Tessa Hillman lives in a hamlet outside Lostwithiel with her husband and two retrievers , where she spends her retirement enjoying her garden, and writing and publishing books.
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I love travel memoirs, and I have read a number of mystical/ spiritual seeker books over the years.
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I always loved writing essays as a teenager, but never considered writing as a career.
My first collection of stories came at a time of great spiritual frustration, in that I wanted to be able to understand and teach about the spiritual aspects of yoga, and I had no experience and no information about these things. I had taught yoga for 15 years and had a very healthy body as a result, but spiritually I felt lost. I threw up a prayer for help to God just in case ‘someone’ might be listening to me. The guru appeared in my head, and after a brief telling off - he told me that I shouldn’t be teaching my students about spiritual matters unless they were following the ‘rules of life’, he gave me a little story about himself as a very young child, learning how not to be greedy and selfish. So it wasn’t a question of deciding to write them, I was not and never had been a writer. It was a matter of listening to and writing down the spiritual dictation that came to me every time I asked for a story. The first stories were rather like the Biblical Ten Commandments, they were about the Yoga Rules of Life – non violence, truth, non greed, non stealing, and so on. I loved them, they made me smile and think, and that’s what they do for my students and readers.
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My writing spot is where ever I can find a quiet corner of the house – it’s quite a big house with large rooms, so in the summer it might be the conservatory, or the sitting room, which has a glorious view over the fields and woods. In the winter our lives shrink down to the big kitchen where everything happens, dogs live in it, husband has his office in it, it’s always cosy, but often distracting. That’s when I go and sit in the bed in the spare room, under a duvet for warmth. It’s very comfy and I get good work done there. If I need more attractive surroundings, I can put the fan heater on in the conservatory, and have it playing beneath my chair! It’s like Kew garden’s glass house in the winter, filled with angel’s trumpets (Brugmansia), forest cacti and orchids. I love to be in there but my climate change awareness prevents me from heating it up very often. It’s the spare bedroom for me most of the time in the winter, or the kitchen if my husband is outside, and if the weather is dry, he’s normally working outside!
My first husband was Cornish. We bought our first house on the edge of Bodmin Moor in our 20s, and I have been under the Cornish spell ever since – for 45 years now.
I love the fact that my writing is channelled, and whenever I ask in meditation, for a story on a specific subject, I get one. It always amazes me how this works. All I need is the subject matter, and a story arrives. The other thing I need of course is the self-discipline to get on and write. I write for a purpose, and over the years I have contributed to educational schemes that have world-wide distribution.
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I’m currently working on my own memoir, because I’m still quite taken aback by the amazing things that happened to me, once I decided to embark on a spiritual seeker’s path at the age of 43. Over the years things that could not possibly be explained by ‘rationality’, but appear to be from ‘beyond this realm’ have completely changed my life – and very much for the better, too. I’m hoping to encourage people to reach out to a more spiritual existence. It makes so much more possible in this world, and God knows, we need that right now, with a pandemic and climate change snapping at our heels. I do have more stories in the pipeline for another two new books that I will take from my Yoga Stories blog of over 100 stories. You can sample them in advance should you wish to!I have now set up a publishing house, Top of the Village Publishing, an exciting development. My audiobook for ‘Yoga Stories from Guru Guptananda’ is currently available (from July 2022) on there, initially for free, to encourage young people and yoga teachers to read the books, which will open a wonderful new avenue in their lives.
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My cooking is inspired by a person who is now in spirit, and who came back to advise me by way of thanking me for helping her when she was elderly and I was a teenager. It’s an interesting story which will be in my memoir. My meals are extremely varied, I never cook the same thing twice, and she must have been a very good cook, because the food I make is so tasty!
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