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.
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, […]
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, […]
2 Minutes of Stillness | Meditation
Just a couple of minutes of soothing visualisation can calm you in body and mind, silencing your internal chatter, reduce creative anxiety, and refresh your passion and inspiration too. As our inner voice can be so easily drowned out by our busy world, it makes it all the more essential — for you, and your creativity — to find stillness and connect to your inner being. […]
Poetry | Call Me by My True Names By Thich Nhat Hanh
7 Ways to Embrace Vulnerability and Write Your Truth
When you create with openness, with a willingness to trust and be vulnerable for your art, your writing is all the more authentic and true because it is uncensored, drawn from the deepest part of yourself — pure feeling articulated on the page — but it can be hard to share our truths, to write without censor, especially when the […]
Pema Chödrön on the Moment, Not Taking Things Personally and Liberation
Creative Overwhelm: Slowing Down and Finding Stillness in a Busy World
Finding stillness in our busy world is crucial not only for our ability to live in such a world, physically, and neurologically, but also for our inner landscape. In stillness we are able to reconnect with our centre, our true, authentic self. To silence the endless clamour of our planet of bleeps and busyness, and disconnect from the demands […]