The Art of Embracing Change

Whether you are facing an empty page or an empty nest, you need the answer to the same question: what wants to emerge here?

After nearly twenty years living and working across Southeast Asia — teaching yoga in Bhutan, leading retreats in Sri Lanka, practicing as a psychotherapist in Thailand — she came home to a high mountain valley in Colorado and found herself a foreigner in her own country, standing in front of a blank canvas.

She thought she needed to figure out who to become next. What she actually needed was to remember who she already was.

For every woman standing at a threshold and wondering what comes next, The Art of Embracing Change offers guideposts drawn from a life of creative and meditative practice, and an invitation: find out what’s next by making something.

These contemplative essays reveal the creative process as a reliable map for navigating change. The stages an artist moves through to make a painting—the blank canvas, vision, contemplation, exploration—are the same stages we move through when a marriage ends, a career dissolves, or the ground shifts beneath our feet.

This is not a program, and there is no specific destination. It is one pilgrim's notes: part story, part teaching, part invitation, with a journaling prompt at the close of nearly every essay.

The Art of Embracing Change: On Creativity, Contemplation and Midlife Transformation is a series of short essays guiding the reader to transform a midlife transition into a creative awakening. Using the outline of a 9-step process of creating a painting, the essays track my own transition from a decades long career as a traveling yoga teacher in South Asia to becoming a landscape painter and marrying an artist at age 58. The book shares stories, teachings and prompts for journaling or contemplation for further self-inquiry for your own life transition.