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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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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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 […]

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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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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, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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