In attempting to understand what hit me recently after the 100 day project letdown, I had to look no further than my inbox for help. Think that’s the last place you’d look? Mine is intentionally packed with restorative goodies.

When the time is right, I come and clean it out. My email box has 10 unread emails, but they’re not with the regular crappy mail one usually has. I have taken care the rounding up the usual stuff with a mail app called Unroll Me. This allows for only the best emails to come in and land. My box has been full of unread newsletters instead.

This means that when I’m ready, as I was today, I get to go in and read emails that I know will be helpful from some pretty amazing people. Let me share them with you in no particular order.

Patty Bechtold

Patty Bechtold is a licensed psychotherapist, board certified coach, writer, and wisdom seeker She is kind and wise and we think similarly. I treated myself to her recent newsletter (follow the link) and I found comfort right in the middle.

As she spoke about some Synchronicity Ahas she has had this year, she said

“…consciously cultivating synchronicities can lead to:

·       Experiences of wonder and awe that release dopamine and increase motivation

·       New approaches for interpreting events and viewing life challenges

·       Feelings of being supported in ways you can’t fully explain but you know are true

·       Seeing the past through a larger lens that opens up self-compassion and self-love

·       Accessing and experiencing deeper meaning and deeper wisdom

·       Connecting to yourself as a person who is genuine and authentic

I long to live in the vortex of these bullet points. Patty’s personal story of life’s synchronicities and how she felt special from them brought a YES from me.

Tara Leaver

Tara Leaver is an incredible artist, writer, and teacher who wasn’t always these things. At one point in her life, she was paralyzed, and bed ridden from her fear and depression. She has since learned and lived herself into a place where she offers support and art teaching through her Happy Artist Movement. She has built a community within her Happy Artist Studio.

I had several of her newsletters awaiting me in my email box and this one (link!) spoke about connecting with yourself and your truths through your creativity.

So, making your art – doing the thing that fills you up, that challenges and grows you, that gives you joy, that is your means of parsing the experiences of your life and expressing what feels true to you – is something, I believe, you must do for yourself first.” Although we al will ask for outside input of some sort, it is ourselves we need to ask us what our heart needs first.

Who couldn’t use this pep talk today or any day. The fact that I can receive it into my mailbox at no costs makes it priceless. And Tara is always so welcoming to me even if I don’t join her Studio, I feel like an artist just being near her words.

Anna Lovind

If you haven’t been reading my blog, Anna Lovind is one of my most respected mentors. Through her Creative Doer book and course, she introduced me to many thoughts about my creative practice and my boundaries as a woman that I have been blown away by. Her mirror has given me such strength. Her recent newsletter titled How to Live Fully in a Broken World , has lingered in my email box for a while so that I may reread it’s message.

Tending to ourselves, valuing our contributions, and keeping ourselves safe are all subjects she covers with such integrity and beautiful wording that I want to save and reread her newsletters. And as I was writing this, I discovered that she included my interview with her about mothering and creativity on her site. It is a good interview and I worked hard on it lo those 6 years ago.

Sas Pethrick

I adore Sas Pethrick, founder of a coaching academy called the Self-Belief school. Any and all of her newsletters are full of her wisdom and her story. Reading them are as if you have a privileged place at a table with her to soak in her wisdom.

From one of Sas’s Newsletters,

“It struck me that in order to become whole, we need witnesses. We need others who are willing to sit with us and be open and vulnerable to our discomfort; people who can make space for our uncertainty and doubt without needing to help. Who can hold us in our shadow, and in our light.

And we need this more than ever.

I wholeheartedly believe that we become whole, not by imagining the light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Because when as women, we make peace with ourselves – when we can feel compassion for the shadowy parts that we learnt to see as unacceptable, when we feel supported to claim our gentle place in the light – we become more of ourselves.

We stop shutting ourselves down to protect other people. We stop distracting ourselves with the acquisition of stuff. We stop literally and metaphorically starving ourselves. We stop trying so fucking hard to be likeable. We unhook ourselves from needing the approval of others.

We stop being afraid of our own power and we start having opinions. We mobilise. We act. We lead.

This is the revolution.

Because the shadow is rising all around us, it is the last gasp of the wounded masculine. It is made of fear and frightened people make terrible decisions.

I am profoundly and fiercely concerned about the state our world.

But I am not afraid. #thefutureisfemale “

I am ever grateful for a recording she made for me telling me how amazing I am just because I wanted to hear her beautiful Australian accent talking to me!

Find Sas’s podcast called Courage and Spice here. And go the bottom of this page to subscribe to her marvelous free newsletter.

There are many more thought leading women I admire. Mara Glatzel is another one. She writes about showing up for yourself, not abandoning yourself, and accepting where you are and the humanity you live every day. Her story is here.

I hope that you may find something here that inspires you to think outside your box as these women have done for me. We are web that needs to stay connected and rise together.

 

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