Tag: creativity

The Way We Live Matters More Than The Way We Think

Posted on by Allan Johnson in habits, Observations

It’s easy to forget that philosophy was never meant to be a spectator sport.

Long before it became something we studied, it was something people did. Philosophy began as a way of arranging a day, training attention, shaping character, and orienting oneself toward what mattered in life. It didn’t live in texts, but in habits: how one woke, walked, ate, spoke, listened, and rested.

In other words, philosophy was practical.

This has been on my mind a lot recently, perhaps unsurprisingly. I’ve just come to the end of my sabbatical and I’m now taking on responsibility for running the MA in English Literature and the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Surrey. This transition made me acutely aware of how much of our thinking is shaped not by what we claim to believe, but by what we repeatedly do.

One of the great misunderstandings of modern intellectual life is the assumption that clarity comes first, and practice follows: if only we had the right theory, the right worldview, the right explanation, then our lives would fall into place.

But lived experience tends to run the other way around.

As Pierre Hadot points out in Philosophy as a Way of Life, ancient philosophy was grounded in spiritual exercises, that is, concrete practices designed to transform perception and conduct. Stoicism wasn’t a set of ideas about fate or reason; it was a disciplined training of attention. Epicureanism wasn’t a theory of pleasure, but a daily practice of simplicity, friendship, and fear reduction. Even Plato’s dialogues, for all their abstraction, were designed to do something to the reader: to unsettle, provoke, and reorient.

Closer to our own time, thinkers as varied as Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Michel de Certeau have reminded us that attention, habit, and repetition shape the moral and imaginative texture of a life long before explicit reflection enters the scene. We do not first decide what matters and then act accordingly; rather, what we attend to, rehearse, and ritualise slowly teaches us what matters.

This is why everyday rituals are philosophical, whether we acknowledge them as such or not.

By “rituals,” I don’t mean anything grand or mystical—though they can be. I mean the small, repeated actions that quietly structure our inner lives: how we begin the morning, how we transition into work, how we respond to resistance, how we close a day. These acts rarely feel important, but they are formative.

A life without intentional ritual isn’t neutral; it is simply shaped by default rituals of the world outside: algorithms, inboxes, urgency, comparison, and distraction.

During my sabbatical, this became unavoidably clear. Writing a book is less an act of inspiration than one of sustained fidelity: returning to the page when enthusiasm fades, when doubts arise, when the work resists being done. What carried me through wasn’t motivation, but a set of simple, repeatable practices and routines that made thinking possible at all. A system.

This is where much contemporary advice culture goes astray. We are encouraged to optimise outputs while leaving the deeper structure of our lives untouched. But philosophy—real philosophy—asks a more demanding question: What kind of person is this way of living making me into?

This is also why I’m increasingly wary of purely instrumental approaches to creativity. Writing, thinking, and teaching are not just tasks to be managed; they are forms of life. How we organise our time, relate to resistance, and hold ourselves in periods of uncertainty is not secondary to the work—it is the work.

Much of my recent teaching, coaching, and writing has been circling this insight from different angles: that sustainable creativity requires a different relationship to time, effort, and selfhood than the one most of us have inherited.

This integrative dimension is central to my current work, including the practices I’ll be sharing in upcoming sessions. Whether through meditation, reflective co-working, or rethinking how we organise creative labour, the aim is the same: to help people cultivate forms of attention that make meaningful work—and a more humane life—possible.

If this resonates, you might be interested in the following upcoming offerings:

Integrative Meditation
2 February | 7.30–8.30 PM GMT | £4
A guided session focused on attention, integration, and gentle inner alignment.
Register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/312077761/

Creative Flow Co-Working Session: Reframing Resistance
9 February | 10 AM–12 PM GMT | FREE
A shared, reflective working space for engaging resistance as information rather than failure.
Register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/312151261/

Beyond Time Management: A More Natural Way to Organise Creative Work
24 February | 7.30–9.00 PM GMT | £12
An exploration of rhythms, seasons, and structures for sustained creative practice.
Register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313062163/

Perhaps the most important thing philosophy can do for us now is remind us that a life is not shaped primarily by what we profess, but by what we practice. Everyday rituals—chosen with care—become a quiet form of resistance against fragmentation, haste, and superficiality.

And in a culture saturated with noise and abstraction, this return to lived, embodied wisdom may be one of the most radical gestures still available to us.

What Bookbinding Taught Me About Patience and Care

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations
Photo by Antoni Shkraba Studio on Pexels.com

There is something about the craft of bookbinding. It re-educates the hands, and through them, the nervous system. It returns time to its proper scale.

I’ve been thinking about this more since settling into my new flat, which—by a small but meaningful stroke of grace—includes a dedicated studio space. For the first time in years, my tools don’t need to be packed away between sessions. Paper can sit under weights overnight without being disturbed, and work can pause without being dismantled.

Already this matters more than I expected. Bookbinding, after all, resists the logic of efficiency. Adhesive must dry. Grain direction must be respected. Linen thread must be drawn tight but not too tight. You cannot rush a spine without paying for it later. The work teaches you—firmly but kindly—that attention cannot be compressed.

Simone Weil famously wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Bookbinding operationalises this insight. You can’t bind a book while thinking three steps ahead. If your attention wanders while folding signatures, the error will propagate. If you rush the punching of sewing stations, the whole text block will pull askew. You can’t persuade paper fibres to behave differently through force of will; you must cooperate with them.

In this sense, bookbinding has become a counter-practice to much of contemporary creative life. Online, speed is rewarded. Visibility is currency. Iteration is encouraged, but only when it looks like momentum. The slowness of binding—a practice that may take days or weeks before anything finished appears—feels almost monastic by comparison.

And yet, paradoxically, it has made me more productive, not less.

One of the biggest misconceptions about patience is that it means waiting. In practice, patience is active–it’s a verb (metaphorically at least) because you are always doing something: sharpening a blade, squaring a stack, testing tension, laying out the next stage so it will be ready when the moment comes.

This mirrors something I see repeatedly in coaching work, particularly with highly sensitive or intellectually driven creatives. There is often an underlying anxiety that if one is not producing, one is stagnating. But many forms of growth happen beneath the threshold of visible output.

Since moving into the new flat and setting up the studio, I’ve noticed a subtle shift in how I approach my other work—writing, teaching, contemplative practice. I’m more willing to let something rest unfinished.

There is also, I think, an ethical dimension to working with materials in this way. Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman, describes craftsmanship as a dialogue between hand and material, where resistance becomes instructive rather than frustrating. This is not mastery-as-domination, but mastery-as-listening.

In bookbinding, materials remember what you do to them. Paper creased carelessly will never quite forgive you. Cloth stretched unevenly will telegraph the mistake forever. This permanence sharpens responsibility. You learn to slow down not because slowness is virtuous, but because it is necessary.

This has felt especially grounding during a period of personal transition. A new home, even a welcome one, requires recalibration. New light patterns. New noises. New routines. The studio has become a place where that recalibration can happen somatically, not just cognitively. Through repeated, careful gestures, the body relearns safety.

It’s hard not to notice the symbolic resonance here. Books are already threshold objects—containers of thought, memory, and voice. Binding them by hand heightens this awareness. You become acutely conscious of the labour that precedes reading, of the infrastructure that makes inwardness portable.

All of this feeds into a broader theme that’s been shaping my work lately: the power of small, well-held experiments. Not performative reinventions, but modest shifts in practice that reorient attention.

Perhaps the deepest lesson bookbinding has taught me is that care compounds. What feels like slowness at the outset becomes reliability later. Structures hold. Work lasts. You spend less time repairing what was rushed.

This is true of creative practice, of relationships, of inner life. Patience is not something we adopt once and for all; it is something we rehearse through forms that demand it of us.

For now, I’m grateful for a studio that allows this rehearsal to continue—quietly, materially, without display. And I’m grateful, too, for the conversations that extend from it: in workshops, in coaching, in shared spaces of attention.

Upcoming Events

Integrative Meditation

  • 19 January | 7.30-8.30 PM GMT | £4

Creative Flow Co-Working Session: The Power of Tiny Experiments

Highly Sensitive Creatives: Energy, Boundaries, and Creative Rhythm

More to Explore

Four Dimensions of Stillness for Creatives

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Living in a city like London trains the nervous system in a particular way. Even when we love urban life—its density, its cultural richness, its chance encounters—it asks us to metabolise a constant low-level stimulation: noise, movement, decision-making, comparison.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about this more deliberately. I’ve recently moved into a flat in a beautiful 1920s building. It’s filled with heaps of character, and I know that I’ll be very happy here, but it’s also a significant change.I’ve spent the past decade living in new-build flats, the kind with sleek appliances, underfloor heating, and a comforting sameness to all the others. But my new flat, even before my furniture was moved in and the boxes filled every spare corner, was noticeably maximalist: crown moulding, dado rails, radiators, and, perhaps most notably, the constant sounds of neighbours on all sides.

This move has coincided with a renewed reflection on minimalism as a practice of attention, that is less about owning fewer objects (though that can help), and more about creating pockets of stillness within environments that are, by default, overstimulating.

Minimalism has been thoroughly Instagrammed. White walls, pale wood, a single ceramic cup placed just so. There is nothing wrong with this, but it risks missing the deeper point. And my old flat was certainly minimalist in the aesthetic sense.

Writers like Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism and Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing have both argued, in different ways, that minimalism is not about subtraction for its own sake, but about protecting what matters in a culture designed to fragment attention. Similarly, the Japanese concept of ma—often translated as ‘negative space’—suggests that meaning arises not from what is present alone, but from the intervals of emptiness around it that give it shape.

Big cities are where this discernment is most tested. Urban life rewards responsiveness: quick replies, constant availability, social agility. For many creatives and sensitive thinkers, this can become exhausting. We learn to override subtle signals—fatigue, saturation, the need for withdrawal—because the environment rarely validates them.

Over the years—through my own practice, teaching, and coaching—I’ve noticed that these pockets of stillness tend to form around four dimensions:

  • Spatial stillness: a chair by a window, a desk cleared of visual noise, a room that signals ‘nothing is required of you here.’
  • Temporal stillness: protected times in the week that are not optimised, monetised, or rushed.
  • Relational stillness: fewer, deeper conversations; rhythms of contact that don’t require constant performance.
  • Inner stillness: practices that allow attention to settle without forcing it: meditation, journalling, slow reading.

One theme that runs through my recent work is the idea that many creatives are finely tuned. They notice more. They process more. They feel more. Without the right structures, this depth becomes a liability. This is why I resist advice that tells people simply to “push through” or “build resilience.” Resilience matters, but so do the structures of support and nurturance around you.

A few practical reflections that may be useful:

  • Reduce friction at points of transition. The moments between activities are where overstimulation accumulates. Even five minutes of pause between tasks can change the tone of a day.
  • Let one room be functionally “unproductive.” A space that is not for work, storage, or optimisation becomes a psychological refuge.
  • Limit inputs before increasing outputs. Reading less, scrolling less, listening less can paradoxically make creative work richer.
  • Choose rhythms over goals. A daily walk, a weekly reflective session, a regular co-working rhythm—these stabilise attention over time.

None of this requires perfection. It requires kindness toward your own nervous system.

If this resonates, there are several ways to explore these ideas in a supported, communal way over the coming weeks.

For those wanting more personalised support, I also offer 1-1 coaching, focused on helping creatives and thinkers build sustainable structures for meaningful work and life. You’re welcome to book a free 15-minute clarity call here: https://allanjohnson.co.uk/coaching/

Pockets of stillness don’t remove us from life; they allow us to participate more fully, with less quiet self-erasure. In a culture that rewards constant motion, stillness becomes a form of discernment. And discernment, I increasingly believe, is one of the most important creative capacities we have.

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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