wholehearted stories Archives

Writing the way through – a wholehearted story

September 27, 2019

In this guest post, Sally Morgan shares her experience of writing the way through cycles and seasons to a wholehearted life.

This is the 22nd 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, 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’m delighted to have Sally Morgan as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. Sally and I met via Instagram and shared interests in creativity and writing. In this story, Sally shares how her writing practice has been a tool, process, support and safe place for stepping into wholehearted living. Read on!

Moving into writing

It’s a late-summer morning, still early, and I’m sitting on my patio writing. There’s a comforting weight to my journal, open on my lap, and my pen moves quickly across the page. I’m lost in the writing. This is how I start most days, with Morning Pages, writing at least three pages in longhand. It’s a process I’ve come to trust and value, a meditation of sorts.

It’s still cool on the patio this morning. There’s a hint of a breeze and a faint scent of the ocean. But the sky is a deep blue and the sun, when it filters through the trees, is already warm. I write it all down. The deep green of the cedars lit by early-morning sun. The rich aroma of my morning coffee. The tok-tok-tok of a raven watching me somewhere in the trees. This noticing grounds me, helps me move fully into the writing.

Reminders of cycles

It’s lush out in my backyard, still green, despite the lack of rain. The cedars and firs tower overhead, shading salal and sword ferns and an almost accidental patch of lawn. It’s a wild and unruly space, a perfect place for writing. As I write, I notice that the ferns are a deeper, duskier shade now; they’ve lost their springtime sheen and brightness. Behind them, the creamy blooms of the ocean spray bushes have dried to deep golden, dying away for another year. And now, all around me, I see descent. Dying off. The inevitability of fall. This reminder of cycles.

There was a time when I was less attuned to these subtle signs, when the weeks dropped away until suddenly the holidays were over and it was September. But my writing practice has given me a deeper sensing of the seasons. I watch for the first pale sword-fern stems poking up in spring, the clutched spirals slowly unfurling into bright green fronds. I notice as the fronds take on that darker, dustier hue as summer progresses, how the outer fronds brown and then die off into September. It’s one small way I’m more deeply attuned to the seasons and to the cyclical nature of our lives.

Being aware of seasons

As I write this, I am nearing the end of a short season of rest after a long, full season of houseguests and parties and important celebrations. I’ve become more aware of these seasons and of how I can best embrace each one. During the season of houseguests, I was able to throw myself fully into the fray, into visiting and day trips and shocking quantities of wine. I knew there would be time for rest when our company was gone. There would be time to slow down and step away, time again to drink water. When I am journalling, I am in tune with these cycles in my life, and I can give myself permission to fully embrace what is.

I’ve also come to understand that there are other, overlapping kinds of seasons. After three years of writing nearly non-stop and under deadline at work, I’m not writing much for myself at the moment. There was a time when I would have felt panicked by this, but not now. Now I recognize the bigger patterns, the pushing and then the need for rest. The immersion and the need for time away.

Writing as a safe place

I haven’t always written Morning Pages. I came first to a journalling practice more than twelve years ago, as a way to save myself. In June of that year, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In September, my then-husband announced he was leaving our marriage. I had to write. I was compelled to write, and in that time period, I wrote as if my life depended on it. I hadn’t read Julia Cameron at that point, and I suspect that The Artist’s Way was not the book I needed in that season. But I knew Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within and I followed the rules she laid out in the book: Keep your hand moving. Lose control. Go for the jugular. They were rules that served me well as my life spiralled out of control.

In that season I fell apart. I clung to my friends and to my three little boys like a woman drowning. My journals were filled with disbelief and grief and anger. But in those journals, I found a safe place to descend into despair, a place where I could immerse myself and fully experience my sadness. It was a painful and necessary period in my life. A descent and a dying.

Healing and inner wisdom

And then in late spring, I began to notice the first pale stems of healing. The slow unfurling of hope. The first tentative steps as I began putting myself back together. It was a slow process, and cyclical, one that has taken many years. In that spring, I began to see the learning I needed to take from my experience. I began to see the possibility on the other side of divorce, and to craft a new vision for myself and my little family. For the first time, I sensed freedom and felt hope. There was still much to face – the legal separation, my father’s impending death – but I was beginning to trust my strength and my resilience.

And I was beginning to trust my inner wisdom. By that point, I’d filled a number of journals, and somewhere along the way, a calm, loving voice had appeared in my writing, a voice far wiser than mine. You’re going to be okay, it told me. Your boys are going to be okay. As I wrote, I began listening for that voice, actually asking for guidance. What am I meant to be learning here? What do I need to remember as I move forward? Will I really be okay?

Writing the way through

Just about the time that I was getting back on my feet after the separation, my dad died. In many ways, this was a greater loss for me than my marriage and I expected that my journal would once again be my refuge. But I was shocked to find that I couldn’t write about my dad. I wrote about my concerns for my boys and for my mum, and about all sorts of other tangential things, but my sadness was too deep. Suddenly though, poems began flowing out of me. I’d never really written poetry before in my life, but I think that because I’d been writing so consistently, I was able to connect with an intuitive, deeply emotional part of myself in a period when there was no logical way to approach or express my grief. Again I cycled into descent, and again, I wrote my way out.

In the years since, I’ve fully committed to the practice of journalling, recognizing that it is the most effective way for me make meaning of my experience and – eventually – to grow from it. I’ve written through further heartbreak, through further challenges, and through the many transitions and seasons of my life. Journalling has also helped me to trust my writing voice enough to follow other creative urges, and I’ve continued to write poetry, as well as a couple of unpublished novels, a blog, and a self-published memoir.

Trusting in writing practice

The greatest gift of my journalling practice, though, came during a three-year period when I lost my speaking voice. During that time, I could only talk in a breathless, squeaky little whisper, making most of my daily interactions difficult if not impossible. In that frightening time, as I underwent scores of tests to figure out what was wrong with me, my journal was the place where, if I listened to my wisest self, I could write myself off the edge. It was also the place where I figured out the self-care practices and boundaries I needed in my life to prevent this from happening again. And, of course, it was the one place in my life where I could trust in my voice. Even though my speaking voice was unreliable, I could trust in my writing and in my writing practice.

Over the years, my faith in this practice has deepened to a place where beginning a new journal is a sacred act. I use the first few pages to record gentle reminders about what I need to be my healthiest self, things like stillness, solitude, and self-compassion. I also have a list of what matters most, because for me it’s easy to overcommit. Finally, I include quotes to guide me and reminders from the previous journal. In my current journal, I’ve written, I can trust in my knowing and my inner wisdom. I do not need to seek every answer outside myself.

Writing into a new season

My practice has also evolved. I no longer worry about keeping my pen moving. I write more slowly and thoughtfully, and I make time every day for gratitude and for that wise, loving voice that is always there if I listen for it. But I still write nearly every day, trusting that this practice is one of the great gifts in my life.

I’m heading into a new season now, one that will be both busy and marked by a significant transition, as my middle son embarks on a months-long overseas adventure. I know that I will have moments (maybe days) of sadness and fear and uncertainty. But I also know that I will find solace in my journal. And so, while the weather holds, I’ll find my way out to the patio, journal and coffee in hand. I’ll notice the air as it cools, listen for the first of the autumn birds, and watch for the other small markers of fall. I’ll write into the fall, through the descent into winter. I’ll write about my dark moments and the light, trusting by now that I can write my way through practically anything.

Key book companions along the way

The Light of the World: A Memoir – Elizabeth Alexander

The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times – Pema Chodron

The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems – Lorna Crozier

Eat Pray Love – Elizabeth Gilbert

Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir – Natalie Goldberg

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within – Natalie Goldberg

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage – Ann Patchett

Journal of a Solitude – May Sarton

Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life – Dani Shapiro

About Sally Morgan

Sally is a writer, teacher and mama. She’s on a journey to live a less driven and over-committed life, and to invite more contentment, grace and beauty into her everyday. She’s currently preoccupied with voice, purpose and slowing down.

In her forties, Sally spent a couple of years speed-dating her way through half the men in Victoria, BC. Her memoir, An Alphabet of Men: Dating My Way from Adam to Zak recounts that time in her life. Occasionally she posts to her blog, at www.trustingthejourney.ca. You can connect with Sally on Instagram

Photographs by Sally Morgan, used with permission and thanks.

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Lusciously Nurtured – a wholehearted interview with Dawne Gowrie Zetterstrom

August 20, 2019

In this interview Dawne Gowrie Zetterstrom, author of Lusciously Nurtured, shares her personal story of living with, writing with and learning from Fibromyalgia as well as her thoughts on wholehearted soulfulness.

This is the 21st 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, each of us telling our own story of what wholehearted living means, is a valuable 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’m delighted to have Dawne Gowrie Zetterstrom as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. Dawne and I connected via Instagram and we decided to shape this post as an interview. It has been thrilling to see Dawne write and publish her book ‘Lusciously Nurtured: A Personal Journey of Soulful Self-Care and Intuitive Healing Living with Fibromyalgia’. In this interview, Dawne shares her personal story of living with, writing with and learning from Fibromyalgia as well as her thoughts on wholehearted soulfulness. Read on!

Hi Dawne, thanks for joining Quiet Writing and sharing your wholehearted story via this interview.

To begin, would you like to tell readers a little about yourself:

Based on the Jung/Myers-Briggs personality indicator, I am an INFJ which means I am a bit of a complex character, deeply introverted with extroverted behaviours. I am an idealist and dreamer at heart but can be extremely organized and focused. My super-powers are empathy and intuition which makes me a highly perceptive person. However, these two qualities also work to my detriment at times, as does idealism, as you can well imagine. As a result, I like a lot of space and quiet time, and I value my freedom immensely.

I also have profound concerns for humanity and world affairs and the protection of those basic freedoms in our societies, that appear threatened today. In this body/ avatar, I am 85% South Asian in origins, having over 14 genetic strains in me from most continents, except Australia (Sorry). I was born in Trinidad & Tobago, a tropical island in the Caribbean, subsequently living in the UK for over 25 years and now in Sweden with my Swedish husband, Dan and basset hound Klara. I am essentially a creative and although I am very capable of understanding abstract theories, I enjoy representing them creatively. I am told the INFJ’s ideal city is Paris, for its culture, history, style and beauty. I certainly do love beauty and adore creating beauty on many levels in my life, but maybe I love London a little more, might have to visit Paris a couple more times.

It’s been exciting to read your beautiful new book, ‘Lusciously Nurtured: A Personal Journey of Soulful Self-Care and Intuitive Healing Living with Fibromyalgia’. You talk in your book about ‘wholehearted soulfulness’. I know wholehearted is a word that has evolved to have special meaning for you too. Can you tell us what ‘wholehearted’ and ‘wholehearted soulfulness’ mean to you and why they have been important in your healing journey?

Wholehearted for me means living from the heart/ core/ centre and vibrating my life through the heart. The Biblical representation of the word Heart is not just about feeling but the “ruling centre of the whole” or “the place from which desire springs.” (Google) When I was in my early 20s, a seminarian shared this concept with me that the heart is the seat of decision and it stuck with me. So, yes feeling but also decision and commitment to the core, which was for me, at that time living a meaningful life driven by integrity.

Wholehearted also encompasses integrity and truth which is a willingness to learn about myself and who I am in this time, space and reality. For many years my mantra was “Go in the direction of your dreams and live the life you imagine…” (Whitman) This wasn’t just about my physical life. It also encompassed the way I wished to feel and my long-held desires, of sustaining my life through life-giving work and expressing myself in a holistic way in the world. This could be summed up in the poem I wrote to myself which I explain in the book, Lusciously Nurtured:

To rear bees/ To plant trees/ To write poetry/ To be

When we talk about desires, we are referring to our ideal way of living and being. Two primary aspects of my wholehearted life were to heal myself from Fibromyalgia, by resting more and growing and eating our own food; and to write with the hope that it would become a foundation for my sustenance.

Wholehearted Soulfulness is the commitment I made with myself to follow my dream and make this life. My poem was a summation of that dream: a reality formed through co-creative action with Universal law and Spirit guidance. It has taken turns and twists, but that’s okay, we are on course.

Is wholehearted living hard? Sometimes it is because I am stubborn and may need to be reminded of a thing several times, but at other times incredibly easy, once I am not pushing and being willful. I believe there is a difference between working hard and putting in 100% effort and being willful and domineering. Striking that right balance is important to wholehearted living.

Your journey has been around recovery from burnout and living with the effects of Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Your book provides valuable information for people working through the impact of these conditions. Is it also relevant to people with other chronic illnesses or autoimmune conditions? Or even people who don’t have any illnesses of this type?

Thank you, Terri – I really do hope it provides valuable information for sufferers of Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or CFS. However, this book can be read by any sufferer of chronic illness and autoimmune conditions because it is dealing with the relationship that you are having with your body and developing that close physical relationship into a deeper psychological and spiritual relationship with Self.

Self is Soul – now there’s a bumper sticker moment. (Ha-ha)

But self is also determined by the make-up of the brain and the environment, so we must scratch a bit deeper down to find the Self with the capital S. Yet, once you begin listening to what might be called Deep Intuition, Spirit Guidance, the Inner Word, we begin to tap into the font of knowledge. And the font can provide answers to many other forms of illness. Now, I am not saying you are going to hear voices telling you to take X medicine, but you may be led to someone who speaks a language you understand or you may be drawn to find out more about a medicine that actually works for you. So, we return to the idea of co-creation and sometimes, you may take a wrong turn and must start again, but that’s okay. Nothing is wasted. We are here to learn stuff.

For the ordinary person, I hope this book could provide a comprehensive guide to self-care, so developing an awareness of oneself and one’s needs. In addition, this book encourages such a person to compose their own self-care practice, so that, they can begin to avoid some of the pitfalls that bring many to burn-out. It can also provide an understanding, to those involved in a high-paced lifestyle. These folks may be on the brink of becoming chronically ill and this book might alert them to take stock and redirect their course. For carers, family and close friends of patients with chronic illness, I would advise this book as an aid to understanding their predicament and possibly, getting knowledgeable of many issues the sufferer cannot voice themselves.

Congratulations on writing and self-publishing your book and sharing your story. It’s not an easy task and takes commitment and showing up. What was it like writing and self-publishing ‘Lusciously Nurtured’ especially with the effects of Fibromyalgia impacting your life?

It took me four years to write and publish this book. In the last two years, I have been intensively editing and I am still editing so the paperback will be better. In addition, I have been learning about indie publishing, thus finding the best fit for me. It’s a long time, so it required patience and being patient with my body, with life and with my inner demons.

As you’ve mentioned it required commitment, so I worked on the book every day, but I had to adjust my expectations. So, every day I tried to write or do something towards the work but not every day looked the same as I battled with fatigue, pain and foggy brain. For example: writing 500 words a day was not a realistic expectation but rather, write a couple of sentences today, edit tomorrow, rest the next, read, write a page etc. So once again, co-creation with the body. Yet, you do have to be incredibly disciplined and thoughtful.

As I got better physically, of course the writing got easier, both in the physical sense of sitting for a certain number of hours, say at a computer. Also, the head got clearer, but the demons didn’t always quieten. One of the demons I discuss in the book Lusciously Nurtured, is perfectionism. Quality versus perfection is very important to the writing process. As an INFJ character with idealism and a profound sense of justice, self-judgement is not far behind and I had to remind myself, time and again, that perfection was not the intention for this book. Quality and producing my best work were top priority for me but this book was about the message. The message was aimed at helping people to have a resource for self-care and self-healing. It was meant to raise the awareness of intuition and the power of intuitive healing.

The thing that most writers easily forget is that mainstream published writing is not about perfection, it’s about marketability. Literature is about perfection and they hold this over our heads like a sword, so when authors are declined, they immediately think “I am a crap writer.” However, in today’s world, mainstream publishing is having to adapt itself to the changing demands of literature and reading in a computerized society. This is causing a rise in indie publishing and the traditional market is already changing to these demands. So, write because you have something to say, it may be important to someone. And in the act of writing, I am improving myself always and one day, one day ……. who knows (smile)? That’s how I get the beast of perfection to take a back seat.

How have you worked your strengths and weaknesses to blend and find wholeness?

A lovely question. My answer is simply, I can live with broken.

I guess, my lesson has been that wholeness is a mythology, it’s a great aspiration but a myth, nonetheless. I am partly thinking of the Japanese art of Kintsugi or Kintsukuroi (Golden Repair). In 2015 I injured my back so badly, I was in constant pain, day and night. I could not sit, walk or perform simple tasks for myself for a long time. The only thing that felt comfortable for the body was lying flat on the floor, on my back.

I had seen many health officials for treatment, but none of their advice or interventions had worked. Some even made me feel worse. Did I feel broken? Yes, I did: far from being whole or healthy. Yet, lying on that floor, I began listening to my body and allowed my body to tell me what was needed to heal. Thus, intuitive healing began. One day whilst lying there, I heard the blackbird singing so clearly it was as if her song was just for me. And in that moment, happiness pierced my heart so suddenly, I wept, because I had realised that all that was broken, or perceived as broken in my life, could not stop the joy and fulfilment that was there for me.

And nine months later, after my accident, I was pain-free.

How do I blend my strengths and weaknesses to find wholeness? I don’t believe that I have to “fix” or “create” anything in myself to be whole. It’s taken me over 50 years to reach that place. I am enough and I am “perfect” even in my brokenness: it’s part of the story.

What cultural, societal, health and ancestral issues have impacted on you feeling whole and how have you dealt with them?

You may have noticed in my description of myself I call myself an avatar. My soul has no cultural, societal, health and ancestral issues. My body does. My body has many health issues still, even though my fatigue and pain are much improved, and my viral symptoms quietened. I am now in a loving relationship with my body and I hope to continue healing as much as this life allows me and I will continue to write about it to help others. I tend to deal with things one at a time, so I look for what is calling to me the most. Right now, it’s my weight, because I am at first stage diabetes, so I am dealing with food choices and exercise programs that aid my goal, without damage to my body or dis-ease.

My cultural and societal issues affect my life from the outside in and these are issues to do with unconscious and possibly conscious prejudice in society and organisations. I am not just talking about for example racism in the publishing industry, but also sexism, ageism, gender inequality, and nationalism in our societies today. I am at odds with all of it because I see myself as a global person. I am certainly not nationalistic, but I am patriotic. I am a socialist and abhor any form of fascism. I have faced sexism and ageism in my work of education (of all places!), and I have called it out- Foul! I say in the game of life.

How do I deal with it? I accept the fact that I am at odds and I am at odds for a reason because the Universe wants to shake things up and I am a mover and a shaker. Let’s get the game on. However, I am a quiet mover and shaker, maybe I am giving too much away (laughter) but I think subversive is what I am. To be truthful and serious, the future is about change and we, (women, creatives, intuitives) must be active in that change. The way I want to be active and revolutionary is through the art of creativity and writing.

I am not saying that I don’t have my own issues with regards to racism and sexism within me. For example, as a woman of colour in the self-care business, there aren’t many of us. There is patronism and it’s very difficult to break into cliques and circles and be taken seriously. We also don’t have credibility as unconscious archetypal roles for women have become stereotyped, so I have a lot of questions. I also think the societal pressures of the 80s and 90s to spin in politics has entered the fabric of our lives and speaking out for truth becomes a rant. So, you are constantly fighting against these stereotypes and attempting to bring your authenticity into the arena. I believe it’s a process and must be lived a step at a time. Wholeness, therefore, becomes teaching, learning and negotiation.

My ancestral issues and healing are in a very personal space, now. It’s not a shadow or a secret but rather it needs to be in darkness and quiet for a while to take shape and begin to shoot. It’s something in gestation and I am excited about this.

Artwork by Trinidad & Tobago artist Brianna Mc Carthy @macabrii

You share lots of tools, tips and practices in your book. What 2 or 3 wholehearted practices would you highlight for others?

Meditation, getting quiet and silent – there is a difference there – you can quieten the body and mind. but you must also listen. Listening is very hard, so it takes practice. Every day if necessary and many times a day. This is the only way you will begin to hear your inner voice.

Physical Exercise – This can be combined with getting out in nature. Walk, run if you can, but walk in Nature. Swim, do yoga, play a sport, whatever you do try to spend some time in nature and notice things.

Keeping a Journal – Start with a gratitude journal if you haven’t kept a journal before. You are not writing War and Peace. Just empty your mind in your journal and go with the flow. If you end up becoming addicted, just keep learning and expanding your knowledge. It will begin revealing things to you.

And if you are doing all these things and you are loving yourself without apology, then you know, you know anything is possible in the game so go out and share it, be kind and help/ support someone else.

The only way to wholehearted is to know yourself and be yourself.

What’s the one message you’d like to leave with our readers to finish?

I want them to know that they are loved.

This love is closer than breath so spend quality time with yourself.

The Great Mother cares, even if everything around you feels like chaos. Out of chaos, the Universe was created with mathematical precision beyond our understanding.

Karma is one lifetime. Live your life well and be content. You are always choosing, so choose what you love the most, don’t give yourself second best.

Where can people find your book, Lusciously Nurtured and how can they connect with you?

People can connect with me via Goodreads, Instagram, Facebook or via my website.

About Dawne Gowrie Zetterstrom

Dawne Gowrie Zetterstrom is a writer, teacher, and blogger with an excellent academic background. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, she has lived in London in the UK and now in a small village in Sweden. She enjoys walking, meditation, travel and unexpected, magical moments. She loves animals and is an avid foodie. Her favourite place is sitting in her garden.

4 Things to Know about me

Earth or Water: Water

Desert island book: Too many/ The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wrobrewski

Want to see 2020: The tulip fields of Holland

Favourite alcoholic drink: Vodka Martini/ Olive twist

Photographs all by/provided by Dawne Gowrie Zetterstrom, and used with permission and thanks.

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Learning to live on the slow path and love the little things that light me up

June 10, 2019

This guest post from Kamsin Kaneko looks at learning to live on the slow path and shifting focus to creativity and the little things in shaping a wholehearted life.

This is the 19th 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’m delighted to have Kamsin Kaneko as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. Kamsin and I met via Instagram and shared interests in creativity, writing and gentle business. In this story, Kamsin shares how her focus has shifted to living in a slower, more focused, creative and wholehearted way in a different cultural environment. Read on!

Living life in the ordinary everyday moments

“Let’s eat out on the balcony,” my husband suggests. We are in the wine section of our local supermarket. It is a warm Sunday afternoon, and we’ve come to buy ingredients to cook dinner as a family.

“Sure. Sounds like a good idea,” I reply. One reason we bought our apartment was the spacious balcony. But we rarely sit out there to eat or use it for anything other than hanging washing out to dry.

This small act of cooking together and eating at home is one of the many small lifestyle changes we’ve been making. We’ve always wanted to do things like this, especially since we have a little boy who just turned five. But we haven’t always made the space in our lives.

We had got into the habit of going to the local sushi place on Sunday evening, which isn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds in the context of urban Japan. You can wait 45+ minutes to be seated, it’s a popular family choice at the weekend. It’s cheap and easy, even if the quality of the food isn’t the best.

Nothing is better than a home cooked meal

We are home from the supermarket. There’s homemade pizza cooking in the oven, and the wine has been poured. We decide to move the dining table outside. As we’re doing so, our neighbour is taking in her washing. She laughs when she sees us.

The sun is starting to set over the trees and mountains behind our balcony and beyond; the light is perfect, and it is pleasantly warm. The inflatable paddling pool my boy was playing in earlier is still full of water. Alfresco dining by the pool, I quip.

A short while later and the food is on the table. My little boy closes his eyes, puts his hands together, and declares “Itadakimasu” (I gratefully receive this food), with energy and enthusiasm. My husband lifts his wine glass and smiles.

“I’m so happy,” he says.

Shifting focus

If I focus my attention on the thick, ugly pillars that support the balconies, I remember this is still in urban Japan. Power cables criss-cross the sky everywhere you look, and people crowd around us on every side. I grew up in the countryside, at times I miss the wide-open spaces which are so hard to come by in Japan.

So, I focus instead on the food, the table, my family. With my attention focused on the things I love, we are nowhere but right here and right now. Exactly where we want to be. We have created space in our day, and in our lives, to enjoy the little things which had felt so distant in our busy urban lives just a year or so earlier.

Until recently, I felt like I was always making compromises. I didn’t want sushi or a “family restaurant” every week. It meant being stuck in traffic, having to wait to be seated, and a noisy eating environment and unexciting food choices. It wasn’t lighting me up inside.

Our eating choices weren’t the only area we were making compromises. But food is so fundamental to a well-lived life as a family. So why had we been living like that? And how did we get from there to here?

Looking for the answers right here not over there

I grew up attending church and evangelical Christian groups. I no longer believe the fundamental doctrines that they taught me. But I experienced something of the divine, and I wanted more.

I can remember singing songs about loving God with all my heart, all my soul and all my mind. But I felt that there were parts of my heart that were locked away and I didn’t have the key. How could I love God with my whole heart if I didn’t know how to access what was inside?

Over the years, my understanding of faith crumbled and evolved. I am less concerned with trying to name or understand what those early spiritual experiences were. At the current stage of my life, I am more interested in learning to trust and believe in the divine within myself.

Gratitude and moving on

I remain grateful for the community and the guidance and the love of people in those groups. But I no longer believe that God can only be encountered through a specific understanding of Christianity.

Perhaps I thought that I would find God somewhere “over there” in the setting of religious groups and Sunday services. But God was never there. S/he was always here in the space between our intertwined lives. We had to learn to slow down before I could even see that.

I stayed a part of the church even though it had long since stopped meeting my spiritual or emotional needs. We stopped going about a year ago because my heart was longing for more space and more slow simple Sundays. And my husband wasn’t feeling the same connection to the church anymore.

Learning to listen to the longings of my own heart

In the last four years, I have been learning to listen more carefully to the whispers of my heart and act on what I hear. I’d got out of practice in doing that somehow. Through writing, journaling and mindfulness meditation, I started to find an answer to the question of how to access the locked places in my heart.

I was no longer going to give my time to anything which didn’t help my heart to keep expanding. I had wanted to spend more time with my husband and young son. I wanted the rhythm of Sunday as a day of rest.

The irony that by attending church, I wasn’t getting this wasn’t lost on me. But I thought because we lived in Japan, I would never have the slow Sundays I remembered from my childhood in England. Besides, times have changed, maybe no one lives like that anymore.

But we were living on autopilot rather than making conscious choices about how to spend our time. Now we often spend Sundays in our neighbourhood playing outside without any particular plans. We cook a homemade meal together and our little family has never been closer or happier.

Our slow and simple Sundays are one example of the ways that listening to what I want and need has led me into a more wholehearted life. Slowing down and believing that the longings of my heart can be achieved if I approach them with an open mind wasn’t as easy as it sounds.

Learning to believe in the possibility of a wholehearted life

The first step was learning to notice the places in my life where my behaviour did not align with the things I said I wanted. I had to learn to do that with self-compassion and let go of any judgment.

I was tied up in a long list of “shoulds” and “ought to’s” all of which caused my heart to be locked up tighter than ever before. But I started to believe that I had choices about how I spent my time. I could say no to what I didn’t want and yes to what I did.

I had to find processes to gently allow me to listen and believe I could act on what I heard. Journaling and meditation and carefully chosen books, podcasts, and safe spaces online are showing me how to do that.

I had spent too long allowing other voices to drown out the voice of my own heart. It takes time to learn to tune in and act on what you hear.

How writing and early motherhood changed everything

When I was in my early twenties, there were three things I wanted to achieve in my life. One was to travel and live abroad. I’ve lived in China, Japan, Bosnia, and then Japan again. When I married a Japanese man, Japan became my home.

The second was to become a mother. I’d given up on this idea for a long time, but it happened five years ago when I was thirty-eight. It wasn’t an easy process through miscarriage, medical error, and 2.5 years of trying to get pregnant. But my son is the most delightful little person on the planet.

The third was to be a writer. And it was that final goal which has proved to be the hardest. I took my first writing class as an undergraduate back in the mid-’90s and others on and off over the following twenty years. But it was only after my son was born that I began to unpick the places in my heart which had been standing in my way.

Motherhood in Japan was the key to unlocking my heart

As a new mother in Japan, I was stressed out and struggling so far from home. I felt like I was drowning in cultural norms and expectations, which I was never going to live up to. But I wasn’t about to settle for a slow descent into bitterness and resentment, which seemed to be where I was heading. I wanted to enjoy my little boy and life as a mother. But I needed help.

I began to meditate through the Headspace App. And when someone gave away their copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way I began to keep a journal. Something I hadn’t done consistently for years.

Through these two activities, I found the key to access the locked up places in my heart. I’d felt that wholehearted wasn’t something I would ever achieve all those years ago singing about loving God with all my heart. But over time, all the things which had been leaving me feeling overwhelmed, including unhealed trauma from childhood started to feel more manageable.

Writing is leading to radical transformation: that’s why it’s so hard

The more I wrote, the more I understood that I’d neglected the craft of being a writer and I had a lot to learn. Through online writing classes and working with tutors and writing coaches, I started to understand how to create a scene and a character.

I had a background in academic writing. But to tap into my neglected creativity, I had to bring my writing into the world of sensory detail. I had to connect the emotions and the details that ground a story and bring it alive to a reader.

And that is that process of getting out of my head and into the sensory details of everyday life that is allowing me to unlock my heart. In powerful writing, it is often the little details which bring the most magic to the page. The same is true in our everyday lives.

Writing through the dark to find the light

But I didn’t want to feel the painful things. I tried to go straight to being grateful and finding positive affirmations to help me overcome writers’ block and self-sabotaging habits. I didn’t want to feel the painful things that had been locked up inside of me. But the only way out was to go through.

Thank God the Universe provided me with gifted teachers in the process. This time last year I took an online writing course by Martha Beck; there were guest lectures from Elizabeth Gilbert, one of my favourite writers, and it was completely transformative. Hard work and painful but amazing.

The course comprised the most incredible set of lectures which blew everything I thought I knew out of the water. The writing exercises were designed to take you into the hell of your worst moments and keep writing until you brought everything out into the light.

As I wrote, I kept finding feelings of being unworthy, and crippling fears of never being good enough. A numbing fear that if I spoke my truth, I would be judged, criticised, and rejected. I was so good at avoiding those feelings I’d been unaware of how much they were driving self-sabotaging behaviours like procrastination and perfectionism.

I could only learn to be wholehearted by looking at those feelings of shaky self-worth in the eye. And writing through them to find the validation I need within myself. Perhaps I will never believe that I am good enough to be a “real writer.”

But I have learnt to trust the voice inside of me that says I need to write. And if all I ever achieve is to heal the fractured places in my own heart, it will be enough. I pray also that I can gift my readers a tiny bit of courage to continue on their own wholehearted journey.

Key book companions along the way

The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron

Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert

Martha Beck – Finding Your Way in a Wild New World

Loving What Is – Byron Katie

And the poetry of Mary Oliver

About Kamsin Kaneko

Kamsin Kaneko is a writer, mum, teacher, and traveller, not necessarily in that order. She writes about living a wholehearted life of depth and meaning. You can find her on Instagram most days capturing small moments of beauty in the urban sprawl of her home in Japan. Get your free gift: I Believe in the Magic of Everyday Moments. Kamsin Kaneko’s website The Slow Path can be found here.

Photographs #1, #2, #3 + bio image by Kamsin Kaneko, used with permission and thanks.

Photograph #4 of pen on page by Debby Hudson on Unsplash used with permission and thanks.

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Year of Magic, Year of Sadness – A Wholehearted Story

May 6, 2019

This guest post from Lisa Dunford looks at how her year of magic and change was also one of sadness, the two coming together to weave a wholehearted story.

I’m thrilled to have Lisa Dunford as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. Lisa and I met via Instagram and share interests in creativity, coaching and travel. In this story, Lisa shares how her year of magic also incorporated times of immense sadness. How often do these two elements come together in life especially when we make major changes? So often. Lisa shares how magic and sadness have become key compasses on her journey. Read on!

Year of magic and sadness

The year 2016 was a magical one. I’d stepped back from writing travel guidebooks for Lonely Planet full-time to pursue a more personal growth-oriented path – both in my writing and in my life. It took a few years of stops and starts, but by 2016, I finally felt like things were beginning to flow. Along much of this incredible journey, the inspirational talks and writings of Martha Beck kept me company. I found the book Finding Your Way in A Wild New World particularly influential. I’d always been good at following my gut for big decisions. But Wild New World opened me to the idea of everyday connection and magic.

The more I read Martha’s books and essays, the more I wanted to learn. I took online workshops and listened to her lectures. I branched out to workshops and lessons taught by Martha Beck Institute (MBI)-trained life coaches. I hired a coach myself, and before I knew it, I’d become fast friends with a number of other MBI coaches.

Walking the walk

In spring, with just one month’s notice, I committed to walking the last 100km of the Camino de Santiago in Spain organized by three MBI coaches. Saying yes was a big deal. I’d fallen completely out of shape while living in two car-oriented, pancake-flat places. And I didn’t usually take on anything I might fail at. But a series of serendipities urged me on – Paulo Coelho’s book The Pilgrimage falling off the shelf as I considered, a friend asking me to edit an essay, that turned out to be… about her Camino trip. I embraced my willingness to fail, my willingness to be wrong about failing. Taking even the first step was a win. When I managed to walk every one of the 100 kilometres without getting in the support van, I knew I hadn’t done it alone.

It’s not like the trek was easy. Every morning I had my blister-covered toes sewn up, and I popped pain relievers like candy. But the Divine was there every step of the way: in the unusually unwavering support from my spouse, the unexpected inspiration from nature and faith, and the very practical advice and assistance that arrived from friends and co-walkers exactly when needed. I had accomplished what in my mind was impossible. It began to be hard to say what I couldn’t do.

Being led

“Ok, so if you could do anything, what would it be?” asked a life coach friend. That was easy – go to Africa, I answered. It had always seemed like too big of a dream: too much money, too much distance. I continued writing, I went to retreats, I followed my path. Four months later, out of the blue, another coach asked if I wanted to take her discounted place on a South African safari she’d already paid for, she couldn’t go. Um, let me think about that… YES.

I realized I wanted to learn more of the tools taught in the MBI training, go deeper into self-discovery, into self-belief. In September 2016 I began my own life coaching nine-month training. I’d gone in thinking I was doing it for myself. I planned to use the techniques to inform my life, to help with my writing. Much to my surprise, I really loved coaching. It felt as if I was following magic breadcrumbs to a life I loved.

Things happen

And then halfway through the training, my mom died – suddenly, at the very young, very healthy-seeming age of 71. She collapsed in my father’s arms and was dead three hours later. They’d just gotten back from mom’s first – her last – post-retirement, cross-country driving trip. I was home for an extended visit from where I lived abroad. She and I talked for a long time the night before she died. She went into the tiniest detail about her trip. We made lunch plans for the following week. The next day I left for California and my MBI life coach training meet and greet.

I walked onto the LA car rental lot and discovered they’d assigned me a white Ford Crown Victoria. I was not really feeling the old school, cop car vibe. When I asked to change, the rental guy was more chipper than most. “No problem, I get it,” he said. How would I like a cherry red Mustang convertible for the same price instead? Um, sure. At the time I didn’t think about how much the car looked like the little red Mazda convertible Mom used to drive.

Feeling connected

Some nice lot attendant came out of nowhere to help me as I struggled with the seats and the top. “No, no, no,” he said. I couldn’t possibly take the freeway at this time of day. He was insistent, I had to take the Pacific Coast Highway. “Ok, ok,” I said. I agreed and he sent me on my way with a “Have a Blessed Day.”

As I inched up the coast in traffic, the late afternoon sun sparkled off the ocean waves. I alternated between watching the dancing light show on the water to my right and the orange and blue and yellow wildflowers dotting the hillside to my left. Mom would have loved it. She was the big driver, not me. I was almost to San Luis Obispo when I got the call.

I couldn’t quite process the information. After the heart attack, Mom had been life-flighted to a nearby hospital. We’d figure it out, I told my dad. In the background, I heard the alarms and shouting that meant Mom was coding – again and again. I didn’t understand. I said I would come back right away, we’d take care of her. We patched my sister into the call. We were all together, in a way, when the doctor told dad the news. She’d never regained consciousness. I did the math. She’d been with me on the drive after all.

Going deeper

I’d meant to go deeper with life coach training, but I hadn’t really known what that meant. In the aftermath of Mom’s death, things I thought I’d understood suddenly became clear. I felt everything more deeply. I cried not only for the amazing and infuriating and incredible mother I’d lost but for everything, everyone’s pain. Though I’d never had children, I could better imagine the depth of my friend’s loss as she sent her son off to college (and for mom’s when I first went away). I could imagine the incalculable pain of someone’s miscarriage (of which mom had had three). But I also saw beauty and felt gratitude more deeply. When I returned to Africa the next year, I was more – and less – of myself.

Mom had been fierce and fun-loving, but she had also been an anxious person. After her death, I had the strong sense that she was immediately free of all that. And that if she could be free in one minute, I could be. She would want me to be. So I doubled down on the life coach training. We all have thoughts, habits and patterns that are no longer serving us. I became very aware of how important this work was – freeing myself, so I could help free others. Even if I only helped my sister or my nieces break the chain, it would all be worth it.

The next steps

I would love to say that within six months after mom died, I finished my life coach training and established a thriving writing-coaching-creating business. But that’s not always how things work. And that’s ok. I took time to grieve. I was committed to feeling my feelings, to allowing intense gratitude and sadness to sit side by side. We had other setbacks in my husband’s family, a hurricane that targeted our town in Texas. We had more loss in my mom’s family.

But there’s a big difference now. I have tools to use and a community to turn to. I’m much less hard on myself. I’m not panicked that I haven’t accomplished as much as I think I “should”. I had other things to do, other things to learn. I’m still writing, still using my coaching. I’ve continued to study tools and techniques to help others as a coach. I’ve begun to build my business and a website to reflect that. And I’m still doing my own inner work because it’s a process.

I’m immensely grateful for so much from the past few years – the lessons I’ve learned, the friends I’ve made, the experiences I’ve had. But mostly I’m grateful for an amazing mom, a woman who inspires me every day to dig deeper and do more, be more, help more.

Key book companions along the way

The Pilgrimage – Paulo Coelho

Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino – Joyce Rupp

Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want – Martha Beck

The Joy Diet – Martha Beck

Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live – Martha Beck

Born to Freak: A Salty Primer for Irrepressible Humans – Sarah Seidelmann

About Lisa Dunford

Lisa is a traveler, a writer, a creator and a life coach. Her house lives on a river east of Houston, Texas, her husband works in a desert west of Abu Dhabi, UAE. She alternates between the two. Before becoming a life coach, Lisa roamed the globe for 12 years as a travel writer. She’s lived in six countries and seven states. More than anything Lisa believes that so much more is possible in this life than we tend to think. Follow her travels @lisadtraveler and her attempts at learning to draw, learning to paint and learning to live @lisadlifeartist on Instagram.

Photographs and artwork by Lisa Dunford, used with permission and thanks.

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From Halfhearted to Wholehearted Living – My Journey

March 29, 2019

This guest post from Emily Lewis looks at the journey of moving from half-hearted to wholehearted living.

This is the 17th 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’m thrilled to have Emily Lewis as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. Emily and I met via Instagram and other creative connections. In this story, Emily shares how she is embracing uncertainty and imperfection and questioning the “shoulds” in her life. In doing this, she is moving from half-hearted to wholehearted living. Emily also shares her brilliant photographs. Read on!

I’ll admit that when I first agreed to write a post here I didn’t have any idea what I would say. What is wholehearted living anyway? In the Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown says:

It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, no matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.

I’ve read Gifts, and other definitions, but somehow the guideposts never really stuck with me. I’m not terribly compassionate or patient, I have no idea what it means to play instead of work, and I’m terrible at cultivating consistent gratitude. I’m not sure if I have any faith in a higher power. I tend more to be grumpy, bitchy or bitter, frequently irritated or anxious and feeling guilty on top of it since overall my life is not at all bad. I am certain all of those things are what wholehearted is not.

I think, perhaps, I’ve been living half-heartedly, living according to a series of “shoulds” and being more concerned with what the world thinks of me when I actually do follow what is in my heart and gut. Many of the people who voiced their generally well-intentioned opinions throughout my life were not wrong in their assertions, but that did not mean they were right for me.

Impacts of living halfheartedly

I never wanted to move to Maryland. I never really wanted to be a landscape architect either. But during his time in academia, my father had seen too many students struggle to make ends meet after graduation and thought it would be a good direction to pursue. It was clear during design school many of my professors didn’t think I had what it took to make it in the profession. And in a way, they may have been right. The skills that most of the top students had – graphics, site design – were not where I excelled. I preferred a combination of natural resources and liberal arts but was determined that since I started the program, I should finish it. Then I’d figure out what to do.

Before I moved to Annapolis, I had been to the state all of twice. I thought I’d stay a couple of years then join the Peace Corps or go to grad school somewhere far away. I tried to leave after a few months, but the recession hit and nothing materialized. When I transferred offices to work on a major project, I vowed I’d finish out my role, no matter what. Much like I vowed to stick with my major in the first place. Because good students and good employees finish what they start.

That project finished and I should have felt free. But by then I was marrying my husband, who was new to the area and didn’t want to move again. So instead of applying to the University of Oregon or Pennsylvania for a Master’s degree, I looked into local programs where I could continue to work full time. We bought a house and the day the bank approved our offer I cried because now I was stuck. Once we realized we really did want to move, we decided to be responsible and try to pay off all our student loans before doing so. Twelve years later, I’m still half-heartedly living in a place I wanted to leave after six months, struggling which what I “should” do instead of following my heart.

Being done with “shoulds”

Somewhere along the way, I paused and realized how deeply unhappy I was. In December 2014 I was at a bookstore looking for a Christmas present for my dad when I saw a book called Paris Letters. The author, Janice MacLeod, asks the question “How much money does it take to quit your job?” and then moves to Paris.

It started a process of slow consideration over the next few months of asking myself a series of questions. What am I doing here? Why am I staying in this job that hasn’t helped me grow in four years, just left me with empty promises and fits of crying every morning before I get out of the car? Because I “should” take advantage of the money they are giving me for grad school, at a program I enrolled in because I “should” work full time while I go to school, because I always felt obligated to follow a particular career direction? What if I changed? Who might I become?

I remember the exact moment when I first decided I was done with the shoulds. I was in the bathroom of an airplane somewhere over the Rocky Mountains looking not just at myself in the mirror, but down at my whole life, laid out 10,000 feet below me, and I asked myself “What the hell are you waiting for?” I was reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed on that plane ride, a story about picking yourself the fuck up and DOING something with your life, and something started to crack slowly inside of me.

Small cracks to big cracks

Have you ever noticed that a small crack inevitably leads to bigger cracks? It’s why we design sidewalks and buildings with control joints, to tell the crack where it will and will not go, but we can’t design our own life that way.

I didn’t know on that plane ride, or in that book store, that this tiny crack would split wide open in ways I could never imagine over the next four years. That it would include two job changes, three transAtlantic trips, depression, infidelity, a friend’s suicide, and that I would eventually stop trying to patch myself up, like a slipshod repair job, but rather go all the way to the deepest part of the wound and learn to heal from the inside out. I didn’t know that this was the process of becoming whole, that it’s an ongoing process and I would keep finding new places that needed to be healed. Sometimes these things fester until something happens to bring them to the surface.

I had a moment in the early fall of 2015, while out in the woods measuring trees for a stream restoration project when suddenly I knew I wanted no part of the path I had been following. Not the job, not grad school, not Maryland. I had been trying so hard to plan every bit of my life and you can’t live wholeheartedly if you are willing your life to stick to a plan. In that moment I broke down and spiralled into a depression that lasted for months, where not a day went by that I didn’t weep out of hopelessness and despair and consider ending it all. There was no more plan.

Forgoing the shoulds

Slowly and tentatively I began to talk to select people about how I was struggling. A friend sent me the book Let Your Life Speak by Parker J Palmer who eloquently described what I could barely grasp at:

Sometimes the “shoulds” do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one’s soul. At that time in my life, I had no feeling for the grain in my soul and no sense of which way was crosswise….Had I not followed my despair…I might have continued to pursue a work that was not mine to do, causing further harm to myself, to the people and projects with which I worked, and to a profession that is well-worth doing – by those who are called to do it.

I decided to forego the “shoulds”. Maybe I should have stayed in that job longer, but I knew I was done and I didn’t want to look to the past or the future but rather stay in the present and what I needed in my soul at the time. Maybe I should have quit the volunteer Board of Directors position, but those people have become the closest friends and family I’ve known and can rely on. Maybe I should quit traveling so much and stay put a little more often; I’ve gotten used to people questioning how much I travel, but it what makes me feel alive.

When others question me, it is their own fears they vocalize and too often I let that hold me back or put up my defences, determined to show them that I am right. Everything from what I majored in to where I lived to what I did in my spare time was a “should do” for far too long.

What do I know

With so many unknowns, what do I know? I know that while there have been parts of my life that have been wonderful, there are also parts of it that have been toxic to me. I often wonder, if I stayed at home more, physically more, would it be better? Would I be happier? But WOULD I ever actually stay here more, even if I were less busy, less committed to friends and family and adventures around the country?

Perhaps part of me will always feel the need to be on the go and doing something. Do I leave because I don’t want to be here or do I not want to be here because I always leave? Am I still trying to be someone I am not, that I feel I should be? I posed this question to my husband, Todd. He responded, kindly, “I think you will always want to be on the move. If you tried to stay in one place you wouldn’t be you. You were born to wander.”

So where am I now, emotionally and physically? That’s a complicated question, but I think I am getting closer to the answer, part of which is “I don’t know.” But I do. And I don’t. This chapter of my life is closing, and like all good chapters, it’s emotional, like the end of Deathly Hallows before the Epilogue when you know there’s more to the story but you’re not ready for this part of it to end.

What I want

I want to fully love and live and mourn this chapter so I can wholly move into the next one. I don’t want to allude to things anymore. I want to be real. I have been halfheartedly living in the Chesapeake, trying to be something I have never felt connected to on a soul level. I’ve tried for 17 years to convince myself I could do this particular work and live in this particular place and I can’t. I want to feel alive and I feel alive when I am around art, around animals, in nature, in the mountains. Less people, less frenetic pace of life.

I’m not a “hustle” mentality. I want to equally work hard and play hard and rest hard and love hard and I don’t have room for that when I’m full of irritation and stress and anxiety in this place. I’ve never really felt healthy or whole here and it’s devastating to say that out loud, especially when I don’t yet have the answers to what’s next. I’ve always wanted to completely plan out my life and I don’t think that’s in the cards. I’m scared as hell and want to weep and leap for joy at the same time.

What is next

I’ve always wanted to pack up and just go and see what adventure is waiting around the next turn. I’ve secretly always wanted to stop being so damn responsible and just take a risk. Fear and obligation and what I “should” do stopped me every time.

The Green Mountains have been calling my name since I crossed the state line into Vermont in late May nine years ago. I remember a coworker saying they weren’t sure I was going to come back from that trip and part of me never did. There are pieces of my soul scattered around this world and it’s time I went and reconnected with one of them. I’ll be okay, I’ll be fine, not knowing what the future holds. No matter what happens, I tried. I got up in the morning and went to bed at night knowing that I was still brave and worthy of love and belonging. I will be enough because instead of listening to the “shoulds” I did what I wanted to do. Should I move? Should I find a new career? I don’t know. But do I want to? Yes. And that is enough.

Key book + podcast companions along the way

Radical Acceptance – Tara Brach

The Gifts of Imperfection – Brené Brown

Let Your Life Speak – Parker J Palmer

Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert

Paris Letters – Janice MacLeod

Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling

Wild – Cheryl Strayed

This I Know: Notes on Unraveling the Heart – Susannah Conway

Finding Ultra – Rich Roll

The Runner’s Guide to the Meaning of Life – Amby Burfoot

The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron

Tranquility du Jour Podcast – Kimberly Wilson

Another White Dash (song) – Butterfly Boucher

About Emily Lewis

Emily Lewis is a lover of travel, books, and trees who feels equally at home deep in the city or out in the country. She is passionate about environmental issues, art, and writing. Her photography explores both people and landscape, capturing the juxtaposition of nature and man-made, wild and urban, light and color, to show the often-overlooked details of life. She is a professional landscape architect with a Masters in environmental science and moonlights as a financial director and photographer. You can see her work and connect with her on her website www.emilylewiscreative.com or via Instagram.

Feature image by Diana White Photography

Other photographs taken and provided by Emily Lewis, used with permission and thanks.

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The courageous magic of a life unlived – a wholehearted story

February 28, 2019

This guest post from Bek Ireland looks at the courage and magic of exploring a life unlived.

This is the 16th 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’m excited to have Bek Ireland as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. Bek and I met via coaching and I had the pleasure of guiding Bek through a coaching series. We worked through deep wholehearted story work and Bek focused on getting back to the essentials of what was important. In this story, Bek shares how she has moved courageously into living that life unlived she imagined. It takes brave and sometimes unorthodox steps, but that’s wholehearted work. Read Bek’s journey of working through embracing her natural personality and living her life unlived!

Come in, come in, I’ll show you around. There’s a table, which also serves as a desk of course (excuse my laptop, notebook, 2019 diary on it!) and a gorgeous little kitchen, with coffee and tea and breakfast stuff.

In here’s the bathroom, with ‘Who Gives A Crap’ toilet rolls (love it). Here we have the bed (built high so you can store your suitcases or bags under there). The comfy couch is opposite the television, although we both know that’s not going to get turned on while I’m here, don’t we?

That’s one of the very reasons I’m here!

This is the third time I’ve stayed at an Airbnb in the last few years. It’s interesting that trips are stored in the app – my first time was June 2017, then June 2018, and now January 2019.

I rent them for two nights usually, but I don’t stay overnight. All three have been within a 5-minute drive of my own house. I come for the afternoon on the first ‘night’ and then the full day of the second ‘night’.

The first time was one night, because my daughter, who was nine at the time, had gone to a friend’s house and was possibly going to stay the night, depending on how she felt. I would’ve stayed the night if she’d stayed at her friend’s, but she didn’t. So I was only there for a few hours in the afternoon and evening.

Reclaiming sovereignty

The bliss of it though! The no-TV, no-power tools, nobody talking to me. Not even offering me a coffee – so, still interrupting, still intruding on what I was beginning to understand was an innate need for uninterrupted time to myself.

When you’re a people-pleasing INFJ like me, going against the grain of 40 years and trying to establish some boundaries with scant practice is hard work. Being interrupted with the offer of coffee is excruciating. Because yes, they’re interrupting when you’ve asked politely that they not talk to you, but for an ostensibly nice reason.

It’s all too much and you give up and give in and swallow yourself and go watch TV with them.

But not if you’re in a space of your own.

The second time I told my daughter and her dad that I was going on a two-day writing retreat, which was true. But it wasn’t until it was over that I explained I’d been the only one at the retreat.

I went for walks, I wrote, I read.

I didn’t talk.

I listened to cars driving past, blokes playing sport on the oval up the road. The sounds of birds, the wind, insects. I thanked the thoughts of guilt when they came, then let them dissolve.

Agency and guilt are two of the balls I juggle as I stretch my wings to test their strength. Please excuse the clumsy metaphors. Done is better than perfect, as they say.

Wings to fly

So those two were a year apart. That’s interesting. Come the Junes had I had enough? Did I need some counterbalance mid-year? And what was happening at those times?

I quite like the wings metaphor, let’s think Angelina-Jolie-in-Malevolence type wings. So, in June 2017 you might say I was feeling the nice itch and burn of them under the skin on my back. Perhaps they were starting to protrude a little.

I’d been six months in an assistant manager position at a company for whom I’d worked, on and off, for over 20 years. A company, by the way, that in Year 12 I had sworn I would never work for. Careful what you feel strongly about is my advice to you!

If you ask me where I would have planned to work at that age, I couldn’t have told you – and I guess the universe just fills in the blanks for you sometimes, doesn’t it? Which can be good, or not so good.

Strength and the validation it brings

Anyway, I digress.

By June 2018 my wings had sprouted. Not long after my first brief, blissful sojourn, I had completed a semester of a combined English and Creative Writing/Secondary Education degree.

I deferred the following semester while I held the fort for my boss, who had been promoted to a new role. I absolutely did not want her job – leading a team of 17 across three states – but I was happy enough to fill in till they advertised her job and found someone new.

And to be honest I had gained confidence, having met a kindred spirit in Terri and benefiting from a series of coaching sessions with her; with doing well at my studies; and by being considered competent enough to be the acting manager.

And here we are, six months later, in this glorious tiny space. I would love to sleep the night, but again, juggling with agency and guilt, I find it difficult to justify staying away from home when I’m in the same town. I travel a bit for work, to Adelaide and Sydney, and of course, I stay away from my daughter then. But I have no choice – because I’m so far away.

Here, I am only five minutes down the road. And having the whole afternoon and then the whole next day to myself is good enough, for now.

But as soon as I got settled in this one, I was already planning my next stay. And I won’t even wait six months this time, let alone a year. The first time this is available again is two months from now. The only reason I haven’t already booked it is that I don’t want to seem too weird.

Remembering who you really are

Creating time and space for solitude is symbolic of my journey along the path of wholeheartedness. Believing I deserve to create this time and space for myself. Acknowledging its importance.

e e cummings said,

To be nobody-but-yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Or condensed for modern times by Danielle LaPorte:

Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?

Getting away, stepping outside the realms of my normal life, into the magic of a life unlived, if only for brief periods of time, helps me remember who I really am. It is there I find myself. I have been there all along, but sometimes I am hard to find under the accumulated detritus of the world which does its best to make me (and all of us) everybody else.

In the majesty of silence, I can recalibrate, recharge, rejuvenate, rejoice. Quietly.

I remember thinking of Virginia Woolf and her room of one’s own. It’s a recurring fantasy of mine to rent a house of my own and semi-reside there. What riches could emerge? How might the fabric of the universe stretch and shimmer in those circumstances?

Trusting yourself and honouring your instincts

I also often long for a beloved, wise mentor. Someone who knows me, who sees me, who could guide me on the path. What’s the next right thing? Tara Mohr has an exquisite guided meditation, (you can find it here) where you journey to meet your future-self. I highly recommend it.

The last time I did it, my future-self lived alone (probably with a cat too) in a humble, funky, uncluttered small abode not far from the sea. She had wavy grey hair, and she was fit and strong. Her days consisted of long walks, reading, writing, and conversing with a community of like-minded folk from all over the planet via the world wide web.

I can see now she would live a waste-free life. She would cultivate vegetables and walk or ride to the local farmer’s market each Sunday to buy fruit and catch up with local friends face to face.

Besides solitude, reading is like breathing to me. I also love learning about astrology, and like many INFJ’s, have a wide smattering of interests.

Waking up

I have however recently acquired a new focus: climate change. I can’t believe I got to 43 knowing basically nothing about it.

In October 2018 I attended a local TEDx event. All the speakers were inspirational, but a talk by Darren Lomman of GreenBatch really stood out. He’s working to create the first plastic recycling facility in Perth, Western Australia because at the current rate, it’s predicted that there will be more plastic than fish in our oceans by 2050.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just released their latest report on the state of the planet and Sarah Wilson (of I Quit Sugar and First We Make the Beast Beautiful fame) had posted a summary of it on her blog. I love Sarah’s no-nonsense take on things, and read her views with interest.

Since then, I have been learning about carbon dioxide emissions, what ppm means (parts per million), who the planet’s largest emitters are and how we can avert the potentially catastrophic consequences of our mindless pursuit of economic growth.

I have bought cloth pads and a menstrual cup. I am trying to reduce, reuse, or refuse single-use plastics. I have a large bowl in the sink to save the water that would normally go down the drain when I wash my hands and rinse dishes. I have a bucket in the shower to capture a portion of the water that washes over me.

It makes me think about others that I share this incredibly beneficent earth with, others who do not have toilets or disposable pads or tampons. Others who walk miles to get water. Others who have as much right as I do to feel the itch and burn of newly growing wings under their skin.

Courage to grow

And I am delving deeper into the science and political history of the climate emergency we face, because I want to do more than aspire to waste-free living; I want to help drive policy change.

I need to educate myself, because as much as I’m growing, there’s a saying I still tend to live by: better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

I find myself noticing moments of quiet with more frequency now, and recognising that creating quiet – and solitude – for myself is a necessity, not a luxury. Quiet and solitude allow me to work out what it is that I think, how to apply the ideas I generate, and how to be confident that when I do speak, it’s from a space of considered knowledge. Reading Greg McKeown’s Essentialism guided me to figure out what was essential for me, and to live that.

I believe though that most of us are trying to raise our awareness, and knowing that I am part of a community of brave souls, finding the courage to test our wings and raise our voices, gives me hope.

With such hope, it’s delicious to imagine how the fabric of the universe might stretch and shimmer.

Key book companions along the way

Here are some books I love that have supported me:

Presence – Amy Cuddy

Essentialism – Greg McKeown

The War of Art – Steven Pressfield

The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion

Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg

Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott

The Hate Race – Maxine Beneba Clarke

Autobiography of a Yogi – Paramahansa Yogananda

Anything We Love Can Be Saved – Alice Walker

Quiet – Susan Cain (my first realisation that I was introverted, and not only was that a thing, and okay, but it brought incredible gifts)

The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

Salt – Gabrielle Lord

This Changes Everything – Naomi Klein

Eaarth – Bill McKibben

Requiem for a Species – Clive Hamilton

About Bek Ireland

Bek Ireland leads a team of specialists helping communities build their financial capability. Bek loves reading and learning, and is passionately interested in the connections between things. She has studied, amongst many other things, astrology, English Literature, crystal healing and education. She is an INFJ and is interested in psychology and esoteric teachings. Bek has recently joined 350.org and is learning how she can contribute to raising awareness of global warming, and a sustainable future. You can find Bek on Instagram and Twitter.

Photographs 1, 4, 6 & 7 provided by Bek Ireland and used with permission and thanks.

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Learning to listen to the longings of my own heart

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Reclaiming sovereignty

Wings to fly

Strength and the validation it brings

Remembering who you really are

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Waking up

Courage to grow

Key book companions along the way

About Bek Ireland

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