhood version of me is the voice that I listen to, as funny as that sounds, and as I became more and more adult and the conditioning around that developed, I realised that it was that little girl that I was listening to the whole time. She’s the creative side of me.

Terri Connellan: Oh, I love that. A great way to personalise it. Thanks for that wonderful overview. So we have both recently enjoyed, or we are enjoying the process of taking a book from that crystal or that gem of an idea through to draft, through to published book. Your book, The Balance Theory is ahead of publication in early 2022, which is very exciting. So congratulations.

Natasha Piccolo: Thank you so much. We officially launch in March.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Tell us about your writing journey, what it was like for you.

Natasha Piccolo: The journey of The Balance Theory. It was completely channeled. And when I say channeled, it was listening to that little niggling voice of intuition coming through in a collection of downloads. And I had been writing the core content of The Balance Theory for the last 10 years. That part’s incredible when I think about it, that I actually pulled the book itself together in the last 12 months, but the writing and the channeling and the concept development has been 10 years in the making.

 And I do share this quite openly and deeply in the book, that channelling process started after the death of a very close friend. So I was 19 at the time and we got a phone call that one of my closest friends had fallen asleep behind the wheel and hit a tree. And I was fresh out of school. You know, that whole idea of world at your feet ready to explore and yeah, naively maybe, just the best was yet to come and all of that. And we got that very soul shaking phone call. Very abruptly. No time to say goodbye. And yeah, I think all artists can relate to a point in their life that something really flipped. And I think that flip did happen quite early for me. And I had a big surrendering moment to the universe and I just said, what are you doing? What are you doing? I, yeah, naively had it all together and I was ready to explore what was coming after school. And instead I had a big trip down the grief process, clinical depression, clinical anxiety, a very, very big shake-up at a very core level. And The Balance Theory was actually born from surrendering to the universe and asking for the answer.

Why, why did you rip this part of my life away or this experience? And the answer to that question came through in intuitive hits in a meditation, which I didn’t even realize I was meditating at the time. But it was just in that quiet moment when I was still, I could hear a voice saying because the universe needs balance and I didn’t really understand what that was at the time at all. But I started noticing. And I think initially, when I look back at those very early writings, it was just self comfort that I was putting a question out and writing down things that would make me feel comfortable or try to articulate the grief and I realized that I was tapping into something that was bigger than me. And over the years it shaped. So that’s the journey there. Like I think it took about five years clinically, like I was in and out of therapy for a long time, to realize that I could channel and transmute it into an art form, but it took a long time to get there. Initially it was purely just comfort writing to process grief.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that and I think as you say, many creatives.. I certainly can relate to your story of going to that deep place where something incredibly challenging, something like the loss of someone really dear, and in a sudden way, particularly can be a terrible shock to the system. I’ve experienced that too. So I really sympathize with you on that and just know that it makes you look at your life differently, completely differently. At a young age that must’ve been a real shock to the system.

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah, my friend Dylan, so I do use his name in the book too, at the time he was my boyfriend, high school sweethearts. So my husband’s best friend. So the three of us had our teenage years together and even to this day, like my husband and I, he’s a huge part of our family. We can feel his presence, especially guiding this book. Yeah.

Terri Connellan: That’s amazing. And it’s incredible the way you described that, from that time, the process of writing started. So it’s a book that’s been shaped over a long period of time. And, that idea of channeled writing is really incredible too, that idea of being a conduit or being open and receptive to what comes through. Is that how you describe it?

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah. I kind of feel, and I do say this in the book too, that The Balance Theory, the concept has come through me. I’m the vessel and I’m just transmuting it out into the world. So it’s for us, it’s for the collective, but it happened to come through my life event or my story. I’m kind of that middleman, I guess. That’s how I feel. Like it’s got its own energy really.

Terri Connellan: Did it feel like a calling?

Natasha Piccolo: Yes. Yeah. And there were times, I mean, like writing over 10 years, there was probably two other times before I actually got signed with the kind press that I thought, okay, the book is done, you know? It wasn’t. Like, it was never published at 0.1 and then 0.2 didn’t happen. And then it was third time lucky, but there was actually more life experience that I needed to have before I got to the point where it actually was published.

And funnily enough, it all came to fruition two weeks before my son, who’s a year old next week, was born. So I think because the whole concept is balance and life death cycles is the tying-in theme, I needed to actually experience rebirth in the form of becoming a mother. And I think that’s what really nailed the final concept that just felt unified when I then approached the publishers.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. Yeah. And I love that idea too. Again, it’s something I’ve experienced where, sometimes you wonder if you’re procrastinating in not getting writing done. And then I know I put my draft away for quite a time and it was like it had to incubate or sit until I experienced more and put the pieces together. So I totally understand what you’re saying.

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah. My process and yours similarly, I think once you are really tapped in, on that intuitive level, the book actually tells you when it’s finished. You get that kind of, yeah, okay, I’ve told the story or stories I need to tell. And now it’s just about fine tuning.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. That idea of getting the message out that you want to get in some form because I just find it fascinating how it begins as an idea in our head or is channeled. And then we shape it into something that we can share with others. It’s quite miraculous in some ways, isn’t it?

Natasha Piccolo: It is. What I find funny is that, especially because clinically my work is speech pathology and a lot of that study was like, that hardcore formal language, understanding grammar and structure and how the spoken voice and the written voice can be different. And it’s so clinical. But then in channeling this piece, sometimes I would write and the voice of The Balance Theory or intuition is really quite illogical because I do liken it to that childhood voice. So sometimes the grammar’s a bit weird or the content is like, oh, we really gonna use that word. Like I’m talking to whatever that entity is. And then like now The Balance Theory is in its editorial phase now, like have that logical layer over the top where we’re actually going, okay, does this read properly? Does it flow? And that part’s coming in now, but the actual writing itself was quite intuitive.

Terri Connellan: That makes sense. Perfect sense. So can you share with us a snapshot of what The Balance Theory is about? You’ve touched on it, but can you tell us a bit more about what The Balance Theory is about?

Natasha Piccolo: Sure. So in essence, the idea of the concept is that the universe is attempting one goal and that goal is to seek balance. And if we are open to observing that at all levels of life, we can see it. So from the cell level to the cosmic level, and I love the idea of like the fact that I by nature am intuitive, but clinically I’m a scientist. I actually observed the same thing. So when we’re looking at human cell biology, the way cells behave. There’s an attempt at what we call homeostasis or the quest for balance essentially, but in a clinical term. We witness it in the way that organ systems interact with one another. We witness it in the way that we attempt to emotionally balance ourselves in terms of our mental health and the impact of that when we’re not balanced.

 It’s almost like the book’s split into three sections. So that’s dealing with the self and then we look at one self to another, how they interact with one another and the idea of the energetics of human connection. And then finally the final concept is soul level connection. The final section is actually called kismet connection. So how the energetics of a soul kind of balances itself and in between all of that, I weave my personal stories to illustrate that. So that’s The Balance Theory in a nutshell and what you can expect from it.

Like I was saying, it feels like it’s a concept that needs to be shared for the collective. And I find it particularly interesting that I actually finished it during COVID. Because I think we can all agree in this modern history, if there was ever a time where we really reviewed what balance meant it was when we were all locked inside for a long period of time. And that idea of we were thrown way out of balance. It was almost like thrown out of the arena so we can observe what’s playing inside. Yeah, super interesting. And when we talk about that idea of it not being finished, I think COVID had to happen too before I finished the book.

Terri Connellan: More experiences and circumstance to integrate into that whole idea of balance by the sound of that.

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah. And it’s actually quite funny because before COVID was a thing, I remember logically trying to think about how am I going to articulate The Balance Theory on a collective level, so that there is something that is unifying for everybody’s life experience. And then the logical part of my brain’s saying, well, everyone’s life experience is different. How can we possibly all connect on one thing? And the pandemic happened. So I was like, well, there we go. There’s something we can all talk about. And we’ve all got a take on it. We’ve all experienced what it’s like to be in and out of balance in that time. And I know just from speaking to my circle, there was so many people that… we have that relationship with the pandemic where I was like, oh, we actually love being locked inside. It’s given me time to really evaluate my life and where I’m at.

And then the next day, you’re absolutely on that roller coaster of hating it. And then there’s fear. And then there’s gratitude. Like the whole spectrum of emotion came out to play during that time. And it was interesting channeling that as I was writing.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, it’s been the whole experience of COVID. My work is in transition, so that idea that it’s just been this huge shift and change, and that’s really thrown it back on us, on our internal resources and what toolkit we have, what understanding, what frameworks, how we’re using our personality or all the different aspects we can bring to it. So yeah, I think your book is incredibly timely to pick up on all of those themes that are happening.

So with your channeled writing process, were you surprised at what came through? Like was there, was it sort of landing more than… I guess all writing in a way has a sense of coming from a muse, doesn’t it? Do you see that?

Natasha Piccolo: Definitely. So there were times where, cause I do feel like I had that relationship with whatever the entity was that I would writing and I’d be like, oh, this is so controversial. I don’t know that I want to write this down. And again, like that’s where I speak to that idea of, put on the page and then your logical brain and the brain that understands that this is going into the world and it’s going to be open to a lot of people now, you can shape the language so that it actually comes across in an eloquent way. But there were definitely times where I was like, oh, okay. There was some little shocking moments here and there. And I was curious with it. I was just like, sure, let’s go on this journey.

Terri Connellan: And were there particular sort of rituals and practices that you did as part of your channelled writing?

Natasha Piccolo: Well, I definitely would get quiet before writing, right in the thick of the newborn phase of having a baby too. So there were times where it was easy to achieve quiet and times where it wasn’t depending on baby. But I would at least try and factor in three to five minutes of stillness before going to the computer. Having said that though, there were times where I would still old fashioned hand write. So I found that interesting. A lot of the writing that I did in 2020 in that first lockdown was handwritten. So there are sections of the balance theory that I had to then put onto the computer and it transmuted again when I typed, it came out differently.

But, I think in real time, I’m actually reflecting on this, I think because I was pregnant, I just found it so much easier to jot down in a notebook at the time and then get to the computer. But then all the writing that I had done in this period, which is like the current 2021 lockdown period was all typed. So there wasn’t really anything specific other than stillness, finding the right time of day when baby was sleeping and just having space to open up or to have that intention to open up that channel.

Terri Connellan: So it sounds like you’re a naturally intuitive person. Like it’s probably one of the strengths of your personality by the sound of it.

Natasha Piccolo: So I’m a Pisces moon too, so I think I’m tapped into the collective just by nature of my soul level.

Terri Connellan: Who you are. Yeah. Beautiful. So you’ve also recently had your story When Saturn Hadn’t Returned published as part of the brilliant kind press collection, This I Know is True, which is sitting beside me here. Beautiful book with lots of incredible writing by women and curated by Natasha Gilmour and Sian Yewdall. Could you tell us a little about that story that you wrote and contributed to that collection?

Natasha Piccolo: Sure. So When Saturn Hadn’t Returned, I always preface this by saying I’m not an astrologer, but the idea of a Saturn Return is that every 30 years or so you get a big life lesson governed by Saturn, which is the planet of the life lessons and the responsibility. And the story of When Saturn Hadn’t Returned, again came through in a meditation as that being the title. So that actual title dropped in before I even actually thought about what that meant.

And I thought, okay, so I’ve got the title. What does that mean? And then I just had in my physical hand-written diary a bit of a brainstorm around what that statement means for me. And I realised what I was doing was telling the story of all the lessons I had learned before my Saturn Return at 27 years old. So that was the nature of that.

And essentially the biggest life lesson there was around the importance of healing the inner child,. Because, again, I don’t think it wasn’t until I was pregnant, that I had that full circle journey of realising that there was still a part of my childhood self that wasn’t being seen or heard, not in terms of anybody else, but myself.

And yeah, I guess 2020 was a big year of me going quite inward and I had the space with the lockdown to do that before giving birth to free that little girl. And it was I guess ironic that the contract for the kind press came through the same year. So it really was a healing process. And I pitched that idea to Natasha the publisher at the kind press, and she loved the idea of When Saturn Hadn’t Returned as a concept. And so I got to work. Bubs was eight weeks old when I wrote that. So I was still very fresh into motherhood.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. Motherhood certainly takes you into very creative space. That whole idea of creating a human being naturally takes you into a very fertile space. So it was amazing you could tap into that, but also having read the story, I loved the way you went full circle with your inner child and the birth of your son as well. It was beautifully told.

Natasha Piccolo: Thank you. It was so cathartic to write and I think it actually shaped my first year of motherhood because I wrote that quite early on in becoming a mum. It’s nearly been 10 months that that was written now, which is crazy to say, but whenever motherhood was challenging this year I would actually just reflect on that and say, okay, what part of my childhood, like what part of the wound is coming up? Because he’s obviously triggering something in me. It’s got nothing to do with him. He’s just this little soul navigating his first year. And, it was actually a really beautiful touch point in my first year of motherhood. So I’m very grateful to that writing process.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. It’s amazing how creativity can create something that we need that can help us on our journey. I’ve found that with writing my own book and a bit like yours, it was a blend of personal experience and things that were coming to me. I didn’t quite feel it was channelled, but there was certainly a lot of intuition in the writing process. And I think sometimes we write what we need for ourselves as much as to share with others.

Natasha Piccolo: Absolutely. Did you find that you were writing more of the memoir first or were you writing the concepts first in your own process?

Terri Connellan: I found that I had a pretty clear structure of what the book looked like, which was quite intuitive. I think I shared the mind map in the launch session. I had quite a sense of where it was going. Then I started with the memoir, I think to frame up the story, but I think it was as much to work out my own learning as it was to share it with others. Guess it’s a reflective process to tap deep into that experience to be able to write about it. It’s probably how I’d describe it.

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah. Very cathartic.

Terri Connellan: It is very cathartic. So you’ve mentioned a little as we’ve spoken today and I know you’ve spoken in your writing about your personal mental health journey, about the challenges and what it’s taught you. So what would you like to share about that for people who are listening today?

Natasha Piccolo: Well, firstly, I’m very grateful for my mental illness now. I share in my book that my psychologist, 10 years ago almost, said those words: one day, you will tell me you are grateful for your mental illness. And at the time I was very unwell. And I said to her, like, you have no idea. And she’s like, well, no, I don’t because I’m not you. But one day, trust me, there’ll be a reason, a rhyme and reason. And you’ll be able to express that you found light. And I thought, here we go at the time. Definitely it was not open to seeing the light at that point in my life.

But I guess my biggest thing that I’d want to share with people that are experiencing something that feels quite dark and scary is that it’s an opportunity to be kind to yourself and to see that the shadow side is just as important as your light and to not fear it. And not to take away from the experience because the lived experiences is terrifying at times, but I think when it is terrifying, it’s actually showing you that something’s not balanced in life.

So for me, it was like a compass pointing me back to what I already knew, intuitively that there is light in the world. And to experience that you need that dichotomy and that spectrum. So you need the shadow to see the light. You need the light to understand that there’s shadow. And there is light at the end of that tunnel. It’s a journey. It’s the dark night of the soul. You need to go through it. It’s part and parcel of being human. I’m saying that with a lot of hindsight, though. So it’s a chance to be kind and to forgive self.

Terri Connellan: Thank you for sharing about your experiences. And again, it’s something else that’s popped up in conversations on this podcast. And, it’s just that reminder that sometimes going to the shadow side, the darker side…they’re difficult, horrible, uncomfortable experiences. But if we can, particularly when we’ve been through them, take the opportunity to step back and look at the wisdom, the light that was shed from that time. It can be really powerful for us. So, yeah. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. And it sounds like it’s something you talk about more in your book too.

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah. The Balance Theory gives that a nice big chapter. When I was studying as well, I would have been halfway through therapy at the time, I could feel that I needed to give back with the experience of mental illness. And I did a thesis on understanding anxiety and depression in youth. And I reference that in The Balance Theory, the actual study itself. But it’s such a common thing and yet it’s so lonely. And if I can be just one other voice out there that is willing to talk about it on a public level, I think we are inspiring, healthy, functional conversation around it.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. Thank you for being a voice for that while we’re chatting today. I really appreciate that.

Natasha Piccolo: Thank you.

Terri Connellan: So, as well as being an author, you’re also a speech pathologist and a life coach, as well as being a mumma of a little one as you’ve shared. And you also run a gelato business with your husband too.

Natasha Piccolo: A bit of fun.

Terri Connellan: So you’ve got lots of different streams and passions in your life. So just wondering how the streams and passions come together and play together, and you’ve talked about play, the inner child and play. And I’m wondering too, if there’s a thread that unites your body of work, because often there’s ingredients cluster together that connect things for us and sometimes there’s not.

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s kind of like what joins speech therapy and ice cream together. That’s one. But there is a common thread there. It’s connection. So I actually want to share this story. It’s a beautiful story that highlights why I do what I do, I guess. So the backstory of this is my husband’s side of the family come from a long line of ice cream makers, gelato makers in Italian, and my husband is now taking that baton and makes amazing gelato. And we decided that well, it was his dream to have the gelato cart that we do events with.

And we were doing our very first wedding. And I’ve just finished a full clinical day. And a lot of my work is in autism spectrum disorder. So I’d just seen a whole bunch of patients that day and went straight to the wedding to help my husband serve. And at the wedding I heard a little boy really, really upset, and he had run out of the wedding because he was overwhelmed from the light and the sound.

And I then learned he had autism. But he ran behind the gelato truck and was hiding in the bushes really scared, really upset, overwhelmed, sensory overload. And I could sense straight away. I knew what it was, like just clinically, I could see it. And I went around the bush and I pulled him out and I said, ‘Hey mate, do you want an ice cream?’

And the only word he could say at the time was chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. And I said, sure. We went to the back of the truck, made him a chocolate gelato. And his mother came around and apologized and she was saying, I’m really, really sorry. You know, he has autism, I don’t mean to upset your service.

And I said, whoa, I know. And it’s okay. He can stay with me the whole night. And I then went on to see that little boy clinically. But the one thing she said to me was we were coming to see you because it’s the first time I’ve seen him voluntarily want to connect. And I saw that. I saw that in the way he just took to you. Maybe he sensed that you were there to help him or to give him that experience of having a chocolate gelato.

And it’s just a beautiful story that I always come back to when I am sometimes wearing a lot of hats. And when you come back to yourself and you say, why am I doing this? Or what am I doing this for? And it’s that, it’s the love of connection. And if I can make a difference, start conversations, then I’m doing my job.

Terri Connellan: Fantastic. Yeah. I love that idea. And connection’s one of my top five values too. So, which is interesting, that it’s a thread for you as well. And I find with connecting it often can be about connecting ideas too. Do you find that? Like it’s about connecting people obviously, and that beautiful story that you told, but it can also be from what you’ve said from the writing you’ve done so far, it’s about, how does this idea connect with this idea and then how do they come together to create The Balance Theory in the first place?

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah, I think connection would be my top value because it does it weaves through everything. Why am I writing a book? To connect people or to connect thoughts, to connect ideas, to start a conversation. Why am I a speech therapist? Very same reason. Why do I hand people gelato? Because they smile and the non-verbal connection is fantastic. And then obviously being a mama, it’s I think the height of human connection, parenting.

Terri Connellan: Fantastic. So, this is a big question. There are two questions that I’m asking everyone on the podcast. So the first one big question, but interesting intuitively to see what comes up.How have you created your story over your lifetime?

Natasha Piccolo: This is my favorite question. Yes. I am an observer of my life, I think. So that’s the intuition saying that. If we go back to inner child stuff, I think from the moment I could pick up a pen, I remember saying to my parents that I was going to be an author. I’m going to have books, people going to read them. My first work at five years old was about an elephant, but, something about, remembering it now, but all airports in the world had shut. Maybe I was channeling COVID. Elephants needed to be the way that we got around. No idea, but I think I have always observed some kind of creativity in telling stories and I have always loved to put them on paper. So first I observed my life or the things that are going through my head. And then I write, and that practice of journaling and retelling has just been paramount to how I’ve created my life story.

And I think then, shaping that and articulating it as I got older, it became about wanting to start and initiate important conversation. So then I kept retelling my stories through telling my own story and sparking chat. My favourite thing to do.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. You mentioned in your bio that you’re always up for a good chat. So that idea of having a conversation. So what I’m hearing there is that you create your story almost by telling the story or by storytelling.

Natasha Piccolo: Yes. Yeah. And then I think I’m also a fan of collecting stories. I’ve always loved reading, like on that level, but I just love to hear somebody else’s story and to find the lesson in listening to someone taking that story and if it’s going to help, passing it on. Yeah. What would you answer to that, Terri?

Terri Connellan: Oh, that’s a big one. For me, how have I created my story over my last? One of my top things is reflecting. My background is as an adult educator and one of the key theorists that I really liked in that area was Donald Schon. And his work was about being a reflective practitioner and I love that idea. So I think for me, it’s been very much about experiencing and reflecting. I think again, it’s a very introverted and intuiting process, which is my strength, but very much that idea of taking things in and then sorting them out internally and then getting a structure to them and sharing them with the world. So, yeah. So similar to yours in some ways.

Natasha Piccolo: I think putting that practical way of then giving a message, like reflecting, transmuting and then telling.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And then, but I do think structure and being practical to me, and it sounds like for you, two are very important because, again, I think it’s like two parts of my personality and it sounds like potentially with yours, it’s that, here’s the intuitive, but then how do I structure that into something that others can read and get value from?

Natasha Piccolo: How does it make sense? I think because especially intuitive thinking can be so ambiguous and huge. And I know that that’s been a wonderful challenge with The Balance Theory. How do I actually get this into a form that somebody could pick up similarly with like your Companion Workbook and actually do something with it, apply it to life.

Terri Connellan: Yep. It’s a big challenge as a writer. So the next question is, again, something I’m asking people, because, I’ve written my book with wholehearted self-leadership tips based on my experience, but I see it as a toolkit we can all add to. I’ve shared 15 things that work for me that I think will work for many people. What would be your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practice, especially for women.

Natasha Piccolo: Thank you for asking that question, because I think these are the questions that people can take something away and apply tomorrow, or even in the next hour. I’m actually working through your Companion Workbook at the moment. So I’ve just read the part about your self care practices essentially, and how they shape, can set up your day really.

But I would say, I think maybe because speech pathology is such big part of me as well, having an honest conversation. And I mean that first with self every day, every morning, just that check-in of like, where am I at? What’s going on today? What’s my intention? How can I shape this day to work in my favor so that I show up as the best version of self? That’s probably my little go-to before I do anything else before I get out of bed with breath work.

And then I have a little fun thing I do on a Sunday night. Fun for me because clearly I like practical things. But I look at the calendar and I commit to one self-care practice a day from the Sunday to the next Sunday. So I just looked at the calendar, what’s going on this week and I’ve got my self-care menu of things I like to do. And then I just plot them in. So it’s like a meeting that I promise myself I’ll show up for.

And it can be as small as putting on a face mask while Alfie has a nap, my son to making sure I make a date to go and have a coffee with a friend I haven’t seen. It’s like a self care Sunday hack that I do. It started in lockdown and it’s really, really helpful. And it’s fun. It’s a challenge too. It’s like, well, I’ve had a few coffee dates, maybe I need to go and have a massage, or I need to look at booking a yoga retreat, or I need to just sit in the sun with a cup of tea this week. And, but it’s just been really practical about it and committing to it.

Terri Connellan: I love that. I think I might copy that idea, add that to my toolkit. And I love the idea of having a menu so you’ve thought ahead about what the things might be. And it’s a bit like a plug and play, you know, what does the day feel like, mixing it up with something different.

Natasha Piccolo: Yeah. And making it work for your week. Like there are weeks where like, work is really busy and sometimes it’s just committing to three minutes of meditation or having a big glass of water before you get out of bed. So it’s like, I just need to be really hydrated today to function. That’s my thing. I love a good tick a box, so I just feel like I’ve done. I’ve done me and now the oxygen mask can be on everyone else after that.

Terri Connellan: Awesome. Yeah. I love that. Thanks for sharing those two practical tips we can take away with us. I love them both so thank you.

Natasha Piccolo: Pleasure.

Terri Connellan: Thanks so much for sharing about you or about your life, about your writing, about your books. And we look forward to The Balance Theory coming out in March, 2022. So, that’ll be something for people to look forward to. So where can people find out more about you and your work online?

Natasha Piccolo: Thanks, Terri. I just want to thank you as well, because I think you are an incredible voice and you have a lot to give, and this podcast is going to reach so many people. So I’m just going to extend my gratitude to you. Thank you for having me. And the best way to connect with me is over on Instagram. I love a good DM chat. So @tashspeaks one big word as a handle, and my business is Resonate Holistic for speech pathology and coaching. So yeah, that’s the two, well, I hang out there quite a lot now, especially with the writing process. So come and find me come and say hi.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I love your Instagram. It’s fantastic. And you’ve got some lovely snapshots about the book too, and foreshadowing about the content, which is exciting. Congratulations. And we’ll pop those links in the show notes too, so people can connect with you. Warmest wishes, thanks so much for being with us today and we’ll look forward to The Balance Theory.

Natasha Piccolo: Thanks for having me.

Natasha Piccolo

About Natasha Piccolo

Natasha Piccolo is a mama, small business owner and author. She is always up for a good chat as her main work roles include clinical Speech Pathology and coaching. Her business, Resonate Holistic assists clients to facilitate healthy communication across the life span. Her first book, ‘The Balance Theory’ is out in March with the kind press. She has recently contributed to ‘This I Know Is True’ – a collection of stories to inspire community progress alongside 18 other women in the health and wellness space. Natasha hopes that her words motivate others to live a life that is consciously aligned.

You can connect with Natasha

Website: www.resonateholistic.com.au

Instagram: @tashspeaks 

@resonate_holistic 

@pina_piccolina

Email: Natasha@resonateholistic.com.au

Book purchase links: 

This I Know is True

Australia | Booktopia | Amazon AU

International | Amazon UK | Amazon US

The Balance Theory links – forthcoming when pre-orders open in March 2022.

Links to explore:

My books:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

Free resources:

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

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

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

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories 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/

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

planning & productivity writing

Author – my 2021 Word of the Year check-in!

December 30, 2021

My word for 2021 is AUTHOR.

Here’s what I wrote on Instagram about what that meant sitting on the threshold of 2021:

  • stepping into the identity of author
  • embracing life as an author and learning new skills – publication, launching, author platform.
  • keeping writing front and centre in every way
  • completing, beginning and progressing writing projects
  • being visible as an author and talking about my books and writing
  • helping others embrace writing and being an author
  • helping women be the creator of their stories and the active author of their lives through enhanced self-leadership.

Here’s how that shaped up over the year and some tips for applying this learning in your life!

Stepping into the identity of author

What’s the difference in identity between writer and author? That’s something I’ve pondered this year. For me, WRITER is more focused on the process and act of writing. AUTHOR is more about what we shape and produce through writing: a finished book, something published and out in the world in some way.

I love writing especially the writer’s process so have always aligned myself to that identity. Stepping into the identity of author feels more public. It meant committing to completing my book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook. After four plus years of writing, it meant moving through the long haul of creating a book – or two – and finishing them. Receiving my books in print for the first time. Having them sold by book-sellers. Seeing them in online stores. Working in partnership with editors and publishers like the wonderful the kind press. These were thrilling milestones and I’ve loved stepping into AUTHOR as my writing identity in 2022. Thanks to those who have read Wholehearted and supported me on my author journey!

Tips for you:

If stepping into the identity of author is a priority in your life for 2022:

Embracing life as an author and learning new skills – publication, launching, author platform.

This has been a huge focus this year and I have learnt so much through a combination of doing, reading and listening. Working with the kind press as my publisher has been a wonderful introduction to independent publishing. I deliberately choose the indie author path. This is because I want to keep control of my work as much as I can and have creative freedom. Learning the skills to independently publish has been something I’ve invested time and money in over the long-term for about 10 years now. So to go through the process was so exciting.

I chose to work in partnership with the kind press because even though I had some knowledge, I didn’t have the practical experience. It felt overwheling to do it all on my own. Through this partnership I achieved two goals:

  1. I independently published my books in a way I am totally delighted with, and
  2. I learnt about the independent publishing process; information I can use again and again on my journey.

Another valuable process was working through and creating my Author Business Plan with the help of Joanna Penn’s book Your Author Business Plan. This helped me to gather together what I already had created on my Quiet Writing business journey as a creative. And to work out the next steps to focus more on my author platform.

Key players in understanding the launch process as an author were my publisher Natasha Gilmour, editor Penelope Love, publicist Sian Yewdall and Jessica Tutton who I have worked with over 2020-1 on launching.

This Book Launch Checklist shared with me by the lovely Amanda Rootsey helped a lot too. It feels overwhelming at times as launching anything often does. But strengthening my skillset around launching generally helped immensely.

The other part of embracing life as an author was learning new writing skills especially around long haul writing. Editing, especially editing two books at once, was a challenging process. I was so grateful for the partnership and support of my editors, Penelope Love and Dr Juliet Richters, as well as my publisher, Natasha Gilmour and my co-writing buddy Beth Cregan!

Tips for you:

If embracing life as an author and learning new skills is a priority in your life for 2022:

  • Read Your Author Business Plan by Joanna Penn. It’s short but powerful and then do the work to create your Author Business Plan.
  • Join Beth Cregan and I for the Writing Road Trip in 2022 where we will talk about all aspects of the writing journey and support you including writing your Author Business Plan.
  • Listen to The Creative Penn Podcast.
  • Make a list of all the skills you want to work on and possible paths to learning these skills in 2022.

Keeping writing front and centre in every way

Co-writing with my buddy Beth Cregan of Write Away with Me most week mornings is a crucial element in keeping writing front and centre. I start the day with Morning Pages and Tarot as anchors for the day. The accountability with another writer helps me show up to the page regularly. We talk about writing too which keeps it centred and supported in my world.

Honouring the place of writing in my life as an author has been so important this year. To see my work published in the world is affirming and a goal of many years. Continuing to write and make space for writing as a wholehearted self-leadership skill that supports all of my life is so important. It’s the piece that holds everything else together and makes sense of it all. So I honour its place in my life including writing first thing most mornings.

Tips for you:

If keeping writing front and centre in every way is a priority for you for 2022:

Beth Cregan

Completing, beginning and progressing writing projects

I like the energy of this one. And it captures the idea that writing is an ongoing process and one that has many parts: including getting ideas, researching, drafting, editing, publishing. This year I have worked on the mindset to have writing projects going at different stages. Anne Janzer’s book The Writer’s Process has helped me with this through getting clearer about the different cognitive gears and tools used at different stages of writing. We can use knowledge of the writing process and our personal preferences to juggle multiple projects:

…stagger the start times so the projects are in different phases: research, drafting, incubation, revision. Create the right work environment and conditions for each type of work. If you are freshest mentally in the morning, do the drafting first thing. Schedule research and revision for the other parts of the day, and remember to leave unstructured time to ponder what you’re learning in the research.

Anne Janzer, The Writer’s Process p.142

As I completed both books ready for publication, I also worked on combining the Wholehearted Stories on Quiet Writing into a single draft. It helped manage my energy and keep me motivated to have a new writing project to work on as the others were completing. This idea of managing multiple projects is one I want to work on more in practice.

Tips for you:

If completing, beginning and progressing writing projects is a priority for you for 2022:

The book The Writer's Process by Anne Janzer sitting on a weathered table next to a Traveller's notebook and pen with a spiralled shell and an anemone shell.

Being visible as an author and talking about my books and writing

This has been a big one this year. As writers, we often operate behind the scenes. The work happens in relative privacy and sometimes no-one else sees what we are writing for a long time if ever. But the writing is one thing and the being visible and talking our books via Instagram or Facebook Lives, Masterclasses, virtual or in personal book launch events and on podcasts is another. It’s been new territory for me to be so visible as an author and I’ve embraced it.

I stepped up into talking about my book via Instagram lives. I’ve enjoyed speaking about Wholehearted and the writing process on the following podcasts:

The more you do it, the better you feel. Taking the time to prepare speaking notes on questions provided or brainstormed ahead helps immensely to be clear in what you want to say.

I also started my own Create your Story Podcast launching on 29 October 2021 and have enjoyed sharing conversations on my Wholehearted book with key connections. I’m loving podcasting and the deep conversations shared. I hope you find inspiration in there too – there are many gems!

I held two virtual book launches of Wholehearted given we were in lockdown. You can catch them on the podcast as Episode 2 and Episode 3. I also had a live event with the lovely Anna Loder.

You can join a Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club where we will do a year long community walk through the book with me as your guide and coach. It’s not too late to join. Our community call on Section 1 of the book is in mid January. So head here to join up now – there are still a few spots available.

It’s been a time of stretch talking about my books and writing in all these different ways but I’ve loved it and I hope it’s been helpful. I have so much more to say and share.

Tips for you:

If being visible as an author and generally is a priority in your life for 2022:

  • Send a pitch to me to be on the Create Your Story Podcast. I’d love some new author guests!
  • Listen to podcasts to see how others talk about their books, writing and authorship. Check out my interviews above.
  • Prepare speaking notes for answering questions on podcasts and author interviews so you are ready. Do this even if you don’t have any podcasts booked as yet! This helps you get clear on what you want to say about your writing.
  • Check out Joanna Penn at The Creative Penn for lots of author books and podcasts including her book, Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives & Other Introverts.

Helping others embrace writing and being a new author

As I’ve gone on my writing, authorship and publishing journey, others have reached out to me for advice and support. I’ve helped them in various ways – through my coaching and more informally. I’m a writing teacher by background and helping others to write and create their story is a consistent thread in my life. I found as I committed to writing in a deeper way and stepped more fully into the author role, it’s natural for me to help others.

Throughout my transition journey, I’ve offered women the opportunity to share their wholehearted story and step into being a guest writer on Quiet Writing. Over 20 women have taken up the offer. I’ve helped each of them to craft and share their story so they can feel proud and empowered. You can read the Stories of Wholehearted Living on Quiet Writing. Women have found this to be a healing process that helped them share their deeper, more personal story, sometimes for the first time. Each wholehearted story helps others to write theirs. Readers feel inspired and not so alone in their journeys to living more fully. I collated these stories into one volume for potential publication in 2022. It reminded me of all that I have done in this space as a writing teacher and coach and the powerful voices shared.

For a long time I’ve felt called to offer a program to create community, inspiration and connection for people while writing. This is especially for longer pieces where you need support and tenacity. In partnership with my morning writing buddy, writing teacher and mentor, Beth Cregan, we’ll be kicking off the Writing Road Trip in early 2022. So if writing is high on your list of priorities for 2022, get the support, mindset insights, skills, community and conditions to help you write. You can get on the email list for the Writing Road Trip program now. We are sending out writing inspiration via our newsletters. Working on this partnership and community with Beth is a real joy and I look forward to shaping a supportive writing-focused community in 2022.

Tips for you:

If embracing writing and being a new author is a priority in your life for 2022:

Helping women be the creator of their stories and the active author of their lives through enhanced self-leadership.

All of my work is about helping women to be the active creator of their stories. It’s the focus of the Create Your Story Podcast, my Wholehearted Books, my 1:1 coaching and my group coaching programs. I have a mindmap here of my planned creations when I kicked off my business with ‘Create Your Story’ firmly in the centre of that map of ideas. Create Your Story and Wholehearted Self-leadership are aligned concepts. And 2021 was the year in which many of these ideas came to fruition especially with the podcast and books being launched into the world to share inspiration and strategies with other women.

The place where I work most intimately with women is 1:1 coaching and this is the quiet undercurrent of my work which continued in 2021. Women set goals and moved through blockages; they dealt with unhelpful mindsets and they put practical strategies in place to help them achieve their desires. Coaching has been a bedrock in my own transition journey and I invite you to consider coaching with me if wishing to make change need support on that journey. We all can benefit from such guidance. Sometimes there’s only so far we can go by ourselves. Coaching is via 1:1 or group programs including the Book Club and Writing Road Trip in 2022.

Tips for you:

If creating your story and being the active author of your life is a priority for you for 2022:

So what was your Word of the Year and how did it manifest?

So take some time to reflect on your word of the year – or intentions and goals – and see how it played out. It’s not always as we plan. Sometimes it’s more conscious as it was for me this year. Other times it is more subconscious and we forget our word or focus and then find it has manifested anyway. But take the time to reflect! There are often buried jewels there and important realisations to take forward.

Let me know in the comments here on social media how this played out for you!

I’ve got my Word for 2022 ready to go! it came pretty easily this year. I’ll share more about it in the first week of 2022. So stay tuned. Love to hear what’s coming up for you as a focus for 2022 too.

creativity podcast writing

Waking up in Love, Life & Writing with Penelope Love

December 5, 2021

Subscribe on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Podcast Page | RSS

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 5th 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:

Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition

Wholehearted Companion Workbook

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

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

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

My coaching:

Work with me

Personality Stories 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/

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/writingquietly

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

About Penelope Love

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’s Blog: https://www.wakeupinlove.com

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

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transition writing

Celebrating ‘Wholehearted’ publishing partnership with the kind press

January 31, 2021

I am celebrating publishing Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook in partnership with the kind press in 2021.

The kind press is an independent Australian-based publisher. They work with authors ‘to create high-quality, stylish, books that are diverting, inspiring, spirited and clever.’

Working in partnership with the kind press is the perfect fit. They have a focus on sacred cocreation. This is so in line with the Sacred Creative Collective and Quiet Writing values and my desire to be an independently published author. It is a brilliant, assisted way to publish and learn more about writing and publishing from those who are expert in the field.

My sincere thanks to Natasha Gilmour—editor, publisher and founder of the kind press —and all at the kind press for all the support and guidance in shaping Wholehearted and its Companion Workbook for publication. Huge thanks too to my editor and friend, Penelope Love, for all her valued assistance with editing and nurturing support throughout the wholehearted publishing process! You might remember Penelope’s Wholehearted Story from 2018.

I can’t wait for the next steps and I hope you will all come along for the continuing journey! We are currently working on the cover design which is very exciting so stay tuned for the cover reveal.

The publishing announcement is below:

Let me know any questions you might have about the writing and the Wholehearted publishing process and my own journey!

Write your book with me

I am also offering a Write Your Book group coaching program later in 2021 in case you are interested in support, camaraderie and skills for your own writing projects. Because I can tell you it takes a community to write a book and bring it to fruition and we all need that support. Here for you if that is on your plan for 2021. Head over to pop your name on the WRITE YOUR BOOK PRIORITY LIST to be the first to hear more. 

write your book

About the author + coach

Terri Connellan
Terri Connellan

Terri Connellan is a certified life coach, author and accredited psychological type practitioner. She has a Master of Arts in Language and Literacy, two teaching qualifications and a successful 30-year career as a teacher and a leader in adult vocational education. Her coaching and writing focus on creativity, personality and self-leadership—especially for women in transition to a life with deeper purpose. Terri works with women globally through her creative business, Quiet Writing, encouraging deeper self-understanding of body of work, creativity and psychological type for more wholehearted and fulfilling lives. Her book ‘Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition’ will be published in 2021 by the kind press. She lives and writes in a village on the outskirts of Sydney surrounded by beach and bush.

Book your Self-leadership Discovery Call with Terri here.

Explore your personality further in Personality Stories Coaching.

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