ABOUT MINDFULIST
If you've entered "the second half" you're probably like most of us: you sense that another way of living and working is possible. One that is more intentional, spacious, and also more honest. But life fills quickly, and what you long for gets easy to postpone.
You have ideas you've carried for years without the conditions to bring them into form. Sometimes you know what you want to create or change, but you have a hard time deciding how to begin. Other times, you just need room to pause, reflect, and look again.
The work is there alongside the stories, projects, and questions you haven't had time to sit with. It's all waiting for the right container.
Mindfulist gives you that space. You'll find here practices you can return to, good company that will keep you focused, and the space that will help you move forward in a way that feels meaningful.
To do that, we focus on exploring the eight territories of human life: Creativity, Work, Body, Living, Relating, Story, Psyche, and Thresholds through essays, reflections, guided practices, and gatherings.
“After participating in Cigdem's programs, my way of thinking about the challenges and obstacles in my life has shifted. I’ve developed a new mental approach and attitude to deal with them. Each of her offers is an opportunity to put ourselves first for a change.”
Leeray Costa, Cultural Anthropologist & Professor
How we work and create is based on following five simple but useful five steps. We didn't come up with these steps to propose a system, a set of rules, or recipes. Instead, we think of them as a way of returning: to ourselves, and to what's asking to take form in this chapter of our creative lives. Let's take a look.
Every creative act begins in the middle of something: at a threshold, inside a question, alongside a tangle you haven't yet sorted. There's no need to prepare or resolve anything first. You begin from the life you're already living, from your own essence, with what you've got.
Before anything takes form outwardly, a shift happens within. Attention turns inward. You pause and notice. You ask questions that are honest rather than strategic. These shifts you experience are subtle, but they attune everything that follows.
Good work needs space to think, to rest, and to come back to. Everything feels less rigid and doable when you clear a little room in your day (and in your mind). What's been waiting finds fresh air.
There's no need to rush or carry everything at once. What counts is the next step you actually take. Intention keeps your onward movement aligned, allowing your energy to gather around what matters most, rather than scattering across too many directions.
When you move in your own way and at your own pace, your work begins to resemble who you really are. Not as a shortcut, but as a good fit. How you work and create feels more authentic and coherent. And you enjoy yourself more.
“This course provides a strong structure, a container for personal inquiry at a deep soul level. Writing and journaling using this unique program, I have a new understanding of the facets of my personality. This has allowed me to align the inside and outside, the introvert and extrovert, the personal and public, in a whole new way.”
Kathleen O’Brien, Artist & Designer
Founded in 2013 by writer, publisher, and consultant Cigdem Kobu, Mindfulist lives at the intersection of creativity, presence, clarity, making, and belonging. Nine beacons guide how we live, work, create, and connect. With ourselves and each other.
Presence brings you into contact with what's here and now. That helps you gather and focus your attention. And when you do that, meaningful work begins.
When things become crowded (inside your head or outside in your environment) seeing and noticing things becomes harder. Simplicity is important because it clears the field and lets you perceive what matters to you the most.
Good work asks for telling the truth about what you want, what you resist, and what you're not ready to name yet. Honesty keeps your work alive.
Integrity is a quality of wholeness that appears when what you do reflects who you are. That alignment keeps your work from turning into some sort of performance you stage.
Curiosity makes your work spacious and interesting. Simple questions often lead somewhere unexpected, and the resulting openness may lead to real change.
Whether you're writing, making things, or building a business, craft matters. And craft asks for patience as well as respect (for the process and for the person doing it).
Not everything deserves equal attention. Discernment is the ability to tell what's yours and what isn't. It's about distinguishing knowing what's ready for the next step and what's not. It's one of the most underestimated yet necessary skills for creatives.
You do more wholehearted work when someone who gets you witnesses how you're bringing something to life. Being in the presence of others, listening to them, sharing generously, creating alongside them, and collaborating changes how we grow and how we keep going as humans and creatives.
We consider depth as a value in itself. It't the opposite of what's superficial. We like to sit and stay with things. We try to go under the surface and pay enough attention. We resist the pull toward the quick and the easy as much as possible.
“Everything Cigdem offers is thorough, well-crafted, and with a sense of completeness. As a facilitator, she complements her evoking writing with a gentle presence, fluff-free.”
Monicka Clio Sakki, Artist & Creativity Mentor
Mindfulist is not a modality. Rather, it's an opening that's shaped by listening, timing, awareness, right relationship, and by the kind of work that favors presence over performance.
Our goal isn't to advance or to become a better version of ourselves. Instead, we want to return to the self that was already there. The self before the noise, before the drift. And before life filled up with everything except what mattered. Our goal is to notice and to stay awake inside ordinary life.
What we do our best to offer our readers and members is a calm, structured way to create and make decisions without pressure, formulas, hustling, or comparison. We want you to have good, useful tools as well as a place where you can hear your own voice clearly again.
Our approach involves inquiry, empathy, and story. These are the three main ways of paying attention that form every tool, course, and gathering we design. We refrain from suggesting answers. Instead, we try to help you see your own work more clearly. We want you to find out for yourself what needs observation, what's ready to grow, and what may no longer belong.
At the heart of this work is a simple commitment: to know yourself. Not as an idea or identity, but as a kind of unfurling and emerging through attention. By noticing how you respond, where you resist, and what persists in the background. From that understanding, clearer choices begin to appear.
A Mindfulist is not someone who is mindful. Attention, for a Mindfulist, is a practice. Even a way of being.
For us, this name isn't a claim, but a commitment. A way of being in the world. We're not interested in self-improvement. What we aim for is remembering who we are.
Consider this work a doorway. It certainly is not a prescription. It leaves space for curiosity, experimentation, and the natural shifts that come with creative life. However you arrive, you'll find room to move at your own pace, toward what calls you.
You measure a circle, beginning anywhere. Feel free to step in and explore any of the following eight territories and topics that call to you. Each includes essays, audio, and resources you can return to. Take your time. Look around. See what captures your attention. Our new website is a work in progress. New pieces are added daily.
Creativity is the territory of making: the full range of bringing things into form, from serious craft to childlike play without purpose. Here you’ll find resources on creative process, resistance, flow, experimenting, and the inner work that accompanies any act of bringing something into being. If you're in the middle of a project, circling one, or simply desiring to tend your creative life with more intention, this is your ground.
Work is where purpose meets the practical: how we shape what we do, sustain it, and bring it into alignment with what we value. This section gathers resources on direction, livelihood, commerce, giving and taking, money, and the question of how to build a creative life that holds as it evolves. If you're figuring out what your work is, who you want to serve, or how to do it without losing yourself in the process, begin here.
The physical body is the container through which we experience life. It's the ultimate instrument we have. Without it, nothing gets made. This section includes resources on physical life, aging, rest, sensation, what it means to inhabit a body that's always changing, and somatic practices that support our physical being. If you've been living too much in your head, or if your body has been asking for more attention than you've been able to give it, start here.
Living holds the everyday: the spaces you inhabit, the sanctuaries you create, and the texture of ordinary life when it's tended with care. This section has resources on home, place, our relationship with nature and planet, and the connection between our outer environment and inner state. If you're drawn to the idea that how you arrange your life, your spaces, and how you connect with the world that surrounds you is itself a creative (and spiritual) act, explore here.
Relating holds the territory of human bonds: love, friendship, family, community, and the experience of belonging. This section includes resources on how we show up for others, how others shape us, and what it means to be in genuine contact with another being. If connection feels strained, or if you are thinking about the quality of your relationships, this is your place.
Story is how we listen—to ourselves and others, and how we make sense of our lived experience. It's how we dream up authentic and meaningful ways of being in the world. This section includes resources on narrative, voice, and the work of finding language for telling and expressing what matters whether that’s a book, a body of work, or simply your own life. If you're drawn to language as a way of thinking, remembering, or speaking your truth without courage and clarity, begin here.
Psyche is the territory of inner life: self-knowledge, personality, temperament, and the deeper patterns that shape how we see and move through the world. Here you’ll find resources on identity, the examined life, tales, mythical imagination, and the archetypal forces that operate beneath the surface of everyday experience. If you're trying to understand yourself more honestly, or if you sense there is more to your inner life than you’ve had language for, this is where to look.
Thresholds holds the significant passages: change, loss, renewal, and the liminal spaces where one chapter has ended and the next has not taken shape yet. This section gathers resources on the crossings that mark a life: the in-between states when we're most present, most alive, most vulnerable, and human, the transitions that ask something of us, and the meaning that can be found on the other side. Wherever you are in the other seven, there are moments of crossing. If you're navigating a shift, or standing at an edge you haven’t named yet, start here.
If something here has resonated as you read this page, you’re welcome to stay. You don’t need to decide anything yet. Start with signing up for The Midweek Pause. It's a short letter that arrives each Wednesday, before the rest of the week takes over. It includes a reflection, a question, a writing prompt, and always something worth sitting with. It touches on creative life, and how we want to make meaning and find joy as we live and work in the second half. It's a good place to begin.
When you subscribe, you’ll also receive Twenty-One Sparks: A Guided Journal for Beginning Again. It's a downloadable journal that consists of twenty-one sections including quotes, reflections, and prompts. You can use return to it whenever you need to find your way back to your self. It's free for our subscribers.
"This is one of the best newsletters I’ve had in a long time. Thank you!”
— J. HUNTER, Writer
WHEN YOU WANT MORE
Everyone has access to the free essays, writing prompts, interviews, and The Wayfinding Journal. For creatives and practitioners who are ready for more, a paid membership unlocks The Mindfulist Practice.
(SOLO)
Premium Tools & Resources
Full access to the member library: monthly Creative Companions, weekly practice material, unabridged interviews, audio meditations, field guides, playbooks, early access to new offerings, generous discounts on courses, workshops, and other products, surprise bonuses. No community.
(CONNECTED)
Everything + Community
Everything in The Inglenook, plus the opportunity to experience the weekly practice in the company of kindred spirits on a similar path, a written real-time conversation with the month's guest, member-led interest clubs, first dibs on small writing groups and story circles.
"It's not what you produce as you write that's important; it's who you become as you write that's important.”
— LOUISE DESALVO