healing Archives

Essential matters and feeling your way through pain

April 16, 2018

The cups will fill again and the storm will pass. Feel the pain, and keep one foot on solid ground.

The Fountain Tarot, Five of Cups

A Quiet Writing deep-dive Tarot Narrative each Monday to share intuitive guidance, wisdom and insights from aligned books – for the week and anytime…

This week: essential matters + feeling your way through pain

Theme for the week beginning 16 April

The underlying theme for this week to guide our overall focus is from Lisa McLoughlin’s Life Design Cards deck – #44 Make those essential actions matter.

This week is about essential matters of life and of the heart and remembering what really matters. In this, we might be feeling pain and turmoil, but it’s a time of washing away the inessential.

Often the toughest and most painful of circumstances remind us of essential matters to focus on. We need to take the time to breathe through them and learn from them, as hard as this can be.

Advice from the Life Design Cards Guidebook is:

Let nothing be hidden behind walls of fear. Try to feel what you want to do right now. Clarify your priorities as if every minute matters.

Certainly, the more painful the time, the more we realize that indeed every moment does matter. The gift of challenge is to sharpen our awareness and help us identify what is essential and what is not essential.

This week’s guidance is about experiencing the pain and full feelings of challenging situations so we can learn from them. We are reminded to tap into the power of instinct and intuition as we move through difficult times. It’s as if we need to feel our way in the true sense of this phrase, letting feelings be our guide. This might mean going through pain and upheaval to get to the other side. Being grounded and learning as we move through is key.

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 16 April

Tarot Narrative:

Change is often painful, it’s true. Spilt cups, falling towers, grey skies, stepping between worlds. It all points to the loss and transformation of something, life becoming different in essential ways. You can lose yourself in this loss, focusing on what is spilt, becoming paralysed. Or you can step into the dark clouds and feel them, know their energy and know too that the blue sky and calmer times will come again.

Reading notes:

Cards: Five of Cups and The Tower from The Fountain Tarot and #3 Between Worlds from Wisdom of the Oracle.

Book notes:

You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.

Pema Chödrön

via Rick Hanson’s

Resilient: 12 Tools for transforming everyday experiences into lasting happiness

What a fabulous quote from Pema Chodron and what an amazing book ‘Resilient’ is. I have listened to it as an audiobook the past few weeks as I have driven in and out of my little village. I’m facing challenging times yet again after supporting my mother through her terminal illness last year. In the final stages of my mother’s life, as I drove in and out of town to the hospital, I focused on the essential as I listened to Greg McKeown’s Essentialism.

Both books sing of essential matters, moving through the inessential and gaining clarity. Tough and painful times sometimes simply have to be moved through. But feeling the pain and learning from these times gifts us with powerful lessons we can take forward. We develop psychological resources we can gather if from dark clouds, to face difficult times with grace and strength.

Dark clouds and what they teach us

If there’s one thing you notice from each of the three cards for this week’s tarot narrative, it’s the prevalence of dark clouds.

The Five of Cups reminds us that it’s helpful to feel any pain and loss fully as we move through it. If we don’t, we can miss valuable lessons. It is as if we need to feel the pain to move through it. ‘Befriending Grief’, as the Fountain Tarot interpretation puts it, can be a source of moving through any loss.

The Tower can be a fearful card to pull with its top-heavy energy drawing things down. It reminds us of the pain of moving through change. But as the Fountain Tarot reminds us, it can be about ‘The Inessential Destroyed’ and getting through to what matters.

Between Worlds reminds us:

What is essential now is to admit not knowing. There is great freedom and power to be unleashed.

All of these cards especially in the light of our theme card, “Make those essential actions matter”, bring us into the realm of clear, essential, resilient actions.

We can focus on the dark clouds or we can focus on the light coming through.

The photograph above was taken this evening as dark smoke fills the sky from bushfires not so far away. It’s been a sobering time lately in many respects and my thoughts have been with those battling the fires and trying to keep their homes and loved ones safe. The fight is not over. But whatever we are battling, light and optimism will help shine out the dark and keep us focused, even if we must acknowledge the challenges at hand in very real terms.

Essential matters and resilient practices

I shared some learnings from my reading of ‘Resilient’ last week in my post, Creative healing in times of sorrow and challenge. This week’s focus on essential matters continues this theme and highlights these practices.

The two practices prompted by reading ‘Resilient’ that have helped me the most these past few weeks have been:

1 Honouring my psychological resources

Sadly, I have been through a lot of pain, challenge and loss in my life. On one side, I can focus on this and let it get me down. Or I can see that I have had the opportunity to build psychological resources to be more resilient and strong.

Everything we go through teaches us if we are open to the lessons. At times, I have had to dig deep and be reflective, talk to special friends and professionals. I’ve learnt to know when to spend time alone, when to practice self-care and how to balance my needs with others. Tough lessons all and with more challenges stretching me, I can dig into my learning and bring all of myself to bear to get through. For example, I am much better at contacting people and talking when I need it now rather than battling on alone.

2 Feeling the beauty in small everyday joys as well as feeling pain

A big learning over time for me has been that it is okay to feel the beauty and joy of everyday things – the full cups – even as we feel immense pain.

We can tend to make it an either/or, saying to ourselves either I feel grief or I feel joy. I cannot feel both. It can feel like a terrible tension or betrayal of the feeling of pain if we feel good in any way.

Rick Hanson reminds us we can take an approach of gratitude:

Thankfulness is not about minimizing or denying hassles, illness, loss, or injustice. It is simply about appreciating what is also true: such as flowers and sunlight, paper clips and fresh water, the kindness of others, easy access to knowledge and wisdom, and light at the flick of a switch.

I have found special joy in swimming, reading, writing, sitting in the sun, cups of tea, coffee and connection with special friends and family at this time. The simple act of getting these tarot narratives out each week is a blessing and wisdom I learn from.

What are your essential resilient practices?

So take some time to identify your essential matters and resilient practices:

Where are you feeling pain and can you acknowledge it for what is?
What beautiful and special things have you enjoyed or witnessed lately?
How can this light you up even if feeling pain?
Where have you felt darkness descend and why?
What have you focused on or done to take you there into that darkness?
When have you lightened up and what helped you to do that?
What psychological resources have you developed over time and how can you honour this and build on them?

Take a moment to list:

Your psychological resources, learning and supports and what helps you get through
The blessings and joys that bring light into your life even if there are still dark clouds and if only for a brief moment.

This is a great week for honouring our psychological strengths, appreciating any pain and blessings and getting to the essential matters of life.

Love to hear your thoughts!

I’d love to hear what is working for you as you reflect on the essential matters of life.

All best wishes for this week of being clear on the essential, removing the inessential and developing resilient practices.

May you find strength and resilience in the clarity and peace of essential matters. And let me know what you think of this post and this weekly Tarot Narrative!

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You can work with me to help tap into that inner wisdom and magic guidance. Free 30-45 minute coaching consults chats are available in April for a May coaching start so please get in touch at terri@quietwriting.com to talk further. I’d love to be a guide alongside to help you conduct creativity and magic with spirit and heart in your own unique way.

You can download my free 95-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below. You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

Gathering my lessons – a wholehearted story

March 29, 2018

This guest post from Shalagh Hogan shows how gathering lessons of self-knowledge over time can lead to wholehearted Creative Soul Living.

This is the eighth 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, with 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 am honoured to have Shalagh Hogan as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. My sincere thanks to Shalagh for sharing her story and photographs. Shalagh and I connected on Instagram via our love of creativity. Her story shows how growth and self-knowledge accumulate over time. Embracing creativity wholeheartedly via parenting, blogging, community, writing and social media, Shalagh’s gathering lessons evolve into Creative Soul Living. Read on to find out more!

Gathering lessons of self-knowledge

Despite my low self-esteem and anxieties, I have enthusiastically gathered my self-knowledge with hope for a better life. I accept as a given, my need to seek and grow a more whole version of my formerly fragmented self. Yet up to even a few years ago, the concept of Wholehearted Living, or what I call Creative Soul Living, was still just a conceptual inkling. Having never felt whole, the definition and the feeling of wholeness eluded me.

One lesson at a time is how my self-guided journey has unfolded. I am busy gathering my lessons which rise like cream to the top. From the more important lessons about creativity, community, connection, self-care, and self-trust, I have learned who I truly am, what makes me happiest, and who I want to proudly see myself being. Growth takes its time, yet I always feel like my biggest and best lessons are the ones that have just happened.

Valuing intuition and introversion

As a child, I was fragmented. I held too many pains involving too many people. My self-mirrors were broken, and the chaos was draining. I was a creative with no permission to be me. As a teen, much-needed hope collided with my insatiable appetite for knowledge when my mother’s pursuit of a master’s degree in Applied Behavioral Sciences showed me that knowledge was power, and we can use this power to choose our life’s outcome.

It was then, I also began my life-long journal writing practice, developing my inner voice (which I now know to be my intuition) and the voice of my blog. It was then too that my Myers-Briggs test results pegged me as an ENFP. Although this felt mostly right, last year I was relieved to discover and own that I am equal parts Introvert and Extrovert. Although, for many years I neglected my creative callings, the introverted time I now take to think, write, and create are my self-care practices.

Gathering lessons on self-care and self-esteem

My self-care became essential when I was 38 and pregnant with my son. My anxieties and the last of my self-destructive behaviours shook and woke me. It became clear, how I treated myself would be how my kids would treat themselves. Doing as I did and not as I said, my children would inherit my anxieties, my self-doubt, and my repressed creativity. I truly committed then to taking better care of and healing myself mentally and physically that my children might hopefully do the same. Eventually, I quit smoking, I began eating better, and I continued to seek therapy.

My biggest authentic self “aha”, on which the rest of my work truly depended, was given to me in a therapy session. The therapist offered that I had low self-esteem. At first, I raged against this mis-definition of me. If I wasn’t who I thought I was, who was I then? Yet, this information freed me like a bird from my heart cage. I wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing, nor did I need to help fix anyone I knew. Instead, I needed to have compassion and love for my humanity. And again, I began gathering my lessons.

Writing and connecting to heal

Bad things can happen for good reason, it may just take a while to see why. When my son was one, an American economic slump forced me to close my lovely little gift and antiques store named Bally Eden and I returned home to mourn the loss of my dream shop. I was anxious and desperate not to be stuck at home with my fast-growing-soon-to-be-a-toddler boy without something “just for me”. Encouraged by an old whisper in my ear, I began to write personal essays and publish them online. It then took five more years to start my blog at Shalavee.com which has just turned six.

I purposed the blog to make me a better writer, create a living resume, and voice my lessons regularly. While I achieved these goals, it was the community and relationships I’ve developed here online during my writing journey which have been my truest gift. My new unseen friends and our connections and courtships via comments and kind letters elevated my ego and gave me an immensely better self-image; a self-reflection where there once was none. I began to see my beauty and not my broken. And, as my voice of pain and healing came through on my blog, my readers said, “Keep writing what you are writing. We feel this way too.” Authenticity and vulnerability were my win/win.

Healing through community creativity

These voices from my community have helped to shift my purpose to offering others my voice to speak through. Our self-reflections echo each other through our communications and we begin to see ourselves as both individuals and as a collective of women with one voice of self-love and acceptance. We are gathering our lessons together. Strangers have become mirrors I will treasure forever, and the internet helped make me visible and whole again.

Although I was terrified, in May of 2016, my community encouraged me to host my first Instagram Challenge called the Soul Selfie challenge. For one week, we explored our souls, our fears, and our truths together in a deeper way via the hashtag #Soul_Selfie. My esteem and courage to lead increased incredibly as I hosted another that Fall and two more in 2017.

Then a small gathering on the evening of the first women’s march in January of 2017, inspired me to start a mindful meet-up group of my own in real life. We meet monthly to discuss a soul topic, eat well, and drink prosecco. We witness, acknowledge, and validate one another and that is so very necessary to my process of seeing my wholehearted self. I have created what I needed which benefits me and others and heals us all.

Vanquishing my anxieties with knowledge

Two years ago, even with all the progress in my writing and my self-healing, I knew my anxieties were still running the show. I found a new kick-butt therapist, a new resolve, and heading into my 50’s saw me amp up my efforts of self-discovery and visibility. Reading was one huge resource I used to finally reach the summit of the value hill I’d struggled to climb my entire life. I discovered I could say and mean, “I can”.

I read four books last year with willful intention to change my life’s outlook and my understanding of myself. First, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert gifted me with such validity and permission for my creative process. I came to understand that I was an Uber-Creative and my inner child needed to be creatively indulged until she trusted me again. From this, I was inspired to create online projects and a creative community to support myself and others in being our creative selves.

I had barely put Big Magic down when I read Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. From her brilliant work, I came to understand the necessity of community, vulnerability, and authenticity. Disconnection is our worst fear and we need to be authentic to belong to, trust, and reconnect with ourselves. And I now understand there’s a connection between creativity and vulnerability.

Then, on my therapist’s recommendation, I read Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David R Burns which was the very first book that permitted me to understand and name my anxieties. I learned how to refute the lies called Cognitive Distortions that cause them. Eventually, this book helped me win the battle against my anxieties.

And lastly, on Terri’s suggestion, I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work. This book showed me that I may be even more capable of making a difference in the world if I allow myself the time and visibility to work on and publish my theories. My deeper thinking and writing will help me and the world, and this feels like a noble purpose.

Creativity conquers all

While reading and gathering my lessons, I became aware of an internal dissonance which my therapist suggested was my inner child throwing tantrums. It seems denying my creativity had my creative inner child furious at me for not allowing her to play. So I decided to just give her what she wanted.

First, I indulged in thirty days of creating paper collage through an online creative community challenge. Having really enjoyed that, I created my own Instagram challenge called Our Creative May and this gave me another month straight to play. From this, our IG creative community established the hashtag #ourcreativeselves to continue posting our creations. I immediately did another challenge in June and July creating daily postcard art for the #ICAD project.

Four months straight of daily creating and continuous authenticity had proven that I did have enough time to create and I was trustworthy. My creative indulgence grounded me and greatly dissipated more of my anxieties. As I continue to replace the slave-driving parent who preaches art as impractical with the compassionate empowering present parent, I recreate a trust in myself proving my word is good. Self-trust is the truest most important result of our authentic creativity.

As my anxiety diminished, I began to understand this powerful lesson of how creativity and anxiety cannot coexist, and how indulging one represses the other. Love and presence conquer fear.

Creative Soul Living

This profound understanding of the inverse relationship between creativity and anxiety, and knowing many others need permission to create too, led me to develop and lead a Creativity Workshop this past November of 2017. I believe that our permission to live more creatively is necessary and integral to us being wholehearted individuals. I believe less consumerism and more Creativism will heal the world as we find creative solutions to its problems.

Creative Soul Living is the term I use to describe my process of Wholehearted Living. I intentionally seek and share my life lessons, prioritize my creativity in all areas of my life, develop my self-trust, value authenticity, commit to self-care, am mindful and present, stay connected with my people, and intuit my grandest Why for being here. And while my Why continues to firm up and my path widens, I know I have fought to reach my here and now, gathering my lessons one lesson at a time.

My future “I can” will include more creativity workshops, e-books, and eventually a book about crafting our own life plans based on our life lessons. My inward soul work has brought me the gift of knowing me and that feels like permission to hope. Hope is what I want to share with the world through my writing.

Photos and artwork by Shalagh Hogan used with permission and thanks.

Key book companions along the way

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David R Burns

Deep Work by Cal Newport

About Shalagh Hogan

Shalagh Hogan, said Shay-la, is a personal essayist, a blogger, a designer, an uber-creative, and mother to a five-year-old ginger girl and just turned teen boy. She resides in an ancient house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, USA, and is always amazed and amused by life’s abundance of lessons. Thrice-weekly she shares the lessons she gathers on her blog at Shalavee.com (Chez La Vie was taken) and currently, Creativity is her Why. Follow her as @shalaghhogan on Facebook and Instagram.

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You might also enjoy my free 95-page ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey.

Just pop your email address in the box to the right or below. You will receive the ebook straight away as well as updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

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

2 Comments

love, loss & longing transition wholehearted stories

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

March 1, 2018

This guest post from Kerstin Pilz is about how grief and pain can be our most important teachers on our journey to wholehearted living.

This is the seventh 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 am honoured to have Kerstin Pilz as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. My sincere thanks to Kerstin for sharing her story and photographs. Kerstin’s wholehearted story tells of how she moved from passion through to grief and loss and then to deep healing. It’s a story of learning ways to heal through silence, meditation, yoga, writing and living freely. Kerstin now employs her learning from her journey to help others through her work as a writer, yogini, meditation practitioner and online teacher. Read on to find out more!

Beginning the journey

My journey to a wholehearted life began exactly a decade ago with a tragic false start.

I’d sailed around the world aboard a converted cruise ship for four months, teaching intercultural communication to university students from all over the world.

Copies of Eat, Pray, Love circulated onboard. It was hot off the press and everybody but me seemed to be reading it. I’d recently found love and I was busy writing the next chapter of my own life.

Between port calls in Capetown and Barcelona, my Italian sweetheart and I got married off the coast of West Africa, 1 degree south of the equator.

I was living a fairytale. Even before our final disembarkation, I knew that I couldn’t go back to my old life.

I had a tenured, senior position as Head of Italian Studies at one of Sydney’s Universities. It came with good pay and annual trips abroad. Options to climb the career ladder beckoned.

But there was a side of me that was unexpressed. Ever since I was a little girl I’d wanted to be a writer. Leaving Germany at age 22 to explore the world, had muted my writing voice. But the passion had remained.

At 45 I had enough academic publications to prove to myself that I could really write in a foreign language. It was time to explore another, more creative part of myself.

Taking an adult gap year to follow my passion

Long service leave allowed me to take an ‘adult gap year’ to chase a new, wholehearted life. I had a year to work out if I could transition into blogging and freelance writing.

Months of careful planning went into preparing my sabbatical. I booked a Spanish course in Buenos Aires and stopovers in exotic locations. I did evening courses in freelance writing and photography. I fired off pitches for travel writing assignments and started my first blog.

When I handed the keys to the tenants who’d be living in our home for the next 12 months, I felt a pinch of foreboding. We’d planned the perfect year. What could possibly go wrong?

You can’t prepare for life’s worst-case scenario

On the day of our long-awaited departure, my husband felt a pea-sized lump behind his ear. We’d forgotten to plan for life’s worst-case scenario.

He knew straight away that we’d be going on a very different journey – one from which he was unlikely to return.

And just like that, my world imploded. One day I was about to step into the year of my creative transformation. The next day I walked into the nightmare of a progressive terminal illness – metastatic melanoma – and all that it entailed.

Photo credit: Susan Kelly, Natural Images

Without a home to return to, we were forced to live with his adult daughter. Instead of speaking Spanish in Buenos Aires, I became trapped in an Italian melodrama. It unfolded across two continents as an antagonistic family came together in pain and anger.

I’d wanted to write a new chapter for myself and here it was. Except I hadn’t written it. Trying to fit into this alien scenario and its shifting emotional alliances slowly eroded my own identity.

I was unable to read and I was unable to write the travel and lifestyle pieces I’d researched. My own story consumed all of me. I became paralysed by the fear of death and the prison of toxic family dynamics.

Being a full-time carer to my gradually diminishing husband, gave me a sense of purpose and joy, despite the exhaustion.

Eventually, we relocated to a beach-side home in Far North Queensland, but the Italian melodrama never went away.

It was as if a second cancer had spread. Emotions and estates were negotiated amid the tragic suicide of my husband’s son and the discovery of my husband’s infidelities.

Photo credit: Susan Kelly, Natural Images

The healing power of writing

I discovered the healing power of writing by accident. Living remotely, I didn’t have easy access to counselling. My journal became my on-call therapist.

Watching my life implode felt like watching a movie in slow motion. It had more plot twists than I could’ve ever come up with.

I wrote my story in mad, obsessive bursts. Naming my pain and anger felt liberating. Without noticing, I started to treat journaling like a creative writing assignment. The many hospital visits – flogging the old car for long distances across the wild remoteness of Far North Queensland during an epic wet season – became little vignettes. Creating word pictures was intuitive. Trying to capture the irony of my situation, finding beauty in pain, was a form of therapy.

Writing allowed me to become a detached witness as my story unfolded amid the ruins of Rome and the Sardinian coastline of my husband’s homeland.

In my journal the dramatic settings and the ongoing family feud wove into an epic tale. For several years I thought of it as a blueprint for a novel.

Following my intuition to find the trail to a wholehearted life

My second attempt at creating a self-directed life started somewhere in the pages of my journal.

When I accepted that death was inevitable, my writing showed me that this was a chance for deep transformation. If I was open to it.

I knew that to find myself again, I could not slip back into my old life. For two decades I’d taught Italian Studies at universities. Italian was the language I spoke at home after I’d left Germany. But the Italian part of my identity died with him.

I needed a new identity and a new professional direction, but I had no clue where to find it. My sabbatical year had been spent being a full-time carer. Resigning from a tenured position in mid-life was considered foolish. Everybody cautioned against it, but I followed my heart.

I was scared and at my emotional rock-bottom, when I stepped into the unknown.

Learning about the impermanence of everything

I’d planned to give myself a few months to grief quietly surrounded by my beautiful community in remote Far North Queensland. The remoteness made me feel safe. I would have time to consider the next steps. But life had another dramatic instalment in store for me.

Less than three weeks after the funeral I was asked by State Emergency to evacuate my beachfront home. The biggest cyclone in living memory hauled all night, blowing my beach-side haven to pieces. The next day an entire community was grieving. Overnight, my own grief became eclipsed by tales of lost homes and devastated gardens.

When the airport re-opened, I caught the first flight out. The devastated landscape was a mirror of my inner devastation. I needed to look at things that were whole, not broken. I needed to speak to people who weren’t grieving.

Meditation and yoga became fundamental tools of my healing

For many months I didn’t speak at all. I locked myself away in austere meditation retreats all over Asia. Meditation, like writing, became fundamental to my healing.

Sitting in stillness, listening deep inside, trained me to recognise the voice of my inner knowing. It took months for the noise in my head to subside. Vipassana meditation taught me to become a detached observer. Watching pain and physical discomfort rise and fall for 10 hours a day for many weeks, was healing.

Everything in life is impermanent. Nature’s fury had already hammered home this fundamental Buddhist lesson. But I needed to hear it again and again from my teachers.

Sitting in the presence of His Holiness for two weeks in Bodhgaya, I learned about the true nature of suffering. Pain is inevitable. My story wasn’t unique.

Yoga was another important anchor in my healing journey. My body became grounded through asanas. Living with death had made me tired and skinny. I didn’t sleep enough and I drank too much red wine. Yoga made my body stronger. Conscious breathing felt like reviving a dead tree. I was finally breathing oxygen back into myself.

Finding my writing voice through journaling

The landscape of my beach-side home has healed itself, as have I. After sadness has followed joy. I now know that deep pain can fade if we allow ourselves to heal.

A sealed plastic box with two dozen moleskines is still the first thing I’ll throw into the back of my car the moment a cyclone warning goes out. I am no longer defined by my pain, but I keep my journals safe because they are an important record of my transformation as a writer.

For the two years of my husband’s slow decline and during the years of my healing journey, I wrote compulsively. I told the same story over and over until I was finally free of it. It trained my writing muscle like nothing else could have.

I haven’t opened my diaries for some time, but I know they contain some of my best writing. It’s raw and straight from the core.

Finding joy after grief and pain

Ten years after my first attempt at a life-changing sabbatical, I feel happier than I ever have. Going through the fires of grief has transformed me at my very core.

The journey was long and lonely. Crashing head-first into my own vulnerability has taught me that we can rise strong after falling hard.

It took many years to find a new professional direction. I revived my old travel blog. I worked as a Volunteer for International Development in the Maldives. I reviewed luxury resorts as a travel writer. All of it was fun, but none of it satisfied my core.

For several years I exhausted myself, trying to prove that resigning from a flourishing career in mid-life hadn’t been foolish. I was surprised by how naked I felt without a career.

Giving myself permission to heal, was met with envy. It was considered a self-indulgent luxury. And yet, the inner work I did in the aftermath of those events, laid the foundations for what I do today.

When I finally allowed myself to be guided by the voice of my heart, not the expectations of an achievement-driven society, things started to fall into place.

A new partner walked into my life. A new domain name appeared in the pages of my journal. I finally saw a new way to combine my passions of writing, travelling and yoga with my professional skills. I identified an income stream that allows me to be location independent.

I taught myself basic graphic design, photography and how to build a website. I did a yoga teacher training course. I radically decluttered my house and listed it on Airbnb. Then I packed a small suitcase and headed to Vietnam to make my dwindling funds last a little longer.

Today I live for most of the year in a rented home in the beautiful World Heritage town of Hoi An in central Vietnam.

I’ve always loved teaching and I am finally teaching again. Sharing the tools that have helped me in my healing journey is deeply rewarding.

In Hoi An I lead a weekly writing group. With my partner, who is a professional musician, I teach yin yoga and sound bowl meditations. Once a month we combine it with journaling in our signature “Journey to Self” workshop. Through my website, Write Your Journey, I run online courses. My first writing retreat will be held in Hoi An, this September.

After years of stagnating, I gained momentum when I allowed the voice of my heart to write the next chapter of my life.

Living a wholehearted, self-directed life is the only way to live the nanosecond we have on this earth. But make no mistake, it’s not the easy option.

People tell me all the time how lucky I am. But luck had nothing to do with it. Hard work, the courage to follow my passion and being open to uncertainty is what allows me to live the way I do.

PS: I wrote this post lying on my daybed on a tropical summer’s day with this view in front of me.

Photos by Kerstin Pilz, except where noted and used with permission and thanks.

Key book companions along the way

While my own story unfolded into a story of grief, I found it very hard to read fiction. Instead I found solace in memoirs about grief, in the words of Buddhist masters and in Natalie Goldberg’s zen-inspired writing practice.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Helen Garner, The Spare Room

Claire Bidwell-Smith, The Rules of Inheritance

Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, Freeing the Writer Within

About Kerstin Pilz

Kerstin Pilz Phd is a former academic, writer, photographer, yogini and meditation practitioner based in Hoi An, Vietnam, where she teaches a weekly writers group and holds workshops and multi-day retreats combining yoga, writing and mindfulness meditation. Through her website Write Your Journey she offers e-courses and downloadable guided soundbowl meditations. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You might also enjoy my free 95-page ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’ – all about wholehearted self-leadership, reading as creative influence and books to inspire your own journey.

Just pop your email address in the box to the right or below. You will receive the ebook straight away as well as updates and inspiring resources from Quiet Writing on personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot, productivity and ways to express your unique voice in the world.

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

personality and story transition wholehearted stories work life

Our heart always knows the way – a wholehearted story

July 30, 2017

Frustrated in the quest to find work and a life you love? Don’t despair, the greatest truth is that our heart always knows the way.

This is the first 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.

In essence, Quiet Writing celebrates wholehearted living and writing, career and creativity and I am keen for a community of voices to be telling their story of what wholehearted living means here in 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 am thrilled to have my dear friend, Katherine Bell, as the first ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. Katherine and I met through an online course, The Introvert Effect, created by Katherine Mackenzie-Smith. When I talked on a group phone call about my planned transition to a more wholehearted way of life, Katherine reached out to me afterwards, sensing a connection in our stories. We have been firm and amazingly synchronistically connected friends ever since, supporting each other and sharing a love of books and especially of David Whyte, who features in this story.

I hope you enjoy Katherine’s story, poem and exquisite photography. My sincere thanks to Katherine for her beautiful contribution to Quiet Writing.

Starting out on my journey towards wholehearted life and work

This is not a romantic story. Certainly, others found it inspiring to start with—a quest towards a better life is something we can all relate to … for a time. But when the initial 12 months I had planned (what was I thinking?) grew into 18, then 24 … then five years and there were no tangibles like an impressive job title, a book, or the usual manifestations we take as evidence that someone has a successful life … well, cue crickets chirping and tumbleweed rolling down the deserted street.

Not long after my 39th birthday, with my life in a dire mess, I checked myself into a psychologist. I naively approached this as I would manage a work project, and estimated that I would be fixed before I turned 40. I was about to learn that inner work—deep inner work—is nowhere near linear. My biggest challenge was that I didn’t know what I wanted, despite recognising that I was desperately unhappy. I also felt that something was wrong with me, as the kind of prescribed life my partner of nearly 20 years had envisaged for us—and that everybody else seemed to want as well—was just not me. I felt like the Ugly Duckling, I simply didn’t belong.

A beacon of hope

It wasn’t until a friend passed a copy of David Whyte’s ‘Crossing the Unknown Sea—Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity to me around the same time that I recognised a voice like my own for the first time, and dared to hope that there was another way for work, relationship, life— a way that fit with me, instead of my feeble attempts to contort in ever-increasingly painful ways to fit with it. I can vividly recall the night I started to read it. I was in the bathtub (my Fortress of Solitude in those days) again feeling like the Ugly Duckling. But this time, the experience was akin to the duckling’s heart both leaping and aching when he looked up to see beautiful swans—his own kind—flying overhead. I recognised in David Whyte a kindred other who lived at depth, even though I did not quite know what living at depth was at that time.

This simple, profound recognition was enough to start me on the journey of my own unknown sea. Here, finally, was someone else who had crossed that sea, I recognised his voice, and I knew I belonged in some way to that pilgrimage. Fast forward to the present day, and with a small, knowing smile I say that the recognition was of my own voice. The best gift of David Whyte’s words have not been their beauty, nor their inspiration (as profound as both are) but the validity, the permission, they gave to my own words, my own voice. There was nothing wrong with me after all, I was not a duckling, I was a swan. I had simply been surrounded with voices that did not recognise mine.

With that first heart-leap of recognition, and the simple permission given by the Wonderful Mr Whyte, I took the plunge into the unknown sea towards work, life and relationship that was wholehearted. I tackled the problem in the only way I knew how to at the time, which was to leave my job, home, partner and city in the same week (not recommended) and take flight to the other side of the world for six weeks. My entire known life was in storage, ready to be dealt with when I got back.

In this way I jumped into my own metaphorical boat with not a clue (thankfully) of the squally territory that lay ahead, or that I would feel at sea for several years. I say “feel at sea” as in reality we are never truly lost, or alone, it just feels that way, and part of our quest is to be able to endure the inevitable crises of discomfort, discouragement, or despair. It’s a riding out of the storm, knowing that it will eventually pass.

Allowing our heart direction to emerge

I think the trip was the only part of the plan that made sense, in hindsight. It gave me the relief and spaciousness I needed—both literally, staying in remote parts of the English countryside and roaming open fields, mountains, and wild clifftops in the rain, and metaphorically, in starting to thaw out from what had been a fraught existence, both at work and home, for long years at a stretch. I felt like I was emerging from a coma and needing to learn what was real again. This was in the smallest of ways to begin with, an almost imperceptible turning of my head and simple noticing of what elicited a positive reaction in me, like surprise at hearing the unfamiliar sound of my own laugh.

It was a significant shock when I returned to Australia without a home, job, partner or any structure to my life and needed to take the first breath of my new life. I moved to a regional town near my family, embarking on a series of experiments to find work that worked for me. Work, for me, is of central importance, and my experiences with it not working have been as painful as any of my life’s challenges. David Whyte elevates work to the status of a marriage in his book “The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship” and I agree with it being given this priority. This is especially so for those who are creative types—there is no divorcing ourselves from our work, they are one and the same entity.

In Crossing the Unknown Sea, David Whyte talks of “having a firm persuasion in our work” (p.5) and that has certainly been the crux of my quest, taking precedence over relationship for a time. I have grappled with finding work that is heartfelt and resonant, and what has looked like foolishness to others from a financial perspective has been a dogged determination to settle for nothing less. I certainly miss elements of my former lifestyle, but in resolutely setting my sail to my own course I can say I am at peace and happy.

My golden rule is that as mine is the only head to hit my pillow each night, I’m best qualified to set that sail, as long as I am staying aligned to what is true for me. It has, however, been stressful in needing to hold out far longer than I envisaged, yet the alternative—the life I used to live and the work I used to do—is no more an option for me as running a race if I no longer had legs. As Whyte’s friend Brother David said to him “You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while. You need something to which you can give your full powers” (p.132).

Discovering my work

The only idea I had about what my right kind of work looked like was that I wanted to write. Knowing that I wasn’t interested in writing fiction was at least a start. I stumbled through exploring writerly activities such as creating a blog, writing poetry, entering writing competitions, and applying for a writing scholarship. However, apart from the cathartic blog and poetry, it felt as though I was contorting myself again into a shape that wasn’t quite right. Thankfully, as Rumi says, “what you seek is seeking you”, and I soon had an opportunity presented to write for a research organisation, work which I found I truly loved. All my clumsy attempts and experiments had in fact been my apprenticeship to the kind of writing I love. In revisiting an earlier journal I discovered the prophetic words:

“My work will be a melange of my heart – not just one thing, it will be a blend of all the things that make my heart glad: writing, thinking, researching; the alchemy of ideas”.

Here was evidence that my heart had known all along, I had just not been in a place to hear it, let alone respond to it.

The benefit of hindsight

Hindsight shows us that all experiences—even the most painful—prepare us for our own particular work. Some experiences are definitive (like David Whyte’s influence on me, foundational stones to the structure of the work which only we can do) and some are transitional, forming the scaffolding we need to emerge ever so slowly until ready to stand and reveal our work to the world.

If I could rewind the clock and give myself some advice to make the journey easier, it would centre on the following.

There is no timeframe in matters of the heart, especially when needing to find a way back to life after being metaphorically dead as I was. It will take as long as it will take, even if you are just a little lost. Don’t try to plan and control it; it will only cause additional pain. I think one of the most important things is that any emotional or psychic recovery needs to be given the same credence as a physical injury. I have had to constantly adjust my expectations of the timeframe of recovery, likening it to having every bone, muscle, ligament broken and undergoing extensive rehabilitation, and learning to live again being more than a little changed.
Be kind and patient … with yourself. I wish I had cut myself some slack along the way; I was really doing the best I knew how to at any given point, as feeble as that was.
The truth is not that everything will be OK, it’s that it already is. Time and time again I have had to remind myself “all is well”. Even in the darkest moments, the truth is that everything is working for us when we are aligned to our hearts, not against us.
It’s not a journey with a destination. I’m still not there, and I don’t think I ever will be. As David Whyte says, it’s a ‘continuing conversation’. The important thing is that we keep showing up, open-hearted, looking for the Hansel and Gretel trail that leads us ever homewards, crumbs as clues left behind by an engaged and benevolent Hand (whether we understand that to be our God, our Higher Self, or whatever language we use to give meaning and shape to our spirituality).

From the time I first recognised David Whyte’s voice (and ultimately my own) in the bath all those years ago to now, I trust my little boat, metaphor for my heart, to carry me ever onwards. I have nothing to fear while I’m aligned to it. My only request is that after several years at stormy sea, I’m soon taken to safe harbour for a little respite, perhaps where I can feel the warmth of the sun of friendship and community on my face. Then, as it is now, all will be well.

Postscript

This reflective journey has led me back to a poem that I first started to write as I walked the clifftops in England all those years ago, with my own unknown sea stretched before me. Whilst not originally written with the intention of sharing it, it seems to fit so beautifully into my story that I offer it here.

After

It turns out (in the end) that I am far
stronger than we all thought.

Surprisingly,
I chose to be brave at morning’s first light,
however grey and dim it appeared then.

Turning towards the east
to walk ever closer to the Ocean of Who Knows What,
throwing my face and caution
to the biting wind of my vulnerability,
stripped of all pretence and belief
for better, or for worse:
Strengthened
or at last, Ruined.

In angry defiance
—or quiet acceptance?—
I signed up, took the gamble,
declaring “See here?
This, this is my Mark,
my Consent,
my Line In The Sand
of how I will live and be in this world.
And if I die at this brutal hand
well …
at least I felt the sharp slap and bite of the wind,
the driving rain that hurt my eyes and became my tears,
and the aching weight of loss
after loss
—how will I bear it?—
but knowing at last,
This was Me
I had reached Land’s End,
And I refused to go into hiding again.

Standing on the cliff buffeted, yet
Resolute, watching
the cruel sea
Relentless against captive rocks,
I thought “Poor things, they’re just like me…
—pounded and near-drowned”.

Then pounded and near-drowned some more.

In years to come I will know that in
choosing to live
at risk of the Open Sea
I breathed
walked
and dreamed
Awake
Alive
in this beautiful and vicious world
that sometimes despised,
sometimes loved me
(I never knew which it was).

crossing the unknown sea

Key book companions along the way

The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim

The Language of Letting Go, by Melody Beattie

Entering the Castle: An inner path to your soul, by Caroline Myss

In the Meantime, by Iyanla Vanzant

Crossing the Unknown Sea, by David Whyte

In Tune with the Infinite, by Ralph Waldo Trine

Women who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To Live Again, by Catherine Marshall

The God of Surprises, by Gerard W. Hughes

The Courage to be Disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

About Katherine Bell

Before turning to the quieter world of writing, editing and research, Katherine worked for 25 years in the corporate sector across multiple industries in senior administrative and strategic project roles. Making a tree-change from Sydney to regional NSW several years ago, Katherine is passionate about promoting research that translates into real-life outcomes. She is currently working on forming an alliance with other corporate escapees who share her passion for making the workplace more humane and sustainable, particularly for those who are introverted or highly sensitive. Co-founder of The Edit Bureau she also assists academics in Australia and overseas with getting their work published.

Keep in touch

Subscribe via email (see the link at the top and below) to make sure you receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions in 2017. This includes MBTI developments, coaching, creativity and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world. My free ebook on the books that have shaped my story is coming soon for subscribers only – so sign up to be the first to receive it!

Quiet Writing is on Facebook – Please visit here and ‘Like’ to keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. There are regular posts on intuition, influence, creativity, productivity, writing, voice, introversion and personality including Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel. The links are below.

Remembrance and unconditional love: thoughts on ANZAC Day

April 28, 2017

Anzac Day

25 April is ANZAC Day here in Australia. It’s a day of remembrance for those of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps who served and died in war and related activities including peacekeeping. And a day to remember those who serve now. Celebrated on the day of the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915, the spirit of Anzac and its qualities of sacrifice, courage and mateship have immense meaning for Australians and New Zealanders around national identity, bravery and freedom.

For me, it’s always a very emotional day. As a Queen of Swords, INTJ, Virgo, (some might say ice maiden) type, it’s surprising how this day seems to touch me so deeply and I am in tears for much of it.

I don’t know exactly why but it’s the stories that touch me, the young men and what they went through in World War I and II and other conflicts. Stories we really can’t fathom or ever truly know. And our own personal connections with that through our family history or people that we know directly involved now.

It’s the families and loved ones left behind and impacted when they came back. It’s those who serve now and what they face and experience. The solitary courage of it, the fear, the silence of those who cannot or could not tell their stories. The inner strength they need to search for and the support of each other. It’s the sadness of it all, that it just should not happen, the unnecessary waste of life; that people should not have to go through all this and the aftermath of physical, mental and spiritual pain and suffering.

It’s also that we can be thankful that we have people who can be strong when it’s needed to do this work for the freedom, support and safety of others. Mostly men, mostly young, mostly strong but also vulnerable.

Postcards from the war

In the last few years, I received a box of memorabilia and photos that belonged to my great aunt, Vivie, who died in 1992. A strong woman who never married, she was a connector and recorder within the family, capturing daily life in photographs and keeping in touch with many in the extended family.

In this box was a beautifully embroidered postcard sent from the Western Front in France in 1916 by my great uncle Walter to Vivie, his sister back in Australia.

The stitching, perfect and precise, must have caught Walter’s eye and he has written on the back of the postcard. It’s a message saying he is well and not really saying much more except that he will be in touch with other family members too. What could you say about those horrors of war except that I am here, standing now? And I am thinking of you and love you.

I knew a little about Walter’s war service but I looked into his war records on Anzac Day this year. Joining up with the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) on 1 February 1916 and leaving the country on 13 May that same year, he was on the Western Front in France in the 55th Battalion and saw active service amidst some of the most difficult conflicts of the war.

He served in the Anzac Light Rail as part of this, building and running light railways on the Western Front to provide transport through the difficult terrain. I cannot imagine how hard all of this work was and the terrible conditions in which it was carried out. He was discharged from the AIF on 16 July 1919.

Walter received a Military Medal in 1919 for:

“conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty during an attack on St Denis Wood Perone on 2/9/18. During the initial stages of the attack heavy machine gun fire was encountered. This man, noticing this with great courage and deliberation worked his way forward into a position from where, by sniping he was able to place an enemy machine gun out of action, not withstanding that he was under enemy observation and continually fired at the whole time. This soldier’s action in silencing the enemy machine gun enabled a Lewis Gun to be brought forward thereby greatly assisting the attack. The man’s courage and disregard for personal safety during the operation was most noticeable and his action through-out were a great incentive to his comrades.”[1]

This is not to condone violence or war in any way. Personally, I find violence in any form hard to contemplate or witness. But it happened and for Walter it was real. The postcard is a poignant reminder of the fragile and powerful connections with home in all of this – beauty amidst chaos and war; love of his sister and family sent from afar; such vulnerability and risk.

I cannot imagine how precious that card was once received in Newcastle in Australia on the other side of the word, in so few lines saying so much. Or hard it was for Walter to find words to say along the lines of “I am okay” when the reality was most likely far from that.

Closer to home

The other overlay of emotion for me on Anzac Day is about my brother. Martin served as an Australian Federal Police Officer in East Timor in 1999 as part of the United Nations peacekeeping effort and was awarded the Overseas Service Medal in 2003. Martin is no longer with us now, having passed away tragically in 2007.

The memory of Martin as an unarmed police officer who went to East Timor, now Timor Leste, to provide support, peace and justice to people in the most challenging of circumstances, fills me with pride and love. It symbolises the strong sense of justice and fairness that drove his passions and focus in his career and life.

Here he is in action in East Timor, featured at that time, in Time Magazine on 27 September 1999 and in Aussie Post Magazine in October 1999:

I don’t know what he saw there. I don’t know what he experienced there. Like many first responders and police officers, they cannot always talk about what they saw, experienced and felt. And whilst I am proud, I sense that the experiences in East Timor somehow had a deep impact on the sensitive soul that was and is my brother. How could they not.

A poem of remembrance and peace

So in the early hours of Anzac Day this year, these words come to me:

On Anzac Day

I lay a flower in the remembrance
of my heart,
wreathed there,
amidst the days, red poppy lights
flare occasionally,
lighting up your smile,
buried beneath granite, grass,
days of pain, cascading
hours of grief.

I lay a flower in the remembrance
of my heart,
at nearly dawn here,
for you, my own service,
my own dawn,
my own not forgetting
that war somehow
touched you
and led you down a path
I wish you had not gone.

I lay a flower in the remembrance
of my heart,
amidst tarot, words, books,
the morning’s nearly dawn,
the marching of feet,
to come,
the early days towards
ten years of remembering you,
to come.

I lay a flower in the remembrance of your heart.
I shift that stone of trauma laying there.
I hold the hands of our hearts in peace.

Rose, rosemary and remembrance

Shortly after on Anzac Day, in an Activate sessions with Amber Adrian, working with healing energies and guides, both rose and rosemary comes up as energies to work with, with remembrance as a strong message.

We are reminded to activate our inner love, work with remembrance and our true divine self, and to connect with that unconditional love that is our essence. We are reminded to work with protection techniques every day especially around protection of judgement of others and ourselves.

It’s an emotional day. You can see why the tears come.

Tears of memory, gratitude, appreciating sacrifice and remembrance. And the lessons I’m still learning of unconditional love.

Let us all keep focused on these immense qualities in moving forward:

focusing on the beauty in life
maintaining a passionate sense of fairness and justice in everything we do
and finding a love that can transcend every difficult moment.

And may we all be peacekeepers.

Sources

[1] Source: Ancestry.com. Australia, WWI Service Records, 1914-1920 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015. Original data: National Archives of Australia: B2455, First Australian Imperial Force Personnel Dossiers, 1914-1920. Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia.

The Rose of Unconditional Love in the featured photograph is from the beautiful Plant Ally Healing Cards deck by Lisa McLoughlin.

Thought pieces

Ask for help, talk to others

This was not an easy piece to write especially with regard to my dear brother. However, I felt it needed to be written as there is too much silence. I also want to highlight the power of remembrance and unconditional love in healing and moving towards peace.

I am aware it may not have been easy to read for some people. If anything I have written in this post triggers anything for you, I encourage you to reach out to others for support. Talk to a trusted family member or friend. Or contact organisations set up especially to provide support. In Australia our key organisations for support are Beyond Blue and Lifeline. International support organisations can all be found here.

Keep in touch

Quiet Writing is on Facebook – Please visit here and ‘Like’ to keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. There are regular posts on books, tarot, intuition, creativity, productivity, writing, voice, introversion and personality type.

Subscribe via email (see the link at the top and below) to make sure you receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes tarot, personality type, coaching and other connections to help express your unique voice and truth in the world.

If you were moved by this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

Healing with words of gold: The Empress, Kintsugi and alchemy

March 24, 2017

When we draw the Empress, the time has come for change and renewal in the sense that it is the right moment to dare to come out with our ideas, plans and insights.

Tarot as a Way of Life: a Jungian Approach to Tarot, Karen Hamaker-Zondag

The Empress connects us with this new dimension of awareness; for is it through her intuitive understanding rather than through masculine logic that the spirit leaps forth into outer space to connect with celestial insights.

Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, Sallie Nichols

The Empress – Part II

This is the second in a two part series on The Empress tarot card which has been appearing lately in various guises. These posts explore The Empress, her powers and how she is showing up for me right now as a guide.

In the first post, The Empress: vision, creativity and patience, we explored her appearances recently in tarot spreads and the symbolism of The Empress in various tarot decks as an insight into her meaning.

In this post, I’ll be sharing thoughts and intuitive writing on the messages of the Empress to help channel growth in creativity and healing at this time.

Activating heart energy

I’ve been working with gifted channeller and intuitive healer, Amber Adrian for the past six months as part of a transition process to focus on creativity as a way of life. Amber’s Activate program is about switching on your wisdom, power and light more, especially (for me) around creativity.

It’s all about connecting with our higher selves, integrating what needs to be integrated and showing up with what we learn and experience. It’s powerful and healing work, hard to describe, but my role it seems is to put my experiences into words.

In a session recently, guides stepped through for each of us with a message. For me, the guide was a woman with red hair, goddess-like. She was there to help me connect with my heart. She put her hand over my heart. With gold from her palm, she filled in any wounds with gold, so it was like my heart was made new again. She released shadows and energies, removed cords from my heart and filled the holes left by my heart wounds.

And she gave me a special message:

Your heart is ready, put it on the page.

I am not sure who this goddess or guide is, but I am feeling the energy of both The Empress and Pele, goddess of fire and irrepressible passion who is guiding me this year. I’m feeling the power of both as they appear around messages of vision, creativity and passion. They are a couple of mighty female consorts with transformative energy I can tap into and channel creatively.

My superpower – writing

The guides in this Activate session also came forward with messages around our superpowers: how we want to be seen as we truly are. This included messages around learning how to mother and care for ourselves.

When anyone has ever asked what my superpower is, I would (and will) always say it’s writing. It’s a strength I rely on for so much: in my work role, in my personal life, strategising ideas, processing pain, capturing beauty and sorrow to experience, move through and on. It’s helped me navigate so much and words are my life-blood and heart.

So it was with a smile of recognition that I heard the words from Amber that the guides were activating channelling gifts as they come through writing. The gift being activated, once I cycle through some layers of self-care, is an ability to sit down and receive writing as a divine conduit to words – “beautiful, entertaining, what’s needed in the world.”

I am blown away by this but it seems right. It means opening up through resistance and fear to this and I note also, requires actually sitting down to write. Important.

Later we are encouraged to let our guides show us where they would like to connect and how – for example, ceremoniously, through exercise, afterwards, when you sleep. Journalling is a way we can do this, asking guides to speak to us or come through as we sleep.

In this spirit work, we need to flex and move through our own paths. The guidance and support is to be accessed. It’s a gift we need to learn. We are reminded:

It’s a muscle like anything else.

Like a muscle, we need to use it.

Message in a Bottle

The next day while all this is settling, I receive the ‘Message in a Bottle’ card from The Wisdom of the Oracle deck, in protection position (reversed). This card is all about communication and signs from spirit and guides pointing to your highest good. In protection position, it’s saying:

Don’t ignore the signs. Spirit always has your best interests at heart and will draw your attention to what you are overlooking.

With its image of a telephone in a bottle, there’s a sense of messages coming and not being able to get them or read them. The Wisdom of the Oracle guide book says this is also about allowing yourself to “become fluent in the language of symbols, oracles, and omens.” But in protection position, it’s about maybe not acknowledging signs because they don’t fit our world view. We are tending to want them as we want them. Or we are missing them altogether.

So I’m listening, opening up and working to become fluent in this language of guides, signs, symbols and intuitive writing. It’s natural ground in one way, but the signs are flagging a richer and deeper connection with spirit and channelling of words.

This is welcome but there’s that resistance I can feel around what this means. Channelling, for example, is a concept I am not entirely comfortable with and it seems a big step into an unknown world right now. In my mind, are the inevitable thoughts of “What will (insert anyone you like) think about this?” with all the dark power and shadow that such fruitless thinking can muster.

Night thought visits

I head to bed with an open heart, inviting guides to speak to me in the night as this seems to be the way I am currently receiving information and inspiration.

In a wonderful interview on The High Priestess podcast, Julie Parker speaks with guide and psychic, Helen Jacobs, about intuition in the most down to earth of ways. This was such a balm for my soul at this time. They discuss how the way we access intuition and information from guides is different for everyone. And it can also change from time to time for each of us. Talk about keeping us on our toes!

The way my intuition and guides seem to be speaking to me now is through what I call night thoughts. They are words, symbols, signs or lines of songs that come through clear as a bell when I wake in the early hours of the morning.

So I wake in the night with wavy haint blue lines that I know from the Spirits card in Marcella Kroll’s Sacred Symbols deck. I know it means that spirits are calling offering wisdom and help. I draw the wavy lines with my finger in the air as I can feel them so strongly.

I look at the time and it’s 3:13am. Those numbers speak to me too – I’ve been noticing lots of number sequences lately especially 111, but this sequence 313 seems significant so I take note.

I know I will need to get up and write this down so I don’t forget. And I know I need to write. Here is an opportunity to harness the spirit of guides and channel any messages, despite my uncertainty about this. It’s a gift, a present, a presence and a guide. It’s there for me to access and it’s there to help me channel love and light. It’s not all about me it seems.

Journalling night thoughts

I have a Night Thoughts journal – I’ve had it for a while – and I capture all the thoughts that come in the night there. They are so rich. I open the journal and I write this message:

I’m waking you in the middle of the night to say I’m here, spirit, 313, helping you to see and hear the signs that come to you. Ask and you shall see. You need to ask.

(I then insert three of the Spirits wave symbols as in the card above)

The Empress, orange cloak, golden hair, is guiding you. Plant the seeds, heal the wounds, feel the gold inside the cracks, go there. It’s a gift you’ve always had from very young to see and feel the cracks and fill them with gold. The gold in your heart is what can help heal others’ cracks and wounds and your own.

You’re called to help heal, to hold the hands and hearts of those who hurt. In many ways, like a kindred soul, standing in healing, standing side by side, in the trenches of the heart. But healing with words of gold, from your pen and from your mouth.

Number 313

Afterwards I check about the number 313. And what I read again blows me away. Joanna Walmesley of Sacred Scribes explains in this post that it’s an angel number:

Angel Number 313 is a message from your angels that the strong connection you have with the angelic realm and the Ascended Masters is assisting you with staying positive, light and optimistic about your life…It is time to live your truths and express yourself with clarity, purpose, passion and love. Be a positive light to others.

I’m encouraged just like the ‘Message in the Bottle’ to pay close attention to intuition and inner wisdom, that guides are there helping me with the next steps along my path.

313 is made up of the attributes and vibrations of 3 appearing twice. Then I recall that 3 is The Empress’s number also, she who has appeared twice recently in my tarot readings, with 3 linked to creativity, self-expression, talents and skills. Number 1 is about self-leadership, intuition, fresh beginnings and approaches – all in line with The Empress and her messages of creativity, intention and patience. I love the term ‘self-leadership’ and this number emphasises that:

we create our own experiences with our intentions, thoughts and beliefs. This makes 313 the number of optimism, enthusiasm, communication, creativity and expansion.

Kintsugi

After all this beautiful light and energy that has flowed from The Empress appearing in various guises, I keep reflecting on that palm of the hand holding my heart and filling it with gold. It feels so warm and positive. I know that sense from somewhere.

Then I remember the Japanese art of Kintsugi (or kintsukuroi). A representation of the idea of wabi-sabi, it’s a method for repairing broken ceramic pieces with a lacquer mixed with gold or other precious metals with the philosophy behind this:

to recognize the history of the object and to visibly incorporate the repair into the new piece instead of disguising it. The process usually results in something more beautiful than the original.

In a piece on kintsugi, wabi-sabi, the beauty of scars and her son’s repaired heart, Amy Basken says:

kintsugi pieces are prized precisely because they have been broken. They are said to be more beautiful, more unique, and “stronger at the broken places” (to quote Ernest Hemingway)

I’m feeling like my heart is a vessel, a sacred object, cracked from wounds and hurts but healing. As I reflect, I realise there are 3 significant times in my life when my heart fractured and hurt intensely with deep grief, loss and pain.

I feel my heart wounds fill with gold and heal. I’ve had enough suffering from these wounds for now. I can move on. I can communicate the lessons and emotions to help others heal, to feel they are not alone or to acknowledge and honour these feelings as part of moving on.

How often do we hide these wounds and experiences with a sense of shame instead of realising they are what makes us strong, beautiful and able to support others with what we have learned.

Not that we would ask for these experiences. But if they happen to us, Kintsugi and The Empress remind us that breakage and repair, wounds and healing, are natural, not something to be concealed but there to be held up to the light with love. And love mostly for ourselves.

Seek and you shall find…one layer of Truth at a time. Every experience we have in life, even the missteps, and especially the bliss, is a step closer to that sacred radiance. We are all waking up in the same direction.

Danielle LaPorte White Hot Truth: Clarity for keeping it real on your spiritual path from one seeker to another (forthcoming May 2017)

Alchemy: the power to transform things for the better

I leave the draft to this point overnight, asking for guidance to clarify and make sense. The words that come in the night are:

This is alchemy, you are experiencing alchemy.

Yes, I realise, that’s it. Alchemy: the power to transform things for the better – that would be a relief and something I can work with, a healing thing for me and others. I relax suddenly, snuggling into the warmth of my loved one and cuddling my little stuffed bear in the dark, smiling. I relax into this knowledge, this beauty, and lean into its wisdom, embracing whatever is to come.

Thought pieces

You can learn more about Amber Adrian and her brilliant work in activating creativity and healing at AmberAdrian.com – she is also a fan of stuffed animals and is the most beautiful writer.

Dee at Archangel Oracle – Divine Guidance explores The Message in a Bottle card in more detail. These thoughts resonate on becoming fluent in reading signs and symbols.

For more reading and beautiful visuals on kintsugi and its processes visit:

Kintsugi: the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery

Kintsugi: the art of broken pieces

Image acknowledgements:

The Empress card is from the Sakki Sakki tarot deck; others as noted in the text
Other images from pexels.com and used according to licence with thanks to the creators.

Keep in touch

Quiet Writing is on Facebook – Please visit here and ‘Like’ to keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. There are regular posts on tarot, intuition, influence, passion, creativity, productivity, writing, voice, introversion and Jung/Myers-Briggs Personality Type.

Subscribe via email (see the link at the top and below) to make sure you receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes tarot, personality type developments, coaching and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world. New opportunities and special offers coming soon.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

healing

The cups will fill again and the storm will pass. Feel the pain, and keep one foot on solid ground.

The Fountain Tarot, Five of Cups

Theme for the week beginning 16 April

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 16 April

Book notes:

You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.

Pema Chödrön

Dark clouds and what they teach us

Essential matters and resilient practices

What are your essential resilient practices?

Love to hear your thoughts!

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

Share this:

Like this:

Gathering lessons of self-knowledge

Valuing intuition and introversion

Gathering lessons on self-care and self-esteem

Writing and connecting to heal

Healing through community creativity

Vanquishing my anxieties with knowledge

Creativity conquers all

Creative Soul Living

Key book companions along the way

About Shalagh Hogan

Read more Wholehearted Stories

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

Share this:

Like this:

Beginning the journey

Taking an adult gap year to follow my passion

You can’t prepare for life’s worst-case scenario

The healing power of writing

Following my intuition to find the trail to a wholehearted life

Learning about the impermanence of everything

Meditation and yoga became fundamental tools of my healing

Finding my writing voice through journaling

Finding joy after grief and pain

Key book companions along the way

Read more Wholehearted Stories

Keep in touch + free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

Share this:

Like this:

Starting out on my journey towards wholehearted life and work

A beacon of hope

Allowing our heart direction to emerge

Discovering my work

The benefit of hindsight

Postscript

After

Key book companions along the way

About Katherine Bell

Keep in touch

Read more Wholehearted Stories

Share this:

Like this:

Anzac Day

Postcards from the war

Closer to home

A poem of remembrance and peace

Rose, rosemary and remembrance

Sources

Thought pieces

Keep in touch

Share this:

Like this:

The Empress – Part II

Activating heart energy

Your heart is ready, put it on the page.

My superpower – writing

It’s a muscle like anything else.

Message in a Bottle

Night thought visits

Journalling night thoughts

Number 313

Kintsugi

Alchemy: the power to transform things for the better

This is alchemy, you are experiencing alchemy.

Thought pieces

Keep in touch