by jlouden | Mar 20, 2019 | Blog, Creativity, Self-Care & Comfort
It’s okay to feel exactly what you’re feeling. You don’t need to feel any different than you do. (I often forget this and try to fix what I’m feeling rather than witnessing and welcoming.) Raise your arms up overhead. Exhale long and slow. Relax your shoulders. You...
by jlouden | Mar 6, 2019 | Blog
For some of us, there is an essential passage in our creative lives that, if not reckoned with, leaves us frustrated, stymied, and feeling vaguely lost like we’re searching for something we can’t quite name. We may feel we are blocked from becoming our full selves...
by jlouden | Feb 26, 2019 | Blog
My mom died last week and I’m heavy with sadness. My mind is dull and my sleep is riddled with troubled busy dreams from which I emerge holding only an odd detail like the texture of the blue shag carpet from my childhood home. There was a moment when I was alone with...
by jlouden | Feb 19, 2019 | Blog
I am writing this beside my mom’s bed. She is dying and her breath grows quieter and quieter. Her face is like a child’s, soft and without a wrinkle. I was with her just last week and, four days after I left, her brain stopped knowing how to instruct her body to...
by jlouden | Feb 5, 2019 | Blog
I’ve been bubbling lately with an intensity unusual even for me. I’ve had a hard time sleeping. I often feel uneasy, like I’ve forgotten something important, but I have no idea what. I’ve journaled about this twitchy feeling and meditated with it; greeting my thoughts...
by jlouden | Jan 16, 2019 | Blog
If there is one thing I hear constantly from the creatives and writers I work with at my recommit to your art, recenter in your heart Oasis, on retreat, or in my writer’s mastermind, it’s the lament of what didn’t happen. The cry of “I didn’t make my page count” or...
