In a recent corporate creative journaling workshop I delivered to two groups I had a strange experience. When we got to the creative writing/sketching prompt about resilience each group had a different reaction to this word. One group dove into the exercise (which was to describe a person whose resilience you admire). The other group…
This January has been a big month for me. Two big milestones. If you’ve been a reader of Heart Notes for a while, you may recall this post called Heart Opening from October 2018. In this post I shared my pain as my youngest son left to serve time in a federal prison. I also…
What is unconditional love? And how do we get there? Unconditional: not subject to conditions: wholehearted, unqualified, unreserved, unlimited, unrestricted, unmitigating, unquestioning, complete, total, entire. While working on my latest mat called This Cord of Love That Binds Us during my artist in residence at the Centre for Craft, Nova Scotia. I found myself struggling…
Is there something you used to love to do, but never thought you could do again? Do you remember the way it made you feel? What if it were possible to re-capture just a tiny bit of that sensation, if you could reconnect with the feeling once again? How would your body feel and what…
How responsible do you feel for the emotional well being of others? How much energy do you expend making sure that everyone around you has their needs met? Does this pattern often come at the expense of your own well being? One of the many reasons why I love what I do, is I get…
Some of you may be shocked by my news. Many of you won’t know what to say. Some of you may judge me and my family. And some of you will know exactly how I’m feeling, because you’ve been there. You’ve experienced the pain of an adult child going off the rails in some way,…
I’ve been struggling lately. Our family is experiencing a painful situation that has had me digging deeply to try to find my usual creative, positive methods for moving forward. It has left me feeling raw and vulnerable on a whole new level. My friend and I were talking about how I have been finding it…
Did you ever have something inside of you that you were bursting to say? Only to be told not to be so loud, or so boastful, or so full of yourself? When I was a young girl singing in the school choir, a teacher told me to just mouth the words, not to sing them…
“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” Rosalia de Castro It is in the space of not knowing that our creativity is released. All we need to do is to hold space for ourselves to allow that opening. The…
Do you ever think you’ve got it all together and then suddenly you don’t? What helps you to keep moving forward? I recently had an experience that stopped me in my tracks and gave me pause to think. As you may know, I’ve been doing my self-care work for the past two years. I was…
I’m not a Chakra colour expert. I was introduced to the idea of using the Chakra colours for well being by Louise Gale. Louise has an online class called Chakra Colour Art Journal. I took Louise’s class the summer I was waiting for my diagnosis of breast cancer. I had rented a cottage by the…
How hard would it be for you to write yourself a love letter, a note of encouragement? I was surprised recently in my writing class. Several of the participants struggled with this Invitation to Create from my latest book One Loop at a Time, The Creativity Workbook. “If you were writing yourself a love letter,…