Soul Fire: Accessing Your Creativity

This inspiring guide shows you how to cultivate your creative spirit, particularly in the second half of life, as a way to encourage personal growth, enrich your spiritual life and deepen your communion with God.

Each chapter provides questions for reflection to help you identify your creative energy, overcome your insecurities, and connect with your chosen method of expression. Practical exercises at the end of each chapter help you awaken your creative spirit within.

Whether you're a novice or expert; young adult, middle age or golden age; you will be challenged by this invigorating call to set free your creative potential.

Publishers Weekly

Don't let the author's title of reverend scare you away from this soulful cheer for creativity. A Catholic priest and yoga instructor, Ryan artfully blends his personal journey with equal parts travelogue and biography, yet manages through engaging end-of-chapter exercises to bring the focus back to the reader seeking spiritually creative motivation. At times the combination of his poetry and guidance is a bit awkward and perhaps even indulgent, yet at the same time it is a seductively brave demonstration of his challenge to "Surrender to the Adventure." Friendly and even almost confidential in his manner ("Here's the thing about creativity: It's a live growing entity") he still maintains enough of an air of authority (think yoga master, not schoolmaster) that the questions for reflection and creativity exercises are less like homework and more like steep mountain climbs or complicated yoga positions, delicious in their challenge. Although Ryan is better at relating his own experiences than helping readers generate their own "soul fire," his exuberance is more than enough to inspire and encourage others-regardless of their professed or practiced faith-who seek an enlightened, emboldened path of spiritual creativity. (Mar.)