Hi Mindful Writers,

Welcome to the latest of my regular posts exploring how the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching applies in our modern life. Sometimes I use my own life to explore it, sometimes a fictional story and character, sometimes a bit of both. This month’s chapter is from the Ursula Le Guin translation.

Before we get started I want to let you know that it’s your last chance to sign up for the Rewriting the Story course, starting this week and running as live Zoom sessions every Friday afternoon in September at 4pm UK time. This is for women who want to to write a new story and break free from the one their mother told about them. Writers in the August group have had profound realisations about what their relationship with their mother gave them despite the difficulties that defined it. Info here.

Now, on to the Tao Te Ching…

Being Love with What Is

The line that always stands out for me when I read this chapter is this one:

Because for the longest time I was never able to accept what is. About myself, my family, my writing, and our world.

I couldn’t accept my body. It didn’t conform to what we’re told we should look like, so I judged it constantly instead of treasuring it for the wondrous thing it is that enables me to be here in this world at all (and how it has kept on going with no major issues despite all the ways I abused it in my hedonistic years). And it wasn’t just my body. I judged everything about myself harshly — my work, my friendships, my hair, my face, even my own thoughts.

I couldn’t accept my family as it was. I wanted us to connect in a way we never managed to. I wanted them to be something they couldn’t be, and I couldn’t be what they wanted either. This chapter talks about the ten thousand things returning to the root, and for a long time I think I was trying to make my root into something it was never going to be, rather than accepting the one that was actually there, wonky shape and all.

I couldn’t accept that my writing was enough because I didn’t get the recognition and validation I craved from the mainstream publishing industry. It felt like that was the only thing that would ever let me know that what I was creating was worthy. Accepting that my writing is a gift for me to treasure for what it can bring to me, and to whoever else it may reach, in what ever way it reaches them, is what showed me that whatever I write is enough.

I couldn’t accept what was happening in our world. I’ve written before about how I used to get so bogged down in everything that’s wrong that I couldn’t see anything else. Over the past decade or so, through a magpie practice of yoga, Reiki, qigong, Buddhism, Taoism, New Age teachings and science, I’ve become more accepting of all that’s happening in our world too. And in becoming more accepting, I started to actually see how much is good and right with it, at the same time as everything that’s wrong with it. You can see this acceptance in my Love and Light Notes, sharing pictures every day of this beautiful planet and life we’ve been gifted with.

What I’m learning, slowly, chapter by chapter, of the Tao Te Ching and of my life, is that acceptance isn’t connected to things changing to how I want them to be. Accepting how my body was didn’t mean loving every part of it overnight but in accepting it I’ve learned to love it and look after it. Accepting how my family is didn’t mean the connection I wanted between us appeared, the opposite in fact and we no longer have contact at all. Accepting my writing didn’t make the industry validate it. It made me realise I didn’t actually need that validation after all. But accepting each of these things as they actually are, rather than fighting the gap between what is and what I wanted, was the way peace found a way in.

Storytelling

I think this is where so many of the characters in our stories get stuck too — fighting the gap between what is and what they think should be, instead of accepting what is. A character who can’t accept what is keeps circling around the same hurts, the way I did for so long. The change, when it finally comes, isn’t that the world becomes what they want, it’s them finally seeing what else was there all along.

Story Reading

The Star by H.G. Wells

Read it in full here.

Synopsis

Astronomers discover a strange object entering the solar system that’s on a collision course with Neptune. What begins as scientific curiosity becomes global catastrophe, as the resulting star grows brighter and nearer each night, bringing tidal waves and devastation to Earth. The story ends with an unexpected shift in perspective, to Martian astronomers watching the same event from much further away.

Story Analysis

I chose this story because of everything we see happening with the global environment today and because of what happens in that final shift of point of view. The scale of the catastrophes that unfold in it feel like the end of everything, which is how things can seem today if you watch or read the news, but the story pulls back to the Martians, who show us that from their perspective the damage to Earth has been minimal.

The devastation for the people living through it is still huge and harrowing and heartbreaking. But the immensity of the loss they experience is shown alongside the smallness of the impact on Earth on a cosmic scale. That feels like the acceptance this chapter talks about. Not that the hard things don’t matter, but that they’re not all that matter, there’s always more happening around them.

What did you make of that final shift in perspective? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Craft Development

In Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, she writes with real affection about the “shitty first draft” as a necessary part of how anything gets written at all. I think this is the same acceptance as Chapter 16 talks about applied to our craft. You can’t get to what endures in a piece of writing without first accepting what’s actually there on the draft in front of you, mess and all.

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg draws directly on Zen practice, and Chapter Sixteen of the Tao Te Ching resonates with much of what she teaches too about first-draft writing. She talks about the practice of “emptying the mind” onto the page without controlling where it goes and trusting that whatever arises doesn’t need to be managed.

Her instruction to “keep your hand moving” is its own version of accepting what is. You don’t go back to fix the sentence that didn’t work. You don’t stop to find the exact right word. You just let it flow and somewhere in that release is the peace the chapter describes because we’ve stopped fighting the fact that most of it won’t be perfect, and accepted it for what it is.

That’s all for this month’s exploration of the Tao Te Ching. I really hope you have enjoyed it and I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas about it all.

With love,

Amanda 💙

Your Turn: Writing Prompts

Personal Prompts

• Is there a part of yourself - your body, your work, your thoughts - that you judge harshly instead of treasuring? What would treasuring it look like instead?

• Describe a relationship where you wanted the other person to be something they couldn’t be, or you couldn’t be what they wanted. What would accepting the root as it actually is change?

• Where in your life are you measuring what endures by someone else’s standard of validation? What might endure regardless of whether that recognition ever comes?

• What practice, big or small, has helped you hold the good and the hard of something at the same time, rather than choosing one over the other?

Fiction Prompts

• Write a character who cannot accept their own body, and show the moment they finally see it differently - not because it changed, but because they did.

• Create a character measuring their worth by someone else’s validation, who never receives it. Show what they find instead, once they stop waiting for it.

• Write two family members who each wanted the other to be something they couldn’t be. Show the moment one of them finally accepts the root as it actually is.

• Explore a character whose acceptance of a hard truth is mistaken by everyone around them for giving up. Show what’s actually happening underneath.

I’d love to hear what comes up for you with these prompts if you’d like to share in the comments.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching. You can read the other posts in this series here.

With love,

Leave a comment

Share

The summer sale ends on 31st August so you have just a few days left to get a whole year’s membership for just £22.50 and it stays that price for as long as you stay a member. 💙

Subscribe now

Hi Mindful Writers,

It’s been over two weeks since I wrote to you. An unplanned break that just happened. I was away in my hometown for a week earlier this month and went straight from there to stay with friends near Inverness to complete the second level of my Reiki training, and then this week I had an unexpected, last minute trip to Wales. So with all of that going on, I just didn’t get around to writing.

The Reiki experience was just as profound at level two as it was at level one. The training was adapted slightly as I have told my teacher that I have no plans to start a Reiki practice offering sessions to others but that I am developing it as a personal practice and to share with my loved ones. That one day, once I have completed my master level, which in the Usui Holy Fire tradition that I am learning is focused on your own development as a spiritual practitioner and teacher, that I think I might like to teach Reiki to others to use in the same way.

So with that in mind, on the third day of the training when usually the focus is on setting up a practice, I was able to choose what I would like to focus on instead. I was given three options, one of which was a meditation to heal the timeline from my conception to my birth. I knew immediately this was the one I needed to do. If you have been reading my work for a while you’ll know that my conception was a mistake, I was unwanted, and my 18-year-old parents were made to get married but had already split up by the time I was born.

During this meditation, which lasted for about thirty minutes, I was transported to my grandparents’ house, which is where my mother lived when she was pregnant with me and when I was born by emergency Caesarean as I got stuck and couldn’t get out (more on what I have discovered about the meaning of this coming in a future post). She stayed there until I was 18-months old and she got a job as a live-in housekeeper and nanny for the man who would become her husband and my stepfather, and the three troubled children who would become my stepbrother and stepsisters. So it’s the first home I had and also where I spent most of my school holidays until my nana and granddad moved in with us when I was nine.

Their house was in Staines, which is a town in Surrey about 15 miles from central London. The train line into Waterloo ran along the end of the back garden, where I spent many hours making perfume from rose petals and playing with the chickens and the girl who lived next door, Amma. In the front room, where my nana always sat in her chair by the fire, there were pictures and maps of Australia, and a boomerang, on the wall. Souvenirs of my Aunty Pam’s year-long trip visiting cousins who went out there as Ten Pound Poms. There was a dog, Tosh, and cat, Flossie. A teapot in a cosy, sugar in a bowl, ginger nuts on a plate, a record player on a table in front of the bay window. It’s the place where I have the happiest memories of my childhood. My nana and granddad are the people that showed me the most love.

So I was so happy to be in their house during this meditation. And their faces kept appearing right up close to mine, shining with love, and so happy to see me. I travelled all around the house, floating from room to room, seeing it all again, and as I did a deep knowing came to me that at the time of my conception and my birth I was the latest girl to be born to a long line of women who hadn’t wanted children. That I had ended that cycle by not having children of my own. By not going along with family and society expectations to just have children as it’s what you do.

I ended the meditation in floods of tears but also with a bone-deep sense of peace. And I knew that my decision to remain childfree was not just the right one for me, it was the right one for my ancestral line. That the path I have taken has led me away from the bitterness that defined my mother’s life, and by all accounts my nana’s life and the way she mothered her children, and her mother before her, and on and on, to one of compassion and love. The final chat I had with my Reiki teacher before I left ended with me saying, “We all just have to keep being love.”

And that is what everything I am learning is teaching me. We have to be love, write with love, keep our hearts filled with love. In a time where division and chaos and hatred are rife, being love is the path out of that into peace, joy and unity.

Who wants to be love and write with love and keep their heart filled with love alongside me?

With love,

Amanda 💙

Write with me

Applications for the 12-week Mindful Memoir Course starting on 7th September close on 1st September. Your life has stories inside it that only you can tell. Stories that have shaped you, healed you, broken you open and made you who you are. And beneath the facts and the timelines, there is something truer — a living, breathing account of what it meant to be you, in this body, in this life. Join us to write that story.

And there’s still time to sign up for the Rewriting the Story course, running in September as live Zoom sessions. This is for women who want to to write a new story and break free from the one their mother told about them. Writers in the August group have had profound realisations about what their relationship with their mother gave them despite the difficulties that defined it. Info here.

Applications for Year of Mindful Writing 2027 open in just over 2 weeks. This course has sold out every year since I launched it in 2023 and writers from every year have continued for the following years. The group that started in 2024 are now going into their fourth year in 2027! Join the waitlist for the 2027 cohort and you’ll be sent the application form a week before it opens to everyone else, which means you’ll get first dibs on the limited number of mentored spaces available. I’ve revamped things a little too and it’s going to be even better than before!

And this isn’t writing with me but I wanted to share with you a new 1-day retreat from that’s bringing writers together to create. If you’re in or near Margate, England, it sounds wonderful! Info here.

Leave a comment

Share

It was the latest in the Liminal Writing Live series yesterday and it was wonderful to welcome Megan Youngmee who writes Hey friend, keep breathing, as my latest guest.

We talked about writing as an anchor through transition and how pen and paper helps her linearise the layered, misty quality of her thoughts, as well as how she returns to what she’s written after some time to see what she couldn’t see in the moment.

We traced the thread between writing and her channelling work, the way both involve translating something unseen into form, and how sharing our words turns a private process into something sacred and communal with readers often reflecting back themes we didn’t know we were writing.

Partway through, Megan paused to guide us through releasing some collective energy she felt rising in the room — a reminder of how much gets held in the body when we write and put ourselves out there.

We closed on the dark and the shadow, Taoism, self-compassion, and the practice of celebrating ourselves for simply getting up again. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

My next guest is who writes Remembering Self. We’re chatting at 2pm UK time on Tuesday 25th August - hope to see you there!

You can see all the previous episodes in the series here.

With love,

Amanda 💙

Hi Mindful Writers,

Recently I wrote a Note that has resonated with lots of people, getting hundreds of interactions. You can see it here, but what I said was:

So I wanted to talk more about this today as I think we all need to be honest with ourselves about what’s happening in our world and what it could mean for us. I think a lot of the problems humanity is facing are made worse because we don’t talk properly about it. We don’t let ourselves feel it all properly. That many of us, myself included, just carry on as if everything is always going to be like it always has been. I said in my last post about feeding our fire with good fuel to keep it burning steadily, but doing so doesn’t mean pretending we’re not feeling the things we are.

As I am soon to set off travelling again and be untethered in the world, alongside the feelings of anticipation and relief to not be tethered again, there is also a worry about what the world is going to be like, about whether my income is going to remain enough to keep us sheltered and fed, as my paid subscriptions here have fallen by 30% in the past year and bookings for the Mindful Memoir Course starting next month are low.

But then I remind myself that Writing the Bardo sold out and I have people on a waiting list for Year of Mindful Writing 2027 applications to open; that submissions to WestWord are increasing; and that I have just launched as a teacher on Insight Timer. I am really excited about this latest step on my path and currently have two tracks on there and will be uploading many more in the coming weeks (if you like to do guided meditations and could listen, review and support me on there that would be a great help!). And that after almost four years of re-training, Mr Saint is just launching his qigong teaching venture. So something in me does trust and have a really strong feeling that all will be well.

Even so, somedays I get up and anxiety and dread hums away beneath everything. Fear that my untetheredness is not a good way to live right now. But I can’t help it, I can’t be tethered. I have to wander. Then there’s the grief for our beautiful planet and how it has been ravaged, for the amazing creatures that are struggling to survive, for the many people all around the world who are living in fear, and chaos, and who don’t have enough to eat. For all of the children growing up without the care they need to help them become emotionally mature, kind and resilient adults.

So just like I said in that Note, somedays I struggle to trust and believe. But most days, I am able to hold all of the dark alongside all of the light. As there is just as much light, I know this in my heart to be true.

And I believe that if I just keep connected to my heart, keep it open and filled with loving kindness, that all will be well. Which is not to say there won’t be loss and grief and difficulties, as that is the nature of this human life. But what I have learned on this mindful journey, is that I don’t have to get lost in the suffering. It can live alongside the joy of being here having this life, which is an amazing gift with all of the many emotions and experiences it brings.

And I just keep turning to the Tao Te Ching and the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh to help me live with it all and hold it all as lightly as possible.

So when I get up and I am filled with that dread and fear, I feel it all, and I try and figure out where it is coming from, then I try and let it go. Somedays it works, others I cling. And that’s okay. I’m doing the best I can as I live through these volatile times.

Tell me how you are and what helps you to do the best you can?

With love,

Amanda 💙

Write with me

Year of Mindful Writing: A year-long journey of writing, mindfulness and community — showing up to the page with intention, curiosity and joy. Applications for 2027 open September 2026. Info here.

Mindful Mentoring: One-to-one support for your writing life bringing presence, craft and deep listening to wherever you are on your path. Currently full. Applications for January 2027 start open September 2026. Explore mentoring options.

Writing the Bardo: Six months of writing, mindfulness and Yoga Nidra to help you move through life’s transitions with an open and courageous heart. Next start date May 2027. Find out more.

Journalling Courses Self-paced PDF courses using the transformative power of reflective writing to help you release limiting beliefs, cultivate self-compassion and find peace and meaning as you age. Download and work at your own pace, in your own time. Browse the courses.

Thank you for reading my work. I really appreciate you taking the time and hope you find inspiration in it. If you’d like to support my writing and all of the posts I provide for free with a paid subscription, it really makes a difference. Until the end of August, the year’s subscription is reduced to just £45. As well as helping me to keep providing the weekly free posts, you’ll get an additional post each month with mindful writing craft discussion and prompts.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Hi Mindful Writers, before we get started on this post about how the five elements at the heart of Taoism matter in our lives today, just a couple of course reminders.

The Rewriting the Story course starts on Friday - 4 live Zoom sessions once a week using therapeutic journalling prompts to help you rewrite the story you inherited about your worth from your mother. The way I rewrote mine. Info and sign up here. This course is also running in September too.

The deadline for applying for the Mindful Memoir Course is just a few weeks away now. 1st September applications deadline, 7th September start date. Info and application form here.

Several years ago I wrote and taught a course called The Five Elements of Fiction, which was all about using the five elements at the heart of Taoism and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to inspire fictional stories.

It keeps coming back to me so I have decided to revisit the five elements in my posts here but not for fiction this time. Now I want to look at how they are playing out in our lives, and how we can use them to live more mindfully and change the stories we tell ourselves about us and our world.

First let’s look at the Five Element System and its place in Taoist philosophy, TCM and Qigong.

At the heart of the philosophy is the Tao Te Ching (also known as the Dao De Jing), written by Lao Tzu around 500 BCE and which I use all the time for inspiration in life and in the Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching series. Taoists (maybe I am one?!) believe that Yin-Qi and Yang-Qi, which are the primordial feminine and masculine energies, produce the Five Elements, which in turn create all of existence. The Five Elements are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water.

All of the Five Elements work together to support and control each other, within our bodies and minds, within everything on earth, and everything in the universe, to balance the Qi of all creation so that all is in harmony.

When the Five Elements are balanced, we experience health and prosperity in our lives and on our planet. When they’re out of balance — overacting, counteracting, or failing to properly support one another — we experience dis-ease of one sort or another, which manifests itself in our bodies and minds; and when the elements are unbalanced in nature (which is often nowadays because of human activity), the dis-ease is seen in the world we live in too. TCM and Qigong both work with the energies of these elements within our bodies and minds to help us find balance. And when we are more balanced, our relationship with our planet reflects that.

In the book Wood Becomes Water: Chinese Medicine in Everyday Life by Gail Reichstein she says:

Each element within the cycle has many different correspondences connected to our bodies, our spirits, our planet, and the solar system that go through cycles in a day, a month, a year, a lifetime.

As we look around at what’s happening in our world right now — wars, wildfires, rising costs of everything, the confusion and fear about what AI means for us all, governments that are no longer public servants, corporations pillaging everything for profit, the rise of fascism, it’s easy to believe that everything is so completely out of balance that there’s no hope of our world ever being equitable, loving and kind. I have times when this feels like the truth to me.

But at the same time as all of this is happening, there are all of the things stemming from love that provide the counterbalance to it. We just don’t hear about those in the news as stories of love and unity empower people, make them harder to control and manipulate.

But I look at the WOMN stories shares about how the people of Minnesota have loved each other in the face of ICE; I go to the Kindred community sessions organises and see women from all around the world showing up for each other and I hold space myself for people where the support and genuine feeling for each other is tangible; I read and watch countless articles and programs and films about people helping others, rescuing animals, doing what they can to conserve and restore our wild places. I travel a lot and see firsthand in every country I go to all the ways we’re loving each other, supporting each other, and welcoming each other.

And when I see all of that, I see that qi, which flows out of unconditional, selfless love, and is considered the source of all existence, so where the five elements arise from, I know that things are not as out of balance as they’d have us believe.

Here in the northern hemisphere it’s the height of summer (although here in southwest Scotland you’d never know it!) and summer is peak Yang season. Peak fire energy of expansion and light and heat. It represents transformation, consciousness, and connection and is the most expansive and active phase for linking our physical bodies to our spiritual selves. Fire is also the seat of the Shen (Spirit), which encompasses our consciousness, mental activity, memory, and emotional balance. It dictates how we relate to ourselves, others and experience joy.

For our fires to burn brightly and steadily in this season of expansion and connection, we need to feed them the right fuel. The fear-filled news, doom-scrolling, and constant bombardment of messages focused on all the things that are wrong with us and in our world, is not feeding the fire with the fuel it needs to thrive. It either makes the fire rage or almost puts it out, depending on how other elements are at play within us and the universe. And fire out of balance can express itself as depression, apathy, social withdrawal; or as anxiety, mania, restlessness, and hysteria.

So we need to feed our fires with stories and activities of love that counterbalance all of that.

The Fire element also governs how we relate to others, how we’re seen, and how we connect and feel a part of something, so if we feed it the wrong fuel we become a part of the despair, the anger, the fear, along with so many others. But if we feed it the right fuel we become part of the change, the solution, the love. Fire corresponds to the heart too so if we keep it burning nice and steadily, our hearts will be open and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and our world and our future will be positive and freeing, and then the reality we create will be the same.

Tell me, what have you been feeding your fire with this week? What have you been feeling a part of based on that fuel?

I love finding connections and the ways that ancient wisdoms apply in our lives today and I hope you have enjoyed this first in my my new posts exploring the five elements. There will be more. Please click the heart, leave a comment and share with others to help my posts reach more people and spread the mindful living and writing word.

With love,

Amanda 💙

Journalling Prompt

Think back over the last week. Write down everything you can remember feeding your fire — the news you read, the conversations you had, the stories you sought out or scrolled past. Be completely honest with yourself.

Now go back through it and mark each one: did this fuel make my fire rage, gutter, or burn steady? Sit with whatever you’re seeing. (I foolishly Googled “Iran War News” the other day and it made me afraid, angry and so desperately sad for the innocent people in the Middle East who are caught up in this. My fire sputtered and needed tending with love.).

Then use this starter sentence and write until it comes to a natural stop:

If I fed my fire only what I chose consciously and mindfully for the next week, what would I be choosing, and what would I stop feeding it?

Leave a comment

Share

Welcome! If you’ve found your way here from a Note or a friend’s recommendation, you’re in the right place for mindful living and writing inspiration and explorations.

I’m Amanda, and this is a community for those who believe that writing is a spiritual practice. Here, we don’t just talk about writing craft (although there is a bit of that too); we use storytelling to remember ourselves, find stillness, and explore how the ancient wisdom of the Tao Te Ching applies in our modern lives.

I’m Amanda, a writing and mindfulness guide, Yoga Nidra guide, and Usui Reiki practitioner. As a nomad for nearly 30 years and the author of 3 novels and 100s of short stories and flash fictions, I’ve learned that the stories we tell ourselves, and the ones we write, have the power to change our reality. After decades of navigating family dysfunction and abuse, I rewrote my own life by refusing to stay trapped in someone else’s narrative.

I also publish a literary magazine, WestWord, and share ideas with writers on how to use storytelling not just to entertain, but to unite us and bring more understanding of this human experience to our lives. I believe that storytelling rooted in conscious awareness and empathy, can bring more peace, love and compassion to our world that desperately needs it.

Subscribe for free to get every new post delivered to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Start with these three posts that give you a good idea of the writing and insights I share.

Join the Community

Every week I send out essays on writing, mindfulness, and conscious living. These are a mix of personal stories from my life, deep dives into the Tao Te Ching and it’s relevance in our lives today, and prompts and mindfulness practices to integrate into your life and writing.

Subscribe now

I’m so glad you’re here.

With love,

Amanda 💙

Hi Mindful Writers,

Welcome to the latest of my regular posts exploring how the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching applies in our modern life. Sometimes I use my own life to explore it, sometimes a fictional story, sometimes a bit of both. This month’s chapter is from the Stephen Mitchell translation (which you’ll know if you’re a regular reader is my favourite one!).

Before we get started I want to let you know that the early-bird price for the 12-week Mindful Memoir Course starting in September ends on Friday. Sign up before then to get the reduced rate (and if you took the original 6-week course you get a discount off this one too!). Get all the info and apply here.

Friday is also the submission deadline for the September edition of WestWord, which is the lit mag I founded and run. Send us your stories on the theme!

And there’s still time to sign up for the Rewriting the Story course, running in both August and September as live Zoom sessions. This is for women who want to to write a new story and break free from the one their mother told about them. Info here.

Applications for Year of Mindful Writing 2027 open in just over 6 weeks. Which I can’t quite believe! This course has sold out every year since I launched it in 2023 and writers from every year have continued for the following years. Join the waitlist for 2027 and you’ll be sent the application form a week before it opens to everyone else, which means you’ll get first dibs on the limited number of mentored spaces available. I’ve revamped things a little too and it’s going to be even better than before!

Now, on to the Tao Te Ching…

Back in 2023, I used this chapter to explore my feelings of confusion and yearning for a home as yet another house sit arrangement turned out to be people wanting to take advantage of me and Mr Saint.

A situation that continued for a quite some time longer and culminated in the final work for accommodation arrangement we ever plan to do in March 2025 (but never say never as life is unpredictable indeed!), where the accommodation was uninhabitable and we ended up with nowhere to live at all for five months. As you can see by the title of that one, I explored the penultimate verse of this chapter in relation to my predicament.

Today, I want to look more deeply at the first and second verses and how they speak to our modern times and ways of being.

Subtlety and depth don’t seem to be the traits that are respected and revered in our modern times. There’s not a lot of nuance and transformative exploration of what it means to be human in many of the books, music, films, and TV shows being published today. To find the profound and subtle works of art and artists producing them, you have to either be in the know or search very hard.

And when the entertainment we consume doesn’t engage us on deeper and more meaningful levels, over time, we stop knowing how to engage with ourselves and others in this way. In the physical wellness and longevity programs I watch and articles I read, a phrase that is used often is, “Use it, or lose it,” and I believe this applies to our emotional, behavioural, spiritual and psychological muscles too.

I’ve written many times about how I feel social media has changed us. And I think it has definitely suppressed these aspects of our psyche. When we’re scrolling and clicking, hearting and thumbs upping and downing, buying things on a whim that we don’t need, or really want, we’re not being careful at all. We’re not alert to the real world we inhabit, to the physical needs of our bodies and emotional and spiritual needs of our minds, we’re lost in a world of soundbites and clickbait and a lot of negative emotions that these platforms seem to be full of.

And courtesy often seems to be a forgotten trait completely on social media where people think nothing of attacking others with vicious words, judgements and personal insults, even when they have never had any interactions with a person before. I too got caught up in all of the angst and doom scrolling and buying things I didn’t need but I slowly started to realise that it wasn’t doing me any good. Which is why I closed all my accounts down several years ago. The reason why I’m wondering how much longer Substack will remain a nice place to be, as day-by-day it seems to be becoming more and more like the other platforms I left behind.

But we can choose not to let these platforms condition us in these ways. We can choose not to let them brainwash us into staying on the surface, easily provoked to say and do things we haven’t thought through.

So how can we be fluid, shapable, receptive and clear and what does it mean to be those things? I’ve been reading the Tao Te Ching for many years now and I don’t have any definitive answers about this (or anything!), as what I think and feel about each chapter changes depending on when I read it.

Today as I write this, being fluid as melting ice and shapable as a block of wood means to me that I need to be open to new ideas and adaptable to new situations, flexible in my thinking and willing to change my mind. Receptive as a valley makes me think I need to have the capacity to let new perspectives, new people, new ways of being move towards me, through me and away from me and to accept that some of what comes and goes will bring lightness and some will bring darkness.

Being clear as a glass of water is about my thinking and communication, I need to keep my thoughts and the words I say and write coherent and nourishing of all life, just like water is. But just like everything I do, sometimes this will go well, sometimes not so well. But one of the best things my mindfulness practice has brought to me is to accept whatever comes and not judge myself harshly for the times when it doesn’t go so well.

I am a middle-aged woman in perimenopause living through what appears to be the breakdown of the society and way of living I have always known. I am self-employed in the arts in a time when they are deemed of no value. In a time when people’s income for taking writing courses is shrinking. Some days it’s hard to stay coherent and nourishing. Some days I’m overwhelmed and exhausted and irritable and scared. But I know that these feelings are flowing through my valley and will pass on by soon enough.

What about you? What do these verses make you feel and think about what’s happening in your life today?

With love,

Amanda 💙

Your Turn: Writing Prompts

Personal Prompts

• When was a time you realised you’d lost a skill or capacity through not using it? What was it, and have you come back to it?

• Describe a moment when you caught yourself being careless, reactive, or discourteous online, face-to-face with someone, or in your consumption habits. What was happening for you at that time?

• Explore a time when you had to adapt quickly to changed circumstances. How did being “fluid as melting ice” or “shapable as a block of wood” help you navigate it?

• Write about a time when you “let the mud settle” before you took action. How did that change the outcome?

Fiction Prompts

• Write a character who is the opposite of the Masters - loud, rigid, reactive, murky. Show the specific moment when this backfires and creates real consequences.

• Create two characters in conflict: one who has learned to be careful, alert, and courteous; one who hasn’t. Show how their different approaches to a situation lead to very different outcomes.

• Write about a character who discovers that their “strength” (their rigidity, their certainty, their need to control) has been slowly destroying something they love. What does the reckoning look like?

• Explore a character who is so conditioned by surface-level engagement that they’ve forgotten how to be present with another person. Show one moment where presence breaks through.

I’d love to hear what comes up for you with these prompts if you’d like to share in the comments.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching. You can read the other posts in this series here.

With love,

Leave a comment

Share

Hi Mindful Writers,

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ll know I had a very difficult and damaging relationship with my mother, and for the longest time that meant I had a difficult and damaging relationship with myself. But I’ve spent the last decade rewriting my story and changing the beliefs her behaviour towards me had instilled. In doing so, I have been able to understand and forgive her and myself for the ways in which we hurt each other and ourselves. And I want to help you do the same.

Rewriting the Story is four live 1-hour sessions on Zoom on Fridays in August: 7th, 14th, 21st, 28th at 3pm UK. It’s just £10 for each session bookable in one block at £40 for all four. No replays for this one — it’s live only to keep the space safe for everyone. I will be sharing the tools and ideas that helped me access my own inner wisdom and start to see my worth and heal my relationship with myself which, in turn, transformed my whole life. You’ll write to prompts and there is no obligation to share anything.

If your relationship with your mother left you carrying doubt about your worth, your place in the world, or how to be loved and show love, this is for you. I’ll bring practical mindfulness tools and guided writing prompts to help you notice the stories you carry and begin writing different ones. There is no pressure to share.

Book here

Why do this work?

When your mother doesn’t respect you and treat you with kindness as an adult, it’s so hard to untangle your true worth from her treatment of you. I know this because my mother was physically abusive to me until I was in my early twenties, when I finally stood up to her. She was verbally and emotionally abusive until a decade ago when I was in my early forties and I finally took responsibility for myself and said no more.

Why do this with me?

Doing this work myself and bringing mindfulness into my life and my writing has changed everything about how I feel about myself, how I process my emotions, how I behave in relationships, how I feel about my writing craft, and how I deal with the challenges life brings. I’m living the transformation I want to guide you through. All of it comes from my lived experience with my mother, with myself, and through the training I’ve done in journal therapy and mindfulness teaching.

My vision is to help people have a happier, more meaningful relationship with themselves, their writing, their families and friends, and the world they’re part of. As when we have that, we become part of the change our world needs, as we are kinder, more loving, more compassionate and that ripples out in everything we do.

If any of this has struck a chord with you, I’d love you to join me for Rewriting the Story where we’ll look at the stories we carry and begin writing different ones. Book here.

And if this is something you want to go deeper with, I also have a small number of places for in-depth work where we meet three times one-to-one for 90-minutes each time, over a period of 6-12 weeks, and I share journalling prompts and provide support in-between the meetings: Rewriting the Story 1-1.

If you have any questions, reply to the email or leave a comment on the post and I’ll get back to you.

With love,

Amanda 💙

The replay of my latest Liminal Writing Live is now up — this one with the wonderful of Mel’s Messy Love Lab.

What does it mean to reinvent yourself, not once, but again and again, and to do it without knowing where any of it is leading?

Mel’s life has moved through several distinct chapters — an actor touring with improv, international education and marketing, then back to acting and a one-woman show that was heading for a US tour until the pandemic ended that plan. What came next was a move from Portland, Oregon to Fiddletown, a Northern California town of 187 people, and a slowing down into whoever she was arriving at day by day — including, as she put it, discovering she’s “a witch in a lab coat.”

We talked about embracing the mystery of not knowing what life is about and what we’re supposed to be doing and how leaning into that can be unsettling and playful and joyful all at once.

Mel’s analog letter-writing project came up too: 52 weeks of handmade collage letters sent to people she was thinking about, each one shared on her Substack, some reconnecting her with people she hadn’t seen in decades. That project has since grown into Mel’s Messy Love Lab Live, a gallery space in the tiny town of Volcano where people gather to make their own cards.

And then we went to the place both of us know well: what it’s like to go from a lifetime of city living to somewhere rural and slow, and how that reshapes you and that writing isn’t just how you process an experience, but sometimes the only way you find out what you actually feel about it. We also talked about what it means to live in a community that doesn’t share your politics, and how proximity tends to be what teaches you to find the shared humanity despite the differences.

It’s a warm, wandering half hour on mystery, letters, cows, and love as the water we swim in. I hope you enjoy the replay.

The next Liminal Writing Live will be on 12th August at 4pm UK and my guest is who writes Hey Friend, Keep Breathing. Hope you can join us!

Want to be a guest on this live series? Get in touch and let me know!

With love,

Amanda 💙

Hi Mindful Writers,

Back in February 2023 shortly after I started this Substack I wrote a post called ‘The power of love to fuel our writing’ and today I want to build on what I said there as now, three and a bit years later, I believe that the power of love is what we need to fuel our entire lives, of which our writing is just one element.

Last weekend, me and Mr Saint went into Glasgow for the day and the Pride 2026 march and celebrations were taking place there. The sun was shining and as we walked from the train station towards the festival site we caught up with the marchers and walked alongside them. Everywhere were messages of love. On t-shirts, on banners, on signs in the shops we walked past, on people’s faces and in their eyes. In their arms draped around each other and in the millions of bubbles being blown that sparkled rainbows in the sunshine.

When we reached the festival site, the Rock Choir were on stage filling the streets with beautiful harmonies. People were dancing and singing along and the energy was so potent. So charged with love. It brought tears to my eyes to feel it flowing so freely and see everyone so joyful. There were rainbows painted on the ground and graffiti chalked on a wall saying: “Life is Beautiful.” I couldn’t agree more.

Later we went for a walk in the park and it was filled with families, with couples, with friends of all nationalities, ethnicities and genders. It was filled with laughter, peace and joy. There was no sign of all this division and hatred the media would have us believe is everywhere. And I knew, without a doubt, that it’s hardly anywhere. There are only a minority of us that are filled with fear and suspicion. To steal an expression from my great friend , I know that the vast majority of us are filled with fierce love. I saw the evidence of it everywhere on Saturday. I see the evidence of it all the time in my work with writers, in the interactions I have on Substack and out in the world everywhere where I go. And I go many places as I am prone to wander.

Ever since I started writing here on Substack, I have been sharing how important it is that we write stories that bring more connection and love to the world, and I know that this is true. I have shared so much evidence of the difference it makes in posts like The Science of Storytelling and The Water in Your Body is Listening, and in the personal stories I share from my own life of how it transformed when I told a different story about myself.

Now I am taking it further, it’s not only important to tell and write stories that are powered by love, it’s vital to live a life that is rocket-powered by love. I have been reading a lot lately about the cosmos and it’s influence on how our human lives unfold on this amazing planet we’ve been gifted with as our home, in work by and , and now more than ever is the time to live the way you want the world to be. To open your heart and your mind and be love in the world in everything you do and say and write and think.

In reading their work, I have come to understand that the way my path has unfolded before me over the past decade has prepared me for this time when I needed my heart to be open and ready. I have been following this path with no idea where it is leading, shedding old ways of being and disconnecting from the mainstream way of living and working, finding myself learning so many unexpected things and becoming a version of me that I had never envisaged.

This version of me is ready to keep being love and spreading love in the face of all the chaos and all the propaganda. To speak up and out with love no matter what. To help as many people as I can to find their way to love, of themselves first and foremost as we have to have self-love to be love in the world. And that’s the hardest love to have.

But everything I’ve been through, all the grief from all the bereavements, from the estrangement from my abusive family, from the dreams and versions of me I let go of, taught me how to love myself and that taught me to love everyone else, to love life, and to know that despite how mad and bad and dangerous the world can be, love will see us right.

With a whole lot of love,

Amanda 💙

Write with me

Mindful Memoir: A 12-week course for writers ready to go deep with their own story — using embodied writing practices and mindfulness to unlock the memories that live in the body as well as the mind. Applications close 1st September 2026, early bird pricing ends 31st July. Info here.

Year of Mindful Writing: A year-long journey of writing, mindfulness and community — showing up to the page with intention, curiosity and joy. Applications for 2027 open September 2026. Info here.

Mindful Mentoring: One-to-one support for your writing life bringing presence, craft and deep listening to wherever you are on your path. Currently full. Applications for January 2027 start open September 2026. Explore mentoring options.

Writing the Bardo: Six months of writing, mindfulness and Yoga Nidra to help you move through life’s transitions with an open and courageous heart. Next start date May 2027. Find out more.

1-1 Zoom Meetings: Focused, personalised sessions for your writing and your life — written feedback and mentoring for your work, or a tailored Yoga Nidra practice and journalling prompts for whatever you're navigating right now. Bookable now. Explore 1-1 options.

Journalling Courses Self-paced PDF courses using the transformative power of reflective writing to help you release limiting beliefs, cultivate self-compassion and find peace and meaning as you age. Download and work at your own pace, in your own time. Browse the courses.

Leave a comment

Share

This post is for paid members of The Mindful Writer and has been adapted from my popular Year of Mindful Writing course when I had modules leftover after merging two years of the course into one. This is the final Beyond Craft post as all the leftover course materials have now been used. From August 2026, they will be replaced by a new monthly writing prompt as requested by the community members. Join us to deepen your practice and transform your relationship with writing and deepen your connection to your craft, yourself and others, and the world we live in.

Subscribe now

Come write with me

Mindful Memoir: You have a story that matters. In this 12-week course you’ll explore your memories and start to turn them into a work of literary art that brings you deep understanding and connects with readers through universal themes. Online content to work through in your own time plus 6 live writing sessions. Early-bird pricing until end of July. Applications close 1st September. Starts 7th September. Get all the info.

Journalling Courses: Self-paced PDF courses using the transformative power of reflective writing to help you release limiting beliefs, cultivate self-compassion and find peace and meaning as you age. Download and work at your own pace, in your own time. Browse the courses.

Join the Liminal Writing chat

This brand new Substack Live series is all about writing from the in-betweens of our personal and collective lives. Next event is at 4pm UK 22nd July and my guest is . Watch previous events here. Want to be a guest? Get in touch and let me know!

Hi Mindful Writers,

This month we’re going somewhere that I think is one of the most challenging territories we can enter as writers — and as human beings.

Forgiveness.

Not the sanitised, tidy version of forgiveness that we’re sold. Not the kind that requires us to feel warm and fuzzy, or to pretend the past didn’t happen. The real kind, which is messier and harder and ultimately far more liberating than anything we were taught it should look like.

What I Believe Forgiveness Is

For a long time, I thought forgiveness meant welcoming people back into my life with open arms. That it meant getting over it and pretending nothing had happened so we could all get along. Bu every part of me rebelled against that idea, and I spent years feeling like I was failing at something fundamental about being human — because I couldn’t find a way to have a happy relationship with my mother and stepfather and act as if the past was irrelevant, the way everyone around me seemed to expect me to.

It took me a long time to understand that forgiveness is not actually a feeling. It’s a choice. And it’s not a one-time event but an ongoing practice, like mindfulness itself. Some days we forgive. Some days we need to forgive again. And some days we give ourselves permission to feel the old hurt and anger, and that’s okay too.

Forgiveness is about releasing ourselves from the prison that resentment keeps us locked up in. Choosing freedom over the familiar weight of old grievances, knowing that holding on to them means we’re making ourselves unhappy.

In our writing, we get to explore all of this complexity. Whether we’re writing fiction, memoir, poetry, or personal essays, we can go to the questions that are hardest to sit with: How do we forgive someone who never asked for forgiveness? How do we forgive ourselves for the choices we made when we were wounded? How do we forgive life itself for not being what we expected?

What Our Writing Teaches Us About Letting Go

I’ve noticed that many of my characters are dealing with betrayal — by family members, by institutions, by lovers, friends, themselves. They carry all the history of their lives around, good and bad, like stones in their pockets, and I watch them learn, story by story, what it means to set those stones down. In a story I published in the Retreat West 10th Birthday Anthology, Ten Ways the Animals Will Save Us, the protagonist literally had a stone in her pocket she’d been carrying for many years.

Two stories that I keep returning to when thinking about forgiveness in writing are ones you might not immediately think of as forgiveness stories — but that’s part of what makes them so powerful.

The first is Karen Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, in which a pack of wolf-girls are sent to a convent school to be civilised into human society. The story follows Claudette’s gradual assimilation — and her growing abandonment of her wild sister, Mirabella, who cannot adapt. When Mirabella is eventually expelled, Claudette doesn’t say goodbye. She leaves a packed lunch with a note that says “Best wishes!” and tells herself she’s done everything she could.

What haunts the story is what happens in the final scene, when Claudette visits her wolf parents near the end of her time at St. Lucy’s. Her mother recoils from her as if she were a stranger. And when the family looks to her expectantly, waiting to see what she has learned, Claudette says — telling her first human lie — “I’m home.”

Russell doesn’t resolve this. There is no reconciliation, no forgiveness granted or received. Instead there is something quieter and more honest: the grief of having become someone your original family no longer recognises, and the impossible task of forgiving what was done to you when doing so means forgiving yourself for what you did to others along the way. The story shows us that forgiveness can be the most complicated when the wound is woven into who we had to become to survive.

The second is A.M. Homes’s Esther in the Night, from The Safety of Objects, in which a mother caring for her son Paul, in a permanent coma after an accident, wanders her house in the early hours of the morning, running through elaborate fantasies of disaster — a burglar, a fire — as a way of processing the unbearable reality she actually lives in. She has turned her home into what she calls a museum of the living dead, giving tours, passing around his medical charts, wearing the same dress she wore the night they got the call.

What Homes understands is that some forgiveness — of life, of fate, of the terrible randomness of what happens to us — can’t be spoken or resolved. It has to be held in the body, in the repetition of days, in the strange rituals we create to keep going. The narrator’s midnight wandering is both grief and a kind of tending. It is not resolution. But it is, in its way, a form of surviving the unforgivable — finding a way to stay present inside a life that has been split in two.

Both stories show us that forgiveness often looks nothing like what we expect. It is rarely dramatic or clean. Sometimes it’s as simple as choosing a different thought. Sometimes it’s recognising that the person who hurt us was doing the best they could from where they were. Sometimes it’s understanding that we get to write a different ending to our story, even if we can’t change the beginning.

The Forgiveness We Owe Ourselves

Read more

Hi Mindful Writers,

Nobody came live for this workshop that’s included with paid membership! When you offer replays this can be a problem, as can sunny summer days meaning everyone wants to be outside rather than indoors looking at a screen and I don’t blame them. So rather than talk to myself, I’m bringing you what I had planned as a post instead for you to use in your own time.

It’s all about writing from the in-between, which is a bit of an obsession of mine lately! And that’s because I’m discovering that thresholds are where the most interesting writing lives.

The moment between sleeping and waking. The season between one life and another. The writing that sits in not-knowing rather than reaching for resolution. We tend to rush through these in-between spaces — in life and on the page — as though they are simply gaps to cross on the way to somewhere more substantial.

This is an invitation to slow down and inhabit that liminal time and space instead. To write from the edge, to explore transition and uncertainty as rich territory rather than something to fix. Drawing on Taoist wisdom around flow, impermanence, and the value of not-knowing it will ask you to write three times, from three different thresholds.

Whether you’re working with memoir, personal essay, fiction, or life writing of any kind, I hope this helps you find the creative power in what hasn’t settled yet.

Read more

The replay of this month’s Liminal Writing Live is now up — this one with of A Thin Space, one of the first friends I made on Substack when I joined in February 2023.

Emily was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year, and she’s been living in the thin space she writes about — one foot in the ordinary world, one foot in something less tangible — more intensely than ever since she received that news. We talked about how the diagnosis pushed her further into that other half of the threshold, and how writing close to the bone, in present tense, close to who she actually is, has become a way of giving her experience care.

We got into the two ways people tend to respond to rupture — hardening and tightening to feel safe, or opening and leaning in — and how writing down what’s happening is often the only way either of us actually finds out what we feel. Emily talked about growing up in a household that didn’t encourage her to have a self, and how a self and a voice only emerged for her about ten years ago, in her own version of upheaval.

We also talked about the strange relief of only ever being able to be who you are, right now, however foggy and always changing that self is — and how that’s both a small grief and a kind of freedom. And about finding, through Substack, other people who never could do cocktail conversation either — who go straight for the big things instead.

It’s an honest, unhurried chat about writing as a way of tending to a life that’s shifted underneath you. I hope you enjoy the replay.

The next Liminal Writing Live will be on 22nd July at 4pm UK with my guest who writes Mel’s Messy Love Lab.

Want to be a guest? Get in touch as I love hearing about everyone else’s experiences.

With love,
Amanda 💙

P.S. Applications are now open for Mindful Memoir, my new 12-week course for writers who want to go deep with their own story. We use embodied writing practices, mindfulness and somatic awareness to unlock the memories that live not just in the mind but in the body. It’s the 6-week original course now with 6 brand new additional modules to go deeper. Starting September, with early-bird pricing until the end of July. Info here.

Hi Mindful Writers,

It's been over a week since I last wrote to you. Eleven days, in fact. I had planned to write while I was in Greece on holiday after my sister-in-law's funeral, but I didn't get round to it. I decided to rest properly instead. Apart from a few Zoom classes that were arranged before the holiday was booked, for the 10 days we were there I didn't do anything except enjoy the sunshine, swim in the sea several times every day, eat delicious food grown nearby, and wander around the beautiful towns and villages of the island of Lesbos.

Being somewhere like that is a great mindfulness practice, as I felt fully present. It was so good to be outdoors all the time too. Now I am back in Scotland and trapped indoors again by torrential rain and strong winds, which aren’t forecast to stop until Tuesday. The sun isn’t forecast to make an appearance until next Friday. As I write this, it’s only 13 degrees Celsius and nothing like summer. I’m wearing a winter jumper, the heating is on, and I have the back-from-holiday blues.

But it’s not just the back-from-holiday blues. It’s also the blues of having been in this house sit for almost a year now, and not being able to move on for several more months. This is the longest I have been in one place since the lockdowns and that was an enforced stillness. Apart from the lockdowns it’s the longest I’ve been in one place since I lived in London and I left there in 2012.

In these eleven months here, I’ve come to realise that I really am a nomad, and that this idea I had in my head about finding a home and settling into it forever more isn’t actually what I want. I don’t want the responsibility and expense of looking after a building and filling it with things. I have finally accepted and understood that what I am seeking is inside me, and that I am a citizen of the world, at home wherever I go in it. I am incredibly privileged to be able to roam around, and I intend to make the most of it until I am too old to do it. Or until I find myself somewhere and, one day, realise I haven’t left.

Because wherever I am, I am with Mr Saint and connected to the global community I have built around mindfulness and writing. A community that is always growing, and showing me that what I share here, and in my courses and mentoring, is making a difference for people. And all of it is making a difference for me too. Teaching me, day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year, how to live and write more mindfully, more compassionately, and to keep an open mind and heart to wherever my path leads me. To not get fixed on ideas and ways that things need to be.

As the Tao Te Ching says, a good traveller has no destination. I’ve been a traveller for a very long time, and for a while there I thought it had to lead, in the end, to a “home.” But now I know it’s the journey of life that I am on, and this is just a part of the path I am travelling. To learn all it has to teach me, I need to stay nimble and aware, and willing to follow it wherever it leads.

What about you? What has life shown you lately about the path you’re on?

With love,

Amanda 💙

Leave a comment

Join the community here at The Mindful Writer and get monthly mindful writing workshops (with replays), an extra monthly post with craft ideas and prompts, and a journalling course to help you be kinder to yourself.

Join the community at 25% off

I am currently taking the Power of Awareness course in preparation for the MMTCP course starting in February. This quote from Jack Kornfield is in the opening moments of the first module and it really resonated with me as I realised that a decade ago when I was first bringing mindfulness into my life, I was seeing it as an onerous new obligation.

Yet another thing I had to squeeze into my busy days, which I now know were only so busy as my concentration was shot due to the high levels of stress I was living with. And because my mind was, more often that not, elsewhere. So all of my work and my writing took a very long time to complete.

Back then, I resented having to spend time sitting and being quiet. I told myself it was because I had so much to do, but really it was because I was afraid of what I'd find in the silence. I had spent my whole life distracting myself from what was really going on with me — boozing, taking party drugs, dancing in clubs, watching TV, eating junk food, smoking weed, fixing other people's problems, staying busy, busy, busy, all the time.

Despite the fear, I kept coming back to the practice time and time again even though I felt like I was no good at it. That my mind was too busy still, that I couldn’t meditate properly, that I still got reactive and triggered and upset very easily. Slowly, over years, I started to settle into it more. I looked forward to the time being still and being with me, as I had learned not to judge myself for what happened in meditation. Sometimes there would be stillness and I could keep the focus on my breath, other times I’d be restless, agitated, my mind would be jumping around from one thing to another. And this is still exactly how my practice is now.

It’s how everyone’s is. We’re all doing the best we can. And what returning to the practice over and over again over years has taught me is, that’s enough. Our best is all we can do. Whatever that best looks like on any given day.

So I think what all this is about and what I’m trying to say with this post is, don’t give yourself a hard time for wherever you’re at and however things go with your practice. Not practiced for two months? Oh well. Starting again over and over is how it went for me for the first few years.

Now, ten years down the line and having practiced daily for several years I can tell you it’s worth it. My mind and my heart are much steadier, my wellbeing is greater, my capacity for self-compassion and love for others has grown huge.

So just keep starting again from wherever you are. And this applies to being a mindful writer too. Fallen back into the comparison trap, the seeking validation from others for your work? Oh well. Just start again remembering that your craft is, first and foremost, for you.

And don’t give yourself a hard time for anything. You don’t deserve it. Life is fleeting and precious and way too short for anything but kindness and love to ourselves and everyone else.

With love,

Amanda 💙

Leave a comment

Share

This post is for paid members of The Mindful Writer and has been adapted from my popular Year of Mindful Writing course when I had modules leftover after merging two years of the course into one. Join us to deepen your practice and transform your relationship with writing. You get these monthly in-depth posts and a Zoom workshop every month to deepen your connection to your craft, yourself and others, and the world we live in. Plus 5% of monthly memberships is donated to St. Mungo’s, a UK charity working to help people who have no home.

Subscribe now

Come write with me

Mindful Memoir: You have a story that matters. In this 12-week course you’ll explore your memories and start to turn them into a work of literary art that brings you deep understanding and connects with readers through universal themes. Online content to work through in your own time plus 6 live writing sessions. Early-bird pricing until end of July. Applications close 1st September. Starts 7th September. Get all the info.

Zoom Workshops: Drop-in sessions where we write together, explore craft and find our way deeper into the page. One weekend every month and included with paid subscriptions or just book and come along. See what’s coming up.

Journalling Courses: Self-paced PDF courses using the transformative power of reflective writing to help you release limiting beliefs, cultivate self-compassion and find peace and meaning as you age. Download and work at your own pace, in your own time. Browse the courses.

Join the Liminal Writing chat

This brand new Substack Live series is all about writing from the in-betweens of our personal and collective lives. Next event is at 4pm UK 8th July and my guest is . Watch previous events here. Want to be a guest? Get in touch and let me know!

Hi Mindful Writers,

This month we’re exploring something that I think is one of the most important things we can do as writers — and one of the least talked about in conventional writing craft spaces — bearing witness. To our characters, our memories, our inner lives, our experience of being here. To the truth of what it means to be human.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing fiction, memoir, poetry, or anything in between. The act of witness is at the heart of all of it.

What It Means to Bear Witness

Healing — whether in life or on the page — doesn’t follow a straight line. It loops and spirals and doubles back. Circles closer to the centre, then out again, then closer still.

The people and moments we write about move through their own processes in the same way. And as the writers holding these stories, these memories, these observations, we are witnesses to that process. We don’t have to make everything better by the end. We don’t have to fix what was broken or resolve what was left open. But we can show how something has shifted — even if it’s in just one single moment of clarity. One breath of peace. One small choice that signals things are no longer exactly as they were.

That’s the arc we’re looking for. Subtle, but real. And it applies whether you’re writing a fictional character, a scene from your own past, a present-tense piece about your life now, or a poem about something you can’t quite name but keep returning to.

Read more

The replay of my third Liminal Writing Live is now up — this one with the wonderful Jeannie Ewing of Ghost Mother.

What does it mean to be a ghost — not just a ghost mother, but a ghost daughter, a ghost father, a ghost in your own life?

Jeannie launched Ghost Mother after writing a single stream-of-consciousness essay in her bedroom — a response to her teenage daughter accusing her of always writing, always disappearing into her work. What emerged in that essay was a phrase: specter of a mother. And from that phrase, a whole community of women saying yes, that’s me began to form.

We talked about the many shapes that invisibility takes — stepmothering, adoption, infertility and unseen loss, family estrangement, the women whose love and care is expansive and real but doesn’t fit the cultural template for what a mother is supposed to look like. The psychological obstacles that get in the way of writing our stories, and how sometimes you have to do the inner work before the writing can be shared, was also explored.

And then we went somewhere I didn’t quite expect: into what it means to lean into the liminal rather than scrambling to fix your way out of it — accepting people who have done the unacceptable, the relationship between rest and receptivity, finding awe as a path through being stuck, and the idea that writing comes through us rather than from us.

It’s a warm and honest 45 minutes. I hope you enjoy the replay. We’d love to know what you think about all the different subjects we touched on.

The next Liminal Writing Live will be on July 8th at 4pm UK and my guest is Emily Conway.

With love,

Amanda 💙

P.S. Applications are now open for Mindful Memoir, my new 12-week course for writers who want to go deep with their own story. We use embodied writing practices, mindfulness and somatic awareness to unlock the memories that live not just in the mind but in the body. It’s the 6-week original course now with 6 brand new additional modules to go deeper. Starting September, with early-bird pricing until the end of July.

Leave a comment

Share

Hi Mindful Writers,

This month’s approach to Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching is a bit different and rather than using a fictional story to relate this to, I am using my own life. This month’s chapter is from the Ursula Le Guin translation.

Before we get started I want to let you know that the deadline for applications to Writing the Bardo is only 2 days away now and there are just 3 spaces left to join us. Six months of writing, mindfulness and Yoga Nidra to help you find the writing that wants to come through you. Application deadline 8th June 2026. Find out more.

And a reminder that I am going Live tomorrow with who is my next guest on the Liminal Writing series. Join us at 4pm UK time for a journey into what liminal writing means to her.

About three months ago, I had an experience in Yoga Nidra that fundamentally shifted something in me. It wasn’t a new understanding but a direct knowing of something I’d been learning intellectually for the past decade.

We were doing the body scan, moving through different parts. The teacher guided us to feel ourselves in the space beneath our body, then the front, then the sides. And somewhere in that I stopped being a body at all. I was just awareness. Just essence.

I couldn’t feel my body at all. There was no sensation of being contained, of being located in my head or my heart or anywhere inside the skin and bones that usually defines me. Instead, I was in the dark. Tiny pinpricks of bright white light everywhere against the black. Purple, gold, green colours appearing, growing, then disappearing.

I was floating there, and I knew — not as a thought, but as a direct experience — that my consciousness was not in my body. It was out there. Everywhere. This experience made more sense of everything I’ve been learning over the past decade. The teachings from Bruce Lipton about cells as antennae receiving consciousness. The understanding from Reiki that we’re all part of one field. The Tao Te Ching’s showing of the connections between everything, that nothing exists without the other. All of it suddenly came into direct knowing. My body was the antenna receiving the broadcast of me.

And it’s changing everything about how I live and how I teach.

The past decade has been a continuum of letting go. Closing my social media accounts. Walking away from the mainstream fiction publishing industry. Stepping back from building Retreat West. Each decision came because I intuitively knew those things were no longer aligned with me. And it wasn’t until I started having direct experiences in Reiki and Yoga Nidra meditations that I began to understand why these releases mattered.

The letting go came first. The understanding came after.

What I’m understanding now is that “Amanda Saint” is temporary. Not in the way that we have always known that since we came to understand we would die one day. But that this life, this body, this identity is real in this moment, and it matters while I’m here, but it’s not all there is. The consciousness I experience outside of this body, in the field, among the lights — that continues. That’s constant.

So I cling less to how things should be. I’m more accepting of what is. I notice upset and worry arising, and instead of getting caught in them, I recognise them and let them go. They’re just weather passing through the larger field. They’re not who I am.

Even my nomadic life has been part of this. Mr Saint and I spent years thinking we wanted to find a “home” and we thought we were ready to stop wandering. So we found this long-term housesit, and we’ve been here for ten months, with a long time left to go. And what we’ve discovered is that we don’t want to stop being nomadic. We want to remain free. The housesit is wonderful and the stillness has been nourishing, but we’ve realised we prefer not clinging to place, not identifying with ownership. We want to keep moving. Stay nimble. Keep discovering and exploring.

That’s the letting go continuing to unfold. Not clinging to ideas about how life should look, or ideas I once had of what I wanted. Accepting and trusting the freedom of not being tied to anything.

And this has completely transformed how I teach. My teaching used to be much more intellectual — explaining concepts, offering frameworks, teaching the ideas of mindful writing. Now it’s embodied. I invite the writers who work with me to sink into their bodies and let go of their minds. To find what wants to be written not from thinking but from presence. To have their own antenna moments, their own direct experiences of consciousness beyond the thinking mind showing them what it wants them to write.

I can’t teach them that understanding intellectually. It has to be lived. So I create space for the living of it.

This is what Chapter 14 is pointing to. The Tao that can’t be seen, heard, or grasped.

That ease comes from not trying to grasp. From letting go of needing things to be a certain way. From recognising that we’re part of something much bigger and more mysterious than our human minds can really grasp.

Everything I’ve learned from ancient wisdoms and quantum science seems to say the same thing: the beginning was consciousness itself. The source that moves through all things. When we’re mindful of that, when we remember that’s where we come from, we can hold the thread lightly and let it change direction as it passes through our hands.

I’m so grateful for that Yoga Nidra session three months ago. Grateful for the direct knowing it gave me and keeps giving me each time I practice. Grateful for the decade of learning and letting go that prepared the ground for it. And grateful for the continued unfolding of understanding what it means to hold the thread of the Tao — to know that I’m temporary, but the consciousness I am is eternal, and that changes everything about how I move through the world.

How about you? Have you had any experiences that changed your understanding of life completely? Tell me in the comments as I’d love to hear about it.

With love,

Amanda 💙

Your Turn: Writing Prompts

Personal Prompts

• Write about a moment when you experienced something that couldn’t be explained in words — a direct knowing that went beyond thinking. What happened? What did you discover?

• Describe a time when you let go of something (a belief, a person, a way of life, an identity) without fully understanding why. What did you understand afterward?

• Write about your body as an antenna. What is it receiving? What broadcast are you tuned into?

• When have you experienced consciousness or awareness as larger than your individual self? What shifted in you?

• Write about the continuum of letting go in your own life. What have you released? How has each release led to the next?

Fiction Prompts

• Write a character discovering they are not confined to their body. How do they experience this? How does it change them?

• Imagine a world where people understood themselves as antennae receiving a broadcast rather than separate individuals. How would they live differently?

• Write about someone clinging to an idea of how their life should be, and then gradually releasing it. Show the unfolding.

• Describe the experience of sinking into the body and finding presence there and what waits for you when the mind steps aside.

I’d love to hear what comes up for you with these prompts if you’d like to share in the comments.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching. You can read the other posts in this series here.

With love,

Write with me

Leave a comment

Share

Hope you enjoy it.

With love,

Amanda 💙