"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
Mary Oliver's famous question can sting when the life we planned, and longed for, didn't arrive. This webinar is an hour of gentle, practical company for exactly that place.
Creativity can help. A growing body of research shows that creative practice supports our mental health: easing anxiety, helping us process grief and loss, and reconnecting us with our senses and aliveness. But grief, treatment, waiting, and watching a life you didn't choose take shape can leave creativity blocked and out of reach.
This is where Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way can help. She draws on the metaphor of "the well": the reservoir of ideas, energy and imagination we all draw from, a well that can be drained, and a well that can be refilled. Together we'll explore her two simple, free tools for unblocking it: morning pages (also known as Moaning Pages, or Rage on the Page) and artist dates. We'll try them gently, live, with a short taste of free writing and a quiet exercise mapping your own "well drainers" and "well fillers", using nothing but pen and paper. Along the way we'll reclaim Mary Oliver's question: not an achievement question but an attention question, one that can be lived alongside grief, not after it.
Wherever you are on this journey, still in the thick of it, newly out the other side, or years down the line, you're welcome. You'll be offered the opportunity to leave with one small, concrete step, chosen by you: your first wild and precious act of the week.
DATE: Sunday 20th September
TIME: 11.30am BST - Find your timezone HERE
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Please bring pen and paper, glass of water, comfy clothing, and tissues
REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR HERE
Please note: Whilst the panellists will be recorded, your camera and audio will be turned off. If you are unable to attend the webinar live, you DO NOT need to register to watch the replay. Just subscribe to the World Childless Week YouTube channel and you’ll be notified when new recordings are added.
PANELLIST
Bella Cranmore - UK
Bella is a UKCP registered integrative psychotherapeutic counsellor based in Brighton & Hove, working worldwide online. I work with people for whom life hasn't gone to plan: childlessness not by choice, fertility treatment, infertility, miscarriage
and baby loss. This grief is so often unacknowledged and misunderstood, and I offer a steady, honest space to hold it. Alongside my own lived experience of childlessness, I combine depth psychotherapy with creative practice, including the tools of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which we'll be drawing on together in this webinar. My work is about helping people grieve the child who didn't arrive and discover what's still possible, individually or as a couple.
Creativity, for me, isn't about being "good at art". It's about slowly refilling the well and building a life that is rich, meaningful and your own.
