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wholehearted stories writing

Women’s stories and their uplifting value in wholehearted living

August 30, 2021

Other women’s stories helped me on my journey to wholehearted living and have so much to offer you. Telling your story can be healing and also light the way for others.

In the writing and publication of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition, I’m highlighting people who’ve been a shining light and support on the writing, living and publishing journey.

Stories of Wholehearted Living

First up, here is the most amazing group of women – authors of Stories of Wholehearted Living guest posts on Quiet Writing.

Wholehearted Stories authors

As I went through my journey to living more wholeheartedly, I wanted to hear other women’s voices. Feeling alone and only hearing my voice, it was important to hear what other women had been through. I wanted to know what helped them to shift and integrate life experiences and learning towards living more fully. And I wanted to share this with other women to inspire their journeys and wholehearted lives.

In the middle of 2017, when I was also writing the first draft of my Wholehearted book, I reached out to women I knew. I offered women in my community the opportunity to step forward to write their story.

‘Wholehearted’ emerged as a focus when listening to a Magic Lessons podcast with Elizabeth Gilbert speaking to Mark Nepo. They chat with Cecilia, who lost heart about her writing because of not being accepted into MFA programs. Mark Nepo reads from his poem Breaking Surface which begins ‘Let no one keep you from your journey.’

My book Wholehearted and the Stories of Wholehearted Living all centre around this theme of getting to what is important and not letting others or ourselves stop us. They are women’s stories and voices sharing experiences of challenge, transition, insight and how they moved through to claim wholeness, creativity and strength.

This body of women’s stories has grown over the past few years since then. I’m working on stories with new authors whose stories are imminent. The invitation is always open. The guest posting is a supported writing experience. I bring my writing, teaching, coaching and editing skills together to help you craft your draft into a published story you can feel proud of.

How other women’s stories helped mine

As I was writing Wholehearted, I revisited these stories shared and crafted together. Some feature in the Wholehearted book. These women’s stories and voices inspire me each day, helping me see common connections in experiences. I hope they can help you too because it supports us all to hear other women’s experiences. We feel less alone when we can read another’s story that connects to ours.

Reading of another’s journey through challenging times can give us hope and practical tips. Each author also shares the books and other influences that provided women and insight as they moved towards feeling more whole and wholehearted.

These women’s stories share common themes and strategies like:

  • how to listen to our inner voice.
  • the learning from and working through grief and trauma.
  • how to write our way through and journey with writing.
  • what transition looks like.
  • the resources and learning that can help us gain strength and insight.
  • how art can help us and others heal.
  • practical strategies to get back to what matters and centre it in our lives.
  • how we deal with the toughest challenges in our lives.

Each story tells the author’s journey over time, moving through the challenging middle time of change towards a fuller life.

Turning points in our lives

There are often turning points in our lives when transition takes hold and our lives shift.

For me, it was not being given the opportunity to do a job I felt well suited for in a very changeable work environment where I was struggling to find my place. It sent a powerful message about being out of place and lost with the gap in alignment between myself and the organisation growing. After that, so much changed, and I reached out to a coach for help to make a journey of transition from the long-term government role to a new life. This is the story I share in my Wholehearted book.

Wholehearted story author Heidi Washburn tells of travelling home one day when she experiences a voice speaking to her.

A quiet, gentle but firm voice, not just a thought.

‘I don’t want to do this anymore.‘

What?

‘I said! I don’t want to do this anymore.‘

What do you mean? You have to. You just got the business where you want it. You have staff, an office and now you can do the more creative work. Isn’t that what you wanted?

That was the end of the conversation. Or so I thought.

After that night, after that very moment, everything changed, but so quietly and slowly I hardly noticed. Of course, I was the one deciding. However, I didn’t know where I was going or what the path was. Deep change doesn’t come with a check-list or a schedule. And there is no guarantee that things will work out for the best.

From ‘When the inner voice calls, and calls again‘

How other women’s stories can light the way

Reading other women’s stories can light the way and help us not feel so alone. Each story offers an experience you can relate to and learn from.

Lynn Hanford-Day tells in Breakdown to Breakthrough of getting to the point of a breakdown before making change. Her sacred geometry and mandala art became the way through, and this continues as a sacred creative practice in her life. You can see her beautiful work and process on Instagram.

Katherine Bell went through a huge life transition, leaving behind her country, job and marriage after gaining courage from reading ‘David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea’. She shows us Our Heart Always Knows the Way.

Penelope Love tells her story of her Journey to Write Here and how writing in various forms has helped her navigate so much wisely.

Sally Morgan tells a story of Writing the Way Through and trusting her writing practice in the seasons of her life, especially when she loses her voice for an extended time.

Bek Ireland goes on personal retreats in her own town to shape the quiet she craves and to hear her inner wisdom. She tells her story in The courageous magic of a live unlived.

Shalagh Hogan explains how she gathers her lessons over time, doing the hard inner work and integrating learning to shape wholehearted Creative Soul Living.

Many women form their versions of what wholehearted living looks like to them with their own language, like Sylvia Barnowski’s Maps to Self. These powerful insights from other women’s stories help shape our journey to wholehearted living.

Thank you to these women for stories shared on Quiet Writing


So thank you to: Katherine Bell, Elizabeth Milligan, Colleen Reagon, Jade Herriman, Lynn Hanford-Day, Kerstin Pilz, Shalagh Hogan, Chantal Simon, Amie Ritchie, Sylvie Kirsch, Penelope Love, Sylvia Barnowski, Heidi Washburn, Maura McCarley Torkildson, Olivia Sprinkel, Bek Ritchie, Emily Lewis, Lisa Dunford, Kamsin Kaneko, Dawne Gowrie Zetterstrom, Sally Morgan and Valerie Lewis.

Thank you for sharing your wholehearted story, creativity, life hacks, special reads and learning from challenging times to inspire our journeys. You’ve all helped mine immensely and you’re stitched into the pages of Wholehearted.

📖 Head to Stories of Wholehearted Living to read more about the project and the guest posts. Or click on the individual names of authors above.
✍️ If you would like to contribute as a guest post author, pop over to Wholehearted Stories to read the invitation.

wholehearted stories
Stories of Wholehearted Living

Book and light photo by Nong Vang on Unsplash

wholehearted stories work life

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.

halfhearted 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! 

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 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!

halfhearted to wholehearted living

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.

halfhearted to wholehearted living

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.

halfhearted to wholehearted living

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.

halfhearted to wholehearted living

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.

halfhearted to wholehearted living

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.

halfhearted to wholehearted living

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

half-hearted to wholehearted living

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.

Read more Wholehearted Stories

If you enjoyed this wholehearted story, please share it with others to inspire their journey. You might enjoy these stories too:

The courageous magic of a life unlived – a wholehearted story

Dancing all the way – or listening to our little voice as a guide for wholehearted living

Tackling trauma and “not enough” with empathy and vision – a wholehearted story

When the inner voice calls, and calls again – my journey to wholehearted living

Maps to Self: my wholehearted story

The Journey to Write Here – my wholehearted story

Ancestral Patterns, Tarot Numerology and breaking through – my wholehearted story

Message from the middle – my wholehearted story

The journey of a lifetime – a wholehearted story

Gathering my lessons – a wholehearted story

Grief and pain can be our most important teachers – a wholehearted story

Breakdown to breakthrough – my wholehearted life

Embracing a creative life – a wholehearted story

Becoming who I really am – a wholehearted story

Finding my home – a wholehearted story

My wild soul is calling – a wholehearted story

Our heart always knows the way – a wholehearted story

How knowing your authentic heart can make you shine

Keep in touch + free Reading Wisdom Guide

You might also enjoy my free ‘Reading Wisdom Guide for Creatives, Coaches and Writers‘ with a summary of 45 wholehearted books to inspire your own journey. Just pop your email address in the box below.

You will receive access to the Wholehearted Library which includes the Reading Wisdom Guide and so much more! Plus you’ll receive monthly Beach Notes with updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing. This includes writing, personality type, coaching, creativity, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook  Instagram and Twitter so keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. Look forward to connecting with you and inspiring your wholehearted story!

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