Diana Rowan is the author of The Bright Way. She is a professional harpist with an MM in classical piano performance and a PhD in music theory. She is also the founder of Bright Knowledge Guild, an online creative community that offers students around the world access to her Bright Way system. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find out more about her work at www.DianaRowan.com.
Activities in this series encourage the use of your own private diary or journal, easily made from a blank notebook, pad of paper, or your preferred digital format to capture 'reflections, questions, discoveries, and stories.'
From a young age, author Diana Rowan knew she was destined to be a musician. But around the age of ten, she started to get anxious and afraid, feelings that stemmed from the immense pressure she felt to be perfect and please the people around her. She threw up before performances, and several times she had to run offstage, due to her crippling performance anxiety. This caused her to give up her dreams of being a professional musician.
After a deep spiritual, emotional, and psychological journey, she realized she had to invite authentic creativity back into her life, so she started teaching music and collaborating with other creative people from around the world. As creativity lit up her life again, she found her way back to discovering her core purpose in life.
The Bright Way: Five Steps to Freeing the Creative Within (New World Library, 2020) not only tells her personal story, but shares the five empowering steps that readers can also follow to re-ignite their creative life. We hope you enjoy the excerpts from the book.
When you create, you connect. As you engage with your chosen activity, you become one with it. Reclaim your creativity, reclaim your life.
By its very nature, Sacred Reciprocity fosters a spirit of collaboration rather than competition.
Reconnecting to the roots of nature reconnects your creative journey to the fundamentals of life.
Fulfillment celebrates the grand marriage of yourself to your Self — and, by extension, to the great cosmos of which we are all a part.
As creatives, we all need a real, supportive community to mirror, encourage, and challenge us.