Book of Days & Make a Journal ep.8

How are you over there? Are you settling into the end of the 2021 year? To be honest with you: it’s all been a bit of a blur to me, still so much is going on with the pandemic and general turmoil; I’ve been pretty down/ blue with it all. At times I just want to stay in bed for days on end while feeding myself chocolate and cheese and watch repeats of The Office and New Girl (OMG don’t you just love Nick Miller?!).

But, life continues to demand that ‘I get up out of bed’ for some reason 😆, so I do and I go and I live my thing. In it all I’ve realised over and over again that a few things support me with the crazy of it all, here is my list:

• Community/ chatting with friends/ family about how we feel.
• Feeling my feelings, really.
• Therapy.
• Hugs.
• Art, music, art, music.
• Self care, pausing, resting.
• Some kind of spiritual practice.

I keep coming back to art as it hits quite a few of the above: through art and journalling I can feel my feelings, go into a therapeutic space, do self care and experience it at as a sacred spiritual practice too. Amazing how one activity can be so soothing in so many ways.

Speaking of which: I wanted to let you know that I will be teaching on Book of Days again next year. Most of you know that I rarely have the opportunity to join other year long course due to my crazy schedule, but I always join Effy Wild for her Book of Days course because it’s where we get to go deep into the art journalling process and we get to go deeply into our feelings and deeply into our spiritual practice, plus there is a like-minded community too! Effy is truly a master at ‘meeting herself on the page‘ in her words. I hope you’ll come and join us for Book of Days 2022 for an art journalling deep dive!

If you need some new inspiration: I just uploaded a new episode of Finish A Journal (on my youtube channel) in which I create an expressive watercolour portrait. Come check it out here. I include a voice-over in which I chitter chatter about my creative and emotional process. Hope you find it inspiring!

Call for compassionate sponsors! ❤️ 

We have just counted the amount of scholarship applicants we’ve had for Life Book 2022. We’ve had over 550 applicants this year, GULP! This is more than double what we usually get! We at Willowing Arts are upping our scholarships offers from 10 to 20 to get as many people on Life Book 2022, but sadly we cannot offer scholarships to all 550 people!

If you are able and willing and feel called to sponsor any additional people who struggle financially and are not able to join Life Book without financial support/ a scholarship, please contact us on hello@willowing.org or click the buttons below to donate. With your support we will be able to offer more scholarships to more people! Please help if you can! Thank you in advance to anyone who is willing/ able to sponsor a person in need! We are SO deeply grateful to those donors who have already donated scholarships for Life Book 2022. You have our undying gratitude!