1 Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly. 2 Think with your senses as well as your brain. 3 Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary. 4 Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on. 5 Remember there is no such […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
9 Ways to Make Peace with the Inner Critic
No matter if your creative confidence sings from rooftops or hides in the darkest garret, rise above the rantings of your critical voice and make peace with your inner critic with these techniques. Speak Kindly to Yourself “Every time you judge yourself, you hurt yourself,” as Brazilian lyricist and novelist, Paulo Coelho once said, a statement that is true on many levels, and […]
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 […]
15 Tools Inspired by Eastern Wisdom to Find Stillness in a Storm Part II
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realise it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become asource of beauty, joy, and strength, […]
6 Liberating Ways to Let Go—Skin Shedding—An Essay by Louise Moulin
Delighted to welcome essayist, novelist, lyricist, and poetess, Louise Moulin, with her personal essay, Skin Shedding. When we are born we do not know ourselves. We discover what we are made of on the road. We endure ordeals and roll in blissful fields in a spiritual process of culmination and release, of construction and deconstruction, of metamorphosis […]
When Things Go Wrong—15 Tools Inspired By Eastern Wisdom to Find Stillness in a Storm Part I
During life’s inevitable shifts, these tools & teachings help you find calm in chaos, ground & centre you, giving you a little control in how to respond—in even the trickiest of circumstances. Read Part II for 8 more practices, here. “I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, and grinds to a dreadful halt,” wrote poet, novelist and memoirist, May Sarton in […]
7-Step Process to Align Body, Mind and Soul for Optimum Creativity
Allow your creative conduit to open with ease by using a few ancient healing practices to quieten your inner critic, ground and centre you, refresh your thinking, spark inspiration and refine your focus. Spending a few moments aligning your being before you begin brings clarity to your creativity, so you can create unfettered by distractions or doubt but with gentleness, calm equilibrium, and aplomb. It’s also a perfect practice to do during […]
Diane Ackerman on Truly Living Our Lives
“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat an unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, […]
15 Ways to Fall in Love with Writing [All Over Again]
If your love for writing, much like our ebbing summer’s sky, has lost its glow, its colour, & warmth—try these tips to ensure you fall in love with writing again, no matter the weather outside. Just as we feel displaced as writers if we’re not writing, if we’re not regularly engaging with the act itself, if a specific story or […]