indie publishing Archives

Waking up in Love, Life & Writing with Penelope Love

December 5, 2021

Welcome to Episode 4 of the Create Your Story Podcast!

In this episode, I’m joined by Penelope Love, publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as author of Wake Up in Love and editor of my Wholehearted book.

You can listen above or via your favourite podcast app. And/or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

In this episode, we cover:

Penelope’s book Wake Up in Love
The process and experience of writing Wake Up in Love.
Collaboration on the writing journey
Love, relationships and life connections
Balancing writing and publishing journeys
Writing practices
Spiritual practice, Sadhana and Self-Inquiry
And so much more!

Transcript of podcast

Introduction

Welcome to this episode of the Create Your Story Podcast. This is the first one on interview episode which will be the predominant focus in the podcast so it’s wonderful to be stepping into the deep one on one heart-filled conversations that are what this podcast and Quiet Writing are all about.

Today I chat with Penelope Love, who you might remember featured in Episode 2 of the podcast as part of the first Wholehearted virtual book launch. Penelope received the long draft of my book and helped to shape it into the book it is. Today we focus on Penelope’s story more as well as your collaboration and touchpoints and it’s a magical interview.

But first, a personal update and something you might like to be part of. As I speak it’s the 5^th of December 20201 and the Wholehearted Self-leadership Book Club is now open for enrolment. This is a year-long, actionable, community read of my books, Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition and the Wholehearted Companion Workbook. So it’s part book club, part group coaching and a transformative reading experience where you can do the work of transition over time with accountability and community, and make space for the deep shifts you desire.

We kick off with an orientation in mid-December ahead of a section by section read of Wholehearted together in 2022. So head to the Book Club links in the show notes transcript on Quiet Writing or the links in my Instagram bio, where I am @writingquietly to find out more and join us.

Payment is with upfront or via monthly instalments and 50% scholarships are also available to encourage participation and equity. I’ve aimed to make it as accessible as possible for those who wish to do this deep work with me as your coach. There’s a fabulous group f women gathering, so I hope you will join us for this journey and co-creative read of Wholehearted to make the transitions you desire in your life.

Now to introduce today’s special guest.

Penelope Love, MA, is a publisher, speaker and winner of the International Book Awards as author of Wake Up in Love. In 2000, her career launched in the editorial department of the University of Michigan Press, followed by Barnes & Noble, and the original publisher of Chicken Soup for the Soul. As she expanded into book design, production and business management, it was a natural evolution into the role of publisher. In 2016, she founded Citrine Publishing based on a visionary publisher-author partnership. Penelope passionately supports people in writing the books that only they can write, while also sharing the memoir only she could write, about sexual trauma healing and marriage to her spiritual teacher along a united path of Tantra and Self-Inquiry, illuminating these essential steps on the journey to liberation.

Penelope holds a very special place in my heart as a friend and editor of Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition. She is also author of the wholehearted story, ‘The Journey to Write Here’ on Quiet Writing. Today we will be exploring writing, editing, publishing, becoming an author, working collaboratively as part of our wholehearted journeys, the spiritual practice of self-inquiry and so much more. I am thrilled to share this conversation with Penelope with you.

Transcript of interview with Penelope Love

Terri Connellan: Hi Penelope and welcome to the Create Your Story Podcast.

Penelope Love: Hi Terri. Thank you for having me.

Terri Connellan: Thank you so much for your support of me, my book Wholehearted and Quiet Writing and congratulations on your book. Wake Up in Love being published earlier this year.

Penelope Love: Thank you. And you’re so welcome. It’s an honor.

Terri Connellan: So we’ve had lots of conversations about writing, editing, publishing, and so much more on our journey together. And it’s great to be able to share those conversations with others today. So can you tell people about what you do now, how you got to be here and your new book.

Penelope Love: Sure. Well, I’m an editor and a publisher and also an author. I recently walked through the pearly gates of authorship in January of 2021 when I published my memoir, Wake Up in Love after 15 to 16 years of writing and editing, and working on it. In that time, I was also running a freelance business. Prior to that 15 year period, I did get my start earlier in a career in editing and publishing in the book industry, working at the Chicken Soup for the Soul publisher, the original publisher that is, and they’re based in Florida, where I was living at the time.

And Wake Up in Love actually taps into that journey of leaving the corporate world when I found that I was editing books about changing a life, but I wasn’t really changing my own life. And when I started going into that deep dive of changing my life, that’s when my freelance career took off and I became skilled in not only editing, but designing, and then publishing books and then learning the business end of the publishing side. And over the years developed myself into a publisher.

Terri Connellan: Awesome. What an amazing journey you’ve had. That’s incredible. We’ve known each other for quite a long time online, but we really connected when I reached out with my 100,000 word draft of Wholehearted, which you received so beautifully, and you’re such a magical editor, so supportive. Could you tell us about your work as an editor and why you love editing?

Penelope Love: Editing is just like my heartbeat. I don’t know. It comes effortlessly and naturally, and I feel like it has to do with the way I grew up, patterns of hyper vigilance and being very conscious of what I was saying. And if it was going to make anybody mad or not mad, and also trying to predict what they were thinking. And that is a survival skill in a way. But when you become an artist, you turn your survival skills into creative forces and that’s what editing is for me.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. So you’ve worked on editing a long time, it’s been a longterm career for you?

Penelope Love: Yeah. You know, I didn’t get into it intentionally. When I was in college, I saw an editorial internship bulletin on one of the boards in the religious studies department. And I’m very interested in different types of spirituality and religion. And this fluorescent yellow poster just called to me. Interestingly it said, ‘seniors only apply’ and I was a junior and I still applied. I don’t know it was something in me said, why not? And I went ahead and applied and I ended up working for two years for this teacher who ended up being quite karmically connected.

Terri Connellan: And what do you love about editing? What’s so special for you?

Penelope Love: Well, it’s the relationships that I develop with the people that I work with. It is such a close, connected, intimate relationship. Editing somebody’s book, their book is an expression of their soul. It is their heart’s song playing to the world and I get to be a part of helping them shape it. It’s an honor and so much fun.

Terri Connellan: Oh, that’s wonderful. I’ve certainly experienced that as someone who worked in an editing partnership with you. So it’s a true gift. So thank you for sharing that with me. So at the same time we worked on my book, you were also completing your memoir, Wake Up in Love. So tell us about your writing journey of creating that book.

Penelope Love: Well, it’s funny, in the book, there’s actually a chapter about starting the book and it’s called The Book of Love. And I remember when I met my husband. Maybe I’ll just share a bit of backstory. The book begins where I meet my spiritual teacher, and then I marry him two weeks later. It actually begins a lot earlier in childhood, but it comes forward to this moment. And that’s the beginning of the writing.

And I sat down to write this book of love because I had fallen in love and I was married to him for probably about two or three months. And I just thought I knew absolutely everything about love. And I was 29 years old just hitting that Saturn return, you know? I was ready to take on the world as an author. And I wrote the introduction and then I didn’t really know what or else to write. And he looked at me and he said, well, maybe it’s because you don’t know what love is yet. And I’ll spare you my response, there was an expletive in it and it’s in the book, but I went ahead and became very angry. And yet I used the tools that I was learning from him along this journey, one of which is called the self-inquiry and I took this process inward. I took my anger at that thought that I didn’t know what love was inward. And I went on a journey that lasted about 15 years from the first time I put that pen to paper to write a book to the time it was actually published.

Terri Connellan: Wow. That’s amazing. So the writing over 15 years, what did that look like? Was it like lots of different periods of drafting and editing? Or was there times where you sat down and wrote a lot of the book? How did it work in practice?

Penelope Love: Yeah, in my case, it was a really cool mix of old journals that I’d kept during those years of my early Sadhana, Sadhana being a spiritual practice that you enter when you commit to a spiritual path under the guidance of a teacher. And so I had these journals from my early Sadhana, one of which I started writing on my first trip to India in 2004, when I had no idea, I was beginning to write a book. It was just writing my journal, writing my thoughts for that day. And I feel like that’s a lot like life. I think we don’t really know when our book is exactly being written because we’re just living our life.

And so there are these bits of moments in my life that got recorded in my journals that eventually became fodder for what became the book. We lived in Costa Rica between 2007 and 2010. I went through a period of trying again, to write this book of love. And in that time I was practicing the Morning Pages. So that became a tool and a lot of free writing and beautiful ideas coming out across the Morning Pages. And during that time, a local editor who was starting a magazine, asked me if I would write a column for the magazine. And that’s when I started to write some articles. And I did write about relationship because that was an obsession of mine. Ever since I was young, I was looking for a relationship.

There’s a karma to that too, at the same time, you know, it is one of those human desires. And at this point in my evolutionary journey, exploring relationship in an intimate context, it was the biggest step that I personally could have taken on the journey. So going ahead and, and writing about that process really brought a level of consciousness to it that I think would not have been present had I not had pen and paper. And that quiet time alone to explore what was happening in the relationship. And I applied these wisdoms to the articles that I was writing for the magazine and I got a great response.

It was a local magazine published in Santa Cedro Costa Rica between 2008 to 2009. And it was called Montaña al Mar. Everybody loved when this magazine would come out. People would come up to me in the grocery store and just give me a hug and tell me that they related to what I’d written. And it gave me a lot of encouragement. And I had another mentor of mine say to me, once, you know, if you write enough articles one day, you might wake up and realize you’ve written a book. So I think that time came around 2012, where I had written some of these articles in Costa Rica and I’d taken them also online. There were some websites at the time, sort of like Huffington Post-ish type of websites. And I was putting some of the pieces on there and yeah, those pieces that I created for those contexts, it started to look like I had the material for a quilt that could be a whole piece.

And I remember one day I took every single article I’d written. I wrote the title of it on a sticky note, and then I stuck them all on the wall and I arranged them in different orders. And that started to be the beginning of Wake Up in Love. It was a wall full of sticky notes at one point. And then I said, there’s some order here. There’s some structure, there’s a spine. Now let’s give it some legs. Let’s give it some arms. And over the years I started to become clear what pieces were missing, what pieces needed more fleshing out.

And there was one point , an editor pre-reader, beta reader read it. And I had written this whole book about my journey of sexual awakening through self-realisation, through the exploration of tantra, combined with Self-Inquiry. And I had written this whole book and the editor said, yeah, but I really could use a sex scene in here.

And you know, I was feeling most vulnerable about writing about certain topics, that being one of them. So when she asked for it, I knew it was time in the journey to put that forth into the book. And it actually was the crowning piece, even though it’s in the middle of the book. And that to me speaks a lot to the writing process. You can’t put things in a logical order at first. You have to let it be a wild, creative throwing. You know, some people say throwing spaghetti at the wall. One of my clients uses that term. And there’s some truth to that. There’s not an orderly process when it comes to some aspects of the creative process. And then there’s other parts of the creative process where that order is absolutely essential. And if you don’t have it, your projects won’t ever come to fruition.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. I really relate to your story, having gone through my writing journey. And for me, it was a mix of sometimes having to stop, to integrate more experience, you know, to work out either what you’d written or what you’d lived and then to bring it all together into a new phase. So it’s sort of like an iterative process.

Penelope Love: Yeah. There’s most definitely that time of integrating in between. It definitely calls for patience and that’s real soul growth. That’s real important work that’s being done, even when it seems like no work is being done on the manuscript. And then of course, in the final stages of putting a book together and in the style that I did, where it was from pieces written over the years, was bringing it a sense of coherence to sound like, because it really is the journey of somebody’s awakening over the period of time. There’s some things sound very elementary in the beginning and they should, because that’s where the voice was at that point. But when you’re trying to stitch something together, that’s written over the periods of time, there’s a lot of editing work that has to go into making it make sense and keeping the raw parts raw on purpose and polishing up the polishing of some things that you were really just writing cause you needed to learn it yourself.

We call it like taking the preach out of the book. And I had an editor and she’d done the same thing with a book of essays she’d written on parenting and she said, you know, we were just busy taking the preachiness out of our book because we were preaching early what we needed to learn. And then when we learned it, it had been integrated and now you can take it back instead of telling the reader of the article or the essay, ‘you need to do this’. I could take it back to first person and say, oh, when I was going through this process, this is what I learned. And there’s a vulnerability in coming back to that first person perspective. It’s much more vulnerable than saying, ‘here’s what you need to do to have a great relationship’. This is what happened to me. And I had to go through this and I had to fail in these ways and I had to learn these lessons in order to have the successful relationship I have today.

Terri Connellan: I so relate to that from my experiences. And I guess it’s that ‘show, don’t tell’ too, isn’t it? Rather like showing what you went through rather than telling, like you said, this is what you need to do. I think that’s so powerful. So you’ve mentioned some of the challenges you came against writing Wake Up in Love. Is there anything else that comes to mind as particular challenges or insights you might share from your writing journey?

Penelope Love: Patience, I’ll echo that. It was a really challenging piece because the world began moving very quickly. 2004, there wasn’t even YouTube. I did a little research on that for my book actually, cause when I went home from meditation the first time when I met my husband that night and there had been this photograph of his teacher on the wall, behind him, Ramana Maharshi, and I needed to go home and Google Ramana Maharshi to find out, you know, what I was getting involved in. And I ended up searching only on Google and, you know, cause YouTube wasn’t really a thing. Otherwise I will certainly, would’ve gone to YouTube if I could catch a video of this man. So anyway, long story short, patience, the time. That dates me on how old I was or how young I was when I started writing the book and in the information explosion since then with social media and, you know, the proliferation of book publishing through print on demand, everybody seemed to have a book or a website or a blog and every time I tried to have one, it just wasn’t happening. It wasn’t coming together. It just wasn’t the time. There needed to be a maturing process that, the only way for a maturing process to happen is over time. So I couldn’t rush that one. And that was challenging because I really wanted to be an author like so many other people.

Terri Connellan: I relate to that too. And you are also an independent publisher at Citrine so I’m interested in how becoming a publisher has dovetailed with supporting or conflicting with your own writing, because it must’ve been a bit of tension in there. Working with books all day and then trying to write your own at the same time must have been challenging.

Penelope Love: That’s exactly right, Terri. And that was the thing, I was falling into that, ‘I’m helping everybody else write that book’ and when is it going to be the time that I dedicate to the message that I know is on my soul to communicate with the world and that took grace and patience again. Other types of challenges that come from just the sheer amount of information and really sorting through, you know, what is my message? What is my voice? What is my authentic knowingness? And how do I put that in words and sort out the other voices that are constantly coming into my mind all day, because I’m reading so much information.

So I did end up taking time off last year in the months leading up to the publication of my book. Another man was running my company and he did a wonderful job while I was on this sabbatical, even though at the time, the way it happened was, and I won’t go into the full details of the story, right now. But the way it happened was that I was actually really, truly believed I was giving the company away and that Todd was going to be running the company. And I was just going to be helping him and supporting him. And I truly had to believe it was completely out of my hands or I would not have let go. And it was so gracious the way it came back into my stewardship a couple months after Wake Up in Love came out. Then Todd said, I was only always holding this company for you. And I was like, wow, what a friend, what an amazing person. And he was one of the first authors published with Citrine and he has been by my side in every way. And I’m grateful for him. And not only him though, all of the authors were so supportive of that time that I needed. And even though they thought I was not necessarily going to be their publisher anymore, they supported me. And it’s that type of relationship that I’m even in this whole work for, that connection, that bond, that caring about each other. I think the publishing process holds up a microscope to that. It lets us really explore it and feel it and live it and know a quality of human relationship that I’m not sure you know, is possible in other types of contexts.

Terri Connellan: Hmm. Yeah. So what I’m hearing is that I guess it’s about holding your own space for your own story whilst holding space for other people’s stories and just how that, that whole tension gets managed and it makes sense to me that you would need in a way to step away so that you could sort of get space around your own story to bring it to life. Makes perfect sense.

Penelope Love: And it was wonderful too, because it was a luxury. I got to finally walk the talk I’d be talking for all these years that I knew in theory. And I knew it pretty intimately because my husband went through this process and so I was up close and personal with my husband and seeing what he went through as an author. And that was actually a big part of what played into the formation of Citrine Publishing was just watching the way that his publisher dealt with him. I want to create a company that treats authors the way I know they deserve to be treated and not the way they necessarily are treated in the traditional publishing world. Not to say that all traditional publishing goes that way, but a great deal of it is. There’s not that personal connection that I feel can be one of the strengths of independent publishing as I feel you’re experiencing right now with the kind press.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. For me, that whole writing/ publishing journey has been a real learning process for me, but certainly that relationship you have with both the editor on the way through, the publisher. I’ve been really honored with the kind press to have a very similar experience. It’s been great.

Penelope Love: Yeah. And it’s one of those things I think I may have even said this to you along our journey. It’s something that I often reflect on, you know, the first publisher with a printing press and the first author with a manuscript, having their conversation. What did that look like? Who said what to who, and you know, how did that go down? But I’d like to get to the essence of, look at, what a powerful partnership that was. And so every time I’m speaking with someone who has a manuscript, I try to harness that original creative energy of that, like archetypal conversation. How do we do something? You have a talent, I have a talent. How do we make it synergistically more than it is the individual parts alone.

Terri Connellan: Yeah. And for me, it was a real journey in learning about collaboration with you and with Natasha from the kind press. And I reached out to you because I felt so lost, you know, with what to do with my book. I had created the draft. And then I got to a point, I had planned to self-publish, but I just didn’t know what to do and what step to take and I’ve come to realise writing is such a collaborative process. So is that your learning also, how do you see collaboration as part of the writing and publishing journey?

Penelope Love: Well, I feel like partnership is one of our greatest tools for evolution or heading towards self-realization. That collaborative opportunity to master our own communication because ultimately we are talking with nobody, but our own heart, our own self. And if we know that our outer world is a reflection of our inner world, then we can really use our partnerships in collaboration to master that knowingness and to realize who we are. And I feel like the writing and publishing partnership holds an extremely effective magnifying glass to that process. Because writing freezes everything in time and lets you look at it and notice it. And then if something is not quite right about it, you can edit it and you can change it. And so this freezing in time that writing does, it forces us to be clear with our words. And it ties into that self-realization that is in my own experience, the purpose of being alive.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. And I think there’s often that view that writing is a solitary process. But the moment it really all fell into place for me was when I wrote my acknowledgements and there was this cast of many, many people who were involved in the writing process and all the inputs. And is that how you feel too about it? We can feel like it’s a solitary performance, but it’s so not.

Penelope Love: I love that you’re saying that because it’s really making me think about it and reflect on my own experience. And it was those times when I was trying to be the writer in the cabin in Costa Rica, you know, Walden, my own personal Walden Pond, creating for myself, that I was struggling the most with writing. But when I was living my life and having the daily stresses of running a business, those precious mornings or couple of hours. Sometimes I do my morning pages at night. But I didn’t call them Morning Pages. I would call it my Nocturnal Journal. And I went ahead and when I found those moments, that’s when life is happening all around me and I was dealing with people and that gave me not only material to work with, but emotions and feelings that could come through on the page.

You know, I don’t think writing can be done in a vacuum. That said, there’s a paradox for everything. And sometimes I really do need that solo hermit time to get something exactly the way I want it to be. So I think it’s balance.

Terri Connellan: Yeah, I agree. I think that’s what I’ve learned from my experience, but it certainly shifted my stereotypical view of the writing process.

Penelope Love: Yeah, maybe that taps into sort of that patriarchal view of like the solo man in the cabin and Walden Pond, writing. And to not deny the beauty of those manuscripts and those publications just, I mean, there’s some awesome literature. At the same time, that image that gets perpetuated in culture, I think we’re really challenging that now with our new technologies and our new capacity for relating with each other, and we’re able to explore more of the collaborative aspect of writing and the power.

Terri Connellan: Absolutely. And so part of our collaboration too, has been through you sharing a story on my website and my blog as part of the Wholehearted Story series, which some people might be familiar with. And your story in that series was called The Journey to Write Here, which is about your calling as a writer, your relationship with writing over time. So what writing practices have supported you and have evolved over your time as a writer?

Penelope Love: Yes, Morning Pages, of course. I could sing their praises every day and never get tired of it. They are just such a wonderful, wonderful tool from The Artist’s Way and Julia Cameron, I’m sure your listeners will be familiar with that already. And then free writing. So like there’s nothing like a good free-write. But, that said, I also had another contrasting practice to that, and that would be writing for publication. I think, setting some goals to write for publication started to give order and structure to the free writing and Morning Page chaos that would be upon my eight and a half by 11 line paper in the morning. Because I would start to take the golden nuggets out of those ideas and start to shape them and polish them for publication. And as I alluded to earlier in the interview, when I spoke about writing for the Montaña al Mar magazine, in Costa Rica, that was my first experience of giving structure to those ideas. And it was so helpful. Because now we’re walking that balance out of the writer solo in the room and in the collaborative environment.

And then when you write for publication, that is another key piece, I feel, of practicing. Your early publications won’t be as good as your later ones. I mean, never say never because you could have a really, really awesome first time that you tried to do something like a lot of artists do. And then, you know, then the doer will kick in and the one who wants to try to do that again and try to make it as good as the first time. So we see that with a lot of musical artists. It’s almost more easy to hear in music than it is to see in writing, but it happens in all craft when you first start something, that one who’s trying so hard to be the writer isn’t there and the writing flows, and then the more you practice.

And it’s the same thing with meditation. That happens with meditation too. Sometimes the first time people come to meditation, they will have great, deep profound meditation. And then they’ll start trying to meditate. And that’s when it becomes a more restless experience until you learn to consciously tune out the the doer.

For me, that has been my spiritual practice of Self-Inquiry, using what I learned from my husband, but which is a lineage from Ramana Maharshi in India. And if anybody wants to look up that teaching, it is really profound. And the reason that I got hooked on it is because of our mutual friend Carl Jung. Carl Jung wrote a forward to Ramana Maharshi’s book. And I write about that in Wake Up in Love. I write about how I was very uncertain being a Catholic raised woman to go to a meditation class and start taking instruction from a man in a dhoti. But at the same time, when I read that Carl Jung had written the forward to Ramana Maharshi’s book, I said, you know what, I’m going to give this guy a chance.

And so the Self-Inquiry practice of taking any anxiety I had inward, including the anxiety of ‘I need to write. How do I write? This needs to get done.’ You know, ‘I’m not a writer yet’. Well, who thinks that? I do. And then I was able to be like, oh, I’m not the one. If I’m aware of the one who wants to be a writer, am I that? No, I have to be something so much vaster so much greater, so much beyond words.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Two things come to mind for me, from what you’ve just said. First is that writing for publication can be a really important part of our process. So for me, blogging filled that that way of writing. And I started a blog in 2010 for exactly that reason. I think it helped me to work out what I wanted to write and how I want to write it. So that was an important part of my writing for publication journey.

Penelope Love: Yeah. That’s beautiful. And I think blogging has definitely filled that… I’ve never formally read it or heard it stated anywhere that there’s a sort of like structure or balance you need to hit as a writer to develop your craft. But you know, maybe in our conversation here, we’re coming up with a sort of template that people can use, which is, make sure you’re doing some free writing or Morning Page styles and make sure you’re also doing some structured writing for publication. And that will help you develop your craft into a well-rounded craft.

Terri Connellan: I love that. And the other thing that came to me from what you were saying too, is that it’s a continuing sort of self-development, self-growth such as you went through with your meditation, which is about the mindset of writing too, isn’t it? It’s about , how we see ourselves as a writer and how we respond to our calling, which I think you’ve mentioned a few times today as we’ve spoken. Yeah, just so important.

So this is the Create Your Story podcast. So a question I’m going to ask people each time on the calls is how have you created your story over your lifetime? For me ‘create your story’ is that idea of being active. Active self-leader, active creator in our story and the decisions we make, turning points. It’s a big question. I know, but just what pops up for you around, how have you created your story over your lifetime?

Penelope Love: How fun to dance with you in this question, Terri especially knowing that this will be the podcast question that everybody gets asked. It’s beautiful one. You know, I think I struggled the most when I tried to create my story. And we could look at that literally with the years of struggle that I experienced in trying to write my memoir and get it to a publishing point prematurely.

And that was really, really painful. It started in the book in Wake Up in Love when I said I’m going to write my book of love and my husband questioned, maybe I wasn’t ready yet. And that was my first time turning inward with this process, but that was not the only time I had to turn inward about the idea of wanting to have my writing out there in the world.

And when it wasn’t happening, I’d really have to take it back inward to that question of like, who’s doing the writing, who is the creator of my story. And when I merged with that which is creating the story through my meditations, then I could become the instrument. Like the body mind Penelope could become used and played as an instrument in order to write and show a story and show one perspective of the human experience.

So I would say that’s how I created my story, but really without creating my story, with surrendering to that, which is creating the story.

Terri Connellan: Oh, that’s so beautiful. Yeah. And I think that it’s often that tension again, we’ve used the word tension a lot, but life’s a lot of tensions between what we want to do. And then also allowing, like that, being/ doing tension too, isn’t it?

Penelope Love: Yeah. I love the word tension. You know, I used to be so afraid of the word tension and you know, my counselors and anxiety. And I mean, I can’t believe I didn’t even touch on this yet. Although I did a little bit with the idea that editing is a great outlet for the type of hypervigilant upbringing that I had, but also OCD. I had OCD and depression and these types of things that create a lot of tension in one’s life. But when you look at even sexual energy, that leads to orgasm is full of tension. And like, I love tension because when it releases, it’s freedom. And so why should we fight with tension? And when we stopped fighting with tension and we actually are able to find the joy, the peace, the bliss, the orgasm, a lot easier. Yeah.

Terri Connellan: That’s wonderful. Yeah. I think that’s great. It’s about that, again, reframing of what we go through and just shifting our mindset to, to embrace something rather than fighting it all the time. So I think that’s a valuable insight.

Penelope Love: Yeah. So I’m happy we played with the word ‘tension’ today and I love it. And I don’t even mean to take the tension out of tension. Well, you can’t, but the idea is like if tension is there, let it be there. Like enjoy it because it is part of the human experience to love, to relish, to be like, frustrated that something’s not coming to terms yet or coming into being yet, because you know, when it does, it’s going to be so much more joyful than you can ever imagine. And that I know from publishing the book.

Terri Connellan: I can relate to that. I can relate to that too. The many times I nearly gave up because of that tension. And I think it’s that sort of pushing through and that Yeah, that just desire for completion and commitment to ourselves is really important.

So, you know my book Wholehearted: Self-leadership for women in transition very, very well because you’ve been on an intimate journey with me and you know about some of the tips that I recommend, but what are your top wholehearted self-leadership tips and practices, especially for women.

Penelope Love: You know, it’s an honor to be asked that question by the woman who wrote the book on wholehearted leadership, because I’m like, Hmm, what else could I add to that book? Or what else could I add to that body of wisdom? And I’ll have to reach back into my early experience of Sadhana again, spiritual practice. And I make reference to this in Wake Up in Love as well. I was given a tool by my teacher called the conscious daily planning sheets. And that is a process of setting your daily agenda with intentions. So you’re not only writing down what you have to do, but the feeling of completion or the feeling of connection that you want to have when you’re doing those activities.

So you’re spending your time at night, doing your daily agenda for the next day. And you’re practicing those feelings before you go to bed and you’re taking them into sleep with you. So that the next day, when you wake up and you go through your day, your day’s already played out in your subconscious mind as you’ve been sleeping and it becomes the way you wanted to feel the night before it starts to happen and unfold in an effortless way.

And the practice of this daily sheet actually ultimately removes the doer, the sense of doership or volition, from your daily activities. And that’s where you find a sense of surrender and freedom and more creativity in your life when you practice this. So in addition to the daily agenda part of the sheets, it has a daily review where you’re looking at, and as a Virgo, you’ll love this, a checklist. Did I exercise today? Did I do conscious reading? Not only reading, you know, the tabloids, but did I read a book by an awakened Sage? Did I let that highest consciousness, Rumi poems, did I let those poems slip into my heart today?

Did I eat consciously? How present was I when I was working? There’s a whole checklist on these sheets. And there’s also a walkthrough of the self-inquiry and it’s broken down into the questions of the process that eventually becomes an automatic happening as you practice inquiry. But the sheets are like training.

So they go through each of the steps of the inquiry and you will take anything that made you upset during the day. And you would use the self-inquiry process with that to get behind the sense of I that has the problem and to find the solution. And then to go in forward into the communications you need to have with the people who were involved in the upsetting situation to clear the space and keep the space clear so that you can move forward with your life in a productive way.

And so these sheets, they took about an hour to do every night. And then at the end of the month you’d have 30 sheets. And you would take a log of all the things that upset you and you would write them down again. And you could look and see, do I have repeating patterns of upset? Are things continuing to upset me? Because if they keep coming up, you know what, you’re not getting clear. You’re not taking that inquiry piece all the way home. And so it was a really beautiful process that I was given by Nick, my husband, my teacher. And in the context of the conscious living center that we had, and everybody who lived there did the sheets and you know, the communal center where we lived, this came in really handy because in our communications with each other, and if something upsetting happened during the day, we would resolve it right then in there. And if it wasn’t resolved on the spot, it was at least resolved by the end of the day, before we went to bed and those problems were not carried forward into the day. And it created an efficient and beautiful and loving organisation. And I feel I applied those skills that I used and learned, the muscles that I built from the sheets, in my life. And that was a very wholehearted practice for me that I did for many years. And I affectionately now call them the holy sheets because the idea of doing and cataloging all of these things about your everyday. It takes somebody with a dedicated mind, who really wants to wake up to the truth. But when you commit yourself to that process, there’s no limit to what’s possible.

Terri Connellan: Well, thank you for sharing your practice with us and something that’s been honed over a long period of time too which I’m sure has made a huge difference to how you live and how you create your story. So thank you for sharing that with us.

You just spoke about poetry. Is there anything you’d like to read us from Wake Up in Love before we close?

Penelope Love: Sure. You know, my book is a tapestry of poetry and prose, and it’s funny, I didn’t know I could write poetry until we started, I hopped on Instagram about 2014 and you know, there’s some newsletter and I got an account and people started posting the challenges and I started taking photos with my phone and then these little beautiful ideas would come to me as I was taking the photos or looking through my photo album and they started to come to me as poems. And I taken poetry in college. I got a C, and I was pretty much a straight A student and it was really upsetting to me that I had gotten a C in poetry. I had to get that doer taken out of the way. That one who thought it was writing the poetry and just allow these, these ideas and words to come. And so it was a very beautiful addition to the book that came later that had I published the book three or four years into the writing, it would not have the poetry dimension.

I’d love to share one. And I think the best one to share is, this one is called, Take a Backward Bow.

All the exploration is preparation

for the moment the wind blows just so –

you forget everything you know

and fall in love with the endless show

as you take a backward bow

to the miracle of how

The One you’ve been looking for

finds You

and the exploration begins

anew

Terri Connellan: Thank you. That was just magical.

Penelope Love: I love that one because it’s not only about meeting a soulmate in life, but it’s also about the creative process and ultimately about meeting yourself.

Terri Connellan: Beautiful. Thank you. So I thoroughly recommend to people to seek out Wake Up in Love. We’ll put the links in the show notes. Penelope, can you tell people where they can find out more about you, your book and your work online?

Penelope Love: Yes. Sure. I have a website that is accessible through PenelopeLove.com and I am also active on Instagram. My username there is @penelopelovely

Terri Connellan: Wonderful. And it’s been such a joy to connect with you over many years on Instagram, as the editor of my book and and through our blog writing together. And, just so many beautiful conversations. It’s been such a joy to share those with others today. Thank you so much.

Penelope Love: Yes, Terri, thank you. It is a joy to add to our body of conversation and I look forward to many more years of our friendship going forward.

Terri Connellan: Thank you.