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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!

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 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.

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transition work life

Your body of work: the greatest gift for transition to a bright new life

February 22, 2018

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

Leaving an organisation where I have worked for over 30 years, I reflect on this transition and the gift of learning from my body of work over time.

Leaving a long-term job role

Today marks an auspicious day when I leave an organisation where I have worked for over 30 years. It’s not without sadness. And it’s been a strange conclusion in many ways. I’ve been on leave for some time caring for my mother who recently passed away after a long battle with terminal cancer. So not being in the workplace as I leave, the usual farewells have not been part of the process. It’s as if I have disappeared off into the sunset on another journey.

This is in part very true. I realised about two years ago that I no longer enjoyed my job or working in the organisation. The organisation had changed and so had I. It was time to get back to my long-harboured creative loves and pursuits that lingered in the margins of my days. The books and creative inspiration I craved and hung onto as I made a long commute to work by car and train became key. This liminal time became a passage of transition as I sowed the seeds of my leaving into the stitches and seams of my days. I realised my heart was no longer in it as I applied for jobs I didn’t really want.

In truth, this leaving had been a long time coming and at this stage, I had already started to move on and transition to another life. The one I really wanted to be living. You may know that feeling – your heart has left the building, or relationship or place. And you walk in the door each day feeling so empty dragging yourself through the day until it’s time to leave. So you make a plan to leave for good to create a new life.

The greatest gift

My time in the organisation – a large government department focused on adult vocational education, TAFE NSW – was not without great joy and opportunity. The greatest gift of this transition has been to reflect on my body of work over time to plan a vision for a new life.

It’s so easy when we feel the sadness of moving on to devalue the past, all that we are and all that the organisation and its people have given us. The opportunities, the connections, the people, the learning, the vision, the strategy, the excitement – it can all get snowed over in a narrative of loss. There’s a tendency to risk losing the good and the valuable continuing threads with all of these feelings.

Pain is a player in this scenario too as we may feel undervalued. In my situation, I’ve been made ‘redundant’, my job ‘deleted’ in a restructure I am no longer a part of. The language itself is a challenge to deal with, not exactly creating the best of feelings. We can tie our self-image to this boatload of emotions and feel ourselves being towed behind it, awash with anger. In this, we can risk losing focus on the valuable gift of the resources of such timing.

But the greatest gift hidden in all of these experiences is what Pamela Slim calls our ‘body of work’ – the thread that ties our story together. This is the story we have been crafting and creating from our desires, our dreams, the opportunities, the interactions, the people we worked with, the projects envisaged, the products created and the services delivered. Therein lies the seeds of so much wisdom.

Your body of work

It took a painful experience for me to realise all of this and to start to move on. A chance gut-wrenching workplace experience one day was the catalyst that made me realise I could no longer stay. I had to make changes. The next day I reached out to my friend, Victoria Smith, a life-coach and inspiration, someone who’s been down this road before me, to help me track a new path.

I’d reached a low point and I knew I could no longer navigate this time by myself. My coaching series with Victoria became the blueprint for a new life. A conversation about Pamela Slim’s ‘Body of Work’ in that coaching series was a pivotal piece that helped to tie my transition journey together.

The trick with a wise transition is to reflect on the driving force and heart of your work over time. What really drives you? Across all the job roles you have done, what are the recurring passions? What makes you come alive? Which themes occur in various ways again and again?

Pamela Slim says that her motivation in writing the book was to:

find a set of “new” skills for the world of work in the twenty-first century that would provide options, flexibility and freedom to workers across every mode, in every industry.

Her work enables us to do just that by identifying these core elements:

defining your roots
naming your ingredients
choosing your work mode
creating and innovating
surfing the fear
collaborating
knowing your definition of success
sharing your story

My body of work in transition

As I’ve moved through this time of transition, I have worked through all these areas. You will see these themes woven through my blog posts, as I’ve shared my story along the way. I have realised that the key threads that tie my story together are:

making a difference (always a motivator for me, sharing skills and knowledge to help others);
teaching, coaching, mentoring, blogging (different forms of empowering others and sharing knowledge, skills and experience);
creativity (innovating, leading it, fostering it, writing);
leadership and self-leadership (leading others means leading yourself first);
being a reflective practitioner and knowing myself (a constant search for self-understanding, professional development and reflecting on experiences in work and other life roles);
writing (the authentic heart of it all, being a writer, becoming a teacher of writing and weaving it as a strategic and professional superpower in my life);
introversion and intuition as key strengths and gifts as an INTJ, the captains of my personality ship I needed to learn to work with; and,
in all of this, being wholehearted in how we live and work, not bringing parts of ourselves to the door of any workplace or relationship.

Bringing all this together in a new way into a new life and business is exciting but challenging work. It’s taken consistent work towards my vision sustained over time. And it is about hard work and not luck as Kerstin Pilz reminds us in this beautiful piece, ‘Why luck had nothing to do with my self-directed life.’

Making a path for my transition

So finding myself feeling half-hearted, experiencing a ‘loss of heart’ as Lynn Hanford-Day describes it, a kind of burnout, I shifted to a job-share arrangement 18 months ago to plan a new future. Coaching with Victoria helped me shape this new path and I knew the ingredients for the future, based on the key threads of my past and taking them forward.

I set my goals of:

becoming a Beautiful You Coaching Academy life coach (achieved July 2017)
becoming a certified Jung/Myers-Briggs personality type practitioner (achieved December 2016)
working with my Introverted Intuition preference as a key compass especially via tarot and oracle card tools (achieved via courses, personality work and ongoing practice in 2017)

Setting and achieving these goals has been the backbone of my transition journey, with key learning milestones stepping the way.

Core desired feelings as guides to transition

My core desired feelings are at the heart of everything I do. I want to feel and convey being:

creative, connected, flowing, intuitive, poetic.

Connection especially has been a theme now and finding new kinds of networks. Not being in a traditional workplace can mean a loss of connection. At a time of leaving the workplace, I’ve developed rich connections with a beautiful community of fellow life coaches. We support and inspire each other. I’ve also had the chance to develop deep connections with valued coaching clients who have honoured me through sharing their journey.

Via social media, especially Instagram, I have found the most amazing kindred creative souls. Through Quiet Writing, women have shared wholehearted stories of transition inspiring me and others as we reflect on and initiate change. The hallmarks are startlingly similar across the stories, though they play out in different ways. I am meeting more and more online friends in real life in the most incredible encounters where we share our stories. The personality type community is another tribe of people where I feel a strong connection and source of learning and growth. And I know I will reconnect in different ways over time with many special people from the workplace.

Creating your story

As we move through times of transition, we can create our story, as George Bernard Shaw reminds us. The special ingredients of our body of work, our drivers and passions, are the greatest gifts and teachers on the journey of change. Painful as it might be at times to feel redundant, rejected or no longer belonging to the team, it’s an opportunity to create ourselves anew.

This time can be an opportunity to interrogate what Steven Pressfield calls our ‘shadow careers’, where our lives are an imitation of the real thing we want. He suggests in ‘Turning Pro’:

If you’re dissatisfied with your current life, ask yourself what your current life is a metaphor for.

That metaphor will point you toward you true calling.

So now I move full steam into a new career focused on being a writer and a personality and life coach supporting women to create their wholehearted story at times of transition. I know the ingredients of my body of work. Writing, creativity, making a difference, coaching, teaching, reflecting, sharing knowledge, leadership, self-leadership, introversion and intuition are the threads taking my story forward in support of others.

Distilling all of this brings me to the focus of this transition and new phase of life:

choosing to journey deeper into your wholehearted story

This is the theme of my journey and body of work. And it is what I offer to you through my writing, this blog, my coaching and personality type work and my intuitive tarot work. My deepest threads weaving together into a new story to inspire yours.

Thank you for your support on this journey. May you find your true calling, bringing together all the elements of your body of work forward into a new life. I look forward to sharing my newly formed self-sustaining creative life with you in all its guises in support of your own.

If you’d like to find out how to work with me, you can find out more here. I’d love to work with you!

Image of me by Lauren of Sol + Co

Thank you

With gratitude and love to my family and all my key influences, special friends, life coaches, teachers, coaching clients and fellow travellers on the journey this past year or so, especially my dear friend Victoria Smith.

Thanks to TAFE NSW and all my colleagues for our time together. It is a time I treasure and one from which the deepest friendships and connections have come. I’ve been blessed with inspiring leaders and mentors who have taught me so much about leadership and self-leadership.

Much love too to my beautiful mum, Shirley, who supported my journey transition generously and with the greatest enthusiasm even as her journey was coming to a close. This truly is the greatest of gifts for which I am forever grateful, her body of work being the deepest love of family.

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Joy – 18 inspiring quotes on enjoying what you do and love

February 16, 2018

Joy is my word for the year for 2018. Here are 18 quotes about joy, spirit and soulful work sparking my year. I hope they inspire you too.

Choosing a word for the year is like deciding on a destination for how you want to feel but not knowing how it will play out. It’s like setting an intention for feeling the tone of the year with no plan for the details. Inviting the energy of a word into your life, you wait to see how it unfolds and manifests.

PASSION was my word for the year for 2017. It was such an inspiring way to get back to what I love as a guiding force in my life. I shared 17 quotes about passion about the driving energy of doing what you love. Last year was a challenging journey which took me back to the heart of what I love as the map and soul of its next steps.

I discovered passion was about feeling your authentic heart, in my case writing, and getting it into its rightful place in your life. It was about following my intuition more deeply and finding a vision that went beyond the everyday. Moreover, it was a guide for transition in a year of crossing over to a new place, sensing potential, seeing opportunity and knowing how to combine my skills in new ways. It was about learning to play bigger and weave all that has happened to me into a book, a new way of living, a new career, a creative life. In there also was an understanding of my uniqueness, the elements that combine as passions within me. As Meryl Streep reminds us:

What makes you different and weird, that’s your strength.

Finding joy

So in turning the corner into 2018 after a challenging time, joy was beckoning me. Sometimes you can take a while to work through your word for the year; other times it arrives, more obviously and insistently. And then there are synchronicities also, like the card my daughter gave me for Christmas. It was a beautifully crafted message of JOY made from handpainted Egyptian papyrus. This sealed the deal perfectly.

As often happens with your word of the year, you have a sense of its meaning but a deeper dive yields surprises and connections. And there is serendipity and further synchronicity too.

This week via an inspiring webinar on Energy Matters in Coaching with Meg Mann I was introduced to the work of David R Hawkins. In particular, we were shown his map of the scale of consciousness as we progress through achieving greater levels of consciousness. And my eye zeroed in on JOY sitting right up near the top described by way of self-view as “complete” and emotion as “serenity”.

David R Hawkins says of the energy of this phase:

As we move up towards this level, inner joy, quiet, and inner knowingness begin to take place. Within this energy field, we connect with something that is rocklike and ever present.

So this year’s focus is no lightweight endeavour but one that has enormous potential to calm and ground me. I knew choosing joy this year was always going to be a challenging task and this scale just helped highlight this.

Being unapologetically joyful

As part of a Goddess Roadtrip Sydney workshop recently on ‘being seen’, we were asked by Jade McKenzie to stand up and say to the group what we were unapologetically going to be this year. Given my focus for the year, I chose “joyful”, but when I stood up to say the words “This year I will be unapologetically joyful…”, I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. I was so mired in grief after the very recent loss of my mother. Eventually, I did say the words with the support of a room of beautiful women who held space for me, quietly, as I got there. But in this moment, I realised the intensity and depth of exploration in this journey of learning about joy this year. In part, it’s about allowing the juxtaposition of grief and joy in my life, something that can seem an uncomfortable fit just now.

Quotes about joy

I love quotes. The distilled wisdom of others in the form of words we can hold, repeat, learn from and reflect on is a balm and portal for me.

I found the 17 quotes on PASSION last year were a place to start from, a way to begin to explore the terrain of what it meant. Frequently, I returned to those words as I did to the Pinterest page I created on PASSION. Both are great ways to unravel the multiple meanings and nuances of words as we seek to explore them in our lives.

So to commence my exploration of JOY in 2018, here are 18 quotes about JOY to begin to tease out its contours and character for this year’s journey. I hope you find some inspiration for your journey this year.

“We cannot cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live in joy.” – Joseph Campbell

“If all you did was just look for things to appreciate, you would live a joyous, spectacular life.” – Abraham-Hicks

“Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” – Lao Tzu

“The body heals with play, the mind heals with laughter and the spirit heals with joy.” – Proverb

“Feelings are just visitors. Let them come and go.” – Mooji

“Joy comes to us in ordinary moments. We risk missing out when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.” – Brene Brown

“Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.” – Anne Lamott

“Strive not to get more done, but to have less to do.” – Francine Jay

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.” – Maya Angelou

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” – Rumi

“Your joy is where you locate your white hot Truth – your pure-burning is-ness, from where you have the creative power to turn thought into matter.” – Danielle LaPorte

“Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.” – Marianne Williamson

“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” – C. S. Lewis

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.” – Annie Proulx

“Don’t wait for everything to be perfect before you decide to enjoy your life.” – Joyce Meyer

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” – Oscar Wilde

“JOY is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the street, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.” – David Whyte

Do read the whole David Whyte’s beautiful meditation on JOY from which these words come. It is pure magic. They are such a balm for the soul. It seems like much of this work on joy is about spirit, inner stillness and soul, quiet writing perhaps. I welcome joy in as we venture forward together getting to know each other in a deeper way this year.

Share your thoughts

Which is your favourite quote from these ones? Or do you have another quote or thought on joy that inspires you? What does joy mean to you? Would love to hear – share your thoughts in the comments!

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Breakdown to breakthrough – my wholehearted life

January 31, 2018

This guest post from Lynn Hanford-Day takes us on her journey from breakdown to breakthrough and finding new ways to connect and create a wholehearted life.

This is the sixth 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 Lynn Hanford-Day as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. My sincere thanks to Lynn for sharing her story and photographs and stunning artwork. Lynn’s wholehearted story tells of how she moved from burnout and a corporate HR career to working with sacred geometry and the divine feminine and crafting a multi-faceted career as artist, coach, facilitator and therapist working with women in transition and organisations going through change. Read on to find out more!

A heart attack of the soul

“You’re lucky. Some people have an actual heart attack, and some of them die” said a friend. His words really struck a chord in me. I may not have had a cardiac arrest yet I felt dead, lifeless, unable to function physically, psychologically, emotionally. My heart was still beating and that meant I was alive, apparently. I had flirted with burnout many times over previous years and had already read ‘The Joy of Burnout’ by Dina Glouberman three times. I had even done a retreat with her on the Greek island of Skyros for God’s sake!

But this was the big one. It is five years ago this January I woke up unable to move. I’d spent the previous three or four months feeling tired and by the time Christmas arrived, I felt utterly exhausted. I remember telling work colleagues I felt like I had run into a brick wall. I thought I needed a holiday and all would be well again. I never returned to my job as an HR Director, in fact, I didn’t work for another 18 months. During that time I gave up my job and I then had to sell my house because I ran out of money and following that I moved house four times in two years, thanks to the vaguery of the rental market here in the UK.

In January 2013 I was told I had severe clinical depression and chronic stress. I certainly had burnout of epic proportions. I spent three months in denial about this, and, paradoxically I began to recover when I accepted I was ill. Just doing the washing up was a major event. Even now I find it incredible that I didn’t realise I was ill and that I’d been suffering from insomnia for months. That swallowing Nytol tablets by the fistful and glugging chamomile tea at 4am to help me sleep wasn’t normal and didn’t work. I didn’t feel depressed, I felt exhausted and spent. It was my body that made the decision for me to stop working and force me to lay down. Most of the time I didn’t know if I was sinking or floating. Much of the time I felt I was in freefall, falling backwards down a deep, deep well, never knowing when I would land at the bottom. I was being given a lesson in the art of S-L-O-W. And even though I wasn’t busy on the outside I was very busy on the inside.

For me, burnout is about loss of heart. There was no heart attack, but I was turned to ash and I wasn’t even sure whether there were some embers glowing. My internal landscape was like those images after the forest fires in California, an apocalyptic scorched landscape. Both my Doctor and my Counsellor said that this had been coming for many years, and looking back on my life I can see the truth of that. They told me that recovery was possible, yet I wasn’t sure what would rise from those ashes.

Place, space and belonging

Sanctuary arrived in the form of a dear friend who had retired to Dingle on the west coast of Ireland. ’Come and stay’, she said, and so I did, for a week at a time every few weeks. And so began my love affair with Ireland. I discovered the magnificence of the mountains, the sea and the sky and how I loved the sound of the wind from the Atlantic gales. I stood on the clifftops and felt I could breathe. All that spaciousness in the landscape and the seascape gave me peace. And what a joy that no-one knew who I was. To the local folk, I was simply Lynn, and this was such a relief and a liberation as I no longer knew who the hell I was. In my dead and drowning energy I began to feel glimmers of life in Ireland, and I felt a belonging to a place that was missing in my other life. At some level the wildness of the land connected with the wildness in me.

An unlived life

In the slow months of recovery, as I made my way back from the descent into the underworld, I realised that I needed to change my life. I recognised my workaholism for what it was, the numbing of pain and unhappiness, and that for me to continue as before would be a massive act of self-harm, a suicide. I developed a curiosity about the divine feminine and the archetypes that lived in me, about mid-life transition, and what Jung calls the shadow life or the unlived life. I spent a lot of time exploring the transpersonal realm as I connected with my soul. At some point, the following poem arrived in my life and its message became my guiding star.

An unlived life

By Dawna Markova

I will not die an unlived life.

I will not live in fear

Of falling or catching fire.

I choose to inhabit my days,

To allow my living to open me,

To make me less afraid,

More accessible;

To loosen my heart

Until it becomes a wing,

A torch, a promise,

I choose to risk my significance,

To live so that which came to me as seed

Goes to the next as blossom,

And that which came to me as blossom,

Goes on as fruit.

The slowing down of life gave space to the whispers of my heart and soul and I began to seek synchronicities and to just say ‘Yes’ to new people and new experiences as they presented themselves to me.

On becoming an Artist

Very early in my illness, I found a class in meditative art, which I had never heard of, but it contained the word meditation so that meant it was good for me! In class, I kept drawing circles. Another source of peace that quietened the incessant chatter in my head were colouring books, long before they became so popular. I would colour mandalas and kaleidoscopic patterns for hours and my monkey mind would sleep, much like it did when standing on the cliffs at the edge of the world at Dunquin in Ireland. As I made peace with my body I became curious about sacred geometry and mandalas and looked for a class. I couldn’t find any so in 2014 I bought a book on sacred geometry and a pair of compasses and began to teach myself. This interest became a passion and drawing mandalas became my meditation.

Later in 2013, my creativity called for more nourishment so I looked for an art holiday in Ireland and what I found was an art therapy summer school at the Cork Institute which included a module on Carl Jung and mandalas. This really appealed as I had qualified as a psychotherapist in 2008 (I did my 4-year training whilst being a single mum and in a full-time job as an HR Director). Then, on a visit to my local art shop, I saw a poster for the Central St Martins Summer School in London. I found a one week course in Expressive Art, which sounded like you didn’t need to have any experience as I was seeking art for non-artists.

When I got there I wondered what on earth I had done! I was the second eldest in the room, the one person older than me was the teacher who was 72. The young woman next to me was 18 and waiting to get her exam results. I had never used an easel and had no idea how to set it up, much like doing battle with a deck chair. And then in September 2013, I heard of an online course by Flora Bowley in a ‘thing’ called intuitive art. A whole new world opened up as I was astonished to discover the quality of art courses that are available online.

Art was my salvation and brought me connection with my creativity and my intuition. Little did I know that these were my first steps towards becoming an artist. If someone had told me in 2013 that in 2015 I would be exhibiting and selling art, would have a website and take commissions I would have laughed. I hadn’t held a paintbrush since school and that was nearly 40 years ago. As for geometry, I hated that at school! Now my protractor is my friend. And during 2016 I took a 10-month teacher training with Chris Zydel in California in expressive and intuitive art, which I completed in February 2017.

Stepping into a new way of being

Art has sustained me through a transition into a very different life. As much as I tried to return to a full-time job in the corporate world, the universe was having none of it! Reluctantly, I formed my company and became self-employed and then, out of the blue, two weeks later, an old work colleague contacted me to ask what I was doing workwise. Within two weeks I was facilitating a team development programme which turned into an 18-month coaching assignment with eight people. I began taking personal clients for coaching and mentoring and using my training and experience as a psychotherapist and as a coach. I trained others in facilitation skills and group processes. And I took on consultancy contracts in Human Resources and change management.

This sounds easier than it was. As my health recovered I also suffered a significant deterioration in another direction. The sibling to depression is anxiety and during 2014 my declining bank account and constant uncertainty of the house rental market threw me into panic attacks. In an attempt to escape the anxiety I became desperate to get a permanent job in order to give myself a sense of security and safety. The constant stream of rejections made me feel even worse.

From breakdown to breakthrough

My body closed down, my heart turned to ash and catapulted me into a new life and a new way of being. I don’t recommend a catastrophic breakdown. Yet it is also true that for me breakdown was ultimately a breakthrough and I discovered I had an unknown talent and that turned out to be something I love. Claiming the title *artist* was a tricky one! As was wrestling with notions of identity and who I am in the world, letting go of an old self and an old identity. You know, it was a couple of years ago I stopped myself from buying yet another self-help book about how to change your life when I realized I have done that.

My life is radically different to how it was in 2012. I earn my living doing the type of work I want to do. I make a difference in the world by helping people change their lives. I have a hobby that keeps me sane and brings me enormous pleasure, and much to my delight people want to buy my art.

My wholehearted life

For me, the wholehearted life is the opposite of an unlived life. A wholehearted life brings fulfilment and contentment, an inner peace and when anxiety arises I know I am being given a message that I am out of alignment. I now pay attention to my physical, mental and emotional energy and I follow my heart in saying Yes and saying No. I have learned that saying Yes to the unexpected that shows up in life can bring the most amazing experiences, such as offering to write this guest blog post, which is another first for me. A wholehearted life isn’t necessarily easy and I have to beware old habits. In many ways it is about living a simple life, pleasure comes from being with friends and family, love is what really matters, and learning the art and act of self-compassion is a work in progress for me.

What next? As we enter 2018 I have chosen my word of the year to be Nourish. My mum died of pancreatic cancer on 2 November and death brings a renewed focus on life in the way that it always does. Grief and loss bring me to another transition and another opportunity to care for and nourish myself whilst I continue to shape my wholehearted life. I want to develop my mindfulness practice and train as a teacher of self-compassion. I want to be more consistent with my creative pursuits, to write and to paint, to hold more classes and workshops. I want to host my Renaissance Woman retreat which I couldn’t do as mum was dying. I want to develop my coaching practice and run more women’s groups. I want to feel the sun on my face and the warm water and soft sand on my toes.

Key book companions along the way

I Will Not Die an Unlived Life: Reclaiming passion and purpose by Dawna Markova

The Joy of Burnout: How the end of the world can be a new beginning by Dina Glouberman

About Lynn Hanford-Day

Lynn Hanford-Day is an artist, coach, facilitator and therapist working with women in transition and organisations going through change. She is especially interested in creativity and intuition, positive psychology and strengths, helping people to access and express their inner wisdom. She helps women discover clarity and confidence, path and purpose. Her art and more about her as a coach can be found at www.sacredintuitiveart.com. You can also connect with Lynn via Instagram and email lynn.hanford-day@sophrentos.com

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.

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!

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Embracing a creative life – a wholehearted story

December 30, 2017

This guest post from Jade Herriman is all about embracing a multipassionate, creative life as the key to more wholehearted living.

This is the fifth 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 Jade Herriman as a ‘Wholehearted Stories’ contributor. My sincere thanks to Jade for the contribution of her story and the photographs she shares from her work. Jade combines the creativity of art therapy with coaching to help people see themselves and their situation in new ways. Her wholehearted story tells of how she came to embrace the multiple dimensions of a creative life. It is a really valuable reflection piece as we end a busy year and many consider changes in their life for 2018. Read on to find out more!

Building and leaving a career

This is a story of building and leaving a career. It is the story of tasting burnout, choosing healing and moving toward a softer more creative life. Most importantly this story is not finished, it’s still being written.

These days I love the mystery and watching it unfold, without a firm and clear plan but rather trusting intuition and the accumulation of small choices to lead me somewhere new.

Over 15 years I worked hard in various jobs related to environmental management and sustainability. I had been keen on science and environmental issues since I was a kid and wanted to get in there and make a difference. From starting out after uni with no clue about how to apply for work and very little useful work experience to ending up in a senior role in a research organization managing large projects, I had a steady job with long-term career prospects. On the face of it, I was achieving what I had set out to do – so why was it feeling so hollow?

After a while, I began to feel sick of the professional mask required to work in these roles, the way that people came together to speak about work issues but often not what was in their hearts. I felt like the workshops I was running with professionals from different industries were sitting at a very surface level, all about the mind, but rarely about what mattered most to people. I longed to help facilitate more meaningful connection. I wanted to create spaces where people could be honest and share their hopes and fears as well as their competency and their ideas for work.

Over time I started to have a yearning to do something more creative. Our work was deeply creative in a sense – we were always designing and innovating, but I yearned to do something that involved the visual arts and making things. I started studying art therapy, part-time, on my weekends and days off, just in case one day I might find a way to use it.

Burnout helped me take the leap

I had always been quite competent but not very confident, terrified on the inside of all that was required of me, but reliable and seemingly calm. I liked doing well and getting lots done but at times the burden of what I was carrying felt too much, and I would eventually buckle under the weight of the stress.

Burnout was a hard teacher. Finally, I learnt that my body had limits and that I could not be in stress mode indefinitely without it affecting my ability to continue. Burnout taught me that downtime is important to balance the busy periods. It taught me that constant worry about the future is not helpful. It also taught me that I still exist without work, without a title, without ‘outputs’.

In art therapy, we often talk about the hero’s journey and the descent into the ‘nadir’. This is the challenging place at our lowest where we feel that part of us is dying a symbolic death – before our ascent back into the ordinary world refreshed, wiser and more enriched by the journey. Burnout was this for me – the worst fear realized and endured – the catalyst that helped me leave my job and past career and take baby steps in a new field.

Feeling my way as an art therapist and coach

When I decided to start my own business, I gave myself permission to try things to see what I liked. In some ways work for me had always been doing ‘what was needed’ or ‘what I had been asked to do’. This was a chance to ‘feel’ my way through life – what actually felt satisfying, enjoyable and absorbing. Without stress fuelling my actions, with time and space to do and not do, I was able to observe what tasks I was able to do joyfully without much effort.

I had to adjust my pace through the first year especially, as my body was still quite exhausted and recovering its energy. I dialled back my expectations and allowed myself to have days that weren’t very productive. More and more I listened to the quiet voice of my body and less to the fear-driven voice of my ego. It felt like Persephone, a popular archetype for the wounded healer, spending time periodically in the underworld before returning to the productive harvest of summer aboveground. I embraced yin and yang, light and dark, productivity and rest.

Starting again wasn’t always comfortable. It was a brand new area of work and rather than being an experienced practitioner, I was a beginner all over again. I had to adjust to no longer having big and fancy projects to talk about or other trappings that made my ego feel secure. I had to sit with grief, loss, self-doubt and feelings of failure that came up sometimes. A book that resonated with me especially at this time was Wild Creative by Tami Lynn Kent, a love song to a life lived intuitively and in tune with our physical selves.

Bringing together my passions and loves

What my new work brings me is a chance to sit with people in honesty and create a space where all feelings are welcome. In art therapy groups, we speak about all aspects of life – and there is often a bittersweet tone to the conversations, about loneliness, about challenges, about grief, loss, trauma and mental illness. But there is also joy, sweet playfulness, and heartfelt connection between participants. There are shifts and development for individuals on the most humble of levels that are also quite profound – as they stretch their windows of tolerance, as they develop confidence in themselves as a creative person, as they practice speaking and being listened to with respect. In coaching, clients navigate self-doubt as a step forward towards long-held dreams.

I love that my work involves art now – helping other people make friends with art, playing with art materials, attending client exhibitions, making art myself, facilitating spaces where people make art together and reflect on the insights it has for their lives.

It also involves design and creativity in terms of thinking of new workshops, new programs, new writing that might be helpful for my clients. I love problem-solving and brainstorming with my coaching clients. I love the way that each session draws on all that I have to offer and there is a requirement to be in the moment, fully absorbed and focused with that person, responding to the mood, situation, communication styles, needs and more of each client.

Embracing my scanner self and a meandering path

Another big part of the journey towards a more wholehearted life has been embracing the part of my personality that is enchanted with learning and novelty. After discovering Barbara Sher’s work on scanners (multipotentialites, multipassionates, renaissance folk), and especially her book Refuse to Choose, I have found it easier to be kind to myself about my moving passions. Beyond just kind, I also approach my multiple interests with more respect and curiosity. I look for underlying patterns between the things I am interested in and know that to be happy I must do what I love.

How wonderful when we can give ourselves permission to do what we love, and not be wracked with guilt about being ‘selfish’ because we realize that people doing what they love benefits us all.

I went on to train to become a coach with Barbara Sher. This was face-to-face training over five modules all held in Germany! Geez, that was a lesson in following my instincts to do what I love even if it ‘makes no sense’. Since then I have been honoured to work with amazing multipassionate people around the world as they take steps to bring their dream projects into being.

What this insight into my personality has mostly given me is lightness in holding onto whatever it is I’m working on now. So for example, while my creative life at the moment looks like being an art therapist and coach, I no longer define myself entirely by my roles. Instead, I give myself permission to always be learning about how I can contribute my skills in the world, and what configuration of work feels good to me. I know that this will change over time, and I am less attached to having a CV that ‘makes sense’ to others than I am committed to listening to my inner voice, my curiosity and my fascination to see what might be the next thing for me.

What is wholehearted to me?

Becoming more wholehearted has been about embracing my softer side, my fearful side, the side that needs rest and can’t always ‘produce’, my intuitive and heart connected side.

It has been about living through and beyond perfectionism, overwork and burnout. It has been about creating a more gentle and caring way of working that plays to my gifts not just my skills.

In some ways, it has been about letting go of control and being okay with not knowing how the river of my work and life will meander. As a keen gardener, I like to imagine my life as a creative garden, which might be replanted frequently and feature a different mix in the years to come. In part, being more wholehearted has also been about stepping back from work, and having it take up a smaller part of my life, and unhooking myself from the wheel of achievement as a primary driver.

Key book companions along the way

Wild Creative by Tami Lynn Kent

Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher

Live the Life you Love and Stop Just Getting By by Barbara Sher

The Soul’s Palette: Drawing on art’s transformative powers for health and well-being by Cathy Malchiodi

Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life by Parker J. Palmer

Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler

About Jade Herriman

Jade Herriman (Dip TAT, BSc and MSocSci) is a creative business owner, art therapist, artist and certified Barbara Sher life coach based in the Inner West of Sydney. She loves using art therapy and coaching to help people see themselves and their situations in new ways, and helping others create, connect and work towards their dreams. For more information, go to www.jadeherriman.com or connect via Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

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.

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!

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inspiration & influence intuition

How to write a new story in positive ways – Gemini Full Moon Tarot Reading

December 9, 2017

“The world needs a new story. Each of us needs a new story.”

Cathy Pagano, Wisdom of Astrology

“So find your tribe who shares your story and loves you for it! If you live out your story well, you will attract other people out of that dark, dead-end story into their own heart-stories.”

Cathy Pagano, Wisdom of Astrology

The Gemini Full Moon encourages us to write the new story of our lives. This reading reflects on ways to tell this new story and step through any fear.

Here are some thoughts on this Full Moon in Gemini from Mystic Mamma to set the scene for the energies available to us:

With Mercury just having turned retrograde, there is much to reflect on. This is a healing time as well as a time of self-mastery where we have an opportunity to cleanse our perceptions and open up to a new way. Time to upgrade our thinking and remember that we are free to perceive our experience in what ever way we choose.

Those final words above speak so powerfully to me now: “that we are free to perceive our experience in what ever way we choose.” Sometimes we forget the role our perceptions play. We have the ability to choose to create our story. One of my favourite quotes of all time is Peter Drucker’s:

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Gemini Full Moon energies

This Full Moon has powerful energies for writing and rewriting our story and creating our future. We can choose to connect with fear as our story. Or we can choose to see it as a story of love. It’s all about perspective, self-mastery, self-leadership and feeling like an active player in our lives instead of a passive recipient of circumstances. Whatever happens, we have choice in how we respond and how we find power and resourcefulness. And being our best or dream self can help create a more positive future – for us and others.

As Cathy Pagano reminds us in her post:

What have you discovered that can change your beliefs about yourself and the world? What new story comes to you as you shed your old story?…This is all about the stories we tell ourselves about life. Too often we gather facts that support our point of view so we don’t have to change our old story.

This made me think of Colette Baron-Reid’s fabulous definition of FEAR in her oracle cards as ‘False Evidence Appearing Real.’

We can tell ourselves any narrative we like. But with these energies, it’s time to create powerful authentic stories of the heart. Through this, we can connect with our heart tribe and community and help others tell their stories.

This is what Wholehearted Stories is all about here at Quiet Writing: wholehearted self-leadership and authentic, heartfelt storytelling so we can create new more powerful stories. Writing out how we have seen and experienced can be a way to get to the heart of the story we really want to live. This might be the one appearing in our shadow careers or trying to write itself in the margins of our life. And this storytelling can help others to recognise, shape and tell their story.

The current energies help us to write a new personal story in more positive ways.

Gemini Full Moon connections

Working with tarot via Tarot Narrative each day helps me to align with my intuition and with that of others. I’m also working with the cycles of the moon and intentions in each cycle to support my creativity. I’m fascinated with how the messages connect up across these intuitive practices and with those of other people.

As I write, the Page of Fire (Wands) from The Good Tarot has turned up twice in two days, followed by the Page of Water (Cups) with messages around beginning new adventures. It is as if we need to rewrite the story or see it from a fresh perspective to take advantage of these energies right now.

Even if you have felt, like I have this year, that circumstances can be overwhelming, we can always choose how we respond. We can also choose when to respond. I love this quote from Pindar’s Odes in the front of Anne Deveson’s book ‘Resilience’ :

In time the wind sags, and we hoist new sails.

So it’s all about new stories, new sails and new adventures right now as we head into the end of 2017. It’s all about the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Gemini Full Moon tarot reading tools:

For my reading for the Gemini Full Moon, I worked with:

This Full Moon in Gemini tarot spread by Sam Roberts aka @escapingstars on Instagram:

Deck wise, I worked with the Sakki Sakki Tarot deck by Monicka Clio Sakki, my favourite tarot deck especially for questions about creativity.

Tarot reading:

So here’s the reading:

This is another big and deep spread with eight cards like last month’s Taurus Full Moon reading. THE LOVERS was an interesting card to see arriving first up and had also recently appeared in my Tarot Narrative readings. This card speaks of choosing self-love in our relationship with ourselves. It also emphasises following our heart.

There are few swords appearing in the reading too, just as there have been many swords lately in my daily readings. In this reading, they are:

KING of SWORDS suggesting analytical creativity and focusing on how we use our mind
THREE of SWORDS reminding us about getting to the heart of things especially at challenging times.
NINE of SWORDS with thoughts around where we might be giving air-time to negative stories.

To balance this, there are also three RODS or WANDS in the reading:

QUEEN of RODS – emphasising how we actually live out our creative dreams
ACE of RODS – focusing on commencing action and rebooting
SEVEN of RODS – all about standing strong and standing up for ourselves and our story

Element-wise, it’s nearly all fire and air, fitting in with all the phoenix energy around lately as we rise from the ashes of negative stories and find new ways to live and focus.

There’s an absence of water and not a lot of earth, suggesting emotion is perhaps lacking or sitting beneath the surface of our days. There’s a clue there as to how to balance things a little more.

As always, a fabulous Tarot Narrative with these initial clues – so let’s dive into the fuller reading.

Tarot reading – card by card:

So here are some deeper thoughts, card by card, in relation to the questions. I worked intuitively with guidance from my own Tarot Journal as well as the Sakki Sakki tarot guidebook Playing with Symbols and Jessa Crispin’s fabulous book The Creative Tarot. Then connected back with the key energies highlighted for this Full Moon via the Mystic Mamma post and aligned posts. Messages from my daily readings are also always high in my mind.

1 What is pulling me in one direction? THE LOVERS

Yes, it’s my passions, my loves, my heart and saying yes to possibilities. It’s the desire for completion and the telling of new stories. In ‘Jung and Tarot’, Sallie Nicholls quotes Plato calling Eros:

the desire and pursuit of the whole.

She also says that “as with any archetype, to live out this instinctual force on the outside without assimilating its meaning can result in imbalance.”

This is what Quiet Writing is about – my own wholehearted story. It’s finding my tribe and connections around this, living out my story well to connect with others. And in this to support others to tell and live their story positively. It’s definitely heart and story work that I am working on here. But it needs to be balanced – both heart and mind.

2 What is pulling me in the other direction? KING of SWORDS

Well, yes, it’s my head, my mind, the intellectual side of the equation. This past year has had so much happening around ‘head vs heart’ and learning to work with both in a balanced way. This card here suggests there is still a lot of pull going on around this dynamic!

The King of Swords is a strong card of analytical intellect and creativity. It’s about working with words and clarity of thought. Above all, it’s about putting knowledge into practice. The challenge is blending the heart and mind together, managing this polarity into a more seamless way of working. I am much better at it but this reading suggests there is more work to do in this space now.

Just as we can go overboard with too much emotion or feeling, we can also go the other way with leading with the intellect and leaving the heart out of it. I know this is something I need to be aware of as an INTJ personality type where intellect and logical analysis often rule.

3 How can I best find the balance between the two? SEVEN of RODS

This card for this question speaks to me of needing to stand strong in myself and for what I believe in. It’s about backing myself and my Quiet Writing story, and our wholehearted stories.

It’s so easy to scope out our vision and then doubt it or question it. “Who am I to do this?” we can second guess ourselves. As Jessa Crispin says for this card: “Sometimes you have to fight yourself down, too.”

Combining what I love and am passionate about with putting it into action through words is the way to balance heart and mind now. Standing strong in my vision for myself and my new life, I write a new story I can step into, believe in and share with others.

4 Which facet of my life is not fitting with the others? QUEEN OF RODS

This card flummoxed me a bit here. The Queen of Rods (Wands) is all about embodying passion and creativity. It’s about going after what we want and living our dreams, being the Queen of them.

On reflection, I think this card here is saying that I am holding back a little with my emotions and passions. Intellectually, I know where I want to go with my new story and Quiet Writing business. Possibly in line with my ice maiden, Virgo, INTJ personality, I can be and come across cooler than I feel. So maybe it’s saying to warm up, to embody passion and creativity more. “A woman of heart and mind”, as Joni Mitchell phrases it, sings to me of poetry and really expressing my heart more in how I work and communicate.

This balance of heart and mind possibly needs a bit more warmth in how it expresses itself in the world. My word of the year for 2017 is PASSION. There’s a clue as we wrap up this year. Perhaps time to reflect on how passion is playing out in my life and where I can express myself more. I do tend to hold back a little and can err on the side of understating my feelings. Time to write more heart into my story.

Can you relate to this balance between heart and mind and working out the right balance for you? Your story might be different but this push me/pull me feeling can be a strong one to work through but is valuable to learn from.

5 What illusions must I shatter before I go forward? TEN of COINS

The Ten of Coins (Pentacles) speaks brightly of prosperity and positivity. It suggests material success and how we are manifesting and attracting abundance. Further, it is about true riches in this such as community, connection and a sense of belonging.

This is suggesting I need to shatter some illusions about being comfortable with attracting abundance and being fulfilled in this new story. There’s been so much change in my life and I have been focusing so much on transition and building a new future. I need to remember to enjoy what is here now: new friends, community, connections so rich, the prosperity I have now. And also to be open to more of that abundance in every way as part of this new story.

As The Art of Life Tarot reminds us for this card:

“Not what we have, but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance.”

John Petit Senn

6 What truths will emerge as the Moon rises? THREE of SWORDS

Along with all this balance between heart and mind, it’s about getting to the heart of the matter. It’s about making sense of grief, loss, release and feeling your way to acknowledging pain. This card is always so visceral to me – like you can feel the pain of it. But the Three of Swords is about the meaning of pain and disappointment and how we overcome difficulties.

For me, this has been an ongoing journey this year in the battle of heart and mind and working more seamlessly or in a balanced way. Certainly a lot of the truths this year have been about accepting situations of loss and pain and learning from them. I welcome more wisdom in this area as I continue on this journey.

7 What beliefs trap me and how can I release them? ACE of RODS

We can make things seem very hard by over-stating how hard they are.

The importance of commencing action and just starting is important now and in this coming cycle. Part of the challenge is the negative stories we can tell ourselves making things harder than they need to be. NaNoWriMo taught me a lot about this in the past month. I learnt that I can write 1,667 words in under an hour. And that in an hour a day over a month, I can write 50,000 words.

So if my aim is to write, the best thing is to just start and work through that one hour each day as I write my story. Combining heart and mind, it’s about believing in our story and getting it down in practical terms as well. It’s the energy to start and ignite my passions as I imagine them. AND bring them together King of Swords style into real-life heart work in the world.

How often do we not start something because it seems so difficult? And then when we do start, we often find it’s not so hard at all.

8 What messages does the Universe have for this new phase? NINE of SWORDS

The Nine of Swords highlights where we are giving oxygen to fears especially through our thoughts. Again in that heart and mind balance, this is can be about turning certain thoughts off and focusing on how real our fears are. (Think FEAR = ‘False Evidence Appearing Real.’).

To balance potential fear-mongering in our minds, look at the facts of the situation and what evidence there is. What is real and what is just fear? And how can we turn on the light of joy in the story of our lives more? Look at where you have worst-case scenario stuff churning in your head. See how you can rewrite this story into a more realistic and positive one.

Ways to step into your new life story

So are your thoughts also on how to step into a new more positive life story?

Here are some practical questions prompted by the Gemini Full Moon and reflections on my reading. They build on the recent Taurus Full Moon reading and Aries Full Moon reading around stepping up into our truth. The key focus now is on how we can write our new story in a positive light, leaving fear behind. We can also incorporate learnings from challenges to make meaning of loss, pain and disappointment. Working through this, we can share our experiences with others in a wholehearted way. From this, we create more positive stories and can help others on their journey as well.

Journal, reflect or brainstorm around these questions to help write your new story at this time:

Where are you feeling pulled in one direction or another?
How can you balance the polarities – whether it be ‘head and heart’ or something else?
If feeling fear, is this helping you and how much of it is based on fact?
Where the fear is real, how can you act to minimise its impact?
What stories have you been telling yourself that are not serving you anymore?
Where would it be helpful to write a new story about your skills, knowledge, experience?
How can you cultivate joy in this storytelling?
What new story would you love to write in your life or in your art?
What beliefs or fears are stopping you from writing this story?

Another journalling activity that can be quite telling is to write about our life in fairy tale language. Just starting with the words, “Once upon a time,” is a powerful way to tell our story and rewrite it in new ways.

Wisdom from the Nine of Swords

The Nine of Swords is a fairly dark card but speaks to us of how we can make things darker than they really are. The Art of Life Tarot version of the card reminds us via Voltaire that:

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

May you rewrite the story of your heart with balance and meaning so you can take action and connect with your tribe. And may your wholehearted self-leadership help you be of service to others!

Thought pieces

This is posted a little later than usual for the Full Moon reading but life is fairly challenging at present behind the scenes. I do write these posts and my daily Tarot Narratives based on my cards and intuitive guidance. And whilst a snapshot in time in line with energies and intuition, the messages, quotes and any wisdom therein is applicable to everyday life any day. Plus I find these Full Moon readings are a lovely marker of the energies in focus and I find they tell their own story as they unfold.

I hope you find some meaning and story for yourself in this post and my intuitive tarot work. It’s a touchstone for me every day and a way of making meaning in my story.

Feature image via shutterstock.com and used with permission and thanks.

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transition

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

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Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

Leaving a long-term job role

The greatest gift

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My body of work in transition

Making a path for my transition

Core desired feelings as guides to transition

Creating your story

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Finding joy

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A heart attack of the soul

Place, space and belonging

An unlived life

On becoming an Artist

Stepping into a new way of being

From breakdown to breakthrough

My wholehearted life

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About Lynn Hanford-Day

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Building and leaving a career

Burnout helped me take the leap

Feeling my way as an art therapist and coach

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Embracing my scanner self and a meandering path

What is wholehearted to me?

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About Jade Herriman

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“The world needs a new story. Each of us needs a new story.”

Cathy Pagano, Wisdom of Astrology

“So find your tribe who shares your story and loves you for it! If you live out your story well, you will attract other people out of that dark, dead-end story into their own heart-stories.”

Cathy Pagano, Wisdom of Astrology

Gemini Full Moon energies

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