“What you are is sacred. Core negative beliefs keep you scared.” — Julia Cameron

Week One of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is called Recovering a Sense of Safety, which feels like such an interesting place to begin. Not with ambition or productivity or finally getting that novel finished, but with safety.

Because creativity asks us to reveal something. An idea, a sentence, a drawing, a desire, perhaps even a version of ourselves we have kept hidden for years. No wonder we sometimes hover at the edge of it.

This week, rather than forcing yourself to be braver, notice what might help your creative self feel a little safer coming out to play.

Prompt:

Where have I learned to feel unsafe about being creative, and what would make creativity feel safer now?

If you want to join us for The Artist’s Way and four Heart Leap writing hours a week, then subscribe here.

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“As you move toward a dream, the dream moves toward you.” Julia Cameron

We start at 7pm.

Let’s go!

Here’s the link

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At 7 pm, we officially start Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: 12 weeks of creative recovery, curiosity, courage and finding our way back to the part of ourselves that wants to make and create things.

This is not about becoming “more creative” in some worthy, exhausting way. It’s about removing the blocks, excuses, fears and old stories that have been standing between us and the creative life that is already waiting.

Every week, we’ll meet live to talk through the principles in that week’s chapter, share what we’re noticing, and work through some of the exercises together.

Before tonight’s call, please read the Introduction and Chapter One.

And do one important thing before we begin: sign your Artist’s Way contract.

It might feel slightly dramatic. Good. Sometimes we need to stop vaguely hoping we’ll make time for our creativity and actually make an agreement with ourselves that we will.

Week One is the first step on our 12-week roadmap of creative recovery. We are recovering a sense of safety.

You do not have to know where this is going or what you are going to make. You do not even have to feel particularly creative today. You just have to turn up.

We start today.

Tonight at 7pm.

[Please note, the calls are not recorded to protect our confidentiality. If you can’t make the calls, don’t worry. Just work through the book and catch up when you can.]

Writing Prompt:

What negative belief is blocking your creativity? Don’t know? Finish this sentence without thinking too hard about it: “I can’t be a successful, prolific, creative artist because…” Keep writing. You may be surprised by what comes next.

You can join The Artist’s Way by becoming a paying subscriber.

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If you’re already a subscriber, use this link.

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“Leap, and the net will appear.” Julia Cameron

I love this quote because so much of creativity asks us to move before we feel ready.

We want reassurance that we won’t embarrass ourselves, waste our time or discover that the thing we’ve secretly wanted to do for years is actually… terrible.

But creativity rarely offers guarantees in advance.

You write the first page before you know if there’s a book or pick up the paintbrush before you know what the picture is or sign up, turn up, begin badly, change your mind, have another go.

I believe that the “net” is not some magical cushion waiting below us, but the confidence, skill, people, ideas and unexpected opportunities that only become visible once we’re moving.

So perhaps this week, don’t ask: “Am I ready?”Ask:

What would I do if I trusted myself enough to begin?

I am facilitating the legendary Artist’s Way tomorrow at 7pm. Join us by subscribing to the Heart Leap paid subscription (which also includes 4 x weekly writing hours!)

You can subscribe here.

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If you are already subscribed to the paid Heart Leap Substack, just join us on the Heart Leap writing hour link (below) plus join us for writing hour at 9am. You can always use the writing hour for your Morning Pages if that works for you.

Here’s the link:

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“No matter what your age or life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.” Julia Cameron

Happy 1st September!

Things are going to look slightly different in Heart Leap for the next 12 weeks because I’m going to be facilitating The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s brilliant 12-week course in discovering — and recovering — your creative self.

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I love that word: recovering.

Because I don’t think creativity is something some lucky people are born with and the rest of us have to stand outside with our noses pressed against the window. I think it’s already in us. Sometimes it simply gets buried under work, responsibility, caring for other people, paying the bills, emptying the dishwasher and generally being a functioning adult.

If that Julia Cameron quote made something stir — or even ache — inside you, you’re not alone.

So many of us, especially women, caregivers, over-functioners and midlife superheroes, have spent years showing up for everyone except ourselves. Eventually it shows (symptoms: exhaustion, resentment, feeling a little bit dead inside. 😩)

The good news is that it’s not too late to make some changes.

For the next 12 weeks, we’re going to work our way through The Artist’s Way together. You don’t have to think of yourself as an artist. You don’t even have to know what you want to create, you simply need a little curiosity about what might happen if you started making more room for that part of yourself again.

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This isn’t about becoming self-centred but rather becoming self-connected.

And I think something rather lovely happens when we do that. We have more to give, not less. We become more interested in our lives and we remember that life isn’t simply a long list of things that need sorting out before we’re finally allowed to enjoy ourselves.

We start this Thursday at 7pm. You need to buy the book, read the intro and first chapter by then.

For simplicity, we’ll use the same login as the Writing Hour. Our regular Writing Hours will continue Monday to Thursday at 9am, with our live Artist’s Way session every Thursday at 7pm.

And if you don’t fancy doing The Artist’s Way? I’ll be posting a daily writing prompt throughout September and there will be plenty here for everyone, whether you’re doing the course or simply popping in for a little creative company. But you can join us by subscribing here.

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So perhaps September doesn’t need to be about becoming someone new.

Perhaps it’s about recovering someone who has been there all along.

Today’s prompt

What part of your creative self have you neglected, abandoned or quietly put on hold — and what might happen if you gave it a little attention again this September?

Below is the live link for today’s Heart Leap writing hour at 9 am, where a friendly group of writers come to work on their books, projects or Substack - there’s a little bit of chat at the beginning and end, but mostly, we sit together and just write. If you need accountability and a bit of company, then do join us.

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“But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?"
Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don't.” ― Julia Cameron

No Writing Hour today because it’s a Bank Holiday here in the UK.

But we are starting something very exciting this week.

On Thursday at 7pm (BST), we begin our 12-week journey through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, live on Zoom for all paid Heart Leap subscribers.

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If you haven’t done it before, The Artist’s Way is a brilliant creative and self-development course designed to help you reconnect with your creativity, get past the fears and limiting beliefs that keep you stuck, and pay much more attention to what makes you feel curious, inspired and alive.

We’ll be using Cameron’s three core tools: daily Morning Pages, a weekly Artist’s Date and the exercises in each chapter, which I think of as rather brilliant DIY coaching sessions with yourself.

Before we begin, Julia Cameron asks us to make a commitment to the 12 weeks by signing a creative contract.

So here it is. Copy it into your notebook, print it out, sign it, stick it somewhere you can see it, and let’s see what happens when we take our creativity seriously for the next three months.

“I, …………., understand that I am undertaking an intensive, guided encounter with my own creativity. I commit myself to the 12-week duration of the course. I commit to weekly reading, daily Morning Pages, a weekly Artist’s Date, and the fulfilment of each week’s tasks.

I further understand that this course will raise issues and emotions for me to deal with. I commit myself to excellent self-care, adequate sleep, diet and exercise, and pampering for the duration of the course.

Signed: ………….

Date: ………….”

We start Thursday at 7pm (BST).

Bring your book, your notebook and your curiosity.

To sign up, become a paid subscriber to the Heart Leap Substack (you also gain access to the Heart Leap writing hours - 9am BST, Monday to Thursday where you join our friendly group of writers for an hour a day to write your book or project)

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“Leap, and the net will appear.” Julia Cameron

I am a huge fan of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and I’ve now done the course almost every year, which probably tells you something, because every single time I return to it, something shifts. Sometimes that shift has been creative, sometimes professional, sometimes deeply personal, but I always finish the 12 weeks feeling more alive, more curious, more confident and much closer to the part of myself that can get buried under deadlines, responsibilities, practicalities and the endless business of being a grown-up.

From next week, I’ll be facilitating The Artist’s Way for 12 weeks for all paid Heart Leap subscribers, and if you’ve never come across it before, it is part book, part creative course and part gentle revolution.

Despite the title, you absolutely do not need to think of yourself as an artist. You might want to write a novel, start painting, take photographs, make music, launch something, change your work, rediscover an old hobby or simply reconnect with a brighter, more playful part of yourself that seems to have gone rather quiet.

That is more than enough.

At its heart, The Artist’s Way is about unpicking all the accumulated conditioning that tells us we are not talented enough, original enough, young enough, clever enough or whatever-enough to make the things we secretly want to make, and replacing that fear with curiosity, confidence and permission.

Julia Cameron’s belief is that creativity is not a mysterious gift bestowed upon a lucky few, but something we can practise and strengthen, and the course is built around two wonderfully simple tools.

The first is Morning Pages, which means writing three pages by hand every morning, not for publication and not even necessarily to make sense, but simply to clear the mental clutter and let whatever is rattling around in your head spill onto the page.

The second is the Artist Date, a small weekly adventure undertaken entirely for yourself, which might mean wandering around an art gallery, exploring a vintage shop, buying ridiculous coloured pencils, sitting in a café with a sketchbook, visiting somewhere you have always been curious about or simply following a thread of interest without having to justify why it is useful.

These tools sound almost too simple to be transformative, but that is partly their magic.

Cameron talks about God quite a lot in the book, which can initially make some readers twitchy, but you do not need to be religious or even especially spiritual to get something from the course. She has described the idea instead as pointing your life in a “Good Orderly Direction”, and I’ve always rather liked that, because The Artist’s Way is not really about becoming more productive or squeezing more achievement into your life, it is about becoming more yourself.

Over the 12 weeks, we will work through one chapter at a time, exploring everything from creative confidence and fear to perfectionism, self-sabotage, money, possibility, jealousy, guilt and the many subtle ways we stop ourselves from doing the things that matter to us.

And most importantly, we’ll do it together.

Each Thursday at 7pm we’ll meet live to talk about the chapter, share what has come up, celebrate the breakthroughs, laugh about the resistance and keep one another gently moving forward, because creativity is so much easier to protect when you are surrounded by people who understand why it matters.

There are no gold stars, no creative Olympics and absolutely no guilt if you miss a day of Morning Pages, because the point is not to do the course perfectly, but simply to keep showing up and paying attention to what starts to change.

You will need your own copy of The Artist’s Way before we begin, and I’d love you to read the introduction and Chapter One before our first session.

If there is something you have been wanting to make, write, begin, explore or change, perhaps this autumn is the moment to stop waiting until you feel completely ready, because if we are honest, completely ready is a mythical state that rarely arrives.

So come anyway, bring your notebook, bring the abandoned idea, bring the curiosity, and especially bring the part of you that thinks she is not creative enough, because she is exactly the person this course is for.

Let’s see what happens when we give creativity some proper room.

The Artist’s Way begins next Thursday at 7pm and is included for all paid Heart Leap subscribers.

I cannot wait to do this with you.

All you have to do is subscribe to become a paid subscriber, and you'll receive the Zoom link next Thursday to join.

(As a paid subscriber, you are also welcome to join the Heart Leap writing hours at 9am Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday (BST), where our friendly group of writers meet with coffee and a keyboard to work on their books or projects. )

Join here

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“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”Joseph Campbell

As we come to the end of our month of The Creative Space, I want to leave you with one last thought - choose the thread.

Over the past few weeks, you may have noticed twenty different glimmers, ideas, books you want to read, things you want to make, places you want to explore and projects you suddenly feel wildly enthusiastic about. This is lovely, but please do not attempt to pursue all of them at once, because that way madness and seventeen unfinished pottery courses lie - or is that just me?

Instead, notice the one thing that keeps tugging at you.

It might be a story you want to finish, a subject you want to research, photographs you want to take, a sketchbook you want to reopen or simply the desire to start writing Morning Pages and see what comes out.

You do not need to know where it is going.

You need to take the next small step.

August has been about making space for creativity, “filling the well,” protecting our time, resting and paying attention to what lights us up. And next week we begin The Artist’s Way together, which feels like the perfect next step, because now that we have made the space, we can start exploring what wants to grow inside it.

For twelve weeks, we will work through Julia Cameron’s book together, with live sessions every Thursday at 7 pm, using Morning Pages, Artist Dates, and the weekly exercises to go deeper into our creativity and see where it might lead us.

This is the moment to choose one thread and carry it with you into September.

Writing prompt:

What is the one creative thread you want to follow next, and what is the very first thing you are going to do about it?

NEWS! I will be facilitating The Artist’s Way from Thursday 3rd September every Thursday for 12 weeks at 7pm.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the legendary 12-week creative reset that has helped millions of people reconnect with the part of themselves they thought they’d lost. And it has some rather famous fans: Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Gilbert and Tim Ferriss are among the creatives said to have been inspired by it.

But you absolutely don’t have to think of yourself as “an artist” to do it. This is about curiosity, confidence and giving yourself permission to make things, dream bigger and listen to what you actually want. Through daily Morning Pages, weekly Artist Dates and a series of brilliantly revealing exercises, we’ll spend 12 weeks firing up not just our creativity, but our lives.

I’ll be facilitating the course every Thursday at 7pm. Before we begin, you’ll need to buy your own copy of The Artist’s Way and to have read the introduction and Chapter One.

I’ve done this course before and I don’t use the words “life-changing” lightly. But this one really can be.

This is all part of the Heart Leap £7 a month subscription, which also buys you four writing hours a week plus being part of a vibrant, brilliant, friendly community.

If you’re already a subscriber, here’s the link for today’s writing hour

Read more

“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.”
Auguste Rodin

As we come towards the end of our month of The Creative Space, I have been thinking about what I actually want to take from it, because there is always a danger with these lovely months of reflection that we have all sorts of illuminating thoughts, write them enthusiastically in our notebooks and then, somewhere around the first of September, go straight back to living exactly as we did before.

We began August by filling the well, paying attention to the books, films, landscapes, conversations, colours, people and tiny pleasures that make us feel more alive, and noticing those strange little creative glimmers that catch our attention before disappearing again. We thought about curiosity and about how creativity often arrives quietly, not as a magnificent, fully formed idea, but as something we keep noticing, something we keep picking up, something that refuses to leave us alone.

Then we looked at protecting the space itself, because inspiration is wonderful but at some point it needs somewhere to go. We asked where creativity actually lives in our diaries, what keeps stealing that time and whether one protected hour might be enough to begin changing our relationship with it.

And then, perhaps most importantly, we stopped.

We allowed ourselves to rest, stare out of windows, read, wander, sleep and do absolutely nothing useful for a while, because creativity needs space too. It cannot always be summoned, measured and asked to perform. Sometimes it needs us to leave it alone long enough for something new to begin quietly rearranging itself underneath the surface.

What I have been reminded of this month is that creativity is not another thing to squeeze into an already overflowing life. It is a way of being in relationship with life. It is noticing more, following curiosity, and making room for ideas and permitting ourselves to play. Turning up when we can and resting when we need to.

We don't need to carry all of August into September.

Maybe we choose one thing.

Perhaps you discovered that you think better when you walk, that reading fills you up in a way scrolling never will, that your best ideas arrive first thing in the morning, that you need more solitude than you realised, or that an hour really is enough. Perhaps you remembered how much you love drawing, taking photographs, writing by hand or simply allowing yourself to follow an idea without immediately asking what it is for.

The important thing now is not to admire the insight and then abandon it.

Choose something you want to keep.

Because next week, as we begin The Artist’s Way together, we are going to go deeper into this relationship with our creativity, but I think we will arrive there in a much better place after spending August making room for it first.

Writing prompt:

What is one thing you have done differently during The Creative Space that has made you feel more creative, and exactly how are you going to keep it in your life in September?

NEWS! I will be facilitating The Artist’s Way from Thursday 3rd September, every Thursday for 12 weeks at 7 pm.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the legendary 12-week creative reset that has helped millions of people reconnect with the part of themselves they thought they’d lost. And it has some rather famous fans: Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Gilbert and Tim Ferriss are among the creatives said to have been inspired by it.

But you absolutely don’t have to think of yourself as “an artist” to do it. This is about curiosity, confidence and permitting yourself to make things, dream bigger and listen to what you actually want. Through daily Morning Pages, weekly Artist Dates and a series of brilliantly revealing exercises, we’ll spend 12 weeks firing up not just our creativity, but our lives.

I’ll be facilitating the course every Thursday at 7 pm. Before we begin, you’ll need to buy your own copy of The Artist’s Way and read the introduction and Chapter One.

I’ve done this course before, and I don’t use the words “life-changing” lightly. But this one really can be.

This is all part of the Heart Leap £7 a month subscription, which also buys you four writing hours a week plus being part of a vibrant, brilliant, friendly community.

Subscribe now

If you’re already a subscriber, here’s the link for today’s writing hour

Read more

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” — W. B. Yeats

Sometimes the most interesting thing about stepping away from our usual lives is not what happens while we are away, but what follows us home.

It might be something tiny. An image you cannot stop seeing, a sentence from a book, a conversation that keeps replaying in your head, a colour, a place, a person, a strange little idea that seemed insignificant at the time but has somehow lodged itself in your imagination.

That happened to me in Scotland last week. I came home with photographs and dirty washing and far too many books, obviously, but I also came back with things I cannot quite explain yet. The melancholy of those abandoned wartime buildings on the beach, a castle sitting in the middle of a dark loch, and the white unicorn haunts my dreams, obviously.

None of these things has become anything yet, and I am trying not to rush them.

Because this brings us back to those creative glimmers we talked about earlier in the month, the things that keep catching our attention before we quite know why. Sometimes an idea needs to follow us around for a while before we understand what it wants from us, and perhaps part of creating space is resisting the urge to immediately turn every interesting thing into a project.

You do not have to have been away for this to happen either. Something may have followed you out of a conversation, a book, a walk, a difficult week, a day at work or simply an ordinary Tuesday when you suddenly noticed something differently.

The question is whether we pay attention when it comes back.

So today, rather than asking yourself what you should be working on, have a look at what is already hanging around the edges of your mind.

There may be something there worth following.

Writing prompt:

What idea, image, conversation or thought has kept returning to you lately, and what happens if you give it ten minutes of your full attention today?

NEWS! I will be facilitating The Artist’s Way from Thursday 3rd September every Thursday for 12 weeks at 7pm.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the legendary 12-week creative reset that has helped millions of people reconnect with the part of themselves they thought they’d lost. And it has some rather famous fans: Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Gilbert and Tim Ferriss are among the creatives said to have been inspired by it.

But you absolutely don’t have to think of yourself as “an artist” to do it. This is about curiosity, confidence and giving yourself permission to make things, dream bigger and listen to what you actually want. Through daily Morning Pages, weekly Artist Dates and a series of brilliantly revealing exercises, we’ll spend 12 weeks firing up not just our creativity, but our lives.

I’ll be facilitating the course every Thursday at 7pm. Before we begin, you’ll need to buy your own copy of The Artist’s Way and to have read the introduction and Chapter One.

I’ve done this course before and I don’t use the words “life-changing” lightly. But this one really can be.

This is all part of the Heart Leap £7 a month subscription, which also buys you four writing hours a week plus being part of a vibrant, brilliant, friendly community.

Subscribe now

If you’re already a subscriber, here’s the link for today’s writing hour

Read more

I’m back.

After an amazing week in Scotland filled with white unicorns (although my boyfriend insists they were deer and he is obviously wrong), frogs, castles sitting mysteriously in the middle of lochs, princess towers, rain, reading and an almost heroic amount of sleep, I am back at my desk and back to our Writing Hours.

I loved swimming in a loch until I discovered afterwards that it was apparently home to a twenty-foot pike, information I feel would have been much more useful before I took my clothes off and got in, and there were deserted Second World War pillboxes and strange abandoned buildings on a melancholic secret beach which looked as though they were waiting for someone to put them in a novel.

I slept and slept and slept, spent a night in the gatehouse of a castle ( not Balmoral unfortunately). However, that was just up the road, beside a private airfield from which there seemed to be a suspicious amount of late-night activity, so naturally I decided the clans were gathering. There were castles with proper princess towers, eco villages, long drives through enormous mountainous landscapes, rainy afternoons with books and that wonderful feeling you sometimes get on holiday when ordinary life has become sufficiently far away that another part of your brain finally gets a chance to speak.

And now I am home.

And we have reached the final week of our August theme, The Creative Space, and it feels lovely to be finishing with The Return.

This month we have “filled the well”, noticed our creative glimmers, thought about what inspires us, protected the time we need to make things and then, last week, deliberately stepped away from all of it.

Now comes the return.

There is always something slightly strange about coming home from a holiday because I think we imagine we should arrive back renewed, bursting with brilliant ideas and ready to attack our lives with the energy of someone in a particularly optimistic stationery advert.

I don’t feel like that at all.

I feel slightly dreamy, very well slept and as though part of me is still wandering around Scotland looking for unicorns.

And perhaps that is exactly as it should be, because I don’t want to rush straight past whatever shifted while I was away simply because emails are waiting, washing to do, and a normal life demanding to be resumed.

I want to listen for a while.

That is what this final week is going to be about, not asking what we have achieved during our month of creative space, but noticing what we have heard, what has changed, what has begun to tug at us and what our creativity might be asking for next.

Most of all, I want to resist that horrible feeling that after a break we have to catch up.

There is no creative backlog.

We do not owe creativity extra pages because we rested, and we do not have to compensate for the afternoons spent reading, swimming, staring out of windows or sleeping in enormous beds.

We come back to the page and begin from where we are now, perhaps slightly changed by whatever we have seen, felt and allowed ourselves to stop doing.

So that is what I am doing this morning.

I am back in my Writing Hour, opening the notebook again, without demanding that anything particularly impressive happens.

I am just turning up.

Writing prompt:

What is one thing you want to make, write, read or explore this week, and what space will you give it?

NEWS! I will be facilitating The Artist’s Way from Thursday 3rd September every Thursday for 12 weeks at 7pm.

Subscribe now

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the legendary 12-week creative reset that has helped millions of people reconnect with the part of themselves they thought they’d lost. And it has some rather famous fans: Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Gilbert and Tim Ferriss are among the creatives said to have been inspired by it.

But you absolutely don’t have to think of yourself as “an artist” to do it. This is about curiosity, confidence and giving yourself permission to make things, dream bigger and listen to what you actually want. Through daily Morning Pages, weekly Artist Dates and a series of brilliantly revealing exercises, we’ll spend 12 weeks firing up not just our creativity, but our lives.

I’ll be facilitating the course every Thursday at 7pm. Before we begin, you’ll need to buy your own copy of The Artist’s Way and to have read the introduction and Chapter One.

I’ve done this course before and I don’t use the words “life-changing” lightly. But this one really can be.

This is all part of the Heart Leap £7 a month subscription, which also buys you four writing hours a week and being part of a vibrant, brilliant, friendly community.

Subscribe now

If you’re already a subscriber, here’s the link for today’s writing hour

Read more

“Be the weirdo who dares to enjoy.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic.

This is your final DIY Writing Hour of the week.

If you have written every morning this week, wonderful. If you have filled pages, followed ideas and had a minor creative breakthrough while staring out of a window, wonderful.

But if you have written absolutely nothing, that is wonderful too. Creativity is not always visible.

Sometimes it is happening somewhere underneath the surface while we are sleeping, walking, swimming, reading, laughing with people we love or simply doing very little.

I think we can become frightened that if we stop, the creative thread will disappear, but perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps rest is one of the ways we keep hold of it.

So today, if your body or brain is asking for rest, listen.

Your creativity may simply be underground for a while, doing mysterious root related business.

Writing prompt:

What changes when you stop seeing rest as time away from your creative life and begin seeing it as part of it?

Subscribe now

NEWS! I will be facilitating The Artist’s Way from Thursday 3rd September every Thursday for 12 weeks at 7pm.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the legendary 12-week creative reset that has helped millions of people reconnect with the part of themselves they thought they’d lost. And it has some rather famous fans: Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Gilbert and Tim Ferriss are among the creatives said to have been inspired by it.

But you absolutely don’t have to think of yourself as “an artist” to do it. This is about curiosity, confidence and giving yourself permission to make things, dream bigger and listen to what you actually want. Through daily Morning Pages, weekly Artist Dates and a series of brilliantly revealing exercises, we’ll spend 12 weeks firing up not just our creativity, but our lives.

I’ll be facilitating the course every Thursday at 7pm. Before we begin, you’ll need to buy your own copy of The Artist’s Way and to have read the introduction and Chapter One.

I’ve done this course before and I don’t use the words “life-changing” lightly. But this one really can be.

Writing hours will also recommence on Monday 24th August.

Subscribe now

“Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.” — Maya Angelou

Today how about we bunk off the Writing Hour completely?

One of the practices we will be exploring properly when we begin The Artist’s Way in September is Julia Cameron’s Artist Date, which is simply time spent alone doing something that feeds your curiosity.

It does not have to be grand, expensive or remotely impressive. You could wander around a second hand bookshop, walk somewhere without tracking your steps, sit in a gallery with one painting, buy one ridiculous beautiful thing from an art shop, photograph interesting doors or go somewhere your twelve year old self would have thought was brilliant.

The important thing is that you go alone and follow what interests you - no productivity or useful outcome necessary. Just you taking your creative self out for a little adventure and seeing what catches your eye.

Your invitation today:

Where would your curiosity like to take you?

NEWS! I will be facilitating The Artist’s Way from Thursday 3rd September every Thursday for 12 weeks at 7pm.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the legendary 12-week creative reset that has helped millions of people reconnect with the part of themselves they thought they’d lost. And it has some rather famous fans: Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Gilbert and Tim Ferriss are among the creatives said to have been inspired by it.

But you absolutely don’t have to think of yourself as “an artist” to do it. This is about curiosity, confidence and giving yourself permission to make things, dream bigger and listen to what you actually want. Through daily Morning Pages, weekly Artist Dates and a series of brilliantly revealing exercises, we’ll spend 12 weeks firing up not just our creativity, but our lives.

I’ll be facilitating the course every Thursday at 7pm. Before we begin, you’ll need to buy your own copy of The Artist’s Way and to have read the introduction and Chapter One.

I’ve done this course before and I don’t use the words “life-changing” lightly. But this one really can be.

Writing hours will also recommence on Monday 24th August.

No writing hour today, I’m on holiday in Scotland.

I am hoping to do quite a lot of staring out of windows this week and lazing around in bed looking at mountains versus climbing them.

I have realised how rarely I allow my brain to be genuinely unoccupied anymore because the moment there is a gap, I fill it. I listen to something, read something, check something, Google something or reach automatically for my phone before my own thoughts have had time to wander in.

But creativity seems to need those empty stretches.

It needs the shower, the drive, the walk without headphones and the ten minutes when you are supposedly doing nothing but looking at a blade of grass.

We talk a lot about finding inspiration, but perhaps we sometimes need to stop hunting for it and leave enough quiet for it to find us.

So if you come to the DIY Writing Hour today, perhaps do not rush to fill all sixty minutes. Sit there for a little while first and see what your mind does when nobody gives it an assignment.

You might be surprised where it goes.

Writing prompt:

What arrives when you stop trying to make something arrive?

NEWS! I will be facilitating The Artist’s Way from Thursday 3rd September every Thursday for 12 weeks at 7pm.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the legendary 12-week creative reset that has helped millions of people reconnect with the part of themselves they thought they’d lost. And it has some rather famous fans: Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Gilbert and Tim Ferriss are among the creatives said to have been inspired by it.

But you absolutely don’t have to think of yourself as “an artist” to do it. This is about curiosity, confidence and giving yourself permission to make things, dream bigger and listen to what you actually want. Through daily Morning Pages, weekly Artist Dates and a series of brilliantly revealing exercises, we’ll spend 12 weeks firing up not just our creativity, but our lives.

I’ll be facilitating the course every Thursday at 7pm. Before we begin, you’ll need to buy your own copy of The Artist’s Way and to have read the introduction and Chapter One.

I’ve done this course before and I don’t use the words “life-changing” lightly. But this one really can be.

Writing hours will also recommence on Monday 24th August.

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” Anne Lamott

By the time you read this, I will hopefully be somewhere in Scotland looking at a mountain, the sea or quite possibly rain through a window, because this week I am switching off properly.

So there will be no live Writing Hours this week, but the space is still yours if you want it.

You can turn up at 9am, make your tea, open your notebook and write quietly for an hour, knowing that other people in the Heart Leap world may be doing exactly the same thing. You can write for ten minutes, stare out of the window for fifty, or decide that this week you need to do absolutely nothing at all.

That counts too.

I think sometimes we become so used to tending everything that we forget we are allowed to put things down for a while. The inbox, the project, the plans, the people who might possibly need us, even the creative work we love.

Nothing terrible will happen if we leave it alone for a few days.

Perhaps some things might even be better for it.

Writing prompt:

What could you stop tending for a few days, and what might become possible in the space it leaves behind?

Subscribe now

NEWS! I will be facilitating The Artist’s Way from Thursday 3rd September every Thursday for 12 weeks at 7pm.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is the legendary 12-week creative reset that has helped millions of people reconnect with the part of themselves they thought they’d lost. And it has some rather famous fans: Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Gilbert and Tim Ferriss are among the creatives said to have been inspired by it.

But you absolutely don’t have to think of yourself as “an artist” to do it. This is about curiosity, confidence and giving yourself permission to make things, dream bigger and listen to what you actually want. Through daily Morning Pages, weekly Artist Dates and a series of brilliantly revealing exercises, we’ll spend 12 weeks firing up not just our creativity, but our lives.

I’ll be facilitating the course every Thursday at 7pm. Before we begin, you’ll need to buy your own copy of The Artist’s Way and to have read the introduction and Chapter One.

I’ve done this course before and I don’t use the words “life-changing” lightly. But this one really can be.

Writing hours will also recommence on Monday 24th August.

Subscribe now

“Creativity should always look at the world sideways, backwards, upside down.”
Elizabeth Gilbert

We have spent this week thinking about protecting our creative space, finding the hour that belongs to us and noticing all the perfectly reasonable things that somehow manage to eat it up, but today I want to suggest something slightly less sensible.

Make something completely useless. One of the quickest ways to squeeze the life out of creativity is to start asking what it is for, whether it is any good, whether anyone will want it, whether you could sell it, publish it, post it or somehow turn it into something productive.

I know I do this all the time because somewhere along the way I seem to have acquired the idea that if I am going to spend an hour creating something, there ought to be a point to it.

But some of the happiest creative moments of my life have had absolutely no point at all.

They have been doodling, taking photographs, making ridiculous little films, rearranging a room because I suddenly wanted everything to feel different, writing something I knew nobody would ever read, painting very badly or following some strange idea simply because it made me feel more alive.

Perhaps that is part of protecting our creative space too, because we are not only protecting the time, we are protecting creativity from our constant need to make it useful.

There is something lovely about making something simply because you want to see what happens, because a colour has caught your eye, because an idea is making you laugh or because for half an hour you would quite like to follow your curiosity somewhere without having to explain where you are going.

So today, give yourself permission to make something gloriously, joyfully, magnificently useless, and see what turns up when there is absolutely nothing riding on the result.

Writing prompt:

What would you make, write, draw, photograph, cook, rearrange or play with if it never had to be useful, impressive or seen by anyone else?

Want to create a writing practice? Come join us at Heart Leap.

If you’ve been meaning to write — your journal, your Substack, your book, your Big Beautiful Thing but somehow always end up reorganising the fridge instead… welcome home.

At Heart Leap, I host four writing hours a week Monday to Thursday from 9–10am GMT. We chat for five minutes at the start, five at the end, and the rest of the time we simply write together. No pressure or performance, just a calm, friendly corner of the internet where pages get filled and ideas stop hiding.

If you need accountability, a regular rhythm, or a space where other writers are also muttering “why is this so hard?”, you’ll be in excellent company.

We also have a Writing Rehab class on the first Wednesday of the month and we run the 12 week Artist’s Way once a year (we start 4th September 2026).

If you want 2026 to be the year your writing life finally feels supported, fun and alive, subscribe for £7 a month and come write with us.

(Do subscribe on desktop rather than the app, otherwise Apple charge an extra 30%.)

Subscribe now

If you’re already subscribed, here’s the link:

Read more

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou

This week we are thinking about protecting our creative space, and one of the slightly uncomfortable parts of that is noticing what keeps getting into it.

Because I think most of us would say we want more time to write, think properly, read deeply or simply hear our own ideas, but somehow that time keeps disappearing.

Sometimes it is genuinely because life is full, but sometimes it is because we are giving away the small pockets of space we do have without even noticing.

Ten minutes disappears into scrolling, half an hour disappears into messages, the quiet hour in the morning gets swallowed by admin, and suddenly the day is underway and creativity has once again been pushed to the edge with a vague promise that we will get to it later. I am certainly guilty of this.

What fascinates me is that the things stealing our creative space are not always the obvious ones. Sometimes it is distraction, sometimes it is work, sometimes it is other people, but sometimes it is our own reluctance to sit with the uncertainty of making something that might not work.

It is easier to answer an email than stare at a blank page.

Emails, after all, are wonderfully clear about what they want from you but creativity is much less accommodating.

It asks you to sit there without knowing what is going to happen next, which is perhaps why we can become incredibly productive in every other area of our lives just as we are about to begin.

So today, rather than trying to find another six hours in your week, notice where the time you already have is going.

There may be a little patch of creative space hiding there that you could reclaim.

Writing prompt:

What most often steals the time you would like to give to your creativity, and what is one small boundary you could put around that space this week?

Want to create a writing practice? Come join us at Heart Leap.

If you’ve been meaning to write — your journal, your Substack, your book, your Big Beautiful Thing but somehow always end up reorganising the fridge instead… welcome home.

At Heart Leap, I host four writing hours a week Monday to Thursday from 9–10am GMT. We chat for five minutes at the start, five at the end, and the rest of the time we simply write together. No pressure or performance, just a calm, friendly corner of the internet where pages get filled and ideas stop hiding.

If you need accountability, a regular rhythm, or a space where other writers are also muttering “why is this so hard?”, you’ll be in excellent company.

We also have a Writing Rehab class on the first Wednesday of the month and we run the 12 week Artist’s Way once a year (we start 4th September 2026).

If you want 2026 to be the year your writing life finally feels supported, fun and alive, subscribe for £7 a month and come write with us.

Subscribe now

(Do subscribe on desktop rather than the app, otherwise Apple charge an extra 30%.)

If you’re already subscribed, here’s the link:

Read more

“Serious art is born from serious play.” Julia Cameron

I am a bit of a faffer. Especially before a deadline. I can suddenly become deeply interested in making another cup of tea, checking one completely non urgent email, putting something away, looking something up or wandering around the house doing small jobs that have apparently become matters of national importance, all because I am procrastinating. And I think this is where ritual can be surprisingly useful.

I do not mean anything particularly mystical, but simply having a tiny signal that tells my brain, this is the moment when I move from ordinary life into creative space.

For me, the Writing Hour has become one of those rituals. I turn up at the same time, make my coffee, open the doc in my folder and begin, and because I have done it often enough now, something in me knows what is coming.

Your ritual might be putting on the same piece of music, lighting a candle, walking once around the block before you sit down, making coffee in the mug you love, opening your notebook at the same chair, or simply switching your phone off and closing the door.

The ritual itself is not the magic.

The magic is that it gets you across the threshold.

It removes a little of the negotiation, because instead of asking yourself whether you feel creative today, you simply begin doing the thing that tells your creativity you are here and ready to listen.

I think we often wait for inspiration to come and fetch us, when perhaps what it needs is a familiar place where it knows it will find us.

Writing prompt:

What small ritual could tell your creative self that it is time to begin, and what would help you make that ritual part of your week?

Want to create a writing practice? Come join us at Heart Leap.

If you’ve been meaning to write — your journal, your Substack, your book, your Big Beautiful Thing but somehow always end up reorganising the fridge instead… welcome home.

At Heart Leap, I host four writing hours a week Monday to Thursday from 9–10am GMT. We chat for five minutes at the start, five at the end, and the rest of the time we simply write together. No pressure or performance, just a calm, friendly corner of the internet where pages get filled and ideas stop hiding.

If you need accountability, a regular rhythm, or a space where other writers are also muttering “why is this so hard?”, you’ll be in excellent company.

We also have a Writing Rehab class on the first Wednesday of the month and we run the 12 week Artist’s Way once a year (we start 4th September 2026).

If you want 2026 to be the year your writing life finally feels supported, fun and alive, subscribe for £7 a month and come write with us.

Subscribe now

(Do subscribe on desktop rather than the app, otherwise Apple charge an extra 30%.)

If you’re already subscribed, here’s the link:

Read more

“The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

This month in Heart Leap we are exploring The Creative Space, and after spending last week thinking about how we fill the well, what inspires us, what catches our attention and what gives us that little spark of creative energy, this week I want to think about how we actually protect it.

I have just had a glorious weekend with some very old friends who came to stay, and there has been lots of talking, laughing, eating, remembering ridiculous things we did twenty years ago and generally being reminded of how precious it is to have people in your life who have known you through so many different versions of yourself.

But I have to admit that it also feels really good to come back to my Writing Hour this morning, to sit down with my notebook and carve out a little piece of time that belongs to me and my creativity. Because I think that is the bit we sometimes forget. We can buy the beautiful notebook, collect ideas, read wonderful books, go to galleries, dream about the novel or the painting or whatever it is we would love to make, but at some point creativity needs us to actually make a space for it in our lives.

And life, annoyingly, is extremely good at filling any space we leave unattended.

There is always work to do, somebody to ring, an email to answer, washing to put away, a dog to walk, a kitchen cupboard that suddenly seems desperately important to reorganise just as you are about to start writing.

We can also imagine that creativity requires huge stretches of freedom, preferably involving a cottage somewhere beautiful, a desk beside a window and absolutely nobody asking us what is for dinner.

But perhaps what it really needs is much smaller than that, maybe it simply needs an hour that belongs to you.

That is one of the things the Heart Leap Writing Hours have taught me. I do not have to feel inspired before I begin and I do not need the rest of my life to be perfectly organised. I just have to keep turning up and protecting that little space, because if I do, sooner or later something happens inside it.

So this week, I want us to think about the space we give our creativity, not just in our heads but in our actual lives.

Where does it live in your diary? And if the answer is that it currently doesn’t, perhaps this is the week to give it somewhere to go.

Writing prompt:

Which hour of your week could become yours, and what would you need to protect it from?

Want to create a writing practice? Come join us at Heart Leap.

If you’ve been meaning to write — your journal, your Substack, your book, your Big Beautiful Thing but somehow always end up reorganising the fridge instead… welcome home.

At Heart Leap, I host four writing hours a week Monday to Thursday from 9–10am GMT. We chat for five minutes at the start, five at the end, and the rest of the time we simply write together. No pressure or performance, just a calm, friendly corner of the internet where pages get filled and ideas stop hiding.

If you need accountability, a regular rhythm, or a space where other writers are also muttering “why is this so hard?”, you’ll be in excellent company.

We also have a Writing Rehab class on the first Wednesday of the month and we run the 12 week Artist’s Way once a year (we start 4th September 2026).

If you want 2026 to be the year your writing life finally feels supported, fun and alive, subscribe for £7 a month and come write with us.

Subscribe now

(Do subscribe on desktop rather than the app, otherwise Apple charge an extra 30%.)

If you’re already subscribed, here’s the link:

Read more

“The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.” Elizabeth Gilbert

Do you know what I mean by a creative glimmer?

It can feel quite ephemeral. The moment you try to focus on it properly, it disappears. But then it catches your eye again when you’re driving, walking the dog or standing in the shower.

It might be an idea. A colour. A book you keep picking up. A photograph you would love to take. A course you keep looking at. A person you think it would be brilliant to work with. Something that lights you up for a moment before your sensible mind barges in and tells you it is impractical, ridiculous or that you haven’t got time.

That’s a glimmer.

Creativity doesn’t always arrive as one enormous, fully formed idea. More often, it comes in tiny flashes. A little nudge. Something at the edge of your vision that keeps turning up and asking you to notice it.

Perhaps the glimmers are how creativity speaks to us. Tiny flashes of light, quietly showing us where there might be more life.

Writing prompt:
What keeps catching your attention? How do your creative glimmers tend to turn up in your life, and what might happen if you followed one of them?

Want to create a writing practice? Come join us at Heart Leap.

If you’ve been meaning to write — your journal, your Substack, your book, your Big Beautiful Thing but somehow always end up reorganising the fridge instead… welcome home.

At Heart Leap, I host four writing hours a week Monday to Thursday from 9–10am GMT. We chat for five minutes at the start, five at the end, and the rest of the time we simply write together. No pressure or performance, just a calm, friendly corner of the internet where pages get filled and ideas stop hiding.

If you need accountability, a regular rhythm, or a space where other writers are also muttering “why is this so hard?”, you’ll be in excellent company.

We also have a Writing Rehab class on the first Wednesday of the month and we run the 12 week Artist’s Way once a year (we start 4th September 2026).

If you want 2026 to be the year your writing life finally feels supported, fun and alive, subscribe for £7 a month and come write with us.

Subscribe now

(Do subscribe on desktop rather than the app, otherwise Apple charge an extra 30%.)

If you’re already subscribed, here’s the link:

Read more