Connecting The Dots - Because despite appearances, the dots are not placed at random.

Comfort can fall into two extremes. We either chase and practically idolise it, trying to get our lives to exist permanently in our perfect comfort zone - or we resist it everywhere, seeing it as less than, and an enemy to our growth and progress, the comfort zone is a place to turn our noses up at. But what if we saw comfort as part of the process of loving ourselves well, and setting ourselves u...

Continuing on the birthday processing,  from Episode 058 - Age Is But A Number , today I am thinking about how we can put a lot of pressure on our birthdays to make us feel a certain way.  Perhaps if we focused more on filling our hearts and selves with the things that we see as 'special birthday treats' more regularly, then we could arrive at our birthdays with a lot more peace, and be...

I'm no 'Personal Style Guru', I mean I've learnt a few things and am much clearer on the colours that suit me best and make me feel like I look awake, alive and healthy - but I do think that learning to honour our preferences and use what we've learned in our own artistry and personal journey, in our sense of style and how we dress, has real value. How can you authenticall...

How often as a kid at school were you told to show your workings out? In certain situations (eg. maths exams) this is to our benefit, in order to help someone understand our process and give us clarity on how to get to where we are trying to go.  But sometimes it can leave us with a sense that we need to get someone else's approval or sign off on how we are doing, mid way through the process,...

Birthdays can be tricky for many of us, feeling like milestones and marker points in our lives, yet they don't always coincide with where we hoped or thought we'd be.  But what if age really was just a number, and the real marker points where how much more fully we know and have stepped into who we are? Support the show If you would like to support the podcast, you can do so here! And yo...

In nature there are laws of seed time, and harvest... some plants spend ages underground before emerging , but then grow rapidly, bloom and die, whereas others are slow to grow at all, yet last longer, growing from strength to strength. Babies gestate in the hidden place of the womb for 9 months before emerging. Yet we can often be led to expect ourselves to be always producing content and 'e...

Hi there you lovely listeners! So for those of you who have been listening a while, you may have noticed the sporadic output and the near radio silence for over a year.  Burnout, life and moving have played a huge part in that, so here is a slightly shorter episode filling you in on the plan going forward. Thank you for sticking with me. Cassie x Ps. I would love to hear what you struggle with in...

Have you ever been told that in order to survive and get on in this world, you need to develop a thick skin? Maybe you've been led to believe that softness is weakness (and not in a good way), and that to be soft is to be less-than. Well I don't think so! What if, in order to grow into our creativity and our relationships with more freedom, softness was the way forward? Join me today as...

How often do you find that you have big plans or ideas, but then fail to be able to execute them because of... well... Life? Perhaps you long to fulfill a big project, but it's slow going due to ongoing health needs, or family commitments or because you simply cannot maintain the pace? You are not alone. This is where embracing the 'Stop/Start' way of pursuing what matters will get...

Making art requires connection to our emotions and physical sensations... the more connected we are, the better able we are to create work that resonates. However, we can mistake this need to be in touch with our feelings with a sense that we should reside in that feeling space, when by nature, a bubble of Feeeeelings is just that, a fixed bubble of stasis. So how can we treasure those feelings wi...

When you can't see what's happening below the surface, it can cause us to worry whether anything is actually happening at all - whether we are discussing personal growth or creative development. Yet what if the deepest work, that gets us to the point where we see progress on the surface, actually benefits from happening out of sight? Learning to trust our instincts, particularly when we...

When making creative work (and also being in healthy relationships) a lot of value is placed on being able to be present. You can't actually make something that is in the past - it has already passed us by. Neither can we create something in the future, if we don't begin the process now. Yet how many of us spend much of our thought and feeling life time-travelling between past and future...

We all have moments of self doubt, and when we are pursuing a path that is more off the beaten track, it can feel really hard, and sometimes lonely, when we doubt our choices. Yet if we see our creative and personal lives as being part of a quest, an ongoing journey in pursuit of something meaningful, rather than something we will live out to the letter, it has the capacity to free us up to trust...

How often do you judge your ideas (or people - guilty here ) too soon  and without the full picture?   For our creativity to thrive and our ideas to flow, we need to leave judgement at the door. Once we have got the idea or the work fully formed, then we are in a better position to apply critical thinking to the work, and make our adjustments, but too soon, and we'll probably kill it off. The...

How often do we ignore the pull towards something, because we feel we should be doing something else right now? What if we were to be more responsive to those things which do draw us, trusting that we will come back to the shoulds more easily at a later point, and possibly with a greater energy and impetus, due to listening to the deeper parts of ourselves? Join me for today's episode as I ex...

** Welcome to season 6 of Connecting The Dots!*** After the darkest season of Winter, yet before Spring is sprung, join me as I deep dive into all things creativity, artistry, parenting, self-care, personal growth, relationships and EVERYTHING that helps us live more fully into our freedom as creative, vibrant beings - separate to, but not exclusive of our productivity. So this episode kicks off w...

As the days get shorter and darker and we look forward to the coming of the lights of Christmas and hope for the light of new life and creativity in Spring, it can feel as though the waiting is forever. When a difficult season drags, it can be so tempting to give up hope that there will ever be a shift, but i am here to offer you some encouragement that this season is not forever, the wait is not...

Christmas is getting closer, and all the energy is ramping up as we prepare for the coming festivities, but as we enter the season of Advent, maybe we can take a little bit of time to gather inwards, with our thoughts and feelings and with our families in order to sit with the hiatus of the 'now and not yet', and reflect on where we are before we rush into the season, headlong. Support t...

Stories are powerful ways of helping us make sense of the world and our own experiences. Even more so, our own personal stories and the way we engage with and express them. It's not about spin, but framing does matter,  because our stories matter. So allowing ourselves to connect with them with comfort and hope - and a good cuppa, is another way of honouring our voices and caring for ourselve...

I think that we can often feel that our voice (aka what we have to contribute) is not really either valuable or important, and that what we might think or want to say isn't worth sharing. But I disagree. I am convinced that each of us has value and a unique perspective that the world needs to hear, and so getting more confident in both identifying and using our voice, will bring more insight...

How often to we come up against resistance in our attempts to move forward because we are hanging on to a specific picture of what the result should be? We have a fixed outcome in mind - if I do this, or make so and so do that, then the result will/should be .... Having a vision or a goal is a really good and helpful thing, but sometimes we can get to hung up on the specific detail of what we are...

When we are in the thick of a grieving season, sometimes it can be all we can do to feed ourselves. In this episode, I explore what self care can look like when we are trying to survive the worst  of our grief. Support the show If you would like to support the podcast, you can do so here! And you can also click here to sign up to my newsletter Connect, Create & Resonate Original Artwork - Elea...

Delight and joy can come from unexpected places, but often in stressful seasons, we can find it really hard to notice them and allow ourselves to receive the gift of them. I have found that learning to be attentive, lean in and enjoy them, far from undermining the gravity of a tough season, can actually be something beautiful which sustains me through it. How about you? Support the show If you wou...

There is no one perfect trajectory for grief. There is only allowing ourselves to be where we are and be gentle with ourselves in the process of grieving. Today I talk about ways we can lean in to grieving well, without sacrificing our authenticity, and I also share a little about the loss of our infant daughter to a late miscarriage. Support the show If you would like to support the podcast, you...

Definition of Plod - Slow moving and unexciting. How often can our progress through life and especially difficult seasons of trauma and grief feel slow and unexciting, like we will never fly, or come through the worst of our pain into something more meaningful? But what if the art of plodding was actually a gift for us, laying the stable foundations for bursts of growth and greater freedom within...