lara simmons

This week is the culmination of all of our work together over the past five weeks. This is the part where we WRITE OUR LIVES. First, a couple of my favorite quotes on manifestation: "Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it...You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.” --Liz Gilbert "We are living in a dynamic, intelligent Field capable of instantaneous response to each one of us. (It may help to read that statement again.) Instead of living in a gigantic machine in which we are only a tiny cog, we have the opportunity to recognize and identify ourselves as something much more significant – something that the awesome and intelligent creative force that has created the plant kingdom, weather, human beings, this planet, and galaxies beyond, responds to.” --John Nicholl To start flexing your manifestation muscle, begin with the Radical Manifestation Worksheet from Colin Tipping (a...

Who is a writer? Often we think of writing “professionally” as the only legitimate way to call yourself a writer, but looking back on my own writing life, it wasn't until I started writing “just” for myself that my writing really took off. The writing I have done because it really pleased me has been much more satisfying than the writing I have done for money. I would urge you to use this measure of your success - Does my writing please me? Am I enjoying the process? Am I satisfied with what I am  writing? - rather than how much money you make from it. And if you write, dare to call yourself a WRITER!   Here are some of my favorite quotes about writing:   "Everybody is talented original and has something important to say." --Brenda Ueland from her book " If You Want to Write ."   “...[A] writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a wri...

In today's session we worked on bringing more presence to our lives and to our writing. Class began with a ten minute full body meditation . Taking a few deep breaths and then bringing awareness to each part of our body, starting with our toes. Feeling into each part of our bodies, feeling its structures, its movements, its energy. After the meditation we began to explore the concept of small stones. This exercise was created by Fiona Robyn a writer in England whose website is called Writing Our Way Home .  A small stone is "a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment." Writing small stones can help us be more present to our lives and to our writing. We read some examples of small stones from Fiona's small stones blog , her blogzine a handful of stones , as well as from my own small stones blog pebbles are small stones . Then we went out and wrote small stones of our own for 30-35 minutes before coming back together to share our...