Category: Observations

The American Dream in Hallmark Christmas Films

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations
Photo by Tom Fisk on Pexels.com

In the final days before Christmas, as London softened into that peculiar hush that arrives once schools have begun to let out and families retreat inward to the warmth of the home, I found myself doing something thoroughly predictable and deeply comforting: watching Hallmark Christmas films under my Snuggie. Between farewell dinners with friends, long walks through streets still glowing with festive unrestraint, and the gentle anxiety of packing up a life temporarily for an extended stay in the United States, these films offered a reliable background hum. (You can read a longer and older reflection on Christmas nostalgia in my family and the birth of the family Christmas elf here.)

I’m preparing to fly to the US for a long Christmas break with time with family, slower mornings, the recalibration that comes from a geographical and cultural shift. London has been generous this year: beautiful gatherings, thoughtful conversations, laughter that lingered longer than expected. Leaving it, even temporarily, has sharpened my awareness of transition. And it is in moments like this—between places, identities, rhythms—that the Hallmark Christmas universe reveals itself not as kitsch alone, but as a persistent cultural fantasy about the nature of self-invention and moving between ‘city’ and ‘home’ at the Yuletide season.

Almost without exception, these films follow a familiar arc. A protagonist (usually overworked, professionally successful, emotionally disconnected) is pulled back to a small town—often reluctantly—where their old patterns begin to slip away. There is a bakery to save, a family tradition to restore, a local festival under threat. Somewhere along the way, ambition is softened, productivity is re-evaluated, and a new version of the self is chosen.

Because beneath the snow-dusted town squares and improbably attractive small business owners, Hallmark Christmas films aren’t just about romance; they are the American Dream writ large, specifically, the dream in its form as a renewable project of becoming.

The American Dream, as it appears in Hallmark films, isn’t about upward mobility in the sociological sense. It is about re-choosing oneself. Reinventing the self in alignment with values that feel more authentic, more humane, and more emotionally intelligent. The dream isn’t that you can become rich or even necessarily that you can become anything you want, but that you can become truer.

And this idea has deep roots. One can trace it back to Emerson’s insistence on self-reliance, to William James’s pragmatism, to the therapeutic turn of twentieth-century American culture that Philip Rieff so famously diagnosed. But Hallmark offers a softened, seasonal version of this lineage: a therapeutic narrative wrapped in garlands and goodwill.

The protagonists are rarely impoverished or desperate. They are comfortable but misaligned. Their problem isn’t survival; it is meaning. And meaning, in this universe, is restored not through critique or struggle, but through return. Home. Community. A slower tempo. A person who sees you. Who really sees you.

This is why these films often resonate more deeply during this time of year. Watching them while packing to cross the Atlantic, I noticed how insistently they rehearse the fantasy that identity can be paused, revised, and resumed elsewhere. That you can step out of one life and into another without too much residue. That airports are not thresholds of loss, but portals of possibility.

Of course, this is where the fantasy reveals its limits.

The Hallmark town is a place without structural conflict. There is no precarity that cannot be solved by collective goodwill, no inequality that demands reckoning, no historical weight that resists the redemptive arc. In this sense, the films function as what Lauren Berlant might call “cruel optimism”, attachments to images of the good life that soothe even as they obscure.

And yet.

It would be too easy—and perhaps too academic—to dismiss these films as ideological anaesthetic. What interests me more than just their popularity is their persistence and their quiet emotional efficacy, because they continue to speak to something real: a widespread longing for lives that feel coherent, relational, and narratable.

In my recent work—particularly in my ongoing thinking about pedagogy, spiritual self-formation, and the ethics of transformation—I’ve become increasingly attentive to the stories we use to make change imaginable. Hallmark films offer a highly accessible script for transformation: leave the wrong life, return to the right one, and allow love to confirm the choice.

This is not how life works. But it is how many people wish it could work, especially at the turn of the year.

There is something revealing about the timing of these films. They flood the cultural field precisely when people are already taking stock of relationships, work, priorities, failures, and hopes. They offer not instruction, but reassurance: you are not too late; you are allowed to begin again; reinvention can bring you closer to your real ‘Self’.

Having lived long enough outside the US to see these films from an oblique angle (and I say that as someone who grew up in a small, cosy Midwestern town that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark film), I’m struck by how distinctively American this vision of self-invention remains. European narratives of change tend to emphasise accommodation, inheritance, and negotiation with limits. The American story still leans toward reinvention as both a moral right and an ethical imperative.

Hallmark Christmas films distil that impulse into its gentlest form.

They are not about conquest or domination, but about choosing differently. About saying no to a life that looks successful but feels thin. About rediscovering craft, community, and care. About allowing relational life to matter again.

And this is where, perhaps unexpectedly, they intersect with my work in coaching and contemplative practice. One of the most common experiences people bring into one-to-one sessions is not crisis, but quiet misalignment. A sense that life is working externally while drifting internally. That something has been gained at the expense of something unnamed. The fantasy that a single decision—a move, a relationship, a new project—might re-knit the whole.

Hallmark films indulge that fantasy fully. Real life does not. But it does allow for smaller, truer acts of re-alignment.

This is why I continue to return, both in writing and in practice, to frameworks that slow transformation down rather than accelerate it. Quarterly reflection instead of dramatic reinvention. Gentle integrative practices rather than total overhaul. Attention to parts, patterns, and pacing.

As the year turns, I’m offering two spaces that are explicitly designed to work with this threshold moment—not to promise reinvention, but to support intentional re-orientation.

On 5 January, I’ll be hosting Reflect & Reset: a Quarterly Planning Workshop, a 90-minute session designed to help you review where you are, clarify what matters now, and set direction without force. It’s not about hustle or optimisation, but about coherence—internal and external. You can register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311948616

And on 12 January, I’ll be offering an Integrative Meditation session, an hour to settle the nervous system, reconnect with embodied awareness, and begin the year from a place of presence rather than pressure. Details and registration here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311944273

Both are intentionally modest in scale. No promises of transformation by Valentine’s Day. Just spaces to listen more carefully to what is already asking for attention.

If Hallmark Christmas films remind us of anything worth keeping, it is this: people change not because they are broken, but because something in them wants to live more honestly. The danger lies not in the desire for reinvention, but in the belief that it must be instantaneous, total, or externally validated.

As I finish packing, folding one life neatly enough to place it temporarily in storage, I feel grateful for the quieter truths these films gesture toward even as they simplify them. That rhythm matters. That community shapes us. That work is not the same as worth. That it is permissible—necessary, even—to pause and ask whether the life we are living still fits.

The American Dream, in its most humane form, is not about becoming exceptional. It is about becoming aligned. And alignment, unlike fantasy, is something we can practice—slowly, relationally, and with care.

If you’re standing at a threshold of your own—new year, new season, new questions—you’re very welcome to reach out. I have limited availability for 1-1 coaching opening up in the new year, and I’m always glad to explore whether the work might be supportive for where you are now.

For now, though, I’ll finish the last of the packing, queue up another improbably snowy town, and let the fantasy do what it does best: remind me that change is allowed to be gentle.

Upcoming Events

Reflect & Reset: Quarterly Planning Workshop

Integrative Meditation

More to Explore

A Year of Reading and Renewal: Reflections on 52+ Books in 2025

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

I started this year with a strange mix of endings and fresh beginnings. The email confirming my promotion to full professor arrived in early January while I was making coffee, and I remember feeling not triumph but a kind of wry tenderness towards my younger self who had wanted this so badly. Titles come long after the inner effort that earns them, and the moment of arrival is often anticlimactic, yet it still signifies something. Three months later, I stepped down after six years as Associate Dean, closing a chapter of leadership that had greatly shaped my professional identity.

At the beginning of the year, I set a Goodreads challenge to read 52 books, mostly as a reminder to read not only in my discipline but also beyond it, and to let myself wander into other registers. What I didn’t expect was just how deeply the year’s reading would fold into everything else I was doing. The books became companions to the rhythms of the sabbatical, to the shifting layers of my personal work, and to the communities that formed around me as welcomed additions.

One of the brightest of those communities was the Surbiton Literary Salon, first dreamed up over dinner in January with the simplest impulse: the desire to talk about books in good company at my local pub. We began with a handful of us in a small room in our local, a bottle of wine circulating and no agenda beyond the shared pleasure of reading. That little gathering grew into a genuinely warm and inspirational group that expanded month after month, and together we travelled from the quiet, meditative brilliance of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital to the philosophical charm of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a book that sparked one of our liveliest discussions about intelligence, loneliness, and the elegance of human contradiction. From there, we moved through Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, which reignited my intense desire to visit Japan, and The Satsuma Complex, which divided the group’s opinions more than any other.

Angela Thirkell’s Wild Strawberries brought a welcome return to lightness, those bright, English comic notes that somehow disguise their structural precision. Harriet Tyce’s Blood Orange plunged us into a much darker register, and it was astonishing how different members of the group held different emotional keys to it. And then The Resilience Project brought an earnestness and sincerity that balanced the year’s heavier themes. The Women opened unexpectedly deep discussions about duty, silence, and the emotional architecture of courage, and Festive Spirits by Kate Atkinson arrived just as the nights grew longer. By the end of the year, the Salon had become, for me and the 15 or so of us who gather every month in a friend’s well-appointed front room, a steady, quietly joyful ritual of sharing our reflections on books. A reminder that literature is not an individual encounter but a relational one.

Parallel to this, I began leading a Sunday evening Course in Miracles study group, which continues to deepen. Guiding a group through A Course in Miracles is a very different kind of teaching that depends less on interpretation and more on presence. We read it in philosophical, ecumenical language, without doctrinal commitments, which seems to open a gentler, more spacious terrain. Each week invites a shift in perception: forgiveness not as moral duty but as a choice of vision, responsibility not as blame but as agency, devotion not as obedience but as attention. The text asks much of us—stillness, honesty, love—and somehow the group met it with all three.

Then there was The Art of Creative Practice, the coaching and creative development circle I founded on Meetup. I began it lightly in September with free coworking sessions, almost experimentally, but it quickly grew into one of the most rewarding parts of my year. The group attracted writers, artists, and creatives of all stripes who were less interested in productivity hacks than in understanding the emotional and psychological textures that underpin their work. What has struck me most is the courage people have brought to the process, the willingness to inhabit contradiction and complexity with humour and grace. It reminded me again that creativity is not a technique but a relationship with one’s own inner landscape.

All of this shaped the way I read. Books became part of an ongoing unfolding of my year, sometimes offering clarity, sometimes challenge, sometimes simple companionship. Elaine Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person and Judith Orloff’s The Empath’s Survival Guide, for example, woven between sessions of creative coaching, gave me new language for the quieter traits that many group members shared but rarely articulated. These texts reframed sensitivity not as fragility but as attunement, something to be cultivated, not resisted. It created echoes with other books I encountered this year that explored the subtler dimensions of mind and meaning: Steve Hagen’s Buddhism Plain & Simple, Yung Pueblo’s Clarity & Connection, and Marianne Williamson’s writings on the intersections of love, perception, and the ethical imagination. Attending a live weekend workshop with Williamson this summer was one of my highlights of the year.

Money and prosperity, too, became an unexpected theme, not in the acquisitive sense, but as a study of relationship and mindset. Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money, Catherine Ponder’s The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity, and Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind all, in different ways, opened space for reconsidering the beliefs we inherit about value, sufficiency, and trust. These books arrived alongside my own work in reshaping my financial habits and sense of abundance, and they echoed the larger project of creating a life that feels aligned, intentional, and quietly elegant.

Some books were simply pleasures that reoriented me. Maugham’s The Magician—a thinly veiled portrait of Aleister Crowley—was delightfully pulpy and relevant to my occult research. Fiction formed its own thread of discovery. Reading Madame Bovary again reminded me of the surgical precision of Flaubert’s attention, the cruelty and tenderness interwoven in the same gesture. Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude returned me to a world that felt like a dream I once lived inside, a universe where the magical and the mundane breathe the same air. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury challenged me all over again, as it always does, and Brave New World felt unnervingly prescient (and not at all what I remember it being when I read it years ago). 

As I write this, I’m preparing the next cycle of work, finishing my book, continuing The Art of Creative Practice, deepening into the Course in Miracles Study Group, tending the Surbiton Literary Salon, and beginning several new coaching cohorts in the new year. If this year taught me anything, it’s that intellectual life thrives when held in community, when nourished by a wide diet of ideas, and when approached not with performance but with presence. Here’s to another year of reading, learning, becoming—and to the books that will meet us where we are, and gently carry us somewhere new.

My 2025 Reading List

  • Ackroyd, Peter, Introducing Swedenborg
  • Aron, Elaine N., The Highly Sensitive Person
  • Atkinson, Kate, Festive Spirits: Three Christmas Stories
  • Barbery, Muriel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
  • Brann, Amy, Neuroscience for Coaches
  • Brookner, Anita, Hotel du Lac
  • Brown, Dan, The Secret of Secrets
  • Caine, Margaret, Footloose in Cornish Folklore
  • Chanek, Jack, Tarot for the Magically Inclined
  • Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales
  • Cuylenburg, Hugh van, The Resilience Project
  • Davies, Owen, Art of the Grimoire
  • Dean, Liz, The Ultimate Guide to Tarot Spreads
  • Eggers, Dave, The Monk of Mokha
  • Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury
  • Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby
  • Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary
  • Garcia Marqués, Gabriel, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Hagen, Steve, Buddhism Plain & Simple
  • Hannah, Kristin, The Women
  • Harvey, Samantha,  Orbital
  • Hayes, Nick, Wild Service
  • Hollinghurst, Alan, Our Evenings
  • Holiday, Ryan, Courage Is Calling; Right Thing, Right Now
  • Horowitz, Mitch, Occult America
  • Houston, Keith, The Book
  • Kerr, Gordon, A Short History of Coffee
  • Matthews, Michael, Bigger Leaner Stronger
  • Matousek, Mark, Lessons from an American Stoic
  • Mortimer, Bob, The Satsuma Complex
  • Morlok, Franziska, Bookbinding
  • Murphy, Joseph, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
  • Osman, Richard, The Impossible Fortune
  • Ponder, Catherine, The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity
  • Pueblo, Yung, Clarity & Connection
  • Saumarez Smith, Ferdinand, Eleusis and Enlightenment
  • Sertillanges, Antonin,The Intellectual Life
  • Shen Congwen,  Border Town
  • Stibal, Vianna, Seven Planes of Existence; You and the Creator; Digging for Beliefs; Advanced ThetaHealing; ThetaHealing
  • Tarbuck, Alice, A Spell in the Wild
  • Thirkell, Angela, Wild Strawberries
  • Twist, Lynne, The Soul of Money
  • Tyce, Harriet, Blood Orange
  • Warner, Sylvia Townsend, Lolly Willowes
  • Williamson, Marianne, The Law of Divine Compensation; The Mystic Jesus
  • Wolynn, Mark, It Didn’t Start With You
  • Wynn-Williams, Sarah, Careless People
  • Yagisawa, Satoshi, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Upcoming Events

Reflect & Reset: Quarterly Planning Workshop

Integrative Meditation

Understanding Metaconsciousness for Personal Growth

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations
Photo by meo on Pexels.com

At this time of year, I always notice a subtle change in the quality of my attention. The external world doesn’t necessarily slow down, but something inwardly does. Even the light feels different. Darker, yes, but also more permeable. I’ve been feeling that contrast keenly over the last few weeks, particularly as I prepare for the turn into a new year.

It’s also been on my mind recently while reading Kate Atkinson’s Festive Spirits for my local book club’s Christmas meeting. Atkinson’s stories, playful and unsettling in equal measure, brush up against the unseen dimensions of experience without making grand metaphysical claims. They hover at the threshold. That, in its own way, is where much of my thinking about superconsciousness currently lives: not as an abstract spiritual pinnacle, but as a working edge of awareness that we keep rediscovering in different vocabularies.

In my last book and in much of my recent teaching, I’ve returned again and again to the idea that a large proportion of what we call “consciousness” is, in fact, automatic. It is hormonal, patterned, reactive, efficient. William James hinted at this more than a century ago when he described habit as the “enormous fly-wheel of society.” Freud, in his own way, mapped the vast subterranean machinery of the psyche. Contemporary neuroscience has largely confirmed what contemplative traditions have long suggested: most of what we do, think, and feel happens before we decide.

This is where the idea of metaconsciousness becomes so important, the capacity to notice that we are being moved by processes that are not, in any simple sense, “us.” It is the moment when you realise you are mid-reaction and something in you steps back just enough to witness it. Not to suppress it. Not to spiritualise it. Just to see.

But superconsciousness, as I’m increasingly working with it, points to something slightly different again. It is not merely awareness of the machinery. It is awareness that is not exclusively organised by the machinery at all. It gestures toward a dimension of mind that is less bound to survival, identity maintenance, or historical conditioning. Roberto Assagioli—whose work in psychosynthesis continues to shape my own—described the superconscious as the source of creativity, meaning, ethical insight, and transpersonal experience. Not an escape from the human, but its latent extension.

One of the things I’ve become more cautious about over the years is how easily “human potential” gets packaged as something to be maximised, extracted, or branded. The language of fulfilment can slide so quickly into performance metrics. Abraham Maslow’s later writings—often neglected in organisational culture—are far more subtle than his pyramid suggests. Self-actualisation, for Maslow, was never a static achievement, but an ongoing alignment with what is most alive and truthful in us.

Superconsciousness names a direction of travel, not a finish line.

In my own life, this shows up less in fireworks and more in micro-adjustments: choosing not to override tiredness with willpower; noticing when the body says no long before the intellect catches up; letting an idea take months instead of forcing it into productivity. It shows up in teaching too—in learning when not to fill the silence, when to let a group sit with not-knowing.

Even reading Festive Spirits this December has felt like a small act of this alignment. In between sessions, planning for the new year, and working with clients, sitting with a beautifully written short story by the fire (or, more accurately, a very convincing YouTube fire) has felt like a reminder that imagination itself is a superconscious faculty. We don’t manufacture it. We host it.

There is a tendency to associate higher states of awareness with peak experiences: mystical visions, altered states, moments of transcendence. And certainly, those exist. But what interests me far more now is how the superconscious expresses itself in the ordinary:

  • In ethical instincts that arise before rational justification
  • In sudden creative insight that reorganises months of confused thinking
  • In moments of compassion that interrupt long-established narratives about self and other
  • In the quiet certainty that a particular season of life has ended—even when nothing dramatic has occurred

This is not about becoming perfect. It is about becoming less confined.

I notice that many of the people I work with—particularly academics, creatives, and reflective professionals—are weary not because they lack insight, but because their insight has nowhere to land. They understand their patterns. They often know exactly where those patterns came from. But knowing is not the same as reorganising the centre of gravity from which one lives.

Superconsciousness, in this sense, is not an abstract spiritual add-on. It is deeply practical. It changes: how decisions are made, what counts as success, how time is experienced, where authority is located.

And perhaps most importantly, it reshapes the relationship between effort and surrender. Not everything meaningful can be solved through optimisation.

As this year draws to a close, I find myself more attuned than usual to thresholds between exhaustion and renewal, between endings and beginnings, between old strategies and new capacities for trust. This is exactly the territory that both my coaching work and my group workshops increasingly inhabit: not self-improvement as escalation, but re-orientation.

If this reflection resonates, there are a few gentle ways to continue the conversation:

🌿 1–1 Coaching

If you’re navigating a threshold of your own—professionally, creatively, or existentially—I offer integrative 1–1 coaching rooted in psychosynthesis, contemplative practice, and depth psychology.

You’re very welcome to book a free 15-minute Clarity Call here:
👉 https://allanjohnson.co.uk/coaching/

✨ Reflect & Reset: Quarterly Planning Workshop

5 January | 7.30–9.00 PM GMT | £10
A spacious, grounded evening to review the last season and consciously set the next one—without forcing premature certainty.
Register here:
👉 https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311948616

🧘 Integrative Meditation

12 January | 7.30–8.30 PM GMT | £4
A guided practice evening bringing together somatic awareness, imagination, and reflective presence.
Register here:
👉 https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311944273

Superconsciousness, for me, is no longer a speculative peak. It is a daily negotiation between who I have been conditioned to be, who I consciously try to be, and who sometimes appears unannounced in moments of clarity, creativity, or courage. It does not always feel elevated. Often it feels quiet. Sometimes inconvenient. Occasionally unmistakably right.

And perhaps that, more than anything, is the true measure of human potential: not how high we rise, but how deeply we learn to listen.

More to Explore

The Magic of December: London Streets and Seasonal Reflections

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

There is something unmistakably breathtaking about walking through the streets of London in December. The winter light is low, softening the stone façades and gilded lettering that mark centuries of human endeavour. This weekend, as I wandered near St James’s Palace, I found myself pausing before a grand Georgian facade. Its windows were frosted, the door slightly chipped at the edges, but the sense of life contained within those walls—the countless stories, decisions, and quiet domestic dramas—was palpable. Heritage buildings bear witness, in a very real way, to the rhythms of ordinary and extraordinary life, much like the pages of a journal or the quiet corners of a home carefully decorated for the season.

I’ve been particularly aware of this sense of memory and rhythm in my own flat this week, as I put up my Christmas decorations. There is an energy to the season—a balance of calm and celebration—that is both external and internal. A candle flickers on the windowsill, evergreen garlands scent the air, and suddenly the small rituals of light, scent, and colour transform the everyday into something reflective, mindful, sacred in its simplicity. It is a reminder that living spaces, whether our own or the city around us, are containers for memory, intention, and presence.

Heritage buildings function in much the same way. As urban theorist and geographer Sharon Zukin notes in The Cultures of Cities, city spaces are laden with meaning precisely because they carry traces of past lives and social habits. Walking past an ornate corner of Soho or an old warehouse on the South Bank, I find myself imagining the people who once passed through these spaces: their laughter, arguments, discoveries, and defeats. In this sense, architecture is a form of storytelling, a material diary of human experience, and our attentiveness to these stories allows us to inhabit the city more fully, more consciously, and to place ourselves within a continuum that stretches far beyond our immediate perception.

This reflection on the layered life of buildings resonates with my current work in creative and contemplative practice. Preparing for my brand new Five-Day Soul Map Challenge, I’ve been thinking about the parallels between the physical memory of heritage structures and the inner architectures of our own lives. Both are built incrementally, through choices and experiences that accumulate over time. Both require attentiveness to subtle signals—of decay and renewal, of what is alive and what needs careful tending. In our inner work, this might mean noticing repeated patterns, unspoken desires, or hidden sources of energy and creativity. The Soul Map Challenge is designed to guide participants through this process of mindful inquiry, helping to chart the hidden currents shaping the present and illuminating next steps with clarity and purpose.

There is a rhythm to the city in winter, through the soft hush of early mornings, the slow drift of pedestrians along frost-lined streets, the sudden warmth of a café where conversation hums like a quiet tide. Observing the city in this way reminds me, as I do when I light my Sunwait candles (a new tradition from Sweden that I have taken up this year), that mindfulness is not just an interior exercise; it is an engagement with the textures, smells, sounds, and histories that surround us.

Later in December, I will be spending time with my family in the United States, a shift that reminds me of the duality of our experience, rooted in one place, yet carried forward by relationships and movement across space and time. Just as heritage buildings bear the memory of those who inhabited them before us, we have the influences, lessons, and love of family and community, weaving these threads into our own practice and creativity. Recognising this continuity, even amidst change, brings a surprising sense of calm and joy.

Walking through London’s historic quarters, decorating my flat, preparing for the Soul Map Challenge, and anticipating the holiday season, I have become increasingly aware of the subtle ways that structure—both literal and metaphorical—supports our inner life.

If you are curious to explore this dynamic in your own life, whether through the lens of inner alchemy, creative reflection, or structured self-inquiry, I invite you to join one of my upcoming sessions. Inner Alchemy: Practices for the New Season of You is free and takes place on 1 December, 7.30–8.30 PM GMT—a gentle, reflective hour to help you re-centre and step into winter with clarity and calm. Sign up here. For a deeper dive, the Five-Day Soul Map Challenge runs 8–12 December, 8.00–9.00 AM GMT, offering a structured week of guided inquiry to illuminate your current patterns and next right steps (£19).

This December, as I move between London and home, between daily practice and festive preparation, I am committed to noticing these layers, to honouring their subtle rhythms, and to offering space for others to do the same through my workshops and coaching. Mindful living, I find, is never abstract; it is lived in the delicate balance of attention, memory, and intention, in spaces both old and new, and in moments of quiet, flickering light that illuminate the beauty of a life well observed.

LOOKING AHEAD: AN INVITATION

If you’re in your own season of reorientation—whether creative, vocational, or relational—I’d love to support you.

Inner Alchemy: Practices for the New Season of You (FREE)
1 December, 7.30–8.30 PM GMT
A gentle, reflective hour to help you re-centre and step into winter with clarity and calm.
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311901504

Five-Day Soul Map Challenge (£19)
8–12 December, 8.00–9.00 AM
A structured, powerful week of guided inquiry to help you understand the deeper patterning of your current season and identify the next right steps.

Filling the Well: Notes from Sabbatical

Posted on by Allan Johnson in academia, Observations

My research sabbatical is coming to an end, and while I have made a lot of good progress on my next book, I’ve also been delighted by the sublter transformations that I’ve encountered. Alongside the core research for my new projects— on occult print culture and the strange fidelities between intimacy and texts—I’ve been tending to what Julia Cameron calls ‘the well,’ that source of creative inspiration. I’ve been learning to slow down enough to explore new skills, curiosities, and dormant longings to surface. Some of these pursuits are practical; some are contemplative; most sit somewhere between the two.

I began to practice bookbinding because I wanted to understand, physically, how a book hangs together. Working on the history of grimoires and the materiality of printed esoterica, I kept returning to the question: what does a book know about itself? Researchers like Owen Davies point toward the intimate entanglement between form and authority; grimoires weren’t just texts but talismanic objects, their legitimacy often communicated through their very construction.

But it wasn’t until I stitched my first pamphlet binding and felt the click of thread against paper that I understood this not just intellectually but bodily. Bookbinding slows you down to a new tempo. You can’t rush glue or the slow process of folding signatures. There’s something beautifully therapeutic about it.

I’ve also been learning how to brew coffee properly, an unexpectedly transformative discipline. It started with a simple desire to make better morning coffee to get me going (how often do we think of coffee just as an efficient way to get caffeine into our bloodstream?), but quickly became an experiment in sensory calibration. James Hoffmann’s work has been a guide and inspiration here. Grind size, water temperature, bloom time: they are all micro-decisions that shape experience. Becoming more attentive to them has become vital to my routine and daily practice. Sometimes the most powerful shift comes not from a grand reinvention but from learning a new ratio, a better rhythm, a different pour.

Then there is printmaking, a new art form that I have started experimenting with more recently. Monoprints, drypoint printing, and marbling all resist control in the most generative ways. They feel like metaphors for this sabbatical as a whole: you set the conditions, choose your pigments, prepare your plate, but the final print is something all its own, often capturing what Bob Ross would call ‘happy little accidents’. Printmaking is a collaboration between matter and intention, process and surrender. Some pieces are simply meant to exist only once, a reassuring thought for someone trained to measure impact in citations, outputs, and REF cycles.

One of the surprising discoveries of sabbatical is how porous the boundaries are between ‘hobby’ and ‘research’, ‘craft’ and ‘scholarship’, ‘practice’ and ‘life’. The old binaries feel increasingly unconvincing. My work on the ethics of mail-order occultism has been deepened by physically making books. My exploration of attachment in modernist literature has been illuminated by tactile processes that centre contact, negotiation, and impression. Even the coffee—humble as it seems—has become a way of thinking about attention as a moral resource.

There is also, I suspect, something about mid-career tenderness here: the desire to re-inhabit one’s own curiosity after years of professional responsibility. Sabbatical hasn’t been a retreat from work but a reorientation toward it. The crafts have been steadying companions, teaching me to show up with less armour and more texture.

This is the energy I’m carrying into 2026, both in my writing and in the programmes I’m designing: embodied creativity, and forms of inner work that feel supportive rather than ascetic. A year of root systems rather than resolutions.

Looking Ahead: An Invitation

If you’re in your own season of reorientation—whether creative, vocational, or relational—I’d love to support you.

Inner Alchemy: Practices for the New Season of You (FREE)
1 December, 7.30–8.30 PM GMT
A gentle, reflective hour to help you re-centre and step into winter with clarity and calm.
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/311901504

Five-Day Soul Map Challenge (£19)
8–12 December, 8.00–9.00 AM
A structured, powerful week of guided inquiry to help you understand the deeper patterning of your current season and identify the next right steps.

None of these practices—bookbinding, coffee brewing, marbling—were part of my planned sabbatical. They arrived almost incidentally, small doorways into a quieter kind of learning. But they’ve become some of the most meaningful teachers of this season. They’ve encouraged me to be a little less polished, a little more porous, and to remember that knowledge doesn’t only live in the mind.