Change is mostly performance. In that it’s usually behavioural in nature - in that we try changing what we DO as a strategy for getting what we want.

Transformation on the other hand, is about actually becoming the person who just… has / is / does that.

Attunement to your FOUR VOICES is how you do the latter.

A woman attuned to her FOUR VOICES no longer feels compelled to deliver whatever performance she believes is expected.

She is committed instead to practicing & modelling, unapologetically, the full expression of her truthful self.

This is an introduction to a new model of being.

It’s a reclamation of identity & power through the doors of awareness, clarity & direction; with the Four Voices as your own personal guidance system, helping you locate & unlock each one.

I plan on creating an offer to teach you how to work with your Four Voices BUT I NEED YOUR HELP!

I’m not sure yet what the starting point needs to be so I’m offering this series of free discovery calls because I want to find a way to help you into the practice before I settle on a curriculum.

I encourage you to watch this video - it’s 25 minutes long.

Scroll down for a TLDR breakdown with timestamps.

IF YOU’D LIKE TO ATTEND A FREE FOUR VOICES DISCOVERY CALL
& HELP ME FIND YOUR STARTING POINT - CLICK BELOW
THAT WILL REGISTER YOU FOR ANY CALLS I SCHEDULE
& YOU CAN ATTEND WHICHEVER WORKS.
EACH CALL WILL HAVE A REPLAY

FOUR VOICES CALL REGISTER

• 00:00 - Meet Your Internal Household
  An introduction to the four domains of your life: the mental, emotional, spiritual & physical. Why they are constantly interacting, and how the mind came to believe it is the sole “head of the ship.”

• 03:15 – The Internal Dictatorship Problem
  Dismantling our conditioning. False authority, sovreignty & self governance.
  

• 05:45 – THERE CAN BE NO TRANSFORMATION WITHOUT CONSENT
  How to transition from a “take no prisoners” patriarchal power structure to an internal democracy where every single voice is heard and checked for consent.
  

• 08:30 – Why Your Strategies Fail (The Battle of Opposing Wills) What happens when the mind imposes a bedtime routine, a diet, or a lifestyle change without consulting the body’s nervous system, emotional or spiritual life?
  

• 11:15 – Case Study: My Four Voices At The Gym
  A real-time breakdown of checking in with the four voices in an historically ‘charged’ context to discover in real time, how to make the experience a purposeful one and not something to dread, endure & constantly want to get out of.

• 15:30 – Performance vs. Expression
  How to move away from showing up to your art, career and relationships out of fear, and instead bring all of you to the table. It’s the difference between being an observer & a participant in your own life.
  

• 18:45 – UNnaming the Internal Abuser
  A personal story about recently waking up to the internal voice of “hatred” I had internalised, normalised & allowed ‘a free pass’, stripping the abuser of a name & setting an internal boundary.
  

• 20:15 – Éabha’s “Mermaid” metaphor & Rebuilding After Burnout How the water metaphor arose from a desperate need to return to business in a way that didn’t trigger PTSD from past burnout. My FOUR VOICES collaborated in offering me a vision to reframe the experience. This allowed me to choosing ease, play and flow over the white-knuckling hustle of being a one woman, rabid from too many fucking mouse clicks, wolfpack.
  

• 20:15 – Practice & The Prayer Plant Metaphor
  How we build muscle memory in the quiet, messy pages of our journals so that when the high-stakes “real life” circumstances arrive on the field, we find we are better able to handle the mess & become more and more trusting of yourself.
  

• 23:00 – Homework for Call 2: We are going to practice!
  Your instructions for our next call on August 28th: Take a simple, unposed photo of your entryway, yourself, your wardrobe or your creatice space to use as our real-world playground for the four voices.

FOUR VOICES CALL REGISTER

Below you will find:

• The water we’re swimming in (ie: our poem this month)

• A guided listening tour

• August practice sessions Zoom Link

• Any worthwhile treasures, clips of art making, discoveries & whatnot

Come on in!

Éabha 🧜🏻‍♀️💦

Read more

This is a very powerful, compassionate, inquiry & SELF COACHING journaling techique that quite literally changed my life. I can't believe I've never shared it before 🤦‍♀️

But ill do one better!

I've created a guide for you where I break down the method, how & why it works, as well as a profile on each of the four voices & the EXACT technique you see me doing here, detailed step by step.

If you’re already a subscriber, your pdf guide is just below, keep scrolling. If not, now is the time to join us!

Éabha xx
Your inner-life-skills Mentor

…but really, I’m a mermaid 🧜🏻‍♀️

Read more

Aren’t you just fucking DONE erasing your own joy just to be “palatable” to a culture that doesn’t give two fucks whether you even like yourself.

Also, I’m tired of the “moral uprightness” that bypasses the actual experience of being a human woman. Are you with me?

I’m finally ‘coming out’ this year, not just as a queer woman but as a messy human.

I’ve invested 17 years of my energy travelling healing pathways, personally and professionally.

And guess what? I still snap at people. I still get triggered. I still wake up in the morning and would rather start a fucking fire than put my feet on the ground.

And…. I still love my life. Now, more than ever. At 50 years of age, I am the happiest & I’ve ever been.

I am loved now more deeply, with a right-for-me kind of love. My work is finding it’s second life & becoming more powerful. And I feel free.

Because I am finally, finally, FINALLY done upholding the moral hierarchy; socially & spiritually.

I’m done pretending to be ‘unbothered’ when some asshole crosses a line I feel I cannot defend without ‘losing face’.

I’m done softening my boundaries to keep the peace while I drown in frustration and the disenfranchised grief of not feeling like I belong in my own life.

Yes I’m coming out queer but I’m also coming out of the patriarchal, capitalist, hetronormative, neurotypical boxes that had me believing I had to be ‘palatable’ and ‘easy’, to be safe.

Let’s call that bullshit for what it is, a trap designed to keep us busy treading water in an ocean of other people’s expectations, unresolved trauma & arbitrary rules.

I’d rather be messy and free than ‘all together’ and ashamed.

That’s why I’ve created this offer.

Dive Club: Inner Life Skills for Late Bloomers & Messy Bitches

is where we finally stop treading water and start diving for the fucking pearls.

It’s for anyone tired of performing purity and ready to own the full breadth of their humanity; the triggers, the ruptures and the glorious, unpolished reality of being alive.

Register for our upcoming info call by clicking the link below.

Hello I am the link

I should know. It’s literally been my life’s motif and I’m done with it.

I’m also done watching people I love do that to themselves. So in September I’m opening Dive Club.

Over nine months I will teach you everything I know about journaling & the many techniques that have saved my ass over & over & over again.

This is not a course you work through alone.

It’s container you’re held in, while you use the page to get at your deepest patterns, the ones talk therapy circles around and self-help books skim past.

You’ll learn to use your journal as a visual diary, a place to rage and make it beautiful, a compass when you doubt your own judgement & have a chorus of assholes in your ear & a confidant to hold your truest declarations.

You don’t need experience. You don’t need to already be journaling regularly - this is journaling without rules.

You do however, need to be finished performing purity for people who were never going to be satisfied anyway.

And you get me, an inner life coach in your pocket, by your side, having your back for just €150 a month for nine months.

To put this in perspective, this is a 75% DISCOUNT on my 1:1 coaching fees. You will get coached too, just in a group setting.

If this is even remotely of interest to you, click below and fill out the form. I’ll be in touch personally to invite you to an information call**

DIVE CLLUB INTEREST FORM

The water’s lovely. Come in.

Éabha | Amanda xx

_{**To be clear, filling out this form or attending the call is not a commitment, it’s a conversation & a chance for you to ask questions and for me to get to know what the groups needs are so I can customise a curriculum & offer the most value.}

It’s an initiation into mastery. Not of life, but of journaling as a superpower.

Some days you’ll happily play in your journal with a glue stick & imagery torn from a magazine. Other days you’ll run through a cognitive behavioural model to figure out why you’d rather poke your own eyes out than ask for help.

This is a group coaching offer.
€150 a month for 9 months
Weekly office hours, ask-me-anything, real coaching, real support.

There’s no sales page and no hard sell. This is either a fit or it’s not.

If you’re curious at all, click the button below. It will take you to a very short google form. Fill it out & I’ll follow up personally with more information.

HELLO. I AM THE BUTTON

Éabha | Amanda xx

None of it was true, by the way. I went back over the recording. I hadn’t faltered as I’d imagined.

My friend was on the call too & unmuted to say she thought I sounded direct and straightforward.

Nevertheless, I made the offer and I’d like to share it with you.

DIVE CLUB

I have two ways of pitching this.

First, let me pitch the ‘straight’ way. Because you need some actual information. This is the way I’m “supposed to” sell.

THE STRAIGHT PITCH

Details:

• Sept Start / €150 Per Month / 9 Month Commitment

• Curriculum + weekly calls: coaching + ask me anything.

• Express Your Interest via the form below. I’ll be in touch.

EXPRESS YOUR INTEREST

THE CREATIVE PITCH

This is how I’ve actually imagined the offer. Shame wants me to think it’s stupid. Shrink. Undersell. Apologise. Whatever, here it is.

Imagine we are all land-locked mermaids just trying to remember our magic and get back to the ocean; our native habitat, where different rules apply & we thrive & belong.

Either way, I am teaching you how to use journaling as a companion, a coach, a collaborator, a confident, a creative toolkit, whatever you need it to be, to support you on your own personal journey of life.

EXPRESS YOUR INTEREST

I will hold a few open calls in August where you can come ask me anything about this offer. I’ll send those details soon.

In the meantime, if you want to register interest, click the button. It will direct you to a form. Fill it out & I’ll be in touch.

Éabha | Amanda xx

My intention being to open the door a little more on my approach & way of thinking that treats the journal not as something prescriptive you do, but as a relational container that holds you and grows you at the same time.

This video is accessible to everyone until August 1st. After that, it will move behind the paywall & I will be building it out as an orientation and nurture sequence for those paying via monthly subscription.

Subscribe now

Watch this clip to learn:

• How to use asemic writing to “speak” when you don’t have the words [and how it helped me practice coming out]

• How to turn a poem into a “therapist” to point you toward your own internal medicine.

• Why telling yourself the truth is the first step to removing the obstacles in your way.

If this approach resonates with you, I invite you to upgrade to a paid subscription.

You’ll get full access to our deep-dive archives, upcoming field guide (work in progress) and an invitation to join our weekly live community journaling calls where we do this work “alone, together.”

I’ll see you on the page!

Éabha | Amanda xx

REMAINING JULY CALLS OPEN TO EVERYONE

Myself & my friend Tammi Salas are each hosting journaling calls on Sunday evenings. I also host calls on Wednesdays.

We are both removing the paywall to attend our calls for the remainder of July.

REGISTER FOR FREE HERE

We want you to feel what this life changing practice does for us.

Not lost, literally, but more like: I honestly do not know which way to turn here.

This is where the journal stops being a place to vent and starts being a place to navigate.

I have a beautiful card deck that I show in the video below. There’s a card in there that served as my compass for three whole years because it seemed to know something about where I “was” that I hadn’t caught up to yet.

Your journal is a compass when it helps you unpack an image, a scene, an ache you can’t name yet; something you keep returning to because some part of you knows there’s a coordinate hiding within.

psst: get those contemplation cards here.

WHAT HAPPENS ON A JOURNALING CALL

WE MEET TWICE WEEKLY ON WEDNESDAYS & SUNDAYS

These are the kinds of sessions you can expect on our weekly calls.

Sometimes we use imagery, sometimes music, sometimes poetry. Whatever our muse, the goal is always the same, to practice being present to the longings of our hearts, bodies & souls so we are not ruled solely by our minds.

In this session, we enter into contemplation through an image to practice locating ourselves in real time.

Watch and maybe try it for yourself… see what wants to find you.

ART GETS MADE IN RESPONSE

We journal alone, together. Some people write. Some make art. Most do both. Whatever means of expression you choose, you have 20 mins or so to engage in that practice as a response to the prompt.

We all mute our mics & indulge in whatever music or podcast or silence feels good. I tip my laptop camera down so you can see me making art - some people have said they like that & that it inspires them, so I’m going to build a library with these clips.

These will be accessible to our CORAL REEF paid subscription tier.

Subscribe now

WE SHARE OUR FINDINGS

Below is a highlight reel from a recent call to give you a sense of what the ‘sharing’ part of our sessions looks & feels like.

Going forward we will not be recording the sharing aspect of weekly calls as it does not feel congruent with the sense of containment we would like to offer here.

Instead, I intend on facilitating a more considered process for distilling & sharing the very rich wisdom that emerges from these sessions, on a monthly basis.

In the meantime, enjoy this little peak and… notice the joy.

REMAINING JULY CALLS OPEN TO EVERYONE

Myself & my friend are each hosting journaling calls on Sunday evenings. I also host calls on Wednesdays.

We are both removing the paywall to attend our calls for the remainder of July.

REGISTER FOR FREE HERE

We want you to feel what this life changing practice does for us.

Here, I reflect on my resistance to the "unsexy" practice of business journaling (2 min watch)

Try this

A hack that will immediately deepen your practice (1:27 min watch)

Tammi’s Invitation To Nervous System Regulation

REGISTER HERE

REMAINING JULY CALLS OPEN TO EVERYONE

Myself & my friend Tammi Salas are each hosting journaling calls on Sunday evenings. I also host calls on Wednesdays.

We are both removing the paywall to attend our calls for the remainder of July.

REGISTER FOR FREE HERE

We want you to feel what this life changing practice does for us.

FULL CALL REPLAY

I’ve been doing these calls for a while now and I realised I’ve never actually stopped and properly walked people through why I think the journal works the way it does. Why we light the candle. Why we do the readings the way we do them.

So that’s what the intention of this call was, to open one of the doors a bit wider.

And this door is the journal as your very own sacred Companion.

[55 min watch]

Questions?

Ask them in the comments.

See you Sunday!

Éabha | Amanda x

REGISTER FOR REMAINING JULY CALLS

Why am I still getting triggered? Why am I still spiralling? Every meltdown seemed proof of my brokenness.

Until I heard about ‘nervous system work’. I started devouring podcasts & learning about it.

Spirals never stopped.

You know why? Awareness alone doesn’t fix this.

I used to think I could rewire my nervous system by myself.

But I'm learning something different: we can't.

We're relational creatures and we weren't traumatised in a vacuum. What heals us is what broke us - another person, only this person is showing up consciously and lovingly through conflict.

Every time my girlfriend and I trigger each other and choose to stay present - to name what's happening, to repair what ruptured, we're literally rewiring each other's nervous systems.

The old wiring says: expressing needs leads to rejection, conflict means abandonment.

But we're teaching each other something new: She saw my "worst” and she stayed. I told you what I needed and you didn't punish or shame me for it. We broke and we mended.

That's the corrective experience.

It’s not a form of relationship perfection, nor does it feel good in the moment but the willingness to move toward each other when it would be easier to shut down, run away, attack or self erase, is something we both have.

And honestly, It’s transformative.

This is nervous system work.

Gentle practices. Deep breaths. Honest words on a page.

Through witnessing what’s true without trying to fix it immediately.

Through learning that belonging can matter more than performing.

Yes. That’s the work. That’s what I’m learning, my journaling practice once again leading the way.

REMAINING JULY CALLS OPEN TO EVERYONE

Myself & my friend are each hosting journaling calls on Sunday evenings. I also host calls on Wednesdays.

We are both removing the paywall to attend our calls for the remainder of July.

REGISTER TO JOIN US

We want you to feel what this practice does for us. No performance required. Just you, your journal and a poem that might just speak directly to your nervous system’s need to finally, finally rest.

Amanda x

Read more

You’ll need 10 minutes (5 if you watch on 2x speed)

Want To Go Deeper?

I made you something.

Journaling Without Rules: A Guide to Making a Practice Your Own — it’s free, it’s yours and it will change how you think about showing up to the page.

DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY

Got Questions? Ask them in the comments!

Amanda | Éabha

It’s more that this is what I heard.

If you’ve ever noticed how words often pass through the filter of your own history, you’ll understand that what is said and what is heard can be different things.

I met the moment with pantomime faces - ‘cringe’, ‘oops’, - ‘grimace’ - before revealing my true face, which was delight.

Even I could see that my smile was radiating such truth & peace & happiness, it confirmed the obvious without me even having to state it.

Yes. I used to have a husband. Two, actually.

And while I know my private life is ‘nobody else’s business’, I think it’s a fair enough question and totally valid to at least be curious about what happened that I, at 50 years of age, ‘suddenly’ realised I’m much happier doing life with women, than with men.

My free self met the moment playfully. And she was able to because my mothering self is holding a new boundary against the internalised patriarch & his endless encroaching.

But that was before I started pulling apart the web of beliefs and values that were never mine to begin with but imposed, stealthily. By society, culture & our traumatised elders who all should have gone to therapy but didn’t.

And who made clear, in all the ways these things are made clear without anyone ever saying a word, that non compliance should be punished.

To live like that is to live without truth. Without autonomy. Without safety. Without true joy.

I came to understand that there was a hierarchy of command and as long as I obeyed it, then I could do/be/have whatever I wanted.

The fact that I dissented & rebelled made me believe I was free. What I didn’t know yet, is that true freedom does not feel like shame.

Shame is the voice of the internalised patriarch. I call mine Séamus. I depicted him once in a journal spread I find disturbing.

Only now am I beginning to understand what I was trying to tell myself then.

Reader, I have fully spent the last decade & more becoming the woman who’s clacking away at this 13” rose gold macbook keyboard to you right now.

I can’t even begin to tell you about the path I have travelled to get here. But let me share with you the poem I wrote about it.

It would be another 8 years before I would understand fully what I was trying to tell myself.

The shift is one of values. “Home” for me, is not triumph. It is belonging.

It blows my mind that my creativity carried this wisdom to me long before I had the capacity to understand it. And that my journals were the place I captured and held what was true while I did the work of untangling myself from all that wasn’t.

I’ll be honest and admit there were roads in there I would not travel again for love nor money.

There are tears I’m still crying.

There is trauma I didn’t even realise I’ve been carrying.

Since 2009, I have been inching toward my butterfly era. Only I was dead certain that it would arrive looking like accomplishment.

Like me, finally, getting my shit together. Achieving the thing. Becoming someone of value and merit, in a patriarchal sense, at least.

It genuinely never occurred to me that my butterfly era would just be… me, coming home to myself.

That all the struggle & strain was never leading to achievement at all. It was leading to a person. This one. The one finally out of the SHAME closet, typing these words to you.

My Ultimate Ride Or Die

I am endlessly grateful for my one constant companion on this journey.

Every unravelling, every ache that didn’t have a name yet, every morning that getting out of bed was my entire day’s achievement.

She’s not my therapist. She’s not my mother. Or my closest friend.

She is the meeting place where my heart, mind, body and soul get together and figure out what they know.

She is my journal. That is my practice.

Some days she helped me by taking lists. Some days it was letting me scribble so hard I’d tear through her pages.

Some days she witnessed me illustrate words from a poem that made me cry, others as I’d chase myself down yet another spiral, having been snatched once again by the cruel & dirty clutches of Séamus.

It never once mattered how ‘good’ my journaling was. What mattered was that I showed up to our meeting place, no matter what.

And every single time I lost the thread of myself, my journals were the place I went to pick it back up again.

I tell people that Journaling changed my life.
It’s probably more accurate to say that journaling saved my life.

So. Have you journaled today?

Amanda xx

Weekly online journaling call information are “below the fold” for paying subscribers (thank you). Scroll all the way down.

p.s. Want A Free Art Journal Lesson?

For years, I disqualified my art because I don’t like to draw.

I thought those limitations meant I’d never be a ‘real’ artist.

I was wrong.

THIS IS A NO STRINGS ATTACHED FREE LESSON
It’s happening next weekend.

Register Now For Free!

Read more

What is Mary Oliver Heaven you ask?

It’s a threshold I imagine I will encounter, at the edge of my earthly existence, when all is said & done with my mortal life.

I imagine I will be faced with a question that by then, it will be too late to change anything about my answer.

Surely, you know the question.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this question has haunted me since first lodging itself in my psyche.

I don’t know if it’s because it taps into one of my great fears in life; which is to die with a very specific kind of regret.

Researchers call it BOLDNESS regret: missed opportunities and a failure to take chances - e.g., not starting a business or asking someone out.

I’m curious about why this specific regret is so potent for me but suffice it to say it has served as a very powerful motivator - slash - agitator in my life.

I most certainly credit it, partly, for the decision I made recently to exit my marriage to the man with whom I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life.

Do I regret a single day of those 15 years? Absolutely not.

But I had [sadly] arrived at a point where our relationship was now threatening to rob me of something I will only get one shot at in this after - life.

And that is the satisfaction of preparing to arrive in Mary Oliver heaven with a response that will make all the queer angels who hear tell of it, cry tears of happiness & joy.

That is what it means to have impact.

A New Era Starts Today.

When someone said to me that my decision seemed to have ‘appeared suddenly, out of nowhere’, my response was ‘so do daffodils but their getting here is an entire process we didn’t see’

The same is true for me.

I’ll share more in time but suffice it to say that I’m happier than I have ever been and I can honestly say, without a shadow of a doubt that my journaling practice, got me here.

It has been my literal lifeline these past few years as I navigated the sudden death of my father, a global pandemic that completely hijacked my nervous system, led me to confuse the nature of my work & resulted in a burnout so severe, that for the 3 years spanning 2021 - 2023 I had been reduced to a shell of a person.

In October 2023, a concerned and very generous friend, to whom I will forever be grateful, literally ‘sent’ me on a fully paid for sober retreat in Tuscany, hosted by my dear friend .

I returned from that week away knowing exactly what I had to do. And despite my absolute fear, I began.

Community Journaling: June

Please enjoy the above screenshots showing some of the art made on our journaling calls throughout June.

If you’ve never joined a call, it might appear that the journaling we do is all art - it’s not - we write too. You can do whatever you want, your very presence on the call means you will get what you need, if you allow it.

The sacred listening process teaches you how to allow it.

One of my projects in June is to create a static landing page here to make what we’re doing here a little clearer & perhaps easier for you to participate in.

I’m also working on a survey to get some input from you, if you’d be willing to offer it.

Want A Free Art Journal Lesson?

Rooted in the question “What if the thing you think disqualifies you is actually your creative superpower?”

For years, I disqualified my art because I couldn’t draw.

I thought that limitation meant I’d never be a ‘real’ artist.

I was wrong.

Register Now For Free!

LET’S JOURNAL TOGETHER

€10/month gets you:

• Twice Weekly online sessions where naming what’s real is safe

• A community learning to replace performance with realness

• The space to share this life changing practice together

• EXCLUSIVE content + field guide (in process)

Subscribe now

All of June’s journal session replays + upcoming dates are “below the fold” for paying subscribers (thank you). Keep scrolling!

Amanda xx

Read more

I have a diploma in spiritual guidance & soul accompaniment. I have two coaching certifications. One teacher training. Countless certificates and boxes, kindles and shelves full of books.

You know why?

Because I learned early: success is something you DO. Worthiness is in achievement.

Sometimes I look at my wall of qualifications and wonder what I was really trying to achieve.

If I’m honest, I think much if it was an attempt at qualifying myself. Proving myself. Protecting myself from the voice of shame that taunts & tells me: you are simply not enough.

The upside, however means you’re in fairly good hands. I’m qualified to do this work, professionally, at least.

However, shame likes me to think that not yet having “mastered” this nervous system of mine, negates that assessment.

And I am deeply uncomfortable with not doing anything to FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY.

If accessing my ventral state (that regulated place of safety and calm) could have been achieved with sheer determination, intellect or money, I’d have solved this problem years ago.

But it can’t. So I’ve been working lately with the somatics of it all.

After all, it’s not through the mind alone we come to knowing, it’s also through the body, through meaning & purpose, feedback & experience.

And I love to think of journaling as a container for the relationships you develop with and between all your sources of knowing - which, in my experience, yields a life of choice, dignity and intention.

I’m learning one can still be ambitious within a more intentional framework.

Journalling Is A Somatic Practice.

Journaling is what I do when the storms roll through and I know I must DO NOTHING but I can’t stop moving. So I journal instead of reacting.

It’s how I interrupt my own inertia.

It works for me because journaling is a type of doing that’s actually a practice of being.

That’s what we do on our weekly calls here we gather to be with ourselves and it’s not me but the poems that guide us.

It took me years to figure out how to teach journaling until I realised I don’t need to. Journaling is an instinct.

What I do is create the conditions. Hold space. Invite inspiration.

I Leave the discovery to each person.

This week:

One of us showed up worried she couldn’t go “deep enough.” Instead of forcing depth, she just showed up. And realised: maybe I don’t need to change everything. Maybe I’m fine as I am.

Another has journeyed with this poem five times. This Sunday she got stuck on “but you didn’t stop.” Her brain fought back: But you did stop. Why? On our call, she sat with that contradiction until she could name it.

A first-timer worried about doing it “right.” Then she “just splashed some colour” and had a breakthrough: changing the phrase “mend my life” to “mend your life” - recognising how much energy goes to managing everyone else instead of trusting her own instincts.

As for me

This week I had two difficult moments. Both involved comparing myself to other women. Both triggered shame.

But instead of suppressing it, I named it. I journaled about it. And in the naming and the journaling and the space held for me to process, something shifted.

I became regulated.

What I’m learning is the importance of spaces where you don’t have to perform. Relationships where you don’t manage emotional landscapes that aren’t yours. Where you’re free to tend your own.

When all parties invest in themselves, in their relational skills, in naming what’s real and nobody is performing, shame gets contained. Doubt gets witnessed. Joy becomes more embodied.

That’s what I offer & I hope you will join us.

I am working on a little something fun to celebrate our first 100 paying subscribers. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close.

My goal is to have 100 journalers on deck by the end of July. We are currently at 62.

Now Is Your Chance To Join us. I’ll come up with something good.

€10/month gets you:

• Twice Weekly sessions where naming what’s real is safe

• A community learning to replace performance with realness

• The space to share this life changing practice together

• A BONUS exclusively for our 1st 100 paying subscriptions

This week’s journal session replay + upcoming dates are “below the fold” for paying subscribers (thank you). Scroll all the way down.

Amanda xx

p.s.

Want A Free Art Journal Lesson?

Rooted in the question “What if the thing you think disqualifies you is actually your creative superpower?”

For years, I disqualified my art because I couldn’t draw.

I thought that limitation meant I’d never be a ‘real’ artist.

I was wrong.

Register Now For Free!

Read more

Then an encounter with a real life spider got me thinking about things from the spider’s perspective.

It’s a normal thing for spiders to lose their webs. Weather, predators, humans with hoovers & hoses.

Webs get destroyed all the time.

Here’s the thing: a spider’s web isn’t actually their home. It’s just a strategy. A way they set themselves up to meet their needs.

And when a web gets destroyed, the spider just... moves on & builds a new web, I presume.

No shame spirals. No autopsies. No fingers pointing in blame.

That’s when it landed.

I had been fighting for a web that has beeb in tatters for years. Defending a strategy that no longer worked. Lashing on the shame as if this was exclusively my fault and that I needed to feel very bad about that.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO SALVAGE THIS.

That one sentence released me from an emotional tax I felt obliged to pay; literal years of fighting to keep a tattered web intact at the cost of my own joy.

Performing loyalty to a web that not only doesn’t meet my needs but now requires me to suppress them.

And with that permission, all the energy that had been tied up in that entire drama returned to me.

Now I want to build a new web with it.

This is what journaling does

You sit with a problem. A metaphor lands at exactly the moment you need it. You apply it to your actual life and suddenly you have permission.

Permission to stop salvaging. Permission to let the tattered web go. Permission to build something new.

And watch how quickly your world transforms. Your spaces reflect it. Your art reflects it. How you show up reflects it.

The inner work yields outer expression.

It’s about visibility; becoming visible to yourself as much as anyone else. It’s no small thing.

Amanda x

This week’s journal session replay + remaining June dates are “below the fold” for paying subscribers (thank you). Scroll all the way down.

p.s.
Want A Free Art Journal Lesson?

This July, I’m teaching at Make Create Express for its 10th anniversary along with 36 other artists, each of us with distinct approaches to creative practice.

My lesson is rooted in the question “What if the thing you think disqualifies you is actually your creative superpower?”

For years, I disqualified my art because I couldn’t draw, didn’t care about mastering the skill and had little patience for life drawing, something my brain experiences as a “boring” practice.

I thought those limitations meant I’d never be a ‘real’ artist.

I was wrong.

Because here’s what I know for certain: your creative practice is not something you have to earn your way into. It’s something you return to. Over and over. Exactly as you are.

Even - especially - when you’re not sure how.

Register Now For Free!

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How cool is that? Not sure how to do it - doing it anyway.

That’s where your homecoming begins. Not in certainty or perfect conditions. But in the honesty of a humble beginning.

To begin is to give in to a knowing you’ve resisted for too long.

That’s why the first line in Mary Oliver’s poem, ‘The Journey’ (which is our guide this month) is “One day you *finally* knew what you had to do, and began.

Because let’s be real, it can take a while to tire of a status quo - sometimes it can take a whole lifetime.

I’m reminded of Marie. A 76 year old lady I befriended on retreat last year. We were paired to ask each other the question “why did you come here?”.

Her response floored me.

“I’m here to find the courage to finally admit that I am gay”

Finally: denotes the culmination of a long, often difficult wait.

A more accurate word could not have been chosen.

‘Finally’ here let’s us know that it has been long enough and the waiting must come to an end.

‘Finally’ has nothing to do with certainty, talent, skill or having the path forward figured out.

‘Finally’ is about the moment you stop pretending the answer is ‘try harder’.

There is one comfort, however: finally also usually means at least you can be sure you waited as long as you could before choosing whatever change has become necessary.

‘Finally’, is the point when you actually DO what is necessary because you finally understand that nothing will change, until you begin.

Want A Free Art Journal Lesson?

This July, I’m teaching at Make Create Express for its 10th anniversary along with 36 other artists, each of us with distinct approaches to creative practice.

My lesson is rooted in the question “What if the thing you think disqualifies you is actually your creative superpower?”

For years, I disqualified my art because I couldn’t draw, didn’t care about mastering the skill and had little patience for life drawing, something my brain experiences as a “boring” practice.

I thought those limitations meant I’d never be a ‘real’ artist.

I was wrong.

Because here’s what I know for certain: your creative practice is not something you have to earn your way into. It’s something you return to. Over and over. Exactly as you are.

Even - especially - when you’re not sure how.

Register Now For Free!

Paying subscribers - thank you - scroll down for yesterday’s replay + upcoming dates.

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Later they sent me a message to add “I just didn’t want to be alone”

That’s the thing about journaling. Most people think it’s something you’re supposed to do alone.

That’s why spaces where you’re allowed to be alone, together, are so valuable.

Why Company Changes Everything

We light a candle at the beginning of every session to honour our intention: we are stepping into sacred time.

This isn’t body doubling in the productivity sense. We are not cleaning bathrooms and folding clothes. In fact, this time is sacred specifically because, as one participant shared that “it’s literally the only time all week where I am not prioritising household tasks or someone else”

It’s the sense that you’re not the only one making time for this. Not the only one working through something. Not the only one learning to trust herself.

Collectively, we have journaled about grief and loss and mothers and all the people who couldn’t love us the way we wanted to.

We have taken turns unearthing the stories we’ve been telling ourselves about the lives we should be living.

Almost every call, someone arrives at some kind of insight, like maybe the real work wasn’t fixing this; maybe it was accepting that.

And we have wrestled with acceptance & wounding, we have redefined failure & success.

And we have made art. A lot of art.

Sure, we could do all of that alone. And we do most of the time, but we can do it together, too and there’s just something different about structured space & time that makes us actually DO IT.

And one trap I want never to fall into again, is the one where I do everything alone. I was honestly out here trying to ‘make it’ on my own so that I could then come to the table, feeling like I had earned a seat.

Never again.

What happens in these sessions

First, we bless the time & space with our intention.

Then, I guide the group through a listening exercise where you will learn to listen with your body, your imagination and your intuition.

Then you go inward. The listening allows you to touch upon something that’s been waiting. Your inner life wakes up & shows you things.

Journaling is about making room for [to quote Mary Oliver] another voice to speak.

And it’s not the voice of your anxious mind ‘shoulding’ all over itself. It’s way more grounded than that and it just…knows what’s good for you.

Poetry as Your Long-Term Therapist

We journey with each poem for a calendar month. So that we may form an intimacy with it.

Same words. Different medicine each time; the process shows you what’s actually happening right now in your life.

The journalling helps you figure out how you think & feel about it and even offers you ideas as to what your next right step might be.

And also, did I mention that we make art?

And now with an added Sunday session, that’s two whole hours a week you can spend working through whatever is going on for you or you can just spend it studying poetry and making art - you decide!

This Isn’t Self-Care. It’s Soul Care.

Every time you sit with your journal, every time you let your hand move across the page, every time you witness someone else doing the same; you’re practicing something radical.

You’re saying: My inner life matters. My healing matters. My voice matters.

And because your healing matters, everyone around you benefits. The best version of yourself isn’t a gift you give yourself. It’s a gift you give the world.

That’s the real value of these sessions. Not that you’ll feel better (though you might). But that you’ll become someone who brings her best self to her relationships, her work, her family.

Someone who’s doing the work.The world needs more healing people. Why not join us?

Paying subscribers scroll down for replay + upcoming call details.

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I’ve met this poem before. In fact, it was one of my very first encounters with poetry. This was long after my underwhelming introduction to it in school.

And though I knew I ‘liked’ poetry, it would be another couple of decades at least until I would learn to recognise the divine assistance that poetry had to offer me.

Revisiting this month’s poem for me is like revisiting an old therapist. One who knew me as my most wounded, most terrified, most defiant self and who accompanied me through some of the gnarliest dark nights of my young soul.

I only decided on this poem literally as I clicked ‘start’ on the zoom dashboard.

She had been calling at me all day - “pick me! Let me do June” but I kept resisting; apparently the culture snob in me thinks she [and by ‘she’, I mean this particular poem] is ‘too basic. too common. too obvious.’

As if she - as in, this particular poem - didn’t literally shine a god damn torch with one hand & steady me with the other, as I clumsily did the very thing she had prescribed…

I. BEGAN.

As if I don’t still need her to remind me to KEEP GOING. TO LET THE CLOUDS BURN. TO WALK DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO THE WORLD WITH THIS ‘NEW’ VOICE AT THE HELM.

A Voice That Guides

I’ve been thinking about the voices that guide us. Not any one voice in particular, but the voice; something I’ve learned to call ‘Divine Authority’.

I’ve been musing on its genius for speaking through whatever host it needs to, in any given moment; just so we may hear it.

When I was a teenager, my Divine Authority [whom I will refer to as ‘Dorothy’ from now on] came through the beautiful watercolour hallmark cards written by an entity daring to call themselves ‘Oriah Mountain Dreamer’.

In my early twenties, Dorothy reached me through the distorted frequencies of grunge music & a few odd encounters with random elders who each offered a kindness to me.

Once, Dorothy spoke to me through an angel named Cherie, a black female airport police officer who whispered ‘stay calm & you’ll be ok’ into my ear just as I was about to be dragged quite violently through Virginia airport by two meathead state troopers for being drunk on a plane.

Later, my guiding voice began speaking through artists, philosophers, nature and poets.

My own artist self, who has never NOT existed by the way, was only truly liberated after an encounter with Dorothy in the form of a ceramic angel-like figure that insisted on coming home with me.

This led me to discover a mixed media artist I’d never heard of before. Entering her world was like discovering NARIA was real and it broke my heart into a million pieces that I wasn’t living there too; that I felt so locked out of the creative, joyful existence of my dreams.

It was then that I became simply unwilling to live my life knowing that that was possible and not at least give it my best shot.

When I tell you, it hasn’t been easy, I’m not lying. And when I tell you it hasn’t always proved wise either, well.. the jury is still out on that.

It would seem that sometimes the voice simply must guide us through the kind of scrub that will strip the metaphorical skin off your bones. And that this particular form of brutality appears to be in service of growing our capacity for infinite joy, love, wonder & awe.

I mean, isn’t that what we’re supposed to live for? Or is that just what makes life - let’s face it - bearable?

There’s A Pattern To It

These voices, they know where to find us. They know how to beckon. And if you’re anyway curious, they become irresistible.

You can’t really help but follow where they lead.

Our two most recent poet laureates - Mary Oliver & Andrea Gibson - they each had to break something in themselves to get to the places from where they packaged their discoveries & offered them as poems to those of us who were bound to be following on behind.

Because how could we not?

Hope is this: just as the patriarchal, capitalist bullshit is never silenced, either is the voice of Divine Authority.

She knows what it means to survive the call to assimilate. To comply. To become small, skinny, beautiful, or whatever market trends demands of us, enough to fit.

But. But. But.
We were never made to fit.
We were made to belong.

Your Divine Authority is the voice that wants you to choose your soul over the life you are “supposed to” live.

She is the voice of liberation and will always find a way.

This month, as I revisit a poem Dorothy once laid at my feet, I do so in awe, because in some ways “I’ve made it”. The journey, that is.

Yay - I am so happy for me!

And yet, I must not linger too long in celebration at the cost of completion.

There are things still left to do and a life still yet to be saved, after all.

How would I even know this, if it weren’t for poetry?

This Months Invitation

Is not only to contemplate The Journey as a poem, but to also locate yourself within it, as a process.

Where have you been? Where are you now? Where are you faltering? What feels complete? What’s ahead?

That’s what our weekly journaling calls are for; to walk with the kinds of questions that help us build the capacity to hear & act upon our divine knowing.

June Journaling Sessions

We’re gonna try for twice a week this month - Wednesdays & Sundays (there’s a Thursday in there too). These calls will be for paying subscribers.

If that’s you, simply scroll down to see the details and last night’s replay.

Thanks for being here. See you soon!

Amanda xx

p.s… Here’a a better photo of my hair because wtf was I thinking with that last one?

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