Return to Presence with the RAIN of Self-Compassion Practice

If you are finding the weight of the world a touch too weighty, and your thoughts are echoing such, if feeling a little displaced, vulnerable, uncertain or insecure, try this potent practice, complete with its easy to remember acronym, to help you return to calm presence. Sharing as part of a new series of humble healing posts for conscious creatives to heal your writing, life and art, for it truly is a potent practice.

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15 Writing Tips & Touchstones to Return to Each Time Your Momentum Slows or Stops

No matter how much you love a writing project — whether a novel, anthology of short fiction or poetry, memoir, screenplay, non-fiction book, series or course — sometimes after the initial buzz of inspiration and flurry of work, things shift. Maybe you hesitate because of doubt or that nagging feeling that what you’re doing is no good and that unease filters into your work.

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Rainer Maria Rilke on Trusting in Nature, Loving Small Things & Living Questions

In the great silence of these distances, I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, …even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noise that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they […]

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Anne Enright’s Finest 10 Tips for Writing Fiction

In this humble offering before the next longer post, author Anne Enright, who was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for her novel, The Forgotten Waltz, and won the Man Booker Prize for her novel, The Gathering, shares ten writing tips gleaned from her fiction writing […]

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Find Clarity & Presence with a Swift Meditation for Busy Creatives

If you’re feeling a little mentally clouded, a touch hazy in the head, and want to liberate yourself from this place, so you can get on with the work — with writing, creating, and making your art — one swift means to clarity and calm is to practice this simple meditation technique each time you feel overwhelmed, stressed-out or in […]

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Happy Birthday, Frida Kahlo—Arte, Amor, Dolor: Pain & the Healing Power of Art

“Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing,” said Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who was born on this day in 1907. In honour of her 110th birthday (though Frida preferred to state her birth year as 1910 — the start of the Mexican […]

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7 Tools to Liberate Yourself From Writing Doubt

Doubt can crush creativity — the drive to keep creating too — because the more you give away your power to doubt, the more ease with which it can slow your process & thwart your creativity. Take back your power with these techniques. When the words don’t flow or we find ourselves unsure of everything on the page, the […]

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Poetry | Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines) By Pablo Neruda

Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines) Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’ The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me […]

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