A Different Way Home
The Story Behind This Place
Come and sit with me for a while
I don't think this is about becoming someone new.
I think it's about remembering who you already are.
That's not just a belief. It's something I had to learn myself before I could build any of this.
The Short Version
For anyone who simply wants to know who's behind all of this…
I'm Nikie, founder of The Art & Soul of Journaling and creator of The Beckoning.
For more than a decade I've been helping women reconnect with themselves through reflection, creativity and the rhythms that modern life so often teaches us to ignore.
I'm an accredited coach, a qualified Journaling Therapist and—perhaps more importantly—someone who spent a long time wearing coats that didn't fit before finally learning to make my own.
The Longer Version
A reader sent me a message once that I've returned to more times than I can count. She said the work had helped to "call me home to myself." I read it on a grey Tuesday morning, probably with cold tea, and I sat with it for a long time.
That phrase has stayed with me because it names something I couldn't quite say myself. Not that journaling fixes things, or improves things, or makes you more productive, or helps you finally get yourself together. Just that it can bring you back. Back to yourself. Back to the quiet underneath the noise. Back to something you already knew, somewhere.
My relationship with journaling wasn't a neat, lifelong love affair with the page.
It became important because I discovered what could happen there. Over time, and particularly through some of the hardest periods of my life, journaling became far more than somewhere to record what had happened. It became somewhere I could untangle what I was thinking, hear what was underneath the noise and find my way through things I didn't always know how to say out loud.
Eventually I began to understand that what was happening on those pages was something much deeper than simply writing things down.
What I've Noticed Over The Years
What I've noticed, over years of this, is how often we already know more about ourselves than we realise. We know our patterns. We know what pulls at us. We know, if we're honest, what we want. The trouble is that everyday life is extraordinarily good at answering for us before we've had a chance to hear ourselves. Journaling creates enough space for that voice to surface. That's all, really. And somehow that turns out to be quite a lot.
I built The Art and Soul of Journaling® around that single belief. The work includes the Journaling 101® library, a growing series of practical journaling titles; The Beckoning, an immersive membership woven around cyclical living, the Wheel of the Year and thirteen Moon Goddesses; and journals, frameworks and experiences I've been building for years. None of it is designed to be completed in a rush and shelved. It's designed to be returned to, the way you return to a place that has always felt like yours.
I work from a philosophy that people don't need fixing. They need remembering. That shapes everything, from how a journal is paced to how an experience is sequenced, from the questions I ask to the space I leave between them.
If something here feels like it's been waiting for you, you're very welcome to take a look.
The part that
actually matters
For years, I thought I was searching for something I'd lost.
Another course.
Another answer.
Another version of myself waiting just around the corner.
I chased dreams that weren't really mine and wondered why I could never quite picture them coming true. It took me a long time to understand why.
I couldn't see them because they weren't mine to see.
Somewhere along the way, someone told me my writing was pointless.
I was a child, and I believed them, the way children do.
I carried those words for decades until one day I sat down and wrote something exactly the way I'd always written—slowly, thoughtfully, wandering where it needed to wander—and realised that had never been the flaw.
It was simply the way I work.
If you've ever been told your way is wrong…
Too slow.
Too much.
Too quiet.
Too different.
Then perhaps it isn't wrong at all.
Perhaps it's simply yours.
Why this exists
This work exists because I know what it feels like to live disconnected from yourself and not have the words for it.
And somewhere along the way it's easy to forget your own rhythm, to feel like you've failed in some way or you've taken a wrong turn.
I believe you need a way back to what you already know.
That's why I've spent years creating journals, books, guided journeys and quiet places that invite you to pause, listen and remember.
Not to become someone else, you don't need to be.
To return to yourself.
Why This Matters
Living disconnected from yourself is exhausting.
It's easy to spend years searching outside yourself for the next answer, the next strategy or the next thing that promises to fix what never needed fixing in the first place.
But when you begin trusting yourself again, something quietly changes.
Decisions become clearer.
Boundaries become kinder.
Life starts to feel like it fits.
What I Bring
Over the years I've studied coaching, personal development, journaling and therapeutic practice.
I'm an accredited coach, a qualified Journaling Therapist and have spent much of my professional life as both a designer and project manager—which probably explains why I dream big but also love creating things that actually work.
But qualifications only tell part of the story.
This isn't something I once learned and now teach.
It's a practice I return to, season after season, just as I invite others to do.
Because life changes.
We change.
Today
Today I create books, journals, experiences and places of belonging that invite people to pause, reconnect and return home to themselves.
It feels less like a business and more like a vocation.
A thread that's been quietly weaving through my life for as long as I can remember, even when I couldn't yet see the pattern.
If something here feels familiar…
If one of these doorways feels as though it has been quietly waiting for you…
Then perhaps you've arrived exactly when you were meant to.
You're very welcome here.
Doorways
The Mini Journey
A free taste of the path. No commitment, just a beginning.
The Beckoning
The full journey.
One year, one turning of the wheel.
Journals and Guides
Companions for the path — journals, colouring journeys and more.