Inspiring Creativity Success Story

Creating Your Blissness: Living in Rhythm with Your Heart and Soul

By Anne Marie Bennett

The word blissness came to me as a result of a challenge issued to me by my creativity coach. She was praising me on the progress I’d made in my fledgling business. I actually shuddered when she said the word business, as it conjured up images of women in austere dark suits clutching heavy briefcases, sitting in endless boring meetings and never having time to do what they really wanted to do.

My coach suggested that if I didn’t like the word business, to think of a different word to call it. I accepted the challenge. A few weeks later, the word blissness blossomed in my mind and I gleefully chose it for my own. I know that teaching SoulCollage® workshops and building my website KaleidoSoul, is a business, but I choose to call it my blissness because it is giving me something that I never had before: an opportunity to share my passion for SoulCollage® with the world in a way that creates money and spreads joy at the same time.

SoulCollage® is a personal growth tool (created by Seena Frost) that is a mystical, magical blend of self-discovery and the fun of collage. Each participant creates his/her own deck of collaged cards using magazine images that speak to the subconscious mind. A SoulCollage® deck has four suits that represent our personality parts, persons who have influenced our lives, animal energies that assist us as allies, and archetypes who resonate with and inform our life’s direction and purpose. Inner surprises abound as we interpret our cards and do soul readings with our decks.

I knew immediately on making my first SoulCollage® card that I wanted to create a business revolving around it, but I had no idea what this would involve. However, I was so passionate about SoulCollage® that I dove right in. I had no business plan, and my only goal was to share the wonders of SoulCollage® with as many people as possible.

The key to creating a blissness as opposed to a business springs directly from one’s passion (heart) and intuition (soul). There’s no way to create work that sings to you unless you are living that work from your own heart and soul. And in order to allow the flow of universal abundance, you need to be in touch with your own inner wisdom (intuition).

I began by avidly continuing work on my own SoulCollage® deck. The deeper I went with the process, the more excited I became about sharing it with others. I set up a few local workshops in Eastern Massachusetts, and began teaching.

It soon became clear to me that I needed a website, so I did a lot of research and found SiteSell’s Site Build It (SBI), which not only has helped me build KaleidoSoul.com, but is helping me to market it as well. Getting KaleidoSoul up and running was a crash course in web design, internet marketing, keywords selection, and the basics of HTML, but I thrilled to the challenge.

After that, each step I’ve taken has come from following my intuition. This has been a real lesson for me in being open, aware, and listening at all times. As I have continued on this path, I have found myself led to take the next step, and the next…..

I trust my inner hunches and follow where they lead. In this fashion I have created a monthly ezine called Soul Songs, found other websites interested in helping me promote KaleidoSoul, developed an active community of SoulCollagers on the Yahoo Groups board, written e-courses about SoulCollage, and am now getting ready for our first KaleidoSoul Community Conference Call as well as our first annual SoulCollage® Weekend Retreat this August.

There are plenty of things about this blissness that are tedious, of course — photocopying flyers for my workshops, writing press releases and website updates, to name a few. Yet when I remind myself that this is all a part of my blissness, I am reminded of why I began it in the first place — to live in rhythm with my heart and soul. And then the monotonous tasks carry me forward to the next creative step.

I wish for each of you blissness in the daily rhythms of your life and work.

— Anne Marie Bennett, KaleidoSoul

Anne Marie Bennett is a writer, artist, website builder extraordinaire, and experienced SoulCollage® facilitator. Anne Marie lives, laughs, writes, sings (and makes her own SoulCollage® cards) in Beverly, MA. Visit www.KaleidoSoul.com to see more of Anne Marie’s blissness at work!

01/10/06

See also: 9 Steps to Your First SoulCollage Card