Books about Contemplative Practice and the Creative Process
by Kim Roberts
As a dedicated yoga and meditation practitioner for the past 30+ years, I’ve explored in depth the relationship between contemplative practice and creative process. I’m currently working on my third book. Learn more below…
The Art of Embracing Change
Essays on Creativity and Transformation
"A blank canvas is a perfect metaphor for the gap. It's not nothing, but it's not yet something."
Two weeks before turning fifty, Kim Roberts found herself without a job, without a clear next step, and strangely foreign in her own country — home again after twenty years living and working across Asia. She thought she needed to figure out who to become next. What she actually needed was to remember who she already was.
In this collection of contemplative essays, Roberts traces her own unraveling and remaking — from a chance encounter with an art form that cracked something open, to years of meditation and yoga practice in a high alpine valley in southern Colorado — and finds that the creative process itself is the truest map we have for navigating change. Blank canvas. Intention. Contemplation. Exploration. Drafting. Refining. Finishing. Each stage an artist moves through to make a painting or finish a book is the same stage any of us move through when a marriage ends, a career dissolves, grief arrives, or the ground simply shifts beneath our feet.
Drawing on Viktor Frankl's idea of the space between stimulus and response, and on years of sitting with the mind in stillness, Roberts writes with the eye of a painter and the patience of a meditator — never offering easy answers, but staying close to the fear, doubt, anxiety, and the quiet courage it takes to keep showing up to the page or the canvas anyway.
Inside these essays, you'll explore:
Why the fear of not-knowing is often the first sign that something real is trying to emerge
How to meet anxiety as raw material rather than a problem to solve
The role of breath, body, and stillness in steadying a mind in transition
Why creativity isn't a luxury for "artists" but a fundamental human practice for living through change
Reflection and journaling prompts at the end of each essay, to bring the ideas into your own life
Part memoir, part meditation, part permission slip — The Art of Embracing Change is for anyone standing in front of their own blank canvas, wondering what comes next, and willing to find out by making something.
Toward a Secret Sky
From obstacles to spiritual awakenings: a pilgrimage through the Himalayas and beyond.
A pilgrimage is always at the least two things–a literal journey and a spiritual journey. Though it involves a geographical moving about, it also requires a psychological shift of the deepest sort.
Creative Process as Pilgrimage
Making art was a natural extension of the spiritual path I’ve navigated for the past 30+ years. Settling the mind enough to learn to see is a prerequisite for an authentic creative practice.
Creativity arises naturally when you stop striving to achieve something.
What readers say:
In a world full of promises for spiritual growth, how does one recognize an authentic path or teacher? Where does one even begin? Roberts responds to this very question by providing a compassionate “roadmap”, full of personal anecdotes, traditional wisdom, and practical advice necessary for navigating the terrain of one’s own spiritual adventure! A kind and accessible book that supports the human longing for a meaningful life.
~ Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel
Toward A Secret Sky is a guide for anyone who wants to develop a connection to their inner life. In it you’ll find practical tips and guidance for embarking on your own journey of personal exploration, as well as stories from the field.
Ashtanga Yoga for Beginner’s Mind
Ashtanga Yoga for Beginner's Mind is a complete guide to the Ashtanga primary series — written for everyone from total beginners to experienced practitioners who want to deepen their practice from the inside out.
Most yoga books teach you to perfect the postures. This one teaches you to use them as a doorway into meditation.
Drawing on decades of teaching and practice — including authorization from Sri K. Pattabhi Jois to teach Ashtanga after studying in Mysore, South India — author Kim Roberts offers a rare combination: detailed instruction on the postures of the Ashtanga primary series, alongside practical guidance on shamatha (sitting meditation) and how each practice enriches the other.