
the Henny Flynn podcast
A space to settle in and listen, and see where the episode takes you. This inspiring, reflective podcast is an invitation to travel deeper: to deepen self-awareness with profound self-compassion. Henny shares insights from her own life, alongside practices that help us connect with our inner wisdom, explore our relationship with change and find a greater sense of flow.
Henny believes we all hold our own answers, so there are no one-size-fits-all solutions here. This is a space to be with what’s true for you, and to grow from there. If you’re drawn to slowing down, listening in, and exploring what it means to live with greater authenticity, this podcast is for you.
Guided by psychology, mindfulness, therapeutic coaching, flow journaling, and everyday compassion, we explore ideas that help us step further into our inner worlds, in order to shape the changes we seek in our outer worlds.
the Henny Flynn podcast
A New Kind of Pause: A piece of quiet (S17E6)
Tap to send me your reflections ♡
This week, I’m sharing a podcast within a podcast...
It's the launch of something I hope you’ll love, that’s been gently forming behind the scenes.
A piece of quiet is a brand new private podcast offering. A weekly pause. A place to return to when life feels full, your heart feels tender, or you simply long for a few minutes of stillness and space.
In this episode, I’ll explain:
- What A piece of quiet is - and how it might support you
- Why I created it - and the practices it’s built on
- How to access it - including a special founding member invitation
…and I’ll share the very first full episode with you.
Each weekly episode includes:
- A calming audio reflection to gently settle your nervous system
- A carefully crafted Flow Journaling prompt to help you reconnect with your own inner wisdom
- A quiet rhythm to anchor your week — with nothing to achieve, no pressure to ‘keep up’
This is a practice of compassion, not perfection. A moment to come home to yourself.
A Piece of Quiet is a private subscription podcast, created especially for this community.
Founding members & listeners to the Henny Flynn podcast receive 20% off their first year.
With love,
Henny
***
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Today I am delighted to share something that has been emerging within me for quite some time. Welcome to the Henny Flynn podcast, the space for deepening self-awareness with profound self-compassion. I'm Henny, I write, coach and speak about how exploring our inner world can transform how we experience our outer world, all founded on a bedrock of self-love. Settle in and listen and see where the episode takes you. It's called A Piece of Quiet and it is a weekly pause, a space where you can come home to yourself, a calming audio with an optional flow journaling prompt. I'm sharing the very first episode with you. It comes right at the end of this episode of the Henny Flynn podcast, and I'm also sharing the introductory episode, the one that explains what it's all about, how you can access it and what you'll receive when you do so. In effect, today you get a podcast within a podcast. I really hope you enjoy listening, a podcast within a podcast. I really hope you enjoy listening, and I would just be so delighted to welcome you into A Piece of Quiet. I think one of the key things as well here is that A Piece of Quiet is designed for those of us who are looking for something more, something a little bit deeper, a little bit calmer, a little bit quieter, and if that's calling to you, then settle in and listen and let's see where it takes you. Hey, my darlings, I am so delighted to be welcoming you to this founding, grounding episode of A Piece of Quiet, and I am so glad you're here. If you've already subscribed, hooray, have a listen. Hopefully it will help you get settled into our time together, and I'm going to share a few reflections about why we're here and how I see this space evolving. And if you haven't yet subscribed, subscribed, this is a chance to hear what it's all about. Just know that you would be so welcome to join, and there is a link in the notes to subscribe and find out more, or at least there will be once I've written it.
Speaker 1:So this is a piece of quiet, a weekly pause just for you, a chance to slow down, to breathe a little more deeply and to listen in to whatever might be ready to speak inside of you. I created it because I had this powerful realization that what I was seeking, what I see so many people seeking, is a space where we can hold ourselves, where we can hold each other, where we can hold the world around us a little more lightly. There's so much happening right now, there's so much news, there's so much noise that it can all feel a little or a lot overwhelming. And holding these things lightly doesn't mean ignoring what's happening or passively bypassing the realities of life, massively bypassing the realities of life. It simply means recognising that when we're calm and centred and compassionately connected with ourselves and with each other, we're more able to see what truly needs our attention and we're more able to tend to that need in the most useful way we can. So, for me, these moments of pausing, they help us tap into that practical compassion that I often talk about, where we're able to reflect and respond to the world without getting, you know, sort of crowded out by our conditioned reactions. You know those old stories or learnt behaviors that are trying to keep us safe and can sometimes get in our way and I say that with so much love, of course.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to email you each new episode as they come out and, depending when you join us, you can always go back and listen or re-listen from the start. You'll find all of the episodes on our dedicated podcast web page with my reflections and that day's journaling prompt, so you might listen with a pen in your hand, ready to journal, or you might listen while you're out, walking or resting that feels nice or even when you're doing the washing up, you know, as a kind of mindful practice, as Thich Nhat Hanh might invite us to do. However these episodes find you, I hope well, my intention is that it feels like a kind companion, a piece of quiet in your week. So, because this is a private podcast, you're not going to find it on apple or spotify, but when you subscribe you will be sent a link with simple instructions for how to add it to your favorite podcast app. And if that all feels too much when it reaches you, just ignore it and listen via the links I send you each week. And you know each episode.
Speaker 1:Each episode is designed to be quiet in its own way and they include a gentle reflection, sometimes simply a mindfulness practice, and sometimes including something drawn from my own journals. This space will evolve as we go and at the end of each one I'll offer a carefully crafted flow journaling prompt, and you'll notice that at the end of each episode I'm going to play the same piece of music. It's Love Forever, which feels rather perfect, and it will play for 10 minutes Now you could use that as your timer for your journaling and it's there if that's useful. I find this approach useful for me. It creates a Pavlovian response in me, so my body and my mind know that it's time to settle and write. And you might find the same or not. Either is OK, just see what works for you. I also want to just touch very briefly on ways to approach the prompts. So if you're already familiar with flow journaling, that is so wonderful and I am beyond excited that this practice has also spoken to you.
Speaker 1:This deceptively simple act of putting pen to paper has informed my own life in so many ways, and when I wrote my first book on journaling In the Flow, I wrote that journaling saved me. It is such a big statement and it still feels so true. So I have a loving, reciprocal relationship with my journal. Maybe that resonates with you too. You know, I see, I believe I feel that there is something incredibly wonderful within each of us, a kind, wise voice, and I believe it's available to us all when we listen deeply, when we choose to hear it to us all, when we listen deeply, when we choose to hear it. And for me, flow journaling is how I connect with that voice.
Speaker 1:Not always, of course, you know. Sometimes my journal feels like nonsense and and that's absolutely okay, you know, if I look back through my own journals that are beside me on the shelves as I sit here speaking with you, I know that there are some pages in there where it's simply me repeating the same sentence again and again, because it was literally all that I had. However, I also know that even those entries are useful because that was what was surfacing within me and, fundamentally, it is always useful to let whatever's surfacing fall onto the page, and this is partly a practice in non-attachment, you know, not being attached to having the perfect outcome, the right outcome, something that makes sense, even, or something that is like full of, you know, divine wisdom. Sometimes we might find that there are aspects of what we write where we go wow, I can't believe I wrote it. And other times we might be like, wow, I can't believe I wrote it. And other times we might be like, wow, I can't believe I wrote it. You know, it's all okay, we're not journaling for something, we're journaling as the practice. So for others, this kind of experience might be found through yoga or meditation or walking in forests or any other number of things, but my sense is that journaling is something we can layer into any practice. So if you're a practitioner and you're curious about how to share the flow journaling approach with your students or clients, please do reach out to me. Knowledge is, after all, power. So to flow journal.
Speaker 1:There are three very simple points of guidance that I think hold true for all of us, though if you're familiar with me talking about this, you will know I am about to say there are no rules. My suggestion or invitation is to write that day's prompt at the top of your page and then simply let the words flow. Don't stop until the music ends or you complete the number of pages you've chosen to write that day. Simply write whatever comes up and then keep writing. And if you notice any judgment or or criticism this is the second point, by the way if you notice any judgment or criticism or doubt coming in, that is okay. Let that be here. There's no need to suppress or ignore it and there's no need to judge the judgment. Simply allow it and if it's useful, write the words. How can I bring more compassion here? I really recommend noting this down at the beginning of your journal because they're such powerful. Um guide rails I'm not even sure if that's quite the right phrase, but like anchor, such a powerful anchor point to to bring us back home. So how can I bring more compassion here and then see what comes? Your wisdom knows the way. And then my third piece of guidance is at the end of your writing close your book, resist the urge to. It can be strong in all of us.
Speaker 1:You might want to go back to that day's entry later on and sometimes, like I said before, our writing reveals some wonderful insights that it's useful to explore. But in general I'd say let the words rest for a while because they've done their work. So for more guidance, I really recommend getting hold of a copy of In the Flow published by Inner Work Project. It is full of useful techniques to explore and it's got plenty more prompts within it, way more than I could possibly share with you in one short teaser trailer episode. Whatever this is is and there is a link. Well, there will be a link in the show notes and you'll I'll also link to letters of love as well. It's a different type of flow journaling practice and it is equally wonderful. And if you're curious to know more. Take a look and you can always message me if you've got any questions at all.
Speaker 1:It also feels important to say that if writing feels like it's not your thing, that is okay and you can use the prompts in other ways. I often meet people who say, oh, I've tried journaling but it's not for me, or I've tried different types of journaling and didn't really like it. I think 99.9% of the time. When someone says that to me and then I talk about how we flow journal and the fact that this is a place of non-judgment and that it is impossible to get it right or wrong and that there are different ways of approaching it, most people begin to see that actually is something that is available to them. Now you might be the 0.1% and that's absolutely fair enough. Or maybe one of these other options might appeal to you if, for example, you really just can't get on with writing for whatever reason. So one option is to create a voice memo journal. You know, get your phone, your phone press record, say the prompt and then just see where your words take you. It can be really liberating just doing this stream of consciousness, talking. It's pretty much what I do with the podcast episodes anyway.
Speaker 1:Um, the another approach is to create a visual response to the prompt. So make marks on paper. And I'm deliberately not saying draw, as so many of us hold old stories from school or childhood that we can't draw, when of course we can all draw, but we might not draw the same as others, and back in the day we were taught to compare ourselves with others. Well, that's not what we're doing here. It is only you and your journal, you and the piece of paper. So, instead of limiting ourselves with thoughts about drawing, we choose to make marks, use colors.
Speaker 1:I love crayons as they feel like they, you know, they sort of consciously tap into the free child within us, and and also I really love how they can be layered to create depth of colour or lightness of colour. And then the last option, if writing isn't your thing, is to take it to the trees. I really love that phrase. I might just have to repeat that phrase Take it to the trees. Sit somewhere you love and speak to a plant or a tree, or maybe your much loved pet, or the birds in the sky or the sky itself. There's no need to record it, simply speak the words that come from deep inside in response to the prompt, I mean, oh gosh, doesn't that sound delicious? I just want to pause there. Just, you know, and in fact you might enjoy mixing up, you know those different approaches. So maybe sometimes you write, maybe sometimes you speak to the sky. It's all good, it's your practice. So you'll hear you know in each episode that I share a relaxation practice and and it's very conscious, partly to give us all this weekly pause, this piece of quiet that I feel is so vital for us all, particularly right now, but I think really at any time.
Speaker 1:But using the relaxation practice before journaling, whatever form that takes, for you can support all of these different techniques and essentially it helps us get out of our heads and into our bodies, because flow journaling is a somatic practice. It is a, you know, it's a physical practice. If we're writing and we're physically using our hand, our arm, our shoulder, you know that so much of our body is actually engaged in in the process of writing. Um, if we're, uh, if we're speaking, we're physically using our mouth. If we're drawing, we're using our hand as well. So you know there is a somatic element to this. You know very strong somatic element, um, and you know, and it's really helpful when we can just very kindly, mindfully, let the mind know that they don't have to be on full alert when we're doing our flow journaling, you know, they can soften, step back a little bit and allow other aspects of ourselves to come through, that wise, kind voice I spoke about before, and remembering that it actually is a practice like anything else, you know, this is something that we continue to do. You know, we don't immediately do a headstand when we start gymnastics at school. We begin slowly and and in the same way we build up our flow journaling practice, although you might be very natural at doing headstands, so who knows, um, so something about like why they come out on a Wednesday.
Speaker 1:So my sense is that we can get to the weekends, we recalibrate, we settle ourselves, we do some lovely things, maybe we bring ourselves back to ourselves in some way. And I think this is true regardless of, you know, whether we have a kind of traditional like nine to five, monday to Friday job, or or if we don't work or we work in a, in a sort of in a different way, because actually, the weekends, psychologically, we know that other people are resting at that time and so therefore, the weekends become collectively important. I've actually done another episode on this in the Henny Flynn podcast, so I'm not going to talk about it too much, but if you're curious you can message me. But anyway, we get to the weekend, we recalibrate, we settle ourselves and then monday arrives and we're back in the mix. So this is a chance to step out of the melee for a moment, to take your weekly pause, to find your piece of quiet and maybe the rest of the week feels a little easier somehow. Or, of course, you can save up your episodes for the weekends. You know, whatever it's your practice, you do it in the best way for you.
Speaker 1:The main thing is that this is a soft landing place, a place of no requirements. If you choose not to journal to every prompt I share, that's okay. You'll still get the value of these precious moments with yourself. And the journaling isn't the main event really. The main event is tuning in, settling and allowing yourself to come right back into your body and really tend to yourself with endless tenderness. And I'm already noticing the benefits for me in creating this space, and I really can't wait for this energy, this feeling of deep inner and outer connection to begin rippling to and fro between us and between everyone who joins our beautiful community.
Speaker 1:And then, lastly, I'd love to hear your reflections and thoughts. You know you can share what comes up directly with me. Just reply to the email that I send you for that week's episode. I'll read them all and I'll do my best to answer. Your message may inspire a theme or maybe one of the prompts, so please do keep them coming. And if you'd like to share reflections with the wider community, you can use the tap to share link at the top of the show notes, so these will then be shared on the podcast website and you can include your name, or you can keep it completely anonymous if you prefer. So it's entirely up to you. So that's it.
Speaker 1:Here we are in this moment together, a piece of quiet, a weekly pause just for you and me and all of us. I want to thank you from the centre of my heart for being here. It feels utterly joyful to be creating and sharing this space with you and I look forward to writing with you, to being quiet with you, with love and a hug and a wave. So if you'd like to keep listening and hear the very first episode of A Piece of Quiet, then please do this quiet movement toward a more peaceful way of being, a gentler way of being a moment to pause each week in our own time, in our own space, and knowing that we're together in that practice, then you are so warmly welcomed. You can subscribe from my website if you're part of the email list. Use the links in the emails that I send about this and you'll get the welcome offer. That is just for those who are the founding members of this beautiful gentle, powerful, beautiful gentle, powerful, peaceful space. And I'm going to hand you over now to A Piece of Quiet, episode one hey, my darlings.
Speaker 1:And so here we are, ready to begin, ready to settle into a piece of quiet, a place for rest, restoration, relaxation and calm. I'll give you a moment just to settle your body, maybe to press pause on the announcements and alerts that there might be on your phone or your computer, depending on where you're listening, to get your body into as comfortable a position as you can. You know whatever feels available for you right now. Maybe you're walking, maybe it's about slowing your pace and really feeling your feet on the ground, kissing the earth, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say. Maybe you're sitting, like I am, in a chair by a desk, and maybe you can soften your shoulders, allow your arms, your hands to rest, you know, lightly, but with weight in your lap, your feet flat on the ground. Maybe you're able to lie down. If we've been connected for a while, you'll know that's my favorite thing is to lie down, perhaps even with a blanket or something pulled over you, just so that you can get super comfortable, even more cosy.
Speaker 1:So whatever it is that works for you Listening in and responding to what your body needs, gently closing your eyes or softening your gaze so you're not focused on any one thing. Your gaze is soft and wide. Really, it's about allowing yourself to settle in the best way that you can in the environment that you're in right now and allowing your breath to settle. Let's breathe in and out through the nose, if that's available for you today, and just feel how it is. Maybe it's possible to feel each breath as a gift, as a delicious sense of movement within your body, a means of connecting with your body in whatever way that resonates with you, simply breathing. And if there are thoughts that nudge against you, that's okay. Thank them for being here and let them know it's okay for them to pass by.
Speaker 1:For now, keep returning attention to the breath. Maybe there are noises, sounds that are pulling at your attention. That's okay. We can notice the sound without following it, without labelling it, and return attention to the breath and just feeling into how your body feels right now. Is there any softness here, a sense of peace, maybe things feel a little quieter? So then, the invitation is to take a deeper breath in through the nose, really feeling the chest, maybe the belly, expand as a sigh, and, with your eyes still closed, allow yourself to thank yourself for this pause, this piece of quiet, and softly blink, open your eyes to a gentle downward gaze, and if you're choosing to write right now, to journal, then get your book and your pen, and I'm going to play a piece of music for eight or nine minutes that will accompany you as you write, if that's useful for you, and when the music ends, put down your pen, close your book and your work is done.
Speaker 1:And the prompt today is as I begin to write, I see. As I begin to write, I see. And this prompt is included in the notes for this episode, so you can always return to it. You don't even have to listen. You can just come straight to the prompt if that's useful for you and if anything arises from your writing that you'd like to share, then you can always message me. And again, my email is in the notes. So I'll see you next week for another piece of quiet, sending love and a hug and a wave way, thank you. Thank you, the world is full of love and kindness no-transcript.