Dreaming Your Book into Being

Dreaming Your Book into Being

by | Sep 27, 2021 | Blog, Book Mapping, Featured

I once imagined that if I could just sit with someone who was yearning to write a book—not just any book, but a really beautiful book—without the constraints of time or home or office, together we could dream that book into being.

Surrounded by nature and nourished with good food, we could spend a day exploring all the wisdom they’ve been gathering and wanting to express, look at how they are designed to share their message, and create a container unique to them.

We could then map the way, step by step, from that idea straight on through to a finished book. Long scattered thoughts would connect and that book would begin to be born.

When they sat down to write and stepped into the wilderness of confusion, procrastination or overwhelm, that map would be their guide.

So, several years ago, I began offering Book Mapping Days, and they have allowed all that to happen. In Covid times, they’ve happened on Zoom–and I’ve really missed the spaciousness and magic of being together in person.

This week I was able to create a socially-distanced-in-person day in a beautiful little cabin on Mount Hood. We mapped out a plan and it was wonderful to see all the elements working together again.

What could happen if you gave your book idea these things?

✔️Air
✔️Sun
✔️Walks
✔️Dreaming
✔️Trees
✔️Writing
✔️Questions
✔️Mountain
✔️Food
✔️Curiosity

Schedule a complimentary Clarity Call if you’d like to chat about the book you’re dreaming of.

www.calendly.com/madeleine-eno

Queen for a Day

Queen for a Day

by | Jul 2, 2016 | Blog, Featured, Inspiration

Screen Shot 2016-03-22 at 8.53.49 PM

“You have a lot of queen energy,” Star says.
 
“Like a queen on the Scottish moors.”
She paints a feathery design on my forehead.
  A bird or headdress or crown.

I’m at a retreat in Topanga, California. Sipping wine outside in March.

Having my face painted by an intuitive body painter.

Who talks to me about the queen.
Something in me resonates.
I tell Star, “Yes, that kind of feels right.”
 
And then something else butts in.
 
“Wait a minute, I’m the scullery maid, not the queen.
I provide the service. I am not royal.”

This very flip is what I often experience with clients after a Golden Thread session-
after your stories have revealed the truth of your essence.

And it is hard to stay there. It is so easy to drift back to what’s familiar.
I so get it.
 
Like this. It feels good to walk and breathe like a
queen with this paint on my face. Not too long after the retreat,
however, the scullery maid comes knocking at my door.
It takes muscle to keep her out. She’s so familiar.
 
I want to share with you something I wrote in my journal
in the moment when I did feel like a queen.
 
Not because I want to dump random journal-writing on you.
 
But because I want to encourage you to explore and claim your true essence. Really, take courage.
If I can share this, you can SO share yours!
____________________________________
 
I am a Queen.
 
I am the blue flame of clear expression. Dreamer and seer.
 
I am here to awaken you to the story of you. Of all that you are.
 
My kingdom is expression. I sit on a simple throne of earth, water and wood. I was born in mud.
Crowned by experience. Dripping details, intuition, inspiration. Alchemy. Pulling pearls from your dreams.
Polishing diamonds from your coal.
 
My heart opens more each time I listen.
I take in. I let go.
 
I let a tear fall–and paint the spot silver.
 
It’s part of me. It’s part of you.
 
Nothing to fear. So much room.
 
Together we step into the old, the new and this royal moment.

 ________________________________

Ok, now it’s your turn. 
 
I’ve got an invitation for you:
 
If you’d like to learn how you can discover your life’s Golden Thread—
and tap into YOUR Queen for a Day essence—
click the link below to schedule your complimentary 30-minute call.
 

https://calendly.com/madeleine-eno

Here’s to you.

The very essence of you.

 

Tangled

Tangled

by | Jun 23, 2016 | Blog, Featured

Tangled

“You either walk inside your story and own it or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.” Brene Brown

thread

As I was making a present for my baby niece a few weeks ago, this kept happening. With just about every stitch, the thread would transform from straight and smooth to  a crazy thrashy tangle.
 
I untangled that night more than I sewed… and the big vision I had for what I was making kept fading.
 
It felt so familiar and it struck me the same thing happens when you go looking for your own story… you find it, and for  a while it’s smooth and straight. You spot that thread and follow its path and it’s helping connect all the pieces together. Nice and clear.
 
Then when you tug it a little it devolves into an unrecognizable mess, looping back on itself, requiring you to stop everything and just unravel.
 
Makes you want to throw the whole thing out the window, no?
 
The big vision of YOU definitely fades.
 
You move outside of your story again, like Brene Brown describes.
 
You start hustling for your worthiness.
 
Ugh.
 
There are lots of threads in your story. Lots of emotions. Lots of shame, regret, fear dancing around in there. Seriously, when it comes to sorting it all out, tangling like this is a guarantee.
 
Sometimes the way through is to have someone sit and look at that whole tangled mess with you.
 
What I’ve learned in the last few years is that we all have an inability to look at our own story and see if for what it is. Friends shouldn’t let friends dive into their story alone. It can be gnarly in there.
 
If you want to start exploring your story with someone who is not afraid of a few knots, schedule your complimentary Golden Thread session here.
 
Let’s jump on the phone for 30 minutes and see if we can’t do some untangling. Let’s just stop the hustling and start counting ourselves and our own story as worthy right now.
 
Can I Get a Witness?

Can I Get a Witness?

by | May 14, 2016 | Blog, Featured

Can I Get A Witness?

  12011264_10206682858203870_5421968449188314862_n   The guests start zipping up their down jackets, attempt to pull last bits of meat off the roast pig, and the microphone just sits there on the grass. Come on, it says, now or never. I grab it and then grab Jen. Falling into a rhythm so ancient and familiar, we start to sing Grand Funk Railroad’s “Some Kind of Wonderful,” just like we did 100,000 times when we were 10. Listening to it now, it’s a grindy-sexy and male anthem, but we loved delivering it in opera voice and cow voice in the way back of the station wagon and as we walked up West Street in our Dr. Scholl’s. One of my oldest friends, Jen, got married a few days ago and her new husband had requested there be no formal, tear-jerking toasts at the wedding. No hilarious yarns from the golden days of decades-old friendships. So I didn’t prepare anything. But as the day started to wind down and the couple headed off to their future, it felt wrong not to call up a single moment of the past. Jen was a great sport and we gave the song as good a go as we could. (I was so in the moment, I didn’t even put down the cupcake I was eating.) So often I wait for the perfect moment. Hit pause until the better technology comes along. Put it off until the right alignment floats into place like a magical dove. Even typing these words of hesitation  feels like sinking my fingers and mind into muddy quicksand. Blahdy-blahdy-blah. It’s so, so, so tiring to wait, isn’t it? It felt so great and free to be up there singing that song all out, in a grabbed-at moment with my oldest friend that would never come around again. What about you? And what is right on the other side of putting it out there? If you were a child of the amazing 70s, you might remember the line in the song, “Can I get a witness?” I didn’t know what that meant when we were little and just assumed it was a witness in court. Later I learned it was a tradition in certain African-American churches for a speaker who shared a testimony or insight to invite others to clap or shout “Amen!” by asking, “Can I get a witness?” It’s kind of what we’re all trying to do, isn’t it? Just get a witness? When you share your stories, you’re really asking others—your people, your tribe—to shout out their Amen. So, the thing is, you’ve got to give them something to witness. If you’ve been hitting pause on telling your story or sharing your message, let’s get on the phone. Let me be your witness, because, man, do I get it! Grab your complimentary 30-minute clarity session right here. And here’s a fun little clip of Grand Funk Railroad in their heyday.   Grand Funk  
Dead on the Vine

Dead on the Vine

by | Oct 19, 2015 | Featured

The remaining blackberries are raisinlike. Shriveled. Birds have picked over them, leaving them to winter’s dormant dream.
*
And this is how it always seems to go for blackberries. I’ve got to assume they are ok with it. They likely don’t yearn to be plucked and devoured in the warm sun, shared in pies, or sprinkled on your late night bowl of ice cream.
*
But you. You human. You do not do as well when your own fruit dies on the vine. When what you so desperately desire to share shivers away, unheard, unseen, unharvested. Unoffered.
*
I walk past this patch of berries every day, all year long. They remind me so much of our human urge to create. There’s that initial germination of an idea. Then the focused sun of our attention ripens it til it glistens with juicy fullness. The moment that stirs us to offer. To extend our hand. To raise our voice. To hit “send.” Then that sweet instant in which it is consumed.
*
Then, there are the other times. I know these well. The times when I’ve held that nearly ripe fruit so close to my heart and not let it go. When I haven’t extended my own berries to one who might be hungry. When I waited… til I was clearer, better, stronger–different. The moment of offering passes by. And to hold onto what are now wizened, wrinkled berries just seems overprotective and sad. So I drop them and pretend they were no big deal anyway. They sink back into the earth.
*
Every single one of these dried-up berries I’m looking at today was such an offering that no human, bird nor bear accepted. And that is fine.
*
But what about your fruit?
*
My wish for you is that the moment you sense its ripening—the moment the sun is high and the message is full—you breathe in courage. And breathe in awareness that offering it to someone is the PURPOSE of your fruit. THIS is the reason you imagined the fruit in the first place. To nourish or, maybe, delight others.
*
May you let it be easier. May you reach out your hand and say, “Here’s a berry. Please take it if you like.”

What Happens When the Truth Stinks

What Happens When the Truth Stinks

by | Feb 6, 2015 | Blog, Featured

What Happens When the Truth Stinks

 

I recently woke at 3 a.m. to a woman screaming under the bed. I soon realized it wasn’t a woman—it was Simon, the skunk who’d been living beneath our house the last few months.

The peaceable arrangement we’d enjoyed with him seemed to be over.

And, the story, as I liked to tell it, was over, too.

Here’s the way I liked to tell it: 

We tamed a skunk! He eats from the same bowl as the cat. He waddles over when we shake the kibble bag. He stands still as we pass him on the way to the car.

He’s SO amazing!

   

And here’s the way it actually is:

Twice now, we’ve burrowed under the covers as an oily, eye-burning, stomach-wrenching cloud seeps into the bedroom. Simon is just doing what he does when under duress. As for me (also under duress), I’m not quite clapping for a dancing skunk. I’m washing the floors with vinegar, burning incense, and hanging our clothes outside in the trees.

Part of me still wants the story to go a certain way. (We tamed a skunk! He’s awesome!)

The truth is, though, I’m sleeping with a lavender-doused bandana wrapped around my face while John loads peanut butter and cat food in the Have-a-Heart trap. I love this line from the author David Foster Wallace:

“The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you.”

If you’re like me, there’s a way I WANT to tell a story, but then the truth of it ends up to be a very different matter by the time it’s finished with me.

One of the most common things I hear from business-owners who want to share their story, is that they don’t know where to start.

So, here’s a handy little exercise, inspired by Simon, as you’re working with yours.

What’s a story you wanted to tell one way… then the truth kept coming around and telling you something different? Take a peek at your relationships, career, or just your long-held-onto-expectation that something in your life was supposed to be a certain way, until it was clear that it wasn’t that way anymore.

I promise, there is some good juice in there.

And if you’re ready to learn more about what to do when you’ve got it, just click here to sign up for a 30-minute complimentary clarity call, so you can see how this story relates to your business and your message. Here’s to the truth, no matter what it smells like, Madeleine