Dear ,
 

What a wonderful weekend I had at the Sunset Inn with these wise, witty writers who participated in the Coastal Writing Retreat.

We met together in the sunny breakfast room each day to write and share and brainstorm and encourage, and also enjoyed the lovely solitude of our own "Room with a View" of the marsh and intercoastal waterway.

 

I've been thinking about the importance of rooms lately, thanks to Valerie Althoff and her book The Nine Rooms of Your Life: Center, Life Path, Self-Awareness, Family, Opportunity, Success, Relationship, Creativity, and Helpful People. Each is important, I've learned from Val, to live a wholistic life.(One of the benefits of my job is how much I learn from my clients and students. My life is better for having read this book and worked with Val to bring it into being.)

You'll learn more from the excerpt below. And I hope you enjoy this week's prompt as well.

"Maureen definitely has a talent to assist yet-to-be authors in turning their words on paper into a cohesive form."
 

Featured Writer

 

Meet Valerie Althoff

 

Valerie Althoff was born on a small farm outside of St. Paul, Minnesota. Since childhood she’s been curious to know more about God, herself, and the world around her, and this has been the underlying theme of her life path.

Now that she is an elder herself, she has the desire to share some of the wisdom gained from all her life experiences.
This book is her way of leaving a legacy for those who follow. And because every day brings new experiences and greater wisdom, there will be more to come . . .

 What Val says about WordPlay

After a very interesting synchronicity of events that put Maureen and me together, I realized that I’d met her over 15 years ago. At that time, I was thinking of writing a book on feng shui and wanted some guidance on how to proceed. We met at Barnes & Noble and talked over a cup of coffee. I bought her book, Spinning Words Into Gold, did some of the exercises but didn’t follow through with writing the book, even though I held onto the idea. I procrastinated, which turned out to be a very good thing, because my message has shifted and deepened over the ensuing years. Then last March I figured, what the heck, the only way I’ll be able to get this whole book idea out of my head is to write the darn book. So I went on a mission to get it done! It obviously was ready to be written, because the process took less than a year.

 

But I have to state clearly that this finished book is only what it is because of Maureen Ryan Griffin and WordPlay. I “literally” could not have done it without her! It is a collaboration of what I wanted, even needed, to say and her vision of what a professionally written book looks and reads like. Granted, I consider myself a pretty good writer, but Maureen has a way of putting thoughts into a coherence that I could not see, having written it myself. Her ability to put on her editor hat took my thoughts to the level of a professionally written book, and her publishing skills made it a smooth process. She definitely has a talent to assist yet-to-be authors in turning their words on paper into a cohesive form. My words can now be shared around the world (a kind of scary-exciting thing!) and I am so grateful for the steps that brought us back together so we could manifest this beautiful result!

 Featured Writing
 

an excerpt from

The Nine Rooms of Your Life
by

Valerie Althoff

 

 

 

Why Rooms?

I read a parable about a man who lived in a large house that had many rooms, but he chose to occupy only one room. In all the years he lived in this house, he was afraid to open the doors to any other room for fear of what might lie within. To make a long story short, there was a lesson at the end of his life, relating to all the missed opportunities and experiences behind those other doors.

While the man in the story was an extreme case, I believe that we miss out on many life experiences if we keep any of our rooms closed off. We need to open the doors and live fully in all the rooms in our house—all the roles we play that make up the whole of what we call our life. Doing this—living wholistically—brings us fulfillment, a deeper sense of who we are and how we fit into the greater context of life here on Earth.

Living wholistically means being aware of who you are in the context of how well you are in sync with all the various aspects of your life. The awareness that your life is made up of many aspects, or what I’m calling rooms, brings you closer to living your life’s purpose. You have greater control over designing the life you really want to live . . . your heart’s desire. Ultimately, this helps you live a more balanced and peaceful life, because you’re occupying all the rooms that make up the house of your life.

When you live in your home, you spend time in the kitchen, bedroom, and other rooms many times over the years. In much the same way, you also move through the rooms of your life over and over again throughout your lifetime. You pass through the same rooms again and again, but each time you enter a particular room, you’ll be a little more knowledgeable because you’ve had experiences that bring new awareness. Every time you spiral around to a room again, you’ll see it with a different perspective.

Each time you enter a room, you’re different. You bring a different energy and will live in it differently because your experiences have changed your perspective. This is called personal growth.

 

The Nine Rooms

Eckhart Tolle gives a great example of what makes up a room in his book The Power of Now. He explains that furniture may be in a room, but it is not the room itself. The walls, floor, and ceiling define the room, but these are not the room, either. The room itself is energy and cannot be defined, only described through the physical things that are part of it.

When I speak of a room in your life, I’m talking about the different roles we play and the particular experiences that we have that are related to that particular room. I call these nine rooms:

Center
Life Path
Self-Awareness
Family
Opportunity
Success
Relationship
Creativity
Wisdom

The names of these rooms refer to feng shui teachings, and I’ve come to see that taking each of them into consideration as we move through our days gives us a wholistic perspective. Each of the nine rooms is unique, but they’re all inter-connected, they all have value, and it’s important to occupy all of them throughout your life.

You express each room or area of your life differently and each one feels different from the others. A house is made up of different rooms that have specific purposes regardless of the roles you are playing. So it is that the whole of your life is made up of different aspects, no matter your age and circumstances. At any one moment you may be a mom/dad, wife/husband, brother/sister, aunt/uncle, artist/banker, employee/employer, etc. You express each of these roles in different ways as you move through your life. Put them all together and you have a whole, integrated life, or a house that is uniquely you. 

 

~ from Valerie Althoff's book The Nine Rooms of Your Life

Click the book's title to learn more or purchase.