creativity Archives

The journey of a lifetime – a wholehearted story

April 26, 2018

This guest post from Chantal Simon shows how the wholehearted path invites you to weave the threads of your lifetime journey into a cohesive whole.

This is the ninth guest post in our Wholehearted Stories series on Quiet Writing. I invited readers to consider submitting a guest post on their wholehearted story. You can read more here – and I’m still keen for more contributors!

Quiet Writing celebrates self-leadership in wholehearted living and writing, career and creativity. This community of voices, with each of us telling our own story of what wholehearted living means, is a valuable and central part of this space. In this way, we can all feel connected on our various journeys and not feel so alone. Whilst there will always be unique differences, there are commonalities that we can all learn from and share to support each other.

I am honoured to have Chantal Simon as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. My sincere thanks to Chantal for sharing her story and stunning photographs. Chantal’s story shows how following our heart, connecting the pieces of our skills and passions weaves a cohesive lifetime journey. A story with language adventures, healing arts, beautiful photography and a backdrop of changing landscapes, read on to find out more!

Answering the call to adventure

It was January 1991 and time moved unbearably slowly in my native corner of France. Going through the motions at university, dutifully attending classes that failed to hold my interest, and feeling increasingly restricted in other areas of my life, I was restless and needed a change. Fast.

As if on cue, one of my English professors called me at home to offer me one of two places on a European exchange program and a four-month grant to study in Galway, Ireland. Dumbstruck by this unexpected turn of events, I quickly regained my composure on the phone, gratefully accepted and took down the details. Time was of the essence, so there was no second-guessing myself. I made all the necessary arrangements and, less than two weeks later, boarded the ferry and embarked on a journey that would change my life.

To say that I fell under the spell of Ireland is no exaggeration. The rugged beauty of its west coast landscapes moved me almost to the point of aching, everything was exciting and I could see possibilities I had never considered. The canvas of my life had suddenly expanded and I loved how it made me feel. Free to be all that I was. I knew I had found my soul home and decided to do all that I could to stay and create as spacious and fulfilling a life as possible.

Finding joy in the outdoors and writing

Born in a port city on the western coast of France, I had always felt at home in nature and, as a child, spent countless hours playing with friends, my siblings or by myself in the wood at the end of our street. We climbed trees, found secret hideaways and ate all the berries. That sense of ease in the outdoors and need to explore my surroundings never left me.

A month after arriving in Ireland, I immersed myself in Connemara’s wild beauty and climbed my first mountain. I’ve never been the sporty type, but that way of being in the world, feeling my aliveness expand with every step or breath of fresh air, invigorated by the elements and at one with my immediate environment is as natural to me as it is necessary.

My first line of work in Ireland was as a teacher of French and, as such, I enjoyed three full summers off in a row. At the time, I was living in the Irish capital and was more than ready for an outdoor adventure when the much-awaited month of June would come. Two months spent cycling down the western coast of France and around Brittany, a summer of boating on the Irish inland waterways and hiking the West Highland Way during a rare Scottish heatwave presented an abundance of experiences, encounters and impressions which I casually captured with my camera as well as in a notebook. The storyteller and writer in me had been reawakened and, as synchronicity would have it, books on writing and creativity soon crossed my path, encouraging me to nurture that side of me – an invitation I happily accepted.

Broadening horizons and taking risks

After three years of teaching beginner, academic and professional levels of my native language to a variety of students from 3 to 80 years of age, I wanted to broaden my horizons and started seeking work as a translator. Within a month, an IT translation company booked me for a 3-day freelance assignment onsite.

I had no computer experience whatsoever, but that didn’t faze me. How difficult could that be? My willingness to find out still amuses me, as does my faith in my language, typing and on-the-spot learning skills. It seems they worked a charm since I was asked in for a second assignment. IT translation was a relatively new industry then, Dublin-based agencies providing a bridge between American software companies and translation providers in Europe. Before too long, I was doing regular freelance work for two of the largest agencies while maintaining various freelance teaching gigs.

Committing to self-employment

When one of the agencies offered me a full-time position with a 1-year contract, I accepted it as a great opportunity to learn everything I could about that industry. I did that, but also learned something equally, if not more, important: I wasn’t employee material. Being surrounded by people, stuck all day in a neon-lit office full of computers was so draining to me, it was physically painful.

The less positive aspects of city life were also starting to weigh on me and I was missing the wild Atlantic. With the terms of my contract met and realizing I merely needed a computer, phone line and modem to set myself up as a freelance IT translator, I resigned and moved back to the west coast. It was June 1996 and I felt professionally freer than ever before, having just committed to self-employment and made my work location independent.

Healing modalities and deep spiritual unfolding

Building a business on my own terms was exciting, as was the freedom to take time off whenever I wanted, either to pursue my creative activities or to travel abroad. One dull spring, seeking a respite from the ever-pouring Irish rain, my then partner and I booked a flight to Crete. This marked the start of a love affair with Greece.

We returned the following year and eventually bought an old house on the Cycladic island of Paros. Being able to take time off to stay there all summer was priceless. My notebook and camera always in my backpack, I learned some Greek, spent my days exploring the island and neighbouring ones, visited whitewashed churches and temples, watched the sun set into the Aegean Sea every evening, and ate an abundance of sun-drenched fruit and freshly caught fish. It was bliss, pure and simple.

Back in Ireland, I continued to balance work, creative pursuits and the needs of my unfolding spiritual self. My spirituality had always been part and parcel of my creativity and time spent in nature, but another realm of experience opened itself up to me when I started training in Reiki in 1995. After years of practising, integrating, training in other energy healing modalities and treating friends and loved ones, I opened my practice to the public.

Working on people I knew nothing or little about showed me how intuitive and clairsentient I had become. This subtle awareness continued to expand and led me down a beckoning path of investigation. Specific books came my way, certain themes started to appear in my writing and art. Synchronicities abounded and I started to feel an undeniable pull towards a certain part of the British Isles. True to my nature, I heeded the call.

Art and the call of the feminine

The city of Bath, my home for the following two years, was not only stunning and a delight to live in, but also perfectly located to allow regular day trips to the ancient power sites of Stonehenge, Avebury, Stanton Drew and Glastonbury as well as farther north to the fascinating Forest of Dean. I constantly felt like I was bathing in a pool of potent yet nurturing energy. This had a huge impact on my personal unfolding and it is there that I experienced one of my biggest shifts in consciousness to date.

My creativity also flourished, at that point mainly flowing through the channels of collage and mixed media art, techniques I had come across three years previously. Having enjoyed publication success with the articles, poems and collages I occasionally submitted to magazines and journals, I took the jump and started a blog, hoping to connect with like-minded people. The sense of community that characterized what was commonly called the blogosphere back then was truly amazing. I forged lasting friendships with people who, like me, were creating more and more room in their lives for their creativity and art.

My awareness of the divine feminine became increasingly acute and embodied while living in Bath, so it was little surprise that related themes, archetypes and symbolism became prominent in the images I created. I enjoyed the conversations they prompted online tremendously.

It was a very expansive and busy period in my life: I was a high-tech translator by day, a creative by night and spent countless weekends exploring the area. However, some good things come to an end and my personal journey called me back to Ireland.

Forever seeking more congruence

Perhaps it had something to do with the incredible times we live in or simply was a side effect of turning 50. The fact remains that, last summer, I put an end to my 23-year career as an IT translator to focus solely on what truly holds meaning for me and, hopefully, be of service in a different way. My values and slow living aspirations were increasingly at odds with the consumerism-pushing content of my assignments and the near-daily deadlines becoming the norm in that line of work. There was no other true way forward than to pause and course-correct.

To me, living wholeheartedly means following the flow of your life, taking chances but saying “no” when needed. It requires recognizing and using your skills and the resources available to you, as well as being fully present to all that is within and in front of you, the opportunities just like the challenges and difficulties. Sometimes convoluted, the wholehearted path invites you to weave all the threads of your life, your passions, needs and values into an increasingly cohesive whole, and fosters self-responsibility, self-leadership and sovereignty.

Key book companions along the way of my lifetime journey

Anaïs Nin’s diary
D.H. Lawrence’s novels
Jean Houston’s books on human potential
David Whyte’s poetry
The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron
Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg
Writing for Your Life – Deena Metzger
Synchronicity – Deike Begg
Unmasking the Rose: A Record of a Kundalini Initiation – Dorothy Walters
Wild Creative – Tami Lynn Kent
Writing Wild – Tina Welling

Photographs by Chantal Simon used with permission and thanks.

About Chantal Simon

A native of France, Chantal Simon is a writer, translator and photographer living on the North West coast of Ireland. As well as working on a memoir about her spiritual and energetic unfolding, she is currently creating a photographic series inspired by her natural surroundings and her love of the liminal. Connect with her on Facebook or Instagram, where she shares both her photography and snippets from her creative life, or visit chantalsimon.com (website upcoming soon in 2019).

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You might also enjoy my free 94-page ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey. Just pop your email address in the box below.

You will receive the ebook straight away as well as updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

creativity love, loss & longing

Creative healing in times of sorrow and challenge

April 9, 2018

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

C S Lewis

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

This week: creative healing in times of sorrow and challenge

Theme for the week beginning 9 April

The underlying theme for this week to guide our overall focus is from Marcella Kroll’s Sacred Symbols oracle deck – Medicine Man Eye.

This week is about being creative healing especially in times of sorrow and challenge when we can feel so helpless. We are reminded to see higher magical powers, the way of miracles and medicine of different kinds.

Advice from the Sacred Symbols Guidebook is:

Healer – A Healing in its highest form – Prophecy – Natural Magical Abilities

Meditate when wanting healing on the physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual plane.

The Native American Medicine Man Eye symbol reminds us of the “magical powers of spiritual healing and seeing the future. All seeing, all knowing, all uniting.”

This week’s guidance is about tapping into that spiritual, creative healing energy now. Especially when faced with situations where we feel we can do nothing, we are encouraged to reflect on and access higher forms of healing for ourselves and others. As Albert Einstein reminds us:

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

This week we are reminded to tap into the power of miracles, of creative healing, of spiritual energy and higher forms of magic. Call it or make it what you will: prayer, meditation, channelling, energy healing, writing, art therapy, mandala work, tarot, crystals, poetry, chanting. We are encouraged to access and honour our own creative healing forms at this time.

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 9 April

Tarot Narrative:

Creative healing in all its forms calls you now as a way of energy or power. You might feel helpless but know that you have creative ways to make miracles. They might be hard to see and even know the effects of, but channel that energy into healing as you know you can. Write, create art, weave, knit, draw deep. Manifesting miracles and creativity out of the deepest resources and from sorrow is called for now as you and others heal.

Reading notes:

Cards: Queen of Water (Cups) and the Nine of Air (Swords) from The Nomad Tarot and #31 Why? in protection (reversed) position from Wisdom of the Oracle.

Book notes:

The waves echo behind me. Patience––Faith––Openness, is what the sea has to teach. Simplicity––Solitude––Intermittency…But there are other beaches to explore. There are more shells to find. This is only a beginning.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (p120)

Today’s card echo together in various ways about creative healing approaches. It might be how we find solace in challenging times to heal our own troubled mind by walking on the beach. Perhaps it’s learning to channel our creative healing energies in different ways such as through reiki, energy healing or intuitive writing.

I know many of the wholehearted stories featured here on Quiet Writing highlight art as a form of creative healing. For example, Jade Herriman writes about embracing a creative life and art as a form of healing that she now extends to others through her practice of art therapy. Lynn Hanford-Day likewise found the creative healing practice of art central in her move from breakdown to breakthrough. Lynn now works with sacred geometry and the divine feminine, crafting a multi-faceted career as artist, coach, facilitator and therapist working with women in transition and organisations going through change.

The beautiful Queen of Water from The Nomad tarot with its single elegant shell reminds us via the guidebook:

The most successful and harmonious of all the Water cards, the Queen shows us the possibilities unleashed by blending imagination and creativity with action and social usefulness….This can speak specifically to artistic endeavours or any creation manifested out of what life has presented us with.

Creative healing from what life presents

The Nine of Air (Swords) represents what life can throw at us especially the darkest sides of life. As The Nomad Tarot guidebook says:

In this moment, we are incapable of seeing the world as anything other than full of endless sorrow.

Life can be challenging and it’s easy in these moments to feel helpless. It’s important that we feel and acknowledge emotions like sorrow, grief and pain as real and as guideposts in life. And it’s what we then do with these emotions that matters.

So here are some questions to reflect on:

Do we get bogged down in these dark emotions, Ten of Swords style?
Or do we work through them and try to balance them with appreciating the beauty and blessings in our lives?
How do we seek to learn from them and heal ourselves and others?
What creative healing practices do we engage in to help us work through tough times?
How are we upskilling and learning new skills for creative healing and energy channelling?
Where can we share this knowledge with others?

Writing has been a creative healing force for me as I have worked through challenges. As described in 36 Books that Shaped my Story, books, blogging and returning to writing poetry have been creative healing arts for me. And in healing and caring for ourselves, as selfish as it might feel at times, we are better able to support others. Shalagh Hogan, in the most recent wholehearted story, shares how she turned darkness into creative projects and gathered lessons that help her and others feel positive and engaged in Creative Soul Living.

The Why? card from the Wisdom of the Oracle deck also reminds us to look at our whys at this time. We are encouraged to look at intentions hidden from awareness. Sometimes when we are made vulnerable by sorrow and pain, we can find new insights. In another form of creative healing, recognising true motivations can be eye-opening and lead to clearer paths.

Resilient creative healing

I’ve been reading a fabulous book, Resilient: 12 Tools for transforming everyday experiences into lasting happiness by Rick Hanson, listening to it as an audiobook. It’s full of rich wisdom on resilient creative healing approaches to life. Hanson doesn’t deny that tough times happen but he encourages us to do the best we can in any situation with the psychological resources we have developed over time.

There are so many positive examples of practical, resilient creative healing to be used day by day. Here are just a few:

Find refuges:

In the flow of your day, find refuges such as time to yourself in a morning shower, the friendly camaraderie of people at work, listening to music on the way home, or thoughts of gratitude as you get ready for sleep.

Let be, let go, let in

In other words, getting good at coping, healing, and well-being is a matter of getting good at letting be, letting go, and letting in. Mindfulness is necessary for

Be aware of your needs

So try to be aware of needs, or aspects of needs, that have been unmet. Listen to the longings of your heart.

The HEAL process

1. Have a beneficial experience: Notice it or create it.

INSTALLATION

2. Enrich it: Stay with it, feeling it fully.

3. Absorb it: Receive it into yourself.

4. Link it (optional): Use it to soothe and replace painful, harmful psychological material.

See the jewels around you

Each day is like a path strewn with many little jewels: the small ordinary beneficial experiences of life. It’s easy to overlook these and step right over them. But then we get to the end of the day and ask, “Why don’t I feel richer inside? Why does it feel like I’m running on empty?” The jewels are already there. Why not pick some of them up?

I highly recommend this rich and practical book for increasing resilient resources and creative healing in the context of experience. One of the ways of being creative with healing is practising it in the everyday.

This is a great week for digging deep into miracles and creative healing practices of all kinds. With Mercury retrograde around until April 15, it’s a great time for self-reflection and growth amidst the chaos and anxiety.

Love to hear your thoughts!

I’d love to hear what is working for you as you engage with these energies around self-care and supporting those around you

All best wishes for this week of creative healing and developing resilient practices.

May you express yourself and find healing through the creative arts and your psychological resources developed over time. And let me know what you think of this post and this weekly Tarot Narrative!

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

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

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

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

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

You might also enjoy:

Endurance – going the distance with truth, patience and strength

Strategy, patterns and the higher order of connections

Seeking wisdom in water and elsewhere

Alchemy and conducting magic with spirit and heart

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

creativity wholehearted stories

Gathering my lessons – a wholehearted story

March 29, 2018

This guest post from Shalagh Hogan shows how gathering lessons of self-knowledge over time can lead to wholehearted Creative Soul Living.

This is the eighth guest post in our Wholehearted Stories series on Quiet Writing. I invited readers to consider submitting a guest post on their wholehearted story. You can read more here – and I’m still keen for more contributors!

I am honoured to have Shalagh Hogan as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. My sincere thanks to Shalagh for sharing her story and photographs. Shalagh and I connected on Instagram via our love of creativity. Her story shows how growth and self-knowledge accumulate over time. Embracing creativity wholeheartedly via parenting, blogging, community, writing and social media, Shalagh’s gathering lessons evolve into Creative Soul Living. Read on to find out more!

Gathering lessons of self-knowledge

Despite my low self-esteem and anxieties, I have enthusiastically gathered my self-knowledge with hope for a better life. I accept as a given, my need to seek and grow a more whole version of my formerly fragmented self. Yet up to even a few years ago, the concept of Wholehearted Living, or what I call Creative Soul Living, was still just a conceptual inkling. Having never felt whole, the definition and the feeling of wholeness eluded me.

One lesson at a time is how my self-guided journey has unfolded. I am busy gathering my lessons which rise like cream to the top. From the more important lessons about creativity, community, connection, self-care, and self-trust, I have learned who I truly am, what makes me happiest, and who I want to proudly see myself being. Growth takes its time, yet I always feel like my biggest and best lessons are the ones that have just happened.

Valuing intuition and introversion

As a child, I was fragmented. I held too many pains involving too many people. My self-mirrors were broken, and the chaos was draining. I was a creative with no permission to be me. As a teen, much-needed hope collided with my insatiable appetite for knowledge when my mother’s pursuit of a master’s degree in Applied Behavioral Sciences showed me that knowledge was power, and we can use this power to choose our life’s outcome.

It was then, I also began my life-long journal writing practice, developing my inner voice (which I now know to be my intuition) and the voice of my blog. It was then too that my Myers-Briggs test results pegged me as an ENFP. Although this felt mostly right, last year I was relieved to discover and own that I am equal parts Introvert and Extrovert. Although, for many years I neglected my creative callings, the introverted time I now take to think, write, and create are my self-care practices.

Gathering lessons on self-care and self-esteem

My self-care became essential when I was 38 and pregnant with my son. My anxieties and the last of my self-destructive behaviours shook and woke me. It became clear, how I treated myself would be how my kids would treat themselves. Doing as I did and not as I said, my children would inherit my anxieties, my self-doubt, and my repressed creativity. I truly committed then to taking better care of and healing myself mentally and physically that my children might hopefully do the same. Eventually, I quit smoking, I began eating better, and I continued to seek therapy.

My biggest authentic self “aha”, on which the rest of my work truly depended, was given to me in a therapy session. The therapist offered that I had low self-esteem. At first, I raged against this mis-definition of me. If I wasn’t who I thought I was, who was I then? Yet, this information freed me like a bird from my heart cage. I wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing, nor did I need to help fix anyone I knew. Instead, I needed to have compassion and love for my humanity. And again, I began gathering my lessons.

Writing and connecting to heal

Bad things can happen for good reason, it may just take a while to see why. When my son was one, an American economic slump forced me to close my lovely little gift and antiques store named Bally Eden and I returned home to mourn the loss of my dream shop. I was anxious and desperate not to be stuck at home with my fast-growing-soon-to-be-a-toddler boy without something “just for me”. Encouraged by an old whisper in my ear, I began to write personal essays and publish them online. It then took five more years to start my blog at Shalavee.com which has just turned six.

I purposed the blog to make me a better writer, create a living resume, and voice my lessons regularly. While I achieved these goals, it was the community and relationships I’ve developed here online during my writing journey which have been my truest gift. My new unseen friends and our connections and courtships via comments and kind letters elevated my ego and gave me an immensely better self-image; a self-reflection where there once was none. I began to see my beauty and not my broken. And, as my voice of pain and healing came through on my blog, my readers said, “Keep writing what you are writing. We feel this way too.” Authenticity and vulnerability were my win/win.

Healing through community creativity

These voices from my community have helped to shift my purpose to offering others my voice to speak through. Our self-reflections echo each other through our communications and we begin to see ourselves as both individuals and as a collective of women with one voice of self-love and acceptance. We are gathering our lessons together. Strangers have become mirrors I will treasure forever, and the internet helped make me visible and whole again.

Although I was terrified, in May of 2016, my community encouraged me to host my first Instagram Challenge called the Soul Selfie challenge. For one week, we explored our souls, our fears, and our truths together in a deeper way via the hashtag #Soul_Selfie. My esteem and courage to lead increased incredibly as I hosted another that Fall and two more in 2017.

Then a small gathering on the evening of the first women’s march in January of 2017, inspired me to start a mindful meet-up group of my own in real life. We meet monthly to discuss a soul topic, eat well, and drink prosecco. We witness, acknowledge, and validate one another and that is so very necessary to my process of seeing my wholehearted self. I have created what I needed which benefits me and others and heals us all.

Vanquishing my anxieties with knowledge

Two years ago, even with all the progress in my writing and my self-healing, I knew my anxieties were still running the show. I found a new kick-butt therapist, a new resolve, and heading into my 50’s saw me amp up my efforts of self-discovery and visibility. Reading was one huge resource I used to finally reach the summit of the value hill I’d struggled to climb my entire life. I discovered I could say and mean, “I can”.

I read four books last year with willful intention to change my life’s outlook and my understanding of myself. First, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert gifted me with such validity and permission for my creative process. I came to understand that I was an Uber-Creative and my inner child needed to be creatively indulged until she trusted me again. From this, I was inspired to create online projects and a creative community to support myself and others in being our creative selves.

I had barely put Big Magic down when I read Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. From her brilliant work, I came to understand the necessity of community, vulnerability, and authenticity. Disconnection is our worst fear and we need to be authentic to belong to, trust, and reconnect with ourselves. And I now understand there’s a connection between creativity and vulnerability.

Then, on my therapist’s recommendation, I read Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David R Burns which was the very first book that permitted me to understand and name my anxieties. I learned how to refute the lies called Cognitive Distortions that cause them. Eventually, this book helped me win the battle against my anxieties.

And lastly, on Terri’s suggestion, I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work. This book showed me that I may be even more capable of making a difference in the world if I allow myself the time and visibility to work on and publish my theories. My deeper thinking and writing will help me and the world, and this feels like a noble purpose.

Creativity conquers all

While reading and gathering my lessons, I became aware of an internal dissonance which my therapist suggested was my inner child throwing tantrums. It seems denying my creativity had my creative inner child furious at me for not allowing her to play. So I decided to just give her what she wanted.

First, I indulged in thirty days of creating paper collage through an online creative community challenge. Having really enjoyed that, I created my own Instagram challenge called Our Creative May and this gave me another month straight to play. From this, our IG creative community established the hashtag #ourcreativeselves to continue posting our creations. I immediately did another challenge in June and July creating daily postcard art for the #ICAD project.

Four months straight of daily creating and continuous authenticity had proven that I did have enough time to create and I was trustworthy. My creative indulgence grounded me and greatly dissipated more of my anxieties. As I continue to replace the slave-driving parent who preaches art as impractical with the compassionate empowering present parent, I recreate a trust in myself proving my word is good. Self-trust is the truest most important result of our authentic creativity.

As my anxiety diminished, I began to understand this powerful lesson of how creativity and anxiety cannot coexist, and how indulging one represses the other. Love and presence conquer fear.

Creative Soul Living

This profound understanding of the inverse relationship between creativity and anxiety, and knowing many others need permission to create too, led me to develop and lead a Creativity Workshop this past November of 2017. I believe that our permission to live more creatively is necessary and integral to us being wholehearted individuals. I believe less consumerism and more Creativism will heal the world as we find creative solutions to its problems.

Creative Soul Living is the term I use to describe my process of Wholehearted Living. I intentionally seek and share my life lessons, prioritize my creativity in all areas of my life, develop my self-trust, value authenticity, commit to self-care, am mindful and present, stay connected with my people, and intuit my grandest Why for being here. And while my Why continues to firm up and my path widens, I know I have fought to reach my here and now, gathering my lessons one lesson at a time.

My future “I can” will include more creativity workshops, e-books, and eventually a book about crafting our own life plans based on our life lessons. My inward soul work has brought me the gift of knowing me and that feels like permission to hope. Hope is what I want to share with the world through my writing.

Photos and artwork by Shalagh Hogan used with permission and thanks.

Key book companions along the way

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David R Burns

Deep Work by Cal Newport

About Shalagh Hogan

Shalagh Hogan, said Shay-la, is a personal essayist, a blogger, a designer, an uber-creative, and mother to a five-year-old ginger girl and just turned teen boy. She resides in an ancient house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, USA, and is always amazed and amused by life’s abundance of lessons. Thrice-weekly she shares the lessons she gathers on her blog at Shalavee.com (Chez La Vie was taken) and currently, Creativity is her Why. Follow her as @shalaghhogan on Facebook and Instagram.

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You might also enjoy my free 95-page ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey.

Just pop your email address in the box to the right or below. You will receive the ebook straight away as well as updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

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inspiration & influence intuition

Endurance – going the distance with truth, patience and strength

March 26, 2018

Remain true to yourself. Your authenticity alone will keep you in alignment with the energy of miracles.

Colette Baron-Reid, Wisdom of the Oracle – #47 Go the Distance

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

This week: endurance, going the distance with truth, patience + strength

Theme for the week beginning 26 March

The underlying theme for this week to guide our overall focus is from Lisa McLoughlin’s Life Design Cards – #47 Resist coercions of your culture.

This week is about being authentic and true to ourselves and others. It’s about the freedom of standing our ground and working from the truth of our heart.

Advice from the Guidebook is:

With a loyalty to truth, say what you see, regardless of the consequences. Stand firm when your freedom is challenged by direct coercion or insidious persuasion.

This reminds me of Brigit’s message, ‘Don’t Back Down’. Brigit is my guiding goddess for life. She sits on my desk here, as she has for quite a while, with her message of staying strong. “Stand up for what you believe is right.”

This week’s guidance is about endurance and going the distance. It’s wrapped around a core of strength in truth, authenticity and patiently pursuing our goals. How do we know what’s worth enduring for? This is a key underpinning theme this week. Staying strong for ourselves, for what matters and what we believe in is highlighted. It’s worth persevering and going the distance for what we believe is right. In this, we can resist tendencies to conform, to worry about being different and to give up when under pressure.

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 26 March

Tarot Narrative:

You can go the distance with whatever is challenging you now. It might feel daunting or endless, but know you have the strength and endurance for the long haul. Whether it’s creative projects, relationships or other life challenges, know that this strength is about authenticity, being true to yourself, receptivity and above all, patience. Open your heart, dance and be in touch with your intuition as you make your path.

Reading notes:

Cards: Strength and Page of Water (Cups) from The Good Tarot and #47 Go the Distance from Wisdom of the Oracle.

Book notes:

Then there are times when we need Strength, which is getting what we want by standing perfectly still, by being open and by daring to be vulnerable. We want the lion to come and sit in our lap, and so we will sit very quietly and wait for it. We can’t overpower it, we can’t force it to do what we want, so we will sit here patiently, calmly until the lion feels safe enough to approach.

Jessa Crispin, The Creative Tarot (p58)

I’ve written before about the endurance of quiet strength. This sort of strength is not brute strength, it’s a patient, waiting, developing over time kind of strength.

It’s the type of endurance you need to write a book, to parent, to see a much-desired project through and to counter resistance in all of this. Battling things head-on doesn’t always work. Sometimes it’s about being receptive, knowing when to wait and being patient.

The ‘Going the Distance’ card energies were exactly mirrored in the Strength card. Note too that both the Life Design card about resisting coercions of culture and the Wisdom of the Oracle ‘Going the Distance’ card are both number 47. Such synchronicity!

So in this reading, I see connections between going the distance and being true and authentic to ourselves and what we believe in. I see connections too between endurance and a receptive kind of patience. It’s all about staying the course, finding a way through and waiting when the time is not right to move.

In my writing for long-haul projects, I have found that sometimes I just need to wait until more information comes on board. I don’t always realise at the time. But later I can see that I had to wait, go the distance, be receptive rather than act for a while. This can apply to many aspects of life as we wait for the right time.

The gifts of patient endurance

Patient endurance is inspired by the authentic truth of what we believe in. This fortifies us and gives us stamina for the journey. It enables us to sit back and gather ourselves, research, wait for information to come to us, be intuitive.

This is a yin kind of strength just like yin yoga strengthens us through holding poses quietly for a time and breathing into them. We can feel our bodies become more resilient as we stretch gently over time.

Just like this we too can become more resilient as we quietly practice endurance built around the spine of our authenticity and truth.

Keats comes to mind too with his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, that great poem to stillness and waiting:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

He reminds us at the end of this ode to quiet strength:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Throughout this reading, the spine of truth, waiting for truth and authenticity and believing in it, breathes through. Whether it be campaigning for what we believe in, writing our truth, trying to get to the bottom of something, waiting for others or having the persistence to carry on.

Endurance through quiet strength

It’s all about finding our way to endure through patience, receptivity and quiet, resilient strength.

Reflecting on ways to build quiet strength is a valuable practice at this time. This might include:

reading and researching more to understand
breathing exercises and finding ways to create rhythm in our days
yin yoga and other practices that help us with core quiet strength
writing, journaling, morning pages – whatever we call it, to help us anchor in quiet moments
intuitive work to sharpen our noticing and ability to make connections
exercise to enact building endurance over time.
allowing others space and time to come to us
being playful and opening up to childlike innocence (Page of Water)

We are encouraged to be a bit more playful with it all when we can and dancing helps too. As Vivian Greene reminds us:

Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.

This is a great week for uncovering endurance through the authenticity of what makes you come alive and keeps you going! Regardless of what is coming at you, learn to dance in the rain of circumstance.

Love to hear your thoughts!

I’d love to hear if you are feeling these energies around endurance through quiet strength, truth, patience and authenticity.

All best wishes for this week of endurance through realising your truth. And dancing in the rain.

May the lion of quiet strength and Brigit guide you to gentle, receptive endurance whatever the weather. And let me know what you think of this post and this weekly Tarot Narrative!

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

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

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

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

You might also enjoy:

Strategy, patterns and the higher order of connections

Seeking wisdom in water and elsewhere

Alchemy and conducting magic with spirit and heart

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

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

coaching creativity transcending

Coaching goals and the value of being a healthy creative

March 22, 2018

Coaching goals can be many and varied with surprising connections. Learning the value of being a healthy creative has taught me about resilience and strength.

Coaching goals and connections

Working in a coaching series with coach buddy, Jeanette Buchanan, as part of my Beautiful You Coaching Academy program this time last year, I found myself setting a key goal around being healthy. My goal was to ‘feel stronger and sexier’. I was keen to tap into and learn from Jeanette’s love of exercise and passion for physical fitness.

At that time, I wasn’t moving a lot. I was just getting back into walking, knowing I needed to be exercising more and building my strength. Coaching became a search for the right type of exercise as a form of self-care and personal resilience.

I was going through some tough times in my transition journey. With plans in place to leave a long-term job role, my life changed completely as I supported my mother who was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.

I was as surprised as anyone that the coaching goals I focused on were about exercise and building strength. As a creative and writer, it’s easy to think only in terms of those aspects of life – creativity and getting ideas and words down. But to be our best creative selves, we need to be strong and healthy in body and in mind. Going through the journey of being a carer with my mother taught me so much about the value of self-care as we care for others.

Through my coaching experience, I realized the value of coaching goals about movement, strength and health as central to my well-being and life as a creative and supporter of others. When these areas of our lives are in a stronger place, we are more wholehearted and better prepared for managing whatever comes our way.

Swimming and exercise goals

In my work in my life coaching series with Jeanette, I opened up the door to exploring the exercise I loved as a child and young adult. Through free-writing, I revisited how much I loved swimming, also yoga, tai chi and dancing. But swimming shone through as something to get back to. I wrote:

Swimming is something I also enjoy though I haven’t done it for a while. I don’t like the chemicals and chlorine and pool side of it so this turns me off a bit. And I’ve never really seen the beach as a place to do laps as such. But that can change. I realise the benefits of swimming and it could be good for my back and body at this time.

Just opening up that door seemed to work wonders as it often does with coaching and listening to our inner wisdom.

One day just after I wrote this, exactly a year ago now, I was out walking along the beach in my village and bumped into a friend who had just been swimming in the bay. He told me about a group of local swimmers who swam Monday, Wednesday and Saturday mornings in the sea where I live. I didn’t know about this group and it sounded exciting. My friend took me to coffee with the swimming group that morning and introduced me, telling them all I was joining the group. And I embraced it all wholeheartedly.

Finding the best exercise for us

I’ve written here about 10 amazing life lessons from swimming in the sea and what it has taught me. Swimming is the perfect exercise for me. Writing about my relationship with different forms of exercise as part of coaching helped me get back to something I have always loved. But I’d become disconnected from it and had to rediscover this love.

Here’s a picture of me when I was little in my swimmers in what I now recognize as my natural environment – swimming in rivers and the sea.

I had forgotten how much I loved swimming as a child. Forgotten too that I even used to teach young kids to swim to share my love. I’ve also lived beside mountain rivers and relished the peace and calm from swimming there.

And here’s a picture of me as I donned my first ever wetsuit at the age of 55 and kept swimming through winter last year, rekindling this love and feeling stronger all the time.

Being in movement and keeping healthy through swimming has become a critical mainstay in being a healthy creative. Finding the right exercise that I love has been paramount. As Stephanie Stokes Oliver says in ‘Seven Soulful Secrets’:

The key to staying motivated is to find an activity that you enjoy doing.

This is so true in my experience. Swimming to me is no longer a chore or challenge. I’m really disappointed when, for some reason, I can’t go. I love it so much and the feeling when I dive in and start swimming among fish, breathing deeply in and out is the most calming and meditative of spaces. It helps me feel I can manage so much.

Celebrating exercise milestones

I celebrated 12 months of swimming in the sea with a ferry jump swim yesterday. This meant catching the local ferry out to the middle of the bay in our swimmers, flippers, swim mask and snorkel. All quite hilarious – then jumping off the ferry into the bay and swimming back. The weather and water were both wild and it was a tough one kilometre plus swim in a strong swell pushing against us.

But it was exhilarating. I felt so alive as I pushed my boundaries and could feel my resilience, strength, courage and calm from 12 months of swimming. I am so much stronger, fitter and hell, maybe even sexier? It’s certainly helped me to weather so much with courage and adaptability. It was great to celebrate this exercise and resilience milestone in a way that embodied what it taught me.

Being a healthy creative – what it has taught me

Being stronger in this way has taught me so much about the value of being a healthy creative. If we are going to write books, run entrepreneurial businesses and launch creative programs to support others, we need to be strong in body and mind.

Swimming in the sea has taught me to be in the moment. Each day I swim is different – the weather, the water, the fish and the currents. The beach is different each day and so am I, in terms of what is happening to me and how I am feeling. Through breathing and moving through whatever circumstances I face in the water, I have learnt the resilience of moving through each day with strength.

Over the past year, I’ve complemented swimming with walking, yoga, morning pages, journaling, coaching, intuitive work with tarot, blogging and writing longer length pieces such as my 36 Books free ebook. All these practices have helped me to be a healthy creative.

All of this has helped me to realise that being a healthy creative is about sustainability and fitness for the long haul. It’s no easy task to write a book, as I have found as I reached the 80,000-word mark in my ‘Wholehearted – self-leadership for women in transition’ book draft this week!

Being fitter and stronger, getting exercise, being in nature, breathing deeply and learning about managing different conditions have all been outcomes of swimming and exercise that have helped me reach my creativity and writing goals. They have been integral to helping me get those words down.

Coaching clients’ experiences

As I have worked with creative coaching clients, I have found that goals about exercise and being in movement often arise and support creativity goals. It’s been wonderful to support clients to find their own special kind of exercise and movement that supports their resilience and creativity.

It’s not always a straightforward journey as some of my clients have found. Perhaps it’s because, as writers and creatives, we are often introverts and book lovers. Our natural habitat often includes features like a desk, a computer, a notebook, a cafe (and coffee), artwork and plenty of books. We might relish the outdoors and nature. But it’s easy to get stuck, ironically by our own creativity, and not get out the door into any form of stretching ourselves through exercise.

Sylvia’s journey

I worked with the wonderfully creative and inspiring Sylvia Barnowski on her creativity goals and we found ourselves working on exercise. Sylvia sums it up this way:

After our initial meeting, I realized that it would be a good idea to use coaching to start working on something I would describe as a “lost cause”. I was struggling with this goal for the past few years and I actually started believing that I won’t be able to achieve much. So, I added a third goal – exercising. I knew if I could do even the smallest progress on this goal – it would be something really big for me. Adding this third goal felt like a big shift, raising the bar for myself and for Terri.

After weeks of defeat and trying various things, I finally found an exercise class that my body loved. It was challenging but it felt really good. That was a huge change, seeing myself going to the class every week and being excited about it.

You can read more about Sylvia’s journey of coaching with me here. I was so excited to support Sylvia through her own ‘learning to love exercise’ journey. Finding a way to move that felt right and supported other goals was pivotal. It was fabulous to see how this goal helped ignite and complement Sylvia’s personal and professional creative practice goals.

Sylvia Barnowski

The Healthy Writer

I recently read The Healthy Writer by Joanna Penn and Dr Euan Lawson and will post a full review here in the next few weeks. This book, co-written to reflect writing, personal and GP perspectives, traverses all aspects of writing and self-care including exercise, writing practices, back pain, RSI and mental health.

As my Goodreads review summarises:

Excellent read on writing and self-care by indie author and creative Joanna Penn and GP Dr Euan Lawson. I listened to it as an audiobook which was valuable and found it was like being prompted to review my writing practices and approaches by wise and gentle coaches. Plenty of practical advice on a range of health issues including back issues, RSI, mental health, fitness and practices for the creative long haul. Recommended reading/listening to sharpen your own health regime and writing practices to ensure you are fit for creativity and life generally for the long haul.

I look forward to a deeper dive on this book with you soon given the importance of these issues for our health and well-being as creatives.

How about you?

So here are some tips if you are thinking about your health as a creative and exploring some exercise, movement and wellbeing practices to support your writing and creative goals:

Write about the exercise you loved as a child and see what comes up.
Journal about what you are doing now to exercise and what would make your heart sing.
Reflect on the practices that support you as a creative and see where build movement in more.
Read ‘The Healthy Writer’ – available as an audiobook and a great read in this form.
Commit to doing some form of exercise in the next week, even if it is as simple as walking a few days a week for 20 minutes just to get moving. And build from there.
Find a class that attracts you – yoga, tai chi, exercise, pilates – and enjoy learning from others to get you going with your own practice.

And if you’d like to explore these areas as you choose to journey deeper into your wholehearted journey, I’d love to work with you. I’m currently open for free 30-45 minute consultations via Zoom or Skype to see where you might like to explore further in a coaching series with me. It can be a fabulous and life-changing step, so I encourage you to reach out if it’s calling you.

Here’s where I swim, enjoying the beautiful energy it brings to me. All best wishes to you as you explore possible coaching goals and the value of being a healthy creative.

Photo by David Kennedy Photography

Feature image via pexels.com

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

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

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

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

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

You might also enjoy:

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

Seeking wisdom in water and elsewhere

Grief and pain can be our most important teachers

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

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

inspiration & influence intuition

Strategy, patterns and the higher order of connections

March 19, 2018

We can’t learn to see if we can’t keep our eyes open. In just this way, staying open to the unexpected expands the openness of our heart.

Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk

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

This week: the value of strategy, patterns + higher order connections

Theme for the week beginning 19 March

The theme for this week to guide our overall focus is from Lisa McLoughlin’s Life Design Cards – #19 Design from patterns to details.

This week is about strategy, patterns and seeing higher order connections. We can get so lost in detail especially when times are tough, not seeing the forest for all of the trees. There is a higher form of pattern and strategy there if we step back for a minute to see it. It might be new ideas, seeking solutions to problems, being more counterintuitive, putting the pieces together in a different way. Whichever, we are encouraged to see from the perspective of recurring patterns, images and signs, to notice synchronicity. We are reminded to see the geometry of our experiences: the spiralling as we revisit old habits to see anew or recognising the higher architecture of our experiences.

Advice from the Guidebook is:

Are you concentrating too much on the details whilst missing the bigger picture, or vice versa?…Aim to find unique solutions where possible.

There is guidance in there too about avoiding making assumptions or having preconceptions, remaining open and seeing links and connections in new ways.

So the guidance this week is around making space for new strategy and design in our thinking.

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 19 March

Tarot Narrative:

Look for strategy, patterns, the higher order of connection now. See what you’re missing, the geometric shape that can hold the unfolding patterns, events and designs. Perceive what is real and what is fear. Work with the counterintuitive, have courage and be creative in finding solutions.

Reading notes:

Cards: Queen of Air (Swords) and Five of Fire (Wands) from The Good Tarot and #36 Come to the Edge in protection (reversed position) from Wisdom of the Oracle.

Book notes:

When we assume that we author everything we experience, we snuff the possibility of being touched by the more numinous dimensions of reality.

Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk (p116)

This reading reminds us of the higher order of the strategy of the spirit and opening ourselves to answers beyond the obvious. As Mark Nepo reminds us in ‘The Exquisite Risk’, our ego can have a strong role to play in how we see circumstances; sometimes this means we miss other things like signs, patterns, signals, connections and counterintuitive ways of looking at the situation.

Recent experiences have encouraged me to open up to energy connections and ways of working on more spiritual planes. We can get so preoccupied with the here and now, we forget to breathe deeply, seek answers from our higher guidance and work with energy healing that can help us on another level.

Strategy can sound like a cold word but as an INTJ Jung/Myers-Briggs personality type, it’s second nature to me to see higher patterns. Or at least to attempt to. Like everyone, I can get bogged down in detail and confounded; or conversely, so high in the sky, I miss the real connections.

The Queen of Air (Swords), who links with the INTJ/Mastermind personality type, reminds us to wield our swordy clarity in a real way. As The Good Tarot Guidebook prompts us, this might include: setting healthy boundaries, seeing the underpinning whole, having a clear purpose, and being more honest with ourselves about what is happening.

The Five of Fire (Wands) suggests that freedom to explore ideas and be open is a powerful way to move at this time. Just as Mark Nepo reminds us, it’s not just a mind thing either, it involves openness of heart:

We can’t learn to see if we can’t keep our eyes open. In just this way, staying open to the unexpected expands the openness of our heart.

Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk

The gifts of strategy

I’ve worked in strategy in many areas of my life including leadership of strategic policy in government. The gifts of strategy are many and they include:

stepping back to see connections
seeing the whole
allowing the framework to emerge
letting go of false assumptions and unreal fears
searching beyond easy solutions
putting steps into place to reach higher order solutions
being clear in purpose
seeing patterns and connections
looking for ‘out of the box’ answers, unfamiliar or counterintuitive options
doing the research to know the facts
brain-storming to open up the possibilities

Applying strategic skills to our lives and looking for patterns and solutions in more holistic ways is encouraged now. This might involve creative work: collage, poetry, brainstorming, mind-mapping, Sacred geometry might be a way of doing this, as Lynn Hanford-Day has found: mandalas, recurring patterns and seeing the whole in a creative and spiritual way.

Sometimes we have to step away and do things differently to see the patterns, connections and emerging solutions. I know working with visual imagery can help me. I am a person who works with words a lot, so working another way such as through visual collage can help me to break through to new ways of seeing things.

The above is a visual collage in my journal as part of the Softly Wild ecourse by Victoria Smith. This is a kind of paper altar at the start of the journal, a snapshot in time of what I was trying to make sense of then. Once I saw it all together, I understood the message perfectly. But I would have had trouble coming at it in more logical ways. Just taking a few hours with some magazines, a glue stick, a pair of scissors and an open blank page can be the way to work out the critical strategy for the next steps. It’s a way of accessing the unconscious directly, just as tarot is.

We are encouraged to do work counterintuitively now, so lean into what is not so natural for you to open up new possibilities. If you always work with visuals, try writing. Conversely, if you are a word person, take photographs, colour in or make a visual collage to free up different senses and cognitive functions. If you are a logical step by step person, try mind-mapping. Perhaps breaking things up into steps would be helpful if you can get stuck in the big picture and not take action.

What we are attracting and noticing

The law of attraction also has a place in all of this as we work with more spiritual and intuitive dimensions of energy. Thinking about questions like these can help:

What are we fearing and how much energy are we putting into that?
Are we envisioning the positive of what we desire rather than the negative of what we don’t want?
What is leading your thinking – fear or positive desires?
Are we taking time to notice signs, symbols and synchronicity or have we dulled our intuition?
How are we flexing our intuitive skills in the everyday to find higher wisdom?

We are encouraged to open our eyes to the higher order of connections and symbols and to their magic now. As Carl Jung reminds us:

Life is a luminous pause between two mysteries that are yet one.

Strategy work in action

It’s important to remember what practices help you in your own strategy work and making connections at this time. What helps you in making sense of things? Which activities open up options and solutions?

Here are some ideas and options for tapping into your strategic side:

mind-mapping
brainstorming
making lists
colouring in
drawing and painting
taking photographs
making collages
journalling
poetry
gathering facts
envisioning
creating mandalas
researching ideas

Write your own list of activities for developing strategy, identifying patterns and making connections this week.

This is a great week for uncovering more strategic and connected approaches to life!

Love to hear your thoughts!

I’d love to hear if you are feeling these energies around the need for strategy, seeing patterns and deeper connections.

All best wishes for this week of making new connections, being open, seeing patterns and using all this to progress in our creativity and in life challenges.

May the Queen of Air guide you to clarity and openness in matters of ideas and of the heart. And let me know what you think of this post and this weekly Tarot Narrative!

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

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

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

You might also enjoy:

Seeking wisdom in water and elsewhere

Grief and pain can be our most important teachers

Alchemy and conducting magic with spirit and heart

Exploring magic as the heart of creative inspiration

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

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

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Answering the call to adventure

Finding joy in the outdoors and writing

Broadening horizons and taking risks

Committing to self-employment

Healing modalities and deep spiritual unfolding

Art and the call of the feminine

Forever seeking more congruence

Key book companions along the way of my lifetime journey

About Chantal Simon

Read more Wholehearted Stories

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Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

C S Lewis

Theme for the week beginning 9 April

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 9 April

Book notes:

Creative healing from what life presents

Resilient creative healing

Love to hear your thoughts!

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

Share this:

Like this:

Gathering lessons of self-knowledge

Valuing intuition and introversion

Gathering lessons on self-care and self-esteem

Writing and connecting to heal

Healing through community creativity

Vanquishing my anxieties with knowledge

Creativity conquers all

Creative Soul Living

Key book companions along the way

About Shalagh Hogan

Read more Wholehearted Stories

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

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Remain true to yourself. Your authenticity alone will keep you in alignment with the energy of miracles.

Colette Baron-Reid, Wisdom of the Oracle – #47 Go the Distance

Theme for the week beginning 26 March

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 26 March

Book notes:

The gifts of patient endurance

Endurance through quiet strength

Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.

Love to hear your thoughts!

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

Share this:

Like this:

Coaching goals and connections

Swimming and exercise goals

Finding the best exercise for us

Celebrating exercise milestones

Being a healthy creative – what it has taught me

Coaching clients’ experiences

Sylvia’s journey

The Healthy Writer

How about you?

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

Share this:

Like this:

We can’t learn to see if we can’t keep our eyes open. In just this way, staying open to the unexpected expands the openness of our heart.

Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk

Theme for the week beginning 19 March

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 19 March

Book notes:

The gifts of strategy

What we are attracting and noticing

Strategy work in action

Love to hear your thoughts!

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

Share this:

Like this:

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