Tag: creativity

Reveal, Repattern, Realign: The Structure Beneath The Art of Creative Practice

Posted on by Allan Johnson in coaching, creativity
Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com

From the outside, The Art of Creative Practice can look like many different things at once. Writing programmes. Creative challenges. Emotional inquiry. Somatic awareness. Community spaces. Workshops on purpose, planning, and creating change. People arrive through different doorways, often drawn by whatever thread they most need at that moment.

But beneath that variety, the work is not fragmented. There is a single, consistent developmental movement running through all of our community events that mirrors how real change actually unfolds when it’s allowed to be both deep and sustainable:

  • Reveal: Understanding what’s really going on inside you
  • Repattern: Changing the beliefs and habits that keep you stuck
  • Realign: Living day-to-day in a way that matches your new clarity

They aren’t phases you complete once and leave behind. They form a cycle you return to again and again, at deeper levels, in different seasons of your life. Each time, the same essential work is happening: learning to see more truly, loosening what no longer serves, and allowing your life to reorganise around what has been clarified.

Reveal: Learning to See What Is Already Operating

Most people arrive at personal development through friction. Something isn’t working. They feel stuck, scattered, overextended, creatively blocked, emotionally fatigued. The instinct is usually to begin at the level of behaviour—to become more disciplined, more organised, more strategic. Sometimes that helps. Often it doesn’t last.

The reason is simple and quietly unsettling: much of what governs our lives is happening below the level of conscious choice.

This is why the first movement of the work is always Reveal.

This phase is about learning to see yourself accurately, beneath the surface narratives, self-concepts, and coping strategies. It’s about developing the capacity to notice:

  • What’s really happening in your inner world
  • Which part of you is leading at any given moment
  • What patterns are operating automatically beneath conscious choice

This is where the Three Centres of Intelligence come in:

  • Mind (thinking, analysing, strategising)
  • Emotions (feeling, relating, meaning-making)
  • Body (instinct, boundaries, survival, grounded presence)

Most of us don’t live from all three; we over-identify with one. And when we do, we start mistaking a single mode of intelligence for our whole identity. The overthinking mind. The emotionally over-responsible heart. The hyper-protective body.

Reveal is the slow cultivation of inner perception. It’s where we begin to notice what is actually happening inside us, not what we think should be happening.

Many people discover, with a mix of relief and disorientation, that they have been living almost entirely from one centre. The mind that never stops scanning and solving. The heart that absorbs, adapts, and over-responsibilises. The body that stays braced, alert, protective, long after the original threat has passed.

From there, we move into the language of subpersonalities or roles like the Planner, the Helper, the Protector, the Achiever, the Peacemaker, the Lone Wolf. These roles aren’t problems to be eliminated; they are survival strategies that once made deep sense. But when they run unconsciously, they run our lives.

Reveal is the phase where we stop asking “What’s wrong with me?”
And start asking, “What part of me is running the show right now?”

Reveal is not about judging these roles. It is about finally being able to see them as parts of us, rather than the totality of who we are. That shift alone often begins to release enormous pressure.

You cannot change what you cannot see. Reveal is where the seeing begins.

Repattern: When Insight Is No Longer Enough

There is a particular kind of frustration that arises once you can see your patterns clearly—but still find yourself repeating them. You understand your dynamics. You can name the role that has taken over. You can track your reflexes in real time. And yet, in the moment when it matters, the old response still arrives first.

This is where Repatterning begins.

Repatterning is not willpower layered on top of unchanged inner architecture. It is the slower, more intimate work of changing what the nervous system expects, what the emotional system anticipates, and what the psyche assumes must happen in order for you to be safe, valued, or allowed to rest.

Repatterning means working at the level of:

  • Beliefs
  • Emotional reflexes
  • Somatic habits
  • Inner rules about safety, worth, responsibility, success, and failure

Much of this work happens sideways rather than head-on. Through daily practices that reintroduce choice where compulsion once lived. Through creative process that allows the unconscious to reorganise without being forced. Through embodied attention that teaches the body it is no longer living in yesterday’s emergency. Through relational spaces where you are met differently than you were before, again and again, until something inside you begins to trust a new pattern.

In the ACP ecosystem, repatterning happens through:

  • Repeated daily practices
  • Structured reflection
  • Creative processing
  • Embodied awareness
  • Relational feedback inside contained group spaces

This is where the work becomes transformative rather than interpretive. Repatterning is not about becoming someone else. It’s about freeing energy that has been locked into outdated inner contracts. This phase is often uncomfortable, not because something is wrong, but because something real is changing.

Realign: Letting Your Life Catch Up With You

One of the quiet tragedies of inner work is that people often change internally while their external lives remain structurally unchanged. They become clearer, steadier, more honest with themselves—and then return to schedules, relationships, and creative arrangements that require them to abandon that clarity every day.

This is why the third movement, Realign, matters so much. Realignment is where insight and identity translate into:

  • What you prioritise, release, and commit to
  • How you structure your days
  • What you say yes and no to
  • How you work, relate, rest, and create

Realignment is where insight becomes visible in how you actually live. Not as a performance of alignment, but as a series of grounded, often difficult choices that slowly bring your outer life into correspondence with your inner truth. It shows up in how you set limits. In how you organise your working life. In how you relate to time, money, obligation, rest, ambition, and care. In what you agree to carry and what you finally allow yourself to set down.

Realignment is not a destination. It is a continual process, but over time, if it is tended to carefully, something unmistakable happens: your life begins to feel less divided against itself.

How the ACP Structure Mirrors This Arc

This rhythm of Reveal, Repattern, and Realign is quietly built into the structure of The Art of Creative Practice itself.

The weekly Integrative Meditation classes sit at the threshold between Reveal and Repattern. Week by week, they train the capacity to notice what is actually present—sensation, emotion, mental tone, inner movement—without rushing to alter it. This is Reveal in its most direct form: learning to stay with what is real. At the same time, something subtler is already beginning to shift. Through repetition, nervous system settling, and the gradual unwinding of reflexive tension, repatterning is quietly underway. New internal rhythms are being laid down beneath conscious effort.

The Challenges move more decisively into the territory of Repatterning. These are the focused immersions where insight is actively worked with rather than simply observed. Beliefs are questioned. Habits are disrupted. Roles are brought into the light and gently reorganised. The container is temporary but the changes it initiates often continue long after the formal structure ends.

And then there are the Workshops, which tend to lean most explicitly toward Realignment. This is where inner change is brought into direct conversation with the actual architecture of daily life. How you live. How you work. How you create. How you rest. How you structure your commitments and define success on your own terms. Workshops are not primarily about insight—they are about translation. About letting what has shifted internally begin to reshape the external life that must now hold it.

Seen this way, the weekly classes, the periodic challenges, and the deeper workshops are not separate offerings. They are different temporal expressions of the same developmental current. One slows perception. One reshapes pattern. One reorganises life.

People often enter The Art of Creative Practice thinking they are coming for one specific thing: writing, creativity, emotional clarity, steadiness, purpose. And they do receive that. But what they often discover, sometimes only in retrospect, is that they have also entered a larger developmental rhythm.

Each offering is not a standalone technique. It is a different expression of the same underlying movement:

  • Reveal what is actually present.
  • Repattern what has become rigid or automatic.
  • Realign how you live in response to what has changed.

This is why the work is cumulative. At its core, The Art of Creative Practice is not about self-improvement in the performative sense. It is about integration. About learning to live from a steadier centre of gravity. About becoming less fragmented, less driven by unconscious contracts, less at war with yourself.

This is slow work. But it is reliable. And over time, it produces something quietly radical: a life that begins to move as a single, coherent whole.

If this way of working speaks to you, the Five-Day Soul Map Challenge is the most direct and accessible way to step into it.

Across five gently structured days, you’ll be guided through the arc of Reveal, Repattern, and Realign in immediate, lived ways. You’ll begin by noticing the roles you’ve learned to inhabit, trace the deeper threads of your purpose, reflect on how struggle has shaped you, and clarify what it means to live from inner alignment rather than habit or pressure. I look forward to seeing you there!

UPCOMING EVENTS:

The Five-Day Soul Map Challenge | 8-12 December | 8-9 AM GMT | £19

Creative Flow Coworking Session | 8 December | 11AM-1PM GMT | free

Reflect & Reset: Quarterly Planning Workshop | 5 January | 7.30-9.00 PM GMT | £10

Integrative Meditation | 12 January | 7.30-8.30 PM GMT | £4

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.

How I’m Making High-Level Coaching Accessible to Creatives

Posted on by Allan Johnson in coaching

As I sit here planning the year ahead—scribbling ideas in the margins of my notebook, and gathering the threads of my personal and professional goals—I can still feel the calm from a few days spent on the Norfolk coast. Those few days away with my partner were a gentle break before the busy holiday season begins, but also a reminder of why I do this work: to create space for reflection, recalibration, and renewal. Not just for myself, but for the people who join me in the Art of Creative Practice community, which is now nearly 800 members strong.

Something that has been vital to me from the start is to be able to offer workshops, weekly circles, and deep-dive programmes at prices that are actually manageable, at a time when coaching has become, for many, a luxury product. It’s not at all uncommon for year-long coaching programmes to cost the same as a small car, and much of the industry operates on the premise that transformation must be expensive to be meaningful. And while I understand how that logic emerged—good coaching is labour-intensive, relational, and built upon years of professional training—there is something in me that resists the exclusivity that often surrounds coaching.

Over the past two decades, I’ve invested deeply in my own development, training, and accreditation, which, along with the extensive experience that has come alongside it, has placed me in the bracket of coaches who could comfortably charge premium fees. And yet my work has always been, at its heart, for creatives: for the writers, thinkers, makers, explorers, and the quietly ambitious; for the people who feel their inner life calling but don’t always have the financial means to invest in premium coaching programmes.

When I built my online offerings, I began with a simple principle: make the threshold low, but the impact high. I want the Art of Creative Practice to provide access to the kind of group coaching and masterminds typically priced out of reach of most, and delivered in a flexible, small-investment format where people can dip in and out based on need, capacity, and season. By offering a wide mix—free events, low-cost workshops and challenges, and longer 12-week programmes and circles—I want to ensure that nobody feels they have to choose between financial strain and personal growth.

I want to be really clear about this: when you sign up for a paid programme—whether it’s a £10 workshop or a 12-week group coaching programme for £99—you are directly supporting the free events and content I offer. You help someone else join a community for grounding, connection, or inspiration that they may not otherwise have been able to access. I structure my work so that:

  • free events remain genuinely free,
  • low-cost workshops offer significant depth, and
  • longer programmes give you the kind of cumulative transformation you would normally find only in high-ticket masterminds.

This model feels right to me, and it allows the community to grow without becoming extractive. It lets people engage at the level they need now, and return for more when they’re ready.

As I plan for 2026, I’m shaping a more cohesive coaching pathway which will include free and low-cost weekly events, monthly workshops, quarterly challenges, and biannual 12-week programmes. The events are entirely modular, so you can dip in and out of some, any, or all of them, while a central methodological and psychological throughline connects them all and will allow you to map your own personal journey growth in the community.

You don’t need to commit now. The easiest next step is simply to come to Inner Alchemy: Practices for the New Season of You, a free one-hour workshop on 1 December, which will serve as both a powerful workshop for taking stock of your current plans and objectives and a taster of the events ahead in 2026.

UPCOMING EVENTS
Inner Alchemy: Practices for the New Season of You
FREE, 1 December, 7.30–8.30 PM GMT
Join here

And if you want something more immersive before the year ends, there is the:

Five-Day Soul Map Challenge
8–12 December, 8.00–9.00 AM, £19
Book your place

For those who want to go further, more personally, more intensively, I continue to offer one-to-one coaching. These sessions are where the detailed work happens, the long arcs of transformation, the careful untying and re-weaving of inner narratives, the stabilising of new ways of being. And at only £85 per session, they are significantly more affordable than most coaching options today.

If you’re curious, the simplest first step is a free 15-minute Clarity Call:
https://allanjohnson.co.uk/coaching/

My hope is that these offerings—either free or very affordable, and always deeply transformative—give you places to explore, grow, learn, and commit to deeper change and deeper integration in 2026.

700 Members and Counting: Celebrating Our Creative Community and What Lies Ahead

Posted on by Allan Johnson in creativity, Observations

As autumn settles in, the nights are growing long and dark, and there’s a certain stillness in the air that invites reflection. I’m delighted to share that the Art of Creative Practice Meetup group has now passed 700 members in just two months (we also have a 4.9 star rating with 83 reviews, and I am so grateful to everyone who has shared their comments and reviews)! What a privilege it has been walking this journey with all of you! If you haven’t had a chance to join one of our meetups yet, please do because we look forward to meeting you and getting a chance to welcome you to our community!

For me, this season is also one of personal transition. I’m preparing to move to a new flat next year, a beautiful historic 1930s building I’m excited about, even if I never enjoy the actual moving process. I’m taking a few days away this week to recharge, but all of our usual events will continue as normal, including the Course in Miracles Study Group on Sunday night and our weekly co-working sessions on Monday morning.

We’re also now two months into the 12-week Artist’s Way Circle, and the depth and richness that has formed in that group continues to amaze me! Creative work is often solitary, but our collective spaces are where trust, care, and connection flourish. It’s in these spaces that we learn how to sustain ourselves as creatives, balancing the solitary labour of creation with the nourishment of community (if you didn’t get a chance to join the Artist’s Way Circle this year, I hope that we will be able to offer the opportunity again next year!).

The upcoming Five-Day Soul Map Challenge, running from December 8th to December 12th builds on these ideas, offering a structured pathway to align with creative and personal priorities. A central focus of the challenge is an exploration of what are called subpersonalities, the psychological term for the masks and personas we all have. Many of these voices serve useful purposes, but they can also pull us in conflicting directions or keep us stuck.

Alongside this, the challenge works with what are called mind/body/emotion centres. Many of us operate instinctively from one centre—our thoughts, our feelings, or our physical impulses—but rarely from all three. In the Challenge, you’ll explore what it feels like to operate from each centre and discover the balance you need to make aligned choices, manage energy, and move forward with clarity.

The Challenge also introduces a number of powerful, brand-new tools that I can’t wait to share with you! They are designed to reveal hidden patterns, release blocks, and help you translate insight into tangible action.

To give you a taste of the work, I’m hosting a free Inner Alchemy workshop on December 1st. This powerful session introduces some of these tools, demonstrates how they work, and lets you experience the impact they can make in your creative practice before committing to the full five days.

Even as the nights grow longer and the world slows down, the creative work continues, both in the quiet of your studio and in the shared spaces we cultivate together. Whether it’s our Study Group, co-working sessions, or the Soul Map Challenge, these gatherings are where reflection meets action, insight meets support, and the solitary and communal aspects of creativity meet in balance.

The coming year holds enormous potential for you all, and I feel deeply privileged to walk alongside all of you on this journey. I can’t wait to see how 2026 unfolds!

Upcoming Workshops

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