Tag: meditation

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.

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

Weekly Events (free/community supported)

Taming Aversion: How to Work With the Mind When It Pushes Back

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

There’s a moment, familiar to anyone who has tried to live deliberately, when the mind simply says no. One minute, we’re aligned with our highest intentions, the next, we’re scrolling, tidying, grazing. That small, invisible shift — from presence to avoidance — is the terrain I’ve been exploring lately. Not because I’ve mastered it, but because I’ve been caught in it more times than I can count.

Aversion is easy to mistake for laziness, distraction, or even moral weakness. But what if it isn’t? What if the mind’s pushback isn’t defiance, but a form of care — a protective reflex triggered whenever growth begins to feel unsafe? The older I get, the more I suspect that the moments I’m most tempted to flee are the moments that matter most.

Every meaningful change seems to summon a guardian. The Buddhists call it mara; Freud might have called it resistance; psychosynthesis would describe it as a subpersonality defending its role in the inner system. Whatever name we choose, the pattern is the same: when the psyche senses transformation, it activates its most familiar defences.

Sometimes I’ll wake up with a vague heaviness, an urge to delay, to simplify the day, to shrink the horizon of possibility. The rational mind can explain it away (fatigue, overwork, weather), but underneath there’s often something more intimate: a small, frightened part that’s unsure what will happen if I really allow change to occur.

The task isn’t to override that part but to listen to it. Roberto Assagioli urges us to treat each subpersonality as purposeful, never pathological. In the same spirit, Internal Family Systems founder Richard Schwartz suggests asking these inner protectors what they’re afraid would happen if they didn’t intervene. Often the answer is touching: You might get hurt again.

There’s a strange irony in inner work: aversion tends to appear at precisely the moment when we’re closest to contact. The body stiffens not because we’re far from the truth, but because we’ve brushed against it.

This, I think, is why so many contemplative traditions treat aversion as a doorway rather than a wall. Pema Chödrön describes it as “the moment we touch our edge.” In those moments, the goal is not endurance but intimacy — learning to stay with what trembles.

When I sit in meditation and feel the urge to move, I’ve started to see it as a kind of emotional sonar. The resistance tells me something important is near. Rather than pushing through, I name it: aversion is here. I feel where it lives — perhaps in the throat, the chest, the solar plexus — and I breathe around it, widening the frame. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it’s not. Either way, the willingness to stay changes the quality of the moment.

Unexamined aversion tends to generate drama. The mind, avoiding stillness, manufactures movement — endless narratives, self-critique, external blame. I sometimes think of this as the “noise of protection.” Beneath the content, the function is the same: distraction from direct contact with feeling.

In my own life, this often appears as overthinking. If I’m avoiding grief, I become analytical. If I’m avoiding fear, I become productive. The activity disguises itself as virtue — busyness, preparation, clarity — but underneath is the same motive: anything but this.

This dynamic is at the heart of the next workshop I’ll be leading — Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns (3 November, 7.00–8.30pm UK time). We’ll be exploring how the mind uses drama — both internal and relational — to regulate discomfort. It’s not about pathologising the habit, but learning to see it clearly, tenderly, and to notice the quiet peace that emerges when we stop feeding it.

The paradox is that aversion softens not through conquest, but through companionship. The moment we stop trying to get rid of it, it begins to loosen its grip.

One practice that helps is gentle inquiry:

  • Ask, what am I unwilling to feel right now?
  • Ask, what am I protecting myself from?
  • And then, what would it feel like to allow just one degree more of openness?

This incremental approach — widening the window of tolerance rather than forcing it — honours the nervous system’s intelligence. As Bessel van der Kolk reminds us in The Body Keeps the Score, safety is the foundation of transformation.

Psychologically speaking, aversion is a sign that the psyche is reorganising itself. Spiritually speaking, it’s the ego’s last resistance before surrender. Either way, tenderness is the most effective solvent.

So much of contemporary self-help is built on the rhetoric of mastery: “hacking”, “rewiring” the brain. But perhaps what’s needed is not mastery but maturity: the willingness to work with the mind, not onit. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with what I call “soft discipline.” Instead of pushing through aversion, I create conditions for the opposite of fear: trust. I light a candle, clear my desk, breathe slowly, and remind myself that resistance is just another form of aliveness. It’s the psyche’s way of stretching before the leap.

In contemplative traditions from Buddhism to A Course in Miracles, resistance is reinterpreted as an invitation — an opportunity to practice forgiveness, not in the moral sense but in the cognitive one: the gentle release of judgement against ourselves for finding the work difficult.

This theme continues in Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book (8 November, 2.00–5.00pm UK time) — a longer session on translating spiritual study into lived practice. We’ll explore how resistance can become revelation when approached through the lens of practice, not theory.

The longer I’ve worked with clients and students — and with my own mind — the more I see that aversion is not an obstacle to healing but one of its instruments. It appears wherever the psyche is trying to protect what it loves. To work with aversion, then, is to enter a relationship with love in its most disguised form.

The next time your mind pushes back, you might imagine thanking it. “Thank you for trying to protect me.” This simple act of recognition can dissolve years of struggle. Aversion doesn’t vanish, but it begins to trust you enough to soften. Growth, after all, isn’t the elimination of resistance but the deepening of relationship with it. What begins as pushback may, in time, become partnership — the psyche’s way of saying, I trust you to take me further than I could go alone.

Upcoming Workshops

Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns
🗓 3 November, 7.00–8.30pm (UK time)
In this workshop we will explore how resistance and reactivity keep us circling the same emotional loops, and learn how to step out of them with compassion and clarity.

Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book
🗓 8 November, 2.00–5.00pm (UK time)
This half-day workshop is deeper immersion into A Course in Miracles as a lived practice, where we will translate insight into relationship, creativity, and peace.

Metaconsciousness: Becoming Aware of the Ways We’re Driven

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much of life unfolds beneath the surface of our awareness, not just in the mysterious depths of the unconscious, but also in the quieter, more practical rhythms of habit, mood, and reaction. What if our real work is to notice not just what we’re conscious of, but how consciousness itself is being directed?

That’s what is meant by metaconsciousness, the capacity to recognise when we are being driven by hormones, hunger, fear of rejection, deadlines, the steady dopamine drip of our phones, or the deep psychic grooves of childhood conditioning. In my own experience—especially during the past few months of moving between projects, planning new teaching, and reshaping routines—this awareness has felt like an internal turning point. The challenge isn’t simply to ‘be mindful’, but to discern the layers of agency beneath the surface: Who, exactly, is choosing what I’m doing right now?

When I start to ask that question seriously, it becomes uncomfortable. I notice how much of my day is already spoken for by subtle compulsions masquerading as preferences. Even something as benign as checking email can carry the faint pulse of anxiety, a microdose of control. We like to believe that modern life rewards autonomy and discernment, but in practice it trains us in reactivity, which is, by definition, the opposite of freedom.

From Consciousness to Metaconsciousness

Consciousness, in this view, is not a steady state but a constantly fluctuating field of attention. It’s automatic, embodied, and largely determined by biological imperatives. You feel hunger, so you eat. You feel threatened, so you defend. You feel bored, so you reach for your phone. These are not moral failings; they’re simply how the nervous system evolved to keep us alive.

Metaconsciousness, though, introduces a different quality. It’s what happens when we see that we’re acting automatically and hold that recognition with curiosity rather than judgment. There’s a subtle but profound difference between saying ‘I’m angry’ and ‘I notice that anger is arising’. The first statement identifies with the emotion; the second observes it. And in that observation lies the seed of freedom.

This is why contemplative practice remains, for me, one of the few truly radical technologies of our time. Sitting quietly, noticing the mind’s movements without needing to edit or manage them, slowly reveals how much of what we call “self” is just a cascade of impulses, stories, and inherited scripts. Over time, a new perspective opens—one that isn’t outside the body but is no longer confined by it.

If you’re drawn to exploring this dimension in your own creative or professional life, I’ll be leading an online session called Mindfulness for Creatives: Cultivating Focus, Flow, and Inspiration on 23 October (7.30–9.00pm, UK time). We’ll look at practical tools for noticing when attention narrows or scatters—and how that awareness can restore genuine inspiration.

The Drama of the Driven Life

Of course, once we begin to see how we’re driven, another pattern emerges: the drama of selfhood. Many of us unconsciously replay emotional scripts that were formed long before adulthood, such as seeking validation, fearing abandonment, or rescuing others to avoid our own discomfort. These patterns aren’t evidence of failure but they are evidence that we are living out of old perspectives and potentially trying to replicate old relationships from the past, especially the damaging or traumatic ones.

But they can also be exhausting. In coaching and in my own reflective practice, I’ve seen how deeply these dynamics colour our work, our love, and even our whole sense of purpose. The shift toward metaconsciousness invites us to watch these patterns with compassion and detachment, and to move, in psychological terms, from within the drama to observing it.

This theme forms the heart of my upcoming workshop Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns on 3 November (7.00–8.30pm, UK time). It’s an evening devoted to understanding how we get pulled into emotional triangulations—the victim, rescuer, and persecutor roles that Karpman identified—and how to step into a more mature and loving mode of engagement. If you’ve ever felt trapped in repetition, whether in relationships or creative work, this session offers a clear, compassionate way through.

Beyond Insight: Practicing the Miraculous

Metaconsciousness doesn’t stop at awareness; it calls for us to do something with it and act from a deeper centre. For me, this is where A Course in Miracles becomes a training in radical perception. Its central insight, that we can learn to see differently, aligns perfectly with the idea of metaconsciousness: we are not our automatic thoughts, but the awareness capable of choosing love instead of fear.

In Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book on 8 November (2–5pm, UK time), we’ll explore this integration more experientially. How do we move from intellectual understanding to lived transformation? How do we reframe life’s small irritations as opportunities to practice gentler perception? This isn’t about metaphysical abstraction but about everyday miracle-mindedness: the courage to meet the driven mind with tenderness.

A Season of Turning Inward

As autumn settles in, I find myself slowing down a bit. The academic year begins; projects find their rhythm; the light changes. Each season asks for its own form of consciousness, and autumn, for me, always invites metaconsciousness. It’s the season of noticing how we’re driven: by deadlines, by expectations, by the desire to finish before winter.

But it’s also the season of release. Of choosing what’s worth carrying forward and what can gently fall away. In this way, the movement from consciousness to metaconsciousness mirrors the movement from doing to being—from the leaf’s impulse to hold the branch to its graceful surrender to air.

If you’ve been following some of my recent writing on what our books say about us or how to develop positive morning rituals, you’ll recognise the same undercurrent: how to live well within limits. To become aware not only of what drives us, but of the stillness beneath those drives.

And that, I suspect, is the quiet art of metaconsciousness. Not transcending the body or renouncing the world, but inhabiting both more fully—knowing that our thoughts and feelings will continue to move like weather, while something deeper watches with patience.

If you’d like to explore that space with others this autumn, I hope you’ll join one—or several—of these gatherings.

Upcoming Workshops

Sourdough as Slow Philosophy

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Bread is one of the oldest human technologies, and once or twice a week when I feed my starter, I get to feel the quiet intimacy of participating in something ancient. The jar on the counter, alive with invisible life, asks nothing more than regular attention. A little flour, a little water, a little faith. The process become philosophical, a daily practice in patience and presence, and sourdough, for me, is not simply food; it is a mode of inquiry. It asks how transformation occurs, and at what pace we should approach that transformation.

Every sourdough baker learns early on that control is an illusion. The starter has moods, the dough responds differently each day, and the line between perfect proof and an epic collapse is razor-thin. In this small domestic theatre, the dough resists command, growing best when treated with care, not coercion. Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society warns of the violence of acceleration, how the modern subject, obsessed with optimisation, loses the capacity for duration. But sourdough refuses this logic. It can’t be rushed, not by willpower, not by technology. The microbes moved at their own pace, and perhaps I have begun to as well.

Fermentation, after all, is transformation through decay. It is the art of letting things break down in order that something new may emerge. There is philosophy in this: a recognition that change requires dissolution. The sour tang of the starter, the slow bubbling, and the mingling of bacteria and yeast are all material lessons in collaboration and renewal. Our ecological lives, too, depend on unseen networks, on the fermentation of shared experience.

In a world addicted to instant results, fermentation becomes an act of quiet resistance. We live amid the tyranny of instant coffee, instant messages, instant gratification. Sourdough asks us to wait. It requires a slowness that verges on contemplation. Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement began as a protest against fast food, but its real gift was philosophical: a reclamation of pleasure, locality, and rhythm. Baking, like slow thought, teaches that nourishment and wisdom arise through attention. To bake for oneself, or better, to bake for another, is to rejoin an economy of care rather than consumption. When I share a loaf, still warm from the oven, I’m reminded that slowness is also a form of generosity.

The sourdough jar reveals how we attend to it. Some days, the starter is buoyant, light, eager; on others, sluggish and heavy. It reflects not just temperature but temperament. My own perfectionism has often met its match in the unpredictable nature of fermentation. The failed loaves — dense, burnt, deflated — have taught me more than the flawless ones, and sourdough offers its own alchemical education. The process cannot be hurried; it thrives on warmth, patience, and rhythm.

When I take a loaf from the oven, I feel a satisfaction that the intellectual world rarely grants: here is a thing complete, made by hand, known through touch. The world slows, if only for a moment, and becomes sufficient.

Sourdough, then, becomes a teacher of right timing, a philosophy that ferments rather than forces. Its lessons are certainly not confined to the kitchen. I’ve begun to notice similar rhythms in my creative work, where projects now follow seasons rather than sprints. After years of academic urgency, I’m learning the value of waiting and of letting ideas ‘prove’. What emerges, when it finally does, carries more depth, less strain. Slow philosophy isn’t simply slow thinking but slow being: a willingness to inhabit processes rather than rush through them. Education itself could learn from this pedagogy of fermentation, where growth happens unseen, between the visible milestones.

To bake bread is to remember that life itself is leavened by care. The simplest rituals, when done attentively, become meditations on being alive. Whether it’s bread, gardening, sewing, or journaling, each act can be a form of everyday metaphysics where philosophy meets fingertips. The smell of bread cooling on the counter, the sound of the crust cracking as it releases its final breath, is a small hymn to time.

UPCOMING EVENTS

If this resonates, you might enjoy joining one of my upcoming gatherings:

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