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The Birth of Iphelia: From Children’s Book to Self-Help Guide, This Work Is Destined to Change Lives

by | Sep 27, 2018

It’s been almost 10 years since the idea for Iphelia bubbled up. I had been facing a major crisis within myself and in my life and wrote an angry rant in my journal, desperately trying to validate my feelings. In that writing, I had asserted myself and pushed back against what I then perceived to be all the negative feelings and judgments of others in my life. I felt better after writing it all out and giving the anger some form of expression. Observing myself and the relief I felt, I realized a profound truth that in that moment I knew was vitally important and that I never wanted to forget. I then turned the page and began doodling an image of a little girl jumping through the air as if she could fly. Underneath I wrote and underlined Ifeelya. In that moment I imagined Iphelia as some kind of comic book superhero. Her superpower was an incredible capacity to empathize. Only, unlike me at the time, she was able to discern the difference between what was hers and what was everyone else’s. She could hold her own space and even push back if she needed.
A year later I wrote a rough draft of a children’s story and began drawing images free hand. I did this for about six months until lying in bed one night and contemplating the importance of what I felt the story had to say, I began questioning the quality of the images. I thought there must be some kind of software that could help me with this process. There must be a better way for me to visually convey these ideas.
The next day I asked Uncle Google if such a program existed. I learned that it did and my self-taught journey into graphic artistry began. I would spend the next five years creating 3D characters and sets and rendering images of the story. It was a slow and laborious process, but the pace offered me lots of time to contemplate feelings and the invisible but very real dynamics of the feeling level of experience. During this same period when I would spend all of my free time creating images, I was studying and training as a heart-centered hypnotherapist and doing my own personal transformation work. Insights and ideas began to trickle in and as I came closer to finishing the images, there was a quickening.
The final year was spent on the second half of the book, the manuscript. What started as a warning against making assumptions about what others are feeling quickly evolved into a no-bullshit, hard-and-fast course on understanding the value and power of feelings and addressing everything that gets in the way of a truly honest relationship with the self and the capacity for clean-healthy-empathy. Here’s a piece from the manuscript:
The visualization of our feelings is a window’s view of the truth. A view of our interdependence. A view to what we are really doing and being. Visualizing feelings gives us a window’s view of our abuse, our sacrifice, of our selfish and our selfless. When we learn to allow and observe them, our feelings always tell us what is really happening. Our feelings can even tell us who we really are, and that is everything. Discovering who we really are is the most valuable lesson attending to our feelings has to offer. There are no shortcuts. Deceptions are merely temporary congestions of the inevitable. A lie is only a delay. Nothing is hidden. All is accounted for. All has effect. Our emotional shadow follows us wherever we go. When this truth is fully understood, our relationships with everything change. We can’t help but begin striving to be honest and authentic to ourselves and the world. If we lie in a relationship, our experience of the relationship is puppeted and without trust. If we hide our true feelings, we never feel connected or loved, and we ever weaken our ability to love. Conversely, when we strive to be true to the people we love in our lives, we build magnificent bridges of light upon which great shipments of love and affirmation can be transported. Then a miracle is possible…

The Children’s Edition

It has taken some time for me to feel ready to step out from behind my keyboard and begin to really promote Iphelia. The original book was finished right as I was becoming a father. At first, I tried to stay productive, but being a dad slowed things down and put me in a kind of energetic cocoon with my baby and his mother. Eventually I accepted what my heart was telling me: My child takes priority over everything else I am doing. He will be 3 in November. Observing and participating in his development during the last few years has highlighted everything I have been working so diligently to understand through this work. The first few years of his life were a time to hunker down and hold a safe and loving space for him in the home. Now he seems ready to venture out into the world. He talks about going to school. He engages with all the other children he sees wherever we go. He insists on having space for himself and doing things independently. These and many other indicators, including what I feel in my heart and synchronistic signs in my world, assure me that it’s time to go back to work. I feel that Iphelia is also ready to venture out into the world. My hope is that we have created something that children of all ages will spend hours revisiting. There is an important story about a young heroine overcoming emotional confusion and self-doubt told in three acts, but each image will also reveal its own mini story to the astute observer. I hope that the pictures continually stir imagination and introspection. I hope our children can grow up as mindful of their being as they are of their appearance in the world. And I hope they come to see for themselves that caring for their being will always win over managing a facade. I hope my son stands on my shoulders and sees farther and deeper than I have and decides more quickly than I did to try and be something good in the world that makes living peacefully, lovingly, and harmoniously a manifested reality for us all. The date is set. On January 23rd, 2019 Iphelia: Awakening the Gift of Feeling, the Children’s Edition, will be released.

It will be available for preorder in just a couple of weeks. For updates, subscribe to the mailing list here.
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