Inspirations

Over the years, I’ve learnt so much from the people who took the time and made the effort to write these books and blogs, make these videos, and devise these programmes. I always try to acknowledge the sources of my content if it is not mine. However, some of the learning has gone so deep that I can’t always trace back ideas to their origin. So here, with thanks, are some of my inspirations, sometimes with short videos from the studio.

The Artist’s Way

First up, and definitely foremost, is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (no relation). It got me started all those years ago in shifting my life towards the poetic and creative. It’s brought me back to my poetic self several times since.

What Matters Most

My next inspiration is the book What Matters Most by James Hollis. I love that he asks awkward questions about what makes for a well-lived life, from a Jungian perspective. He also offers some kind of comfort for the bad times. One that struck me forcefully was this, “…in the moments of quiet despair we remember we have a soul, and that our soul is inviolate unless we give it away.”

This book speaks to our felt need for a more poetic life:

“Something within each of us is stirred by forms, images, values, to which others may prove indifferent or incredulous. If such images and forms speak to us, occasion resonance, then they express in outer form some analogue to what lies within. To those things that do not resonate within us, we are indifferent, no matter what the endorsement by fashion, popular taste, or vested authority. Such stirring within must be respected, for it is a movement of soul whose vagaries can never nor should be subsumed by mere practicality.”

and to our responsibility to ourselves to do something about it:

“As we get to this point in our life we see that stepping into a larger life is intimidating because it requires that we risk being who we really are, that is, what wants to come to the world through us, rather than serving our ego comforts or whatever instructions came our way. We cannot expect someone else to give us permission.”

Hollis wants to support people in living in uncertainty and taking the risks that their souls ask for. His key take-away: “All of us have to ask this simple but piercing question of our relationships, our affiliations, our professions, our politics, and our theology: ‘Does this path, this choice, make me larger or smaller?’ Usually we know the answer immediately because we always intuitively know, and yet are afraid of what we know, and even more afraid of what it may ask of us.”

I first encountered this book through a newspaper column written by Oliver Burkemann. You can read it here.

Tara Mohr’s Playing Big program

The silence and silencing of women’s voices really saddens me. And makes me angry. Women not becoming all that they might be saddens me. It’s one of my goals to try to do something about this in both my professional and personal lives. The ideas and activities in Tara Mohr’s Playing Big have these same goals. I learnt many tools from her program that continue to help me act more boldly and to trust myself. It helped me a plot a course through my life at that point and inspired me to shift direction.

There’s now a book too.

You can experience the Inner Mentor visualisation that I blogged about through her website.

My blog post about What Matters Most and playing big.