Welcome Home!
The Return to Serenity Island is an immersive course designed to encourage, inspire, and support your journey home to your creative core so you can plant new seeds and see your life flourish from the inside out.
The course is built around six chapters. Each chapter contains video/audio reflections, practical exercises, creative play prompts, and soundscape meditations for you to explore (and return to) in your own time and at your own pace.
Throughout the journey, you will see how the important areas in your life fit together on a map. You will gain confidence as you navigate different terrains and successfully confront the hobgoblins, imps, and trolls you'll find lurking around the island.
By the end of this adventure, you will have maps, practices, and rituals you can use and build on for the rest of your life.
It is my hope that you are going to see life in a completely different way., and that along the way you will uncover, discover, and encounter, new depths of your imagination. This course invites you to explore the possibilities and come home to your creative spirit and playful core.
How To Get Started
Dive into this course with a spirit of openness. Don’t TRY to force anything. Take your time and trust the process.
I recommend following the structure and order. It’s an intentionally designed pathway, so follow it in order and do the practices. But find your rhythm, and if things don't make sense yet, move on and know that the pieces will fall into place in time.
The journey follows three main threads:
Being: opening your senses to the sights, sounds, flavours, aromas, and textures of Serenity Island.
Processing: exploring the landscapes and prepare the land for what comes next
Becoming: planting seeds of treasure around Serenity Island so it yields the life you want to grow
The six chapters integrate these three elements in various ways.
Your Serenity Island Adventure Journal
I recommend keeping a journal/diary as you go through the course. It is somewhere to record your reflections, prompts for further exploration, and anything that catches the sleeve of your attention in daily life.
I started my journalling practice in 2012. After many years of false starts with paper journals I realised that the way for me to maintain a habit was to do it on my laptop.
It doesn't matter HOW you do it. The important thing is simply THAT you do it in a way that works for you.
A journal can help us recognise areas of change as we transition from ideas and theories to daily life actions and environments. For example, it can provide a space to reflect on how current realities correspond to previously expressed desires. Due to our natural negativity bias, it's easy to overlook and ignore positive shifts. A journal gives us somewhere to record successes, glimmers, and happy accidents along the way.
The Podcast Feed
You can access all the audio parts in a unique podcast feed. This means you can take the course with you and listen on the go. Click here to learn how to set this up on different podcast platforms.
I will add updates to the feed after our live picnic sessions, answering any questions that come up and sharing news from around the collective island experience.
Practices
You will see this image throughout the course. It indicates a coursework exercise. I would suggest doing these in order where possible and try not to skip any.
At the end of each section there is a Permission to Play area, where you will find a series of creative prompts that are not vital for the course, but will really enhance your experience. They help you engage your creativity, relax into play, and enjoy some sensory flow in different forms.
Create
An invitation to use your imagination and play to make something creative
Come To Your Senses
An invitation to pause and open your senses
Emerge
An invitation to add to your maps and journals
"When we find a good story and fully give ourselves to it, that story can act through us, breathing new life into everything we do. Then a sense of deeper purpose adds to the meaning and momentum of our lives.
A great story and a satisfying life share a vital element: a compelling plot that moves toward meaningful goals, where what is at stake is far larger than our personal gains and losses."
- Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (Active Hope)