It's All Up From Here, Season 4: empowering women, empowering families...

Season Four is in full swing on the podcast, I can’t quite believe it, we are already up to episode 5! We have gone deep on lots of fantastic topics already like finding your purpose; the importance of self-belief; healing through connection…unless you’re dealing with a narcissist (funny but not funny! we’ve both had quite some dealings with it this year!); and feeling lonely. It’s such an incredible season of conversation, there is so much more to come. As usual Shona & I are raw, unscripted and honest. Here is a little snippet from the first episode of Season Four so you know what’s happening this season…

Shona: “Season Four has a new tag line!  This season we are getting to the core. Our tag line was ‘helping bring the joy back to families’. First, it was ‘helping bring the joy back to parenting’, now it’s still about the joy, but we’ve decided that our new tagline is ‘empowering women, empowering families’. Really what we’ve been talking about all this time is supporting women to a point where they can be more whole; emotionally healthy; be themselves; and feel inspired & empowered which then in turn they pass on to their children, their families and their partners and friends.”

Pia: “As women we birth the next generation, and we need to be empowered to support that, that sense of thriving and learning – if we don’t give it to ourselves, we can’t offer it to anybody else. So it’s the core of what we are doing – bringing out that female energy and empowering it, for everyone’s sake. Some of the topics are going to be: intuition; a journey with self belief – a deeper exploration from self-acceptance which we spoke about last season, and also what external validation has to do with it; creativity; feeling not good enough and unworthy – we are going to work a little deeper with that because again we end up reacting from that place without realising it, without being conscious of it; and we will be talking deeper about intimate relationships….”

If you are interested in living intuitively and are eagerly awaiting my next book then I encourage you to take a moment to listen in as every topic we open up in discussion this season is part of the book, The Alchemy of Intuition. So by listening in on the podcast, you’re getting a glimpse of my creative thought process in conversation with Shona as I write the book.

Thank you so much to everyone who has been listening, sharing, reviewing and messaging us about each episode, we are so thrilled you love it and are looking forward to a live event early next year! Details to come soon.

Pia xx

Welcome to Amiyo, this beautiful life...

I’m so thrilled to finally share with you something incredible I’ve been working on for one of my beautiful clients. It’s been an amazing intuitive journey together, from beginning as mentoring sessions in 2017 through to bringing her latest collection into the world and sharing it through its very own online space…

Susie Duggin is an incredible artist, jewellery designer, and maker based in Bangalow, near Byron Bay here on the east coast of Australia. We met back in 2017 when Susie flew down to Sydney for our first mentoring session together. She has such a beautiful and distinctive aesthetic, and was in the midst of creating the most stunning debut jewellery collection The Native Gold Series, where each piece is art in miniature.

The name Amiyo came into Susie’s life while she was creating the collection and for her she describes this as an ancient word that portrays “this beautiful life, enriched by our dreams and visions, made to be a touchstone to remind us of our inherent magic.”

Each piece features native gold in quartz stones that are sourced locally, and carries its own story which is reflected in the names of each piece: “Landscape of the Soul” , “The Beloved One”, and “In The Sky, On The Ground (and in the Sea)” , just to name a few.

Together over the past few months we’ve been designing and styling her new website, and it was an absolutely pleasure to create the visual storytelling, capturing the magic in this collection. Susie came and stayed at my studio and we spent the weekend photographing the pieces in the studio and down by the waters edge too.

After a wonderfully successful, private launch last weekend, it’s my absolute pleasure to be the first to share with you her collection online. So please take the time to visit her world, read her journal, learn more about her and share her work with people you know will love it…

Congratulations beautiful Susie! It’s been such a pleasure mentoring and collaborating with you on this creative endeavour. The intuitive journey is a jungle path for sure and worth every step when you see what you’ve created led by your heart all the way. This is real magic in the palm of your hands, and you’ve shared it with us, there is nothing more special than this.

With love,

Pia xx

Website design & styling by Pia Jane Bijkerk and Susie Duggin

Production and visual storytelling by Pia Jane Bijkerk

Logo Design by Rick Shearman

Jewellery photography by Michelle Eabry

When you're entire mailing list of 10 years has been wiped, what do you do?

You realise how determined you are to share your creativity with the world, so you dust yourself off and start a new one. Nothing and no one can bring this girl down.

If you’d like to hear the full story and subscribe to receive my heart-written letters, you can do so right here:

I take my time to write these emails to connect you to your heart: That part of you that speaks in whispers and needs more than ever right now to be heard & valued. I have so much coming up this year that I’m eager to share via this special connection. I’ll also post here in my journal, but the emails are more intimate and special, it’s where the magic begins - you get a glimpse of it here on the journal, but it gets activated through the emails.

A massive thank you to those who have resubscribed or subscribed if you weren’t on my mailing list already since I temporarily lifted my social media hiatus to put the call out this week. You are part of this new start! The beautiful messages of support coming through have made me more invigorated than ever to write and send my first email tomorrow with the new moon. I have learnt so much about myself over the past 24 hours that has made it worth it - yes, you read right, worth it.

With Love,

Pia xx

When I was nineteen...

When I was 19, I thought of myself as a worldly feminist. It was 1997. I was halfway through my university degree in Sydney, and already by that age I had travelled the world and lived in more countries than most people visit in a lifetime. Between the ages of 13-15 I lived in a village in northern Italy and was appalled by the sexism that ran rampant in the culture…why did that old man just pinch my bum? Why is it ok that those boys are whistling at me as I eat ice cream with my parents? And why does that newsreader on TV have her body squeezed into that tiny dress and her breasts pushed up to her chin? When she speaks, why is she trying to seduce her viewers? What I saw and experienced felt very strange to me. I struggled to integrate. And it was this reaction that defined me as a feminist.

As I grew into this label, it made me feel different to the other girls around me, like I must be less naïve, less vulnerable than them. After all, I was worldly, and I was apparently a feminist because I believed women deserved the same rights as men. It made me feel strong.

On top of being worldly and a feminist, I was also experiencing deep love with another human, my boyfriend. And although we had our ups & downs as young lovers do, fumbling our way along the paths that others had paved for us to walk, I knew what it was to be in love, and this made me feel not just worldly, but also, mature. So here I was at age 19: a worldly, mature feminist. In the cocoon of this understanding of myself, I felt safe.

Then something happened that shattered my world…

……………………………………………..

This is an extract from a very personal piece I wrote on Monday, August 12 & Tuesday, August 13, which, as it turned out, was the beginning of the full moon phase. I have never had the words to express what happened at this time in my life, and in the early hours of Monday morning, I had a beautiful dream. During the dream, the words formed. Although the nature of the event is traumatic, I followed my intuition and took the time on Tuesday to write it all out. It is incredibly personal, and after writing it I realised my website is not the place to publish it. I may, in time, consider publishing this piece in a publication as I know it is powerful and needs to be read by as many young women as possible, in the hope they may understand how to listen to their intuition. For now, it is available to read in full in my patreon collective. And I’ve also made it available on my new password protected journal, for those who are on my mailing list.

“Does your family have secrets? Or maybe you have a secret from your own life experience that you have never shared with anyone? Today Pia and Shona talk about the undeniable link between secrets and shame and how this can stop us from being truly ourselves and also from becoming the strong, powerful women we were meant to be.”

Secrets & Shame is the latest podcast episode on It’s All Up From Here! Click here to listen xx