intuition

{inner child} create your own colour...

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At the end of last year, I held another art workshop for 50 students in year 2 (age 8) at Laly’s school. This time, I focussed on colour and chatted to the kids about the power of colour in our lives. I was inspired by my faraway friend, artist & educator Lisa Solomon’s new book A Field Guide to Color - it is full of fantastic techniques on understanding colour through watercolour. And the paper throughout the book is ideal to apply watercolour paint, so you can do the exercises directly in the book which I love…

I took the book in and taught the children a little about Lisa’s art, what I personally love about her work, and some of her colour work techniques like Colour Meditation.

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They were all very excited to be making colour! They knew the basic principles of making different colours (red + yellow = orange etc) but I wanted to stretch this a bit further, to get them to experiment, to not just take a colour from a tube and go with that but to adjust it according to their mood, and to use their intuition when creating a new colour.

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We created a few different stations in the classroom so that the kids could go from one to the other, allowing a few children at a time a few minutes at my station - the colour making station. As I mentioned, one of the many things that Lisa does is create colour meditations with watercolour, it’s a wonderful activity so I used this idea as one of the stations for the kids. At this table, they were to repeat a marking on their paper over and over again using a different coloured marker for each one. Another station I set up with a whole bunch of colour samples from the paint section of the local hardware store. These I had gathered over the previous months for my own photoshoots, as I use them to create colour palettes in my storyboarding. For this station, the idea was to look at the names of the colours to gather inspiration, and to then come up with a name for their colour that they will be creating. They came up with so many creative names!

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At my station, it was all about the mixing. It was no easy feat to manage this to accomodate 50 kids in two hours! Their excitement and gratitude though was worth every drop of sweat as I frantically prepped for each round of children. I let them choose a base colour from a group of mixing vessels I’d prepared before they arrived at the table, and then we got adding - I asked them what colour they would like to add to see what happens, and off they went. I tried my best to teach them that the more colour they added, the more it could become brown, but at the same time I also know that they need to learn this from trying themselves. Stepping back to allow their own lessons to transpire while also being available to teach them when they need it is a challenge. I have always had immense gratitude to the teachers of the world who manage this daily, in their own journey to find their own balance.

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After they’d mixed their colour, they went to the painting station to paint their colour onto a piece of paper and write the name of their colour and their name onto the paper. So. much. fun.

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Meanwhile at home, I’d been making my own colour palette for a backdrop and painting I was working on. I’ll be sharing the process in detail of developing a shoot from start to finish on the Wandering Hearts Collective in the coming week, as this process is transferrable to how I design intuitive websites for my mentoring clients as well as intuitive business practice.

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Although I hosted this workshop for children, it’s an activity I would recommend to my clients and anyone at all who is needing to connect with their intuition, creativity, and inner child.

And if you’ve been wanting to learn how to play with watercolours and deepen your knowledge of colour, then Lisa’s book is definitely for you.

With love & colours,

Pia xx


Perspective

Me and my bunny love, Kombucha, snuggling on the couch while we shelter in.

Me and my bunny love, Kombucha, snuggling on the couch while we shelter in.

(this is one of my latest instagram posts that has had much interest through shares and comments - March 30, 2020)


One of the things we are all prone to forget at times, and for some it’s always - depending on the level of awareness - is that our understanding of the world is based on our perspective. And our perspective is formed by our personal life experiences. Which is absolutely of value, but is of no more or less value than someone else’s.

There is still very much an overarching & unconscious belief that some know better than others, and this is based on messaging - subtle & overt, level of education, religion, or simply ego. Without awareness we can move through life, conversing with people from this singular perspective, instead of coming to the conversation or public forum with the knowledge that what we have to share is based on the accumulation of our personal life experiences, but that doesn’t mean our ideas or understanding is ‘the right way or the only way’.

Heart Prompt:

When you converse with someone, are you asking them questions about their life experience or thoughts about what’s happening now? Or are you telling them how it is and what you believe the answer is? How much time do you dedicate in a conversation to ask questions about the other person? And actually listen?

While in solitude we can reflect on this, and practice asking more questions, especially if we reflect and realise we haven’t learnt much about someone we’ve just spoken with, about what their life is like right now.


There is a romantic notion that we are all in the same boat at this time. But we are not - we are in very different boats on the same incoming tide, and some are in no boats at all but swimming like mad in the open ocean with no life raft. It’s not to say that by having a safe boat we should feel shame or guilt over it, but it means that when we are aware that we are not all in the same boat we develop empathy, and we begin to change our mindset into not just serving ourselves but how, if we have the means, can we serve others - and not in a way that satiates our egos, but satiates our hearts.

If you’re experiencing boredom at this time, this is the space you need to open the door to your heart. It’s a very different way of living & now is a great time to explore it.

With Love,

Pia

Find more on the Wandering Heats Collective.

The Sweetest Gift...

“Quietly while you were asleep, the moon and I were talking…” beginning lyrics to The Sweetest Gift composed & sung by Sade.

“Quietly while you were asleep, the moon and I were talking…” beginning lyrics to The Sweetest Gift composed & sung by Sade.

As an Everyday Alchemist, it would come as no surprise to you that over the past year I've been experimenting on myself. Well not just myself - to be more specific, I've been experimenting with the moon too, observing and playing with my connection to it. And what I've discovered has the power to change everything. It already has for me. I am in the midst of putting together something so incredibly grand, I can barely contain my excitement, but these things take time -  because rather than just come up with a theory, I need to know it actually works. I also know that the moon is currently on trend (which makes me laugh just writing it! That something which has existed for all of time as we know it could be suddenly popular) - there are a number of books popping up about it, especially around abundance because that’s another trend ... and you know how I feel about doing anything 'on trend'! But I also won't dismiss something just for the sake of rebelling, instead I will seek out the resistance. What is important for me to continue this everyday alchemy is that in the process, I make sure that what I've come up with works for the whole - for each of us, for humanity, for Earth.

The first step of this is what led you to reading this right now - my new email. We have become so disconnected from the moon, which is our original time maker along with the sun, that we don't even know what phase it's in. Especially for those of us who live in the city, or are always busy doing (pointing a loving finger towards myself here too, with a busy 7 year old at my heels!). So with this email, I'll be sending it at the beginning of each new moon phase, just so we know at a glance what phase it's in. There will not be any information about the meaning or symbolism behind the phase, or anything along these lines. This is just simply to connect us to the moon, to get to know it a little more intimately, and in time I’ll let you know why.

Along with the moon phase illustration, I'll be adding a quote that resonates with me at that time. And this will not be a throwaway quote with no context - it will be from something I have read, from someone who I value, and there will be a deeper intuitive connection as to why I have chosen that particular remark at that particular time, so there will always be a link for you to discover more if it resonates with you and you find yourself yearning to hear, read or learn more. I will not comment on it, I will simply leave it up to you. I hope you’ve enjoyed this first one as much as I have had listening to the entire interview (I have listened a number of times, there is not one remark that does not resonate with my entire being, it’s a powerful interview that I hope you get as much out of as I have).

With each email, sometimes this will be all there is  - my moon phase illustration and a quote. Other times, there will be images and links below to work I have just produced (like you would have seen below the quote and is what led you here). As with all that I do, I like to create things that ignite one of our five senses at a time - sight, taste, touch, smell and sound. At the moment I am all about the sound: my wonderful collaborative podcast with Shona Smith as well as my monthly downloadable piano compositions on Patreon, & sight: my photography feature stories published in magazines, in my new books, and around the world via my personal clients. Some of these also involve taste and touch and smell too, if you choose to cook or craft something from what I've shared through my visual storytelling. And the reason I am so inspired to ignite our senses is because I know these senses are the ways to our hearts, to connecting us to our intuition and learning to trust and use it everyday. This will always come through my work, and is accessed directly each week with my mentoring clients as well as each month on Patreon.

Please share this post with your friends and family and encourage them to subscribe to the email - there will always be much to connect to, and it will be an opening for many beautiful conversations between those you love.

Thank you to every single one of you who are here right now, reading these words - you've made such a powerful impact on encouraging me to share my everyday alchemy, I value your presence so much and it’s my hope that this gratitude flows back to you through my work.  

With love, 

Pia

It's All Up From Here! podcast is now live...

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I’m so thrilled to let you know about this collaboration, it’s something that I’ve been working on in the background for the past 6 months and here it is…

Welcome to Season One of the It’s All Up From Here! parent podcast, hosted by radio producer/presenter + ex-youth worker Shona Smith, alongside me, Pia Jane Bijkerk. This is a refreshing, unscripted & honest podcast opening up discussion on issues and topics of today, with the focus to bring back the fun to our parenting.

What I love about this is that both Shona & I have very different parenting styles, backgrounds & personalities - while Shona is effervescent and knowledgeable, I am, well, the heart wanderer: travelling along my parenting path led by my intuition & creativity. We are very good friends, and this collaboration came about after many wonderful discussions. I found I walked away from our conversations feeling uplifted and empowered to be on this wild parenting journey. There was so much great information shared. And after hosting some parenting workshops together in Sydney in 2017, we soon realised a podcast was in the making…

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Shona’s passion is to bring the joy back into parenting, for so many of us who feel overwhelmed and pressured to ‘get it right’. And my passion is to live wholeheartedly, guided by intuition. In this podcast we come together with honesty, openness and reality, without the bells & whistles or smoke & mirrors of social media. In fact, that is the topic of one of our upcoming episodes.

This is Shona Smith! I love this photograph - it captures the humour, joy and warmth she brings everywhere she goes.

This is Shona Smith! I love this photograph - it captures the humour, joy and warmth she brings everywhere she goes.

Each time Shona uploads an episode, I’ll post it here on this page, but you can also subscribe via Apple Podcasts and Whooshkaa. Without further ado, a very big welcome to It’s All Up From Here! Bringing the joy & heart back to parenting.

With love,

Pia xx