The Forest in June
Guidebook
Becoming Your Own Muse
by Hannah Fraser Moore
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The Borrowed Muse
For centuries, women have been taught to meet themselves through the reflection of others.
We attach our worth to being wanted, chosen, useful, or necessary to someone else’s life.
The Muse is the oldest version of this idea.
She appears in poems and paintings, in literature and song, as the source of another person’s creativity, the figure who animates and excites life. Who magnifies the passion, beauty, and inspiration that belongs to someone else.
The Muse is the origin of the work.
She is almost never permitted to own it.
She is the most generative figure in the room and the one with the least claim over what she generates.
This force exists within us too.
Women are experts at sensing what makes other people happy, at discovering what gives them spark, and what makes them come alive.
Partners, children, parents, work colleagues, friends - even pets!
We often have better knowledge of what animates other people, rather than recognising the spark inside ourselves.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
We forget that the energy for this comes from:
Our own appetite.
Our own imagination.
Our own authority.
Our own creativity.
Being chosen to do this for another can feel enormous.
To be wanted can feel like proof that we exist in the way society values.
They see us, and therefore we are.
When we have lost contact with our own source, we take food from whatever table it’s served on and rarely count the cost.
When our Muse is borrowed, our energy becomes organised around the service of others, but if someone asks us what we want, we can draw a blank.
We have spent the gift so freely, and for so long, that we have come to believe we were only ever the gift and never the one entitled to receive it.
Which is the question this module opens.
What happens when we, who have spent years reflecting life outward, turn in the last toward our own spark?
When we stop existing only in relation to other people’s becoming and become a source of life to ourselves?
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The Muse as Archetype
Jung understood archetypes as the deep organising patterns of the psyche, recurring symbolic forms that shape human experience across myth, art, culture and relationship.
The Muse is one of these figures. She gathers wherever longing, beauty, inspiration and desire collect around a person or an image.
Historically, we have imagined her as feminine: the woman who wakes life in another, who quickens his imagination, his eros, his art, his thought.
But the Muse is larger than the feminine image culture handed us.
She is not, in the end, a woman at all.
The Muse is the psyche’s own movement toward aliveness, toward imagination, toward desire, toward becoming.
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She is the force in us that wants.
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Every culture has needed a figure for that force, and most have given it a woman’s face.
This is precisely why being a Muse is complicated.
Because the figure becomes a fate.
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When we're handed the Muse’s face we are required to live the Muse’s life.
To be the carrier of vitality for everyone except ourselves.
The source of inspiration estranged from our own story, the inspiration around a life rather than the one inhabiting it.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Jung would call part of this projection. The Muse is projected onto.
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He argues that we meet our unlived life out in the world, in another person, in their work, in their freedom, in their potential, before we can recognise it as our own.
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The Muse is so admired that it looks less like a wound and more like a virtue.
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So, the Muse is both the most generative figure in the psyche and the most easily imprisoned.
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She wakes life while she herself stays cold.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Signs of the Borrowed Life
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Recurring fantasies that never move into action
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Sudden bursts of desire followed by collapse
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Becoming energised by imagined futures while remaining unchanged practically
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Waiting for permission, certainty or rescue
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Quickening other people’s work while postponing our own
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Intense attraction to people carrying qualities we have not yet lived ourselves.
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Exhaustion around externally designated roles
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Difficulty sustaining desire once it becomes inconvenient
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Confusing longing with doing things.
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Feeling more alive in imagination than incarnation
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Saving your life for ‘later'
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The Blueprint
The psyche requires image.
We move toward what we can imagine. Without image, desire remains diffuse, suspended, perpetually postponed. The unlived life survives precisely because it never becomes concrete enough to ask anything concrete of us.
This is part of the power of the Muse.
The Muse carries image.
Possibility.
A vision of life that feels larger, fuller, more alive than the one we are currently inhabiting.
And psychologically, we need to pull her in.
The psyche gathers around what it can see.
What it can feel.
What it can picture with enough emotional reality to feel the pull towards it.
This is why vague longing or ambition scarcely ever changes a life.
“More freedom.”
“More creativity.”
"More money"
" A better body"
“A different future.”
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The image remains distant enough to feel emotionally moving while staying psychologically safe. It asks for nothing there.
The blueprint stops this vagueness.
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When our lives becomes detailed, what we want starts to move into focus.
The fantasy starts asking questions.
How would we actually live?
What would become non-negotiable?
What would no longer fit?
What would this life require from us?
The blueprint is an attempt to stay with the image our inner Muse provides us with, for long enough for it to become psychologically real, before all the old patterns and defences try to pull us back to our normal lives.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Why Identity and Not Willpower
If we want to take our goals or dreams seriously, we need to focus less on what we should do.
It think about who must we become.
When we’ve kept the life we want in suspension, we can get used to waiting.
For something to change. For an external intervention. For something to happen to us. For someone to rescue us - all the stuff.
We wait for the perfect conditions, the courage, the right time, the right mood, permission.
We wait for a version of ourselves who does not yet exist to arrive and do the difficult thing on our behalf, preferably without upsetting anyone.
But, of course, she does not come.
She was never going to come.
We need to do it ourselves.
Because that is how the Self is made.
A Self is made the way anything living is made, incrementally, and mostly out of sight. We accumulate who we are piece by piece.
Every ordinary action is a small vote cast for one identity over another.
So, when we get up and draw for 20 minutes we make the artist.
When we write at 5am we forge the author.
When we dance, we become the dancer.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Identity is downstream of behaviour.
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We become what we repeatedly do, and we are almost never watching when it happens.
This is why we do not climb toward a large life in a single leap.
The dream sets the direction. Identity is the engine.
Repeated contact with the life inside us builds the capacities required to inhabit it.
It’s really important that we don’t think of identity work as about becoming a completely new person, because that is not what we are doing her. This work is about strengthening the parts of ourselves that are already asking for expression.
The creator.
The leader.
The generator.
The entrepreneur.
The intuitive.
The self that wants more life than it currently permits itself to live.
To do this we may need new skills, but we also need daily repetition, consistency, practice, curiosity, self-compassion, a greater tolerance for discomfort and a greater tolerance for visibility.
This is how the psyche gathers reality around a life.
Not through image and dreaming, but through repeated participation.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Let’s begin…
Take out a large piece of paper.
A notebook. Loose pages. A sketch book.
Something that allows you room. This is important as we are so often trained to reduce our desires before we even fully understand what they are.
So for this exercise:
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Do not make it reasonable
Do not make it efficient
Do not make it practical or polite.
Do not edit your dreams or ideas.
There is nothing wrong with the size of what you want.
Go big first.
Larger than what feels comfortable.
Bigger still…
What is the biggest goal or dream you can have without flinching?
Write it down - until you have a plan it is just wishful thinking.
Flesh out all the details, what it looks like, what it feels like, what is the best case scenario if all goes well and you know you cannot fail.
What would this dream look like if everyone supported you.
If everyone celebrated your success?
Write it out without negotiating it – or paint it, use clippings, materials, old photos, try to do this with your hands rather than creating a Pinterest board.
If it does not feel a little vertiginous, you have not written the real one.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Break your goal into chunks
What needs to be done in 3 years.
One Year.
A month.
This month.
​This month.
This week.
Tomorrow.
Today.
In the next 20 minutes.
Do that.
Add as much detail here as possible. Make it come alive.
Go into the finest detail.
Make subsections
Personal
Relationships
Money Goals
Career Goals
Home Goals
Fitness Goals
Financial Goals
​What experiences do you want to have?
What do you want to build?
What impact or legacy do you want to leave?
Fill in each block with everything you want in these areas, make these idea maps colourful, have fun doing them, add as much as you can, put dates and timelines against each item.
Keep going back to them until the images within them start to feel familiar and very much yours.
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Now make a list of the things you are going to stop tolerating so you can create some space to work on your blueprint.
What support do you need? Can you get creative about this?
How much time can you dedicate to your project?
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Identity Blueprint
Step into the world of who you think you will be when you have done the thing and are living the life you really want.
What would your life look like if it genuinely belonged to you:
How would you speak about your own time? How would you protect it? Use it?
What would become non negotiable?
What would you stop apologising for?
What do you believe about yourself that you do not yet believe?
Get really detailed here.
What do you like when you live this way, what are you wearing, what do you like to eat, how do you move, how do you sleep, how do you brush your teeth, what does the first hour of each day look like and the last hour at night, how do you honour yourself, what TV do you like watching, what books do you read, what music, what self-devotion practices do you have, who do you spend your time with, how do you celebrate you?
What would you make more time for? What would disappear from your life altogether?
We describe our future selves until she is specific enough to be recognised in a crowd.
Remember we forge ourselves through action, so the more details we have the easier this becomes.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The Instinctual Muse
The Instinctual Muse arrives where something in us has started refusing deadness.
We feel her first as irritation then restlessness.
When our tolerance won't hold.
She lives inside a growing inability to continue inhabiting certain situations
Something inside us begins to say No.
A conversation annoys us. A role we once inhabited easily becomes increasingly difficult to pull off.
Our life feels airless. It becomes harder to ignore what we know.
This is one of the difficult truths about Instinctual Muse: whether we like it or not she reorganises things.
Often she asks for change before the rest of the psyche has negotiated the consequences.
She asks for truth before the personality feels prepared to see it.
She demands incarnation rather than endless fantasy.
And because of this, when the Instinctual Muse comes knocking it can feel deeply inconvenient to the identities and relationships built around our previous accommodation.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Reflection
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What currently feels emotionally deadening in your life?
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What have you continued to tolerate long after something in you withdrew consent?
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Where do you repeatedly feel flat, resentful or internally absent?
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What has become harder to pretend about?
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What part of life now feels too small for who you are becoming?
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Where are you still denying your Instinctual Muse?
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What desire keeps returning despite our attempts to dismiss it?
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What currently feels alive, charged, vital or even dangerous?
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What would becoming more fully alive disturb?
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
The Practice
For the next seven days, notice where the Instinctual Muse is nudging you.
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Notice:
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irritation
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exhaustion
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envy
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boredom
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resentment
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excitement
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sudden clarity
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unexpected energy
Stay with these feelings slightly longer than usual.
Become interested and curious about them.
Ask:
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What is this feeling trying to move you toward?
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What life is withdrawing energy from you?
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What has the psyche already stopped consenting to?
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What wants incarnation here?
Choose one small act that honours the Instinctual Muse
A refusal. A beginning. A boundary.
A conversation. A reclaimed hour. A turn toward the image rather than away from it.
The instinctual muse asks something of us.
Participation. Incarnation. Change. Choice.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Practice: The Muse & Self-Intimacy
One of the central tasks of this work is learning how to stay in relationship with ourselves.
Many of us have become highly skilled at leaving our own experience the moment it becomes uncomfortable.
And we all know the signs, exhaustion is pushed through, dread gets reframed as laziness or fear. Irritation becomes guilt. Envy becomes embarrassment.
The idea appears, asks something difficult of us, and we abandon it before it has time to alter our lives.
After a while, this distancing becomes so familiar that we stop recognising it for what it is.
We call it practicality.
Responsibility.
Keeping things together.
But self-intimacy changes our relationship to the psyche.
It asks us to become curious about our inner life rather than immediately correcting or dismissing it.
To recognise that the psyche speaks constantly through feeling, image, fantasy, resistance, longing, deadness, excitement, contraction and desire.
To remember, the psyche is always communicating.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Real change starts to take place when we stop treating these feelings as annoying and start treating them as meaningful.
Feelings become useful signals rather than a sign of malfunction.
Reflection
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What feeling do we dismiss most quickly?
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Which emotion immediately gets explained away?
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What repeatedly drains energy from us?
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What consistently creates unexpected vitality or aliveness?
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What envy keeps returning?
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What fantasy refuses to disappear?
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Where does the psyche repeatedly interrupt the life we are currently living?
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What do we keep trying to silence before fully listening to it?
The Practice
For the next week, choose one emotional response each day and stay with it slightly longer than usual. Approach it with curiosity.
Ask
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What is this feeling trying to show me?
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What life does it move toward?
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What image sits underneath it?
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What has it been trying to say for a very long time?
The aim here is to listen rather than find the perfect answer.
We want to become people who can remain close to our own psychic lives long enough for them to become trustworthy again.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Becoming Your Own Muse
As we do this work, we stop waiting to be chosen and almost without noticing
– start to choose ourselves.
We stop waiting for permission.
For certainty.
For the future version of ourselves who was always going to arrive later and finally begin.
We start treating our own lives as worthy of attention.
Energy returns.
A desire to write again.
To make something.
To change the room we live in.
To dress differently.
To protect time.
To stop handing the best parts of ourselves to everything and everyone except our own becoming.
And this is where our Muse starts to show up for us.
In repeated acts of participation.
We keep the appointment with ourselves.
We stay with the ideas of what we want to do instead of abandoning them immediately.
We create before we feel fully prepared.
We stop treating desire as decoration and start treating it as instruction.
Life begins generating from within rather than through the gaze of other people.
We become more interesting to ourselves.
More connected to what feels alive.
More capable of recognising when energy expands and when it collapses.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
More willing to protect the spark instead of offering it away automatically.
And each day we notice we are moving ever so slightly nearer to the centre of our lives. Something inside us stops depending entirely on reflection for confirmation that we exist.
We become source as well as vessel.
Creator as well as muse. Participant in our own becoming.
Reflection
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What would it mean to treat my own life as worthy of devotion?
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What practices keep me connected to myself?
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What helps me remember who I am?
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What would becoming my own muse look like in everyday life?
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How can I bring in more joy, more magic, more beauty, more of my inner Muse?
The Practice
Choose one act each day that belongs entirely to your own becoming.
Writing, making, resting, walking, learning, singing, creating, protecting time.
Beginning the thing.
Continuing the thing.
Speaking honestly. Choosing differently. Wanting out loud.
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Prioritise this. Protect it.
Our lives become internally powerful through repeated contact with what keeps it alive.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
In the Forest: Foxfire
Foxfire glows from the hidden life inside the forest floor, strange blue-green illumination rising from decay, from unseen growth, from the places where life continues reorganising itself beyond ordinary sight.
For centuries people mistook it for spirit light.
Witch light. Something supernatural moving through the trees. It was thought to represent illusion, tricks and mirages and form a bridge to the spirit world or the fae realm.
Perhaps they were not entirely wrong.
As we journey further into The Forest, I want us to think about the Foxfire within.
An image or a returning desire. An unexpected spark. The Muse calling us forward.
A growing refusal to continue living against ourselves.
Something begins glowing and asks to be followed.
This work is not about becoming endlessly confident, endlessly healed or endlessly certain. It is about learning to recognise the lights that belong to us.
To stay close to what we’re drawn to. To what quickens the soul. To protect the image long enough for it to become life.
To remain in relationship with the parts of ourselves still trying to grow.
The forest asks whether we are willing to stop abandoning the life already trying to emerge from within us.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
“Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.”
James Hillman
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest
Closing
You have spent this time paying attention differently.
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To the body.
To what you want.
To the spaces you occupy.
To what you place on yourself.
To time that is usually filled before you can feel it.
Now step back into your life, and take this with you.
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Let the world come in and meet you.
© Hannah Fraser Moore | The Forest