LET’S FREE YOUR CREATIVE SOUL
and get you in touch with your imagination + ideas + spiritual center
You’re done trying to push through and grind it out. Here’s how to create real rest, rhythms, and meaning without burning out your creative spark.
Here are a few things I want you to know:
✨ I work with people who feel everything deeply and still want to show up for their lives, their creative work, and the people they love.
✨ You’re sensitive and awake to the suffering of the world. But you refuse to go numb. You want to keep showing up with compassion and creativity, not burnout and bitterness.
✨ Flourish Anyway™ exists for you. Tender-hearted and soul-exhausted humans who are over both constant crisis and shallow positivity. You crave sanctuaries of rest, reflection, and creative renewal; not productivity hacks or spiritual bypassing.
What I Believe About You
⚪ You carry a quiet balm that the world desperately needs.
⚪ Your presence, your questions, your way of tending to what is fragile and holy in ordinary life all matters more than you know.
⚪ There are people who can only receive certain kinds of care, language, and imagination from you.
⚪ You don’t need to become someone else to be well. You need rhythms, rituals, and retreats that work for your real life while cultivating spaciousness in your creative center so your clarity and compassion and ripple outward.
Where Flourish Anyway Comes In
This is where my work meets your longing. Through spiritual direction, online guided retreats, workshops, books, and other thoughtful offerings, I help you listen beneath the surface of your life and create gentle structures that support your spiritual and creative flourishing.
Before, you might scroll the news late at night, feel your chest tighten, and then push it all down so you can function the next day.
After discovering how to Flourish Anyway, you still see what’s hard, but use simple practices to ground yourself, limit how much you take in, and turn to a few trusted rituals that help you return to steadiness instead of spiraling down into the bad place.
Before, you might sit down to write, paint, or journal about your dreams and feel frozen—unsure what you want or what you’re “allowed” to want. After, you have language for your desires, small experiments that fit your real life, and a kinder inner voice that lets your creativity move, even in short, imperfect bursts.
Before, you may feel lonely in your questions about faith, belonging, and meaning—worried you’re “too much” or “not enough” for the spaces you’ve known. After, you feel less alone, more honest, and more connected to people and practices that can hold your real story without judgment.
You won’t aim to become a shiny new version of yourself (because you’re already pretty damn fantastic). You will establish realistic practices and tender clarity you can return to again and again.
Books, spiritual direction, gatherings, and all kinds of nourishing offerings for CREATIVE SOULS who care deeply about personal and world turmoil AND want to show up for their ART, WORK, and RELATIONSHIPS anyway.
Flourish Anyway™ Framework
Spiritual Direction: We create a quiet space during spiritual direction sessions where you can exhale, say the true thing out loud, and not have to be “okay” for 30 or 50 minutes. You have sacred time to be curious, to process, to receive insights from your center, from the Spirit. No more holding it together until you crumble in the shower or in your car in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. More three-breath pauses before opening your inbox. More short evening reflections with a cup of tea and a pen that help you listen to your own inner wisdom and move toward spiritual renewal, even when it feels like the wheels are wobbling and about to fly off.
Rhythms, Rituals, & Retreats: Think less “perfect morning routine at 5 a.m.” and more “five unhurried minutes with your coffee by a window before anyone else can ask you for anything.” Every offering is designed to help you layer in doable rhythms, small rituals and realistic retreats that bring more calm and less chaos—inside your heart, mind, and soul, and in the way you move through your art, work, and relationships. Your custom, personalized flexible rhythms and tools support ongoing self-care and intentional breaks from stress and busyness in ways that work with your existing roles and responsibilities—not against them.
Art as Solace: You will choose to stop doomscrolling yourself numb at the end of the day and learn to reach for a dog-eared book of poems, a favorite playlist in the car, a slow walk through a museum, or a film that makes you feel less alone. We’ll befriend art as tangible companions and pair those artful encounters with gentle, science-backed creative practices that help regulate your nervous system and support your well-being.
Belonging and Connection: If you’re tired of feeling like you have to tone yourself down or translate your tenderness, you’ll find a different kind of space here. Each offering is crafted to feel like pulling up a chair at a welcoming table—no pop quizzes on your beliefs, no side-eye for your doubts—so that people from a wide range of backgrounds can experience real connection, shared language, and spiritual flourishing, especially if they’ve felt isolated or overwhelmed.
Ready to Flourish Anyway™?
If some part of you is whispering, “I want that,” you’re in the right place. You can begin with a Flourish Anyway™ Mini-Series of 1:1 spiritual direction sessions or the Rhythms, Rituals, & Retreats online workshop—spacious ways to experiment with honoring your creative soul in the life you already have. When you’re ready, I’d be honored to help you create sanctuaries of creative renewal, soulful belonging, and spiritual exploration in the middle of your beautifully imperfect life.
Charlotte Donlon is a writer, spiritual director, and gatherer whose work has woven together themes of belonging, art, and soul exploration for more than 25 years. With a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing (2015-2018) and a certificate in spiritual direction (2018-2020), Charlotte guides individuals and communities in fostering sanctuaries of acceptance and connection—her approach warmly welcomes people from all backgrounds, regardless of faith tradition or spiritual inclinations.
Her essays have been featured in prominent publications such as The Washington Post, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Catapult, and The Millions, among others. A new essay about art conservation, Joan Mitchell, and mystery is forthcoming with Image.
She is the author of The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other (Broadleaf Books, 2020) and the forthcoming Spiritual Direction for Writers (Eerdmans, September 2026), as well as the founder of initiatives like Spiritual Direction for Writers®, Take More Retreats, Belonging through Art™, and Parenting with Art®.
Flourish Anyway™ is an online hub for Charlotte’s writing, spiritual direction, and special projects that nurture creative flourishing and belonging, providing compassionate, practical, and artful resources to her readers, clients, and broader audience. Subscribe to Charlotte’s primary email newsletter here.
