Jonathan Allin

Just finished my latest painting, "Wildflowers," and framed it up virtually to see how it looks in a living space.

The dynamic between the deep blues and fiery oranges came out exactly how I wanted, bringing a strong energy to a neutral wall. If you are looking for a distinct focal piece, prints are now available on my website—the link is in the comments below.

All prints are highly customizable in terms of sizing and framing to fit your specific space.

Thanks to all of my new "followers" from my friends list. I really appreciate it. 🙏🫵💪

I'm much closer on my finishing what I need to do with Amazon to get my book published! I'm pretty excited about it as it's my first one. It will be available in both Paperback and Kindle.

Every single day was having to learn a new skill and I did all of it myself. It took over a year+ and near the end, as burnout set in, I had my good friend Chris from ChrisEderDesign.com to give me a hand with the cover.

Here's the scoop from the book description...

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Attention has become the rarest form of currency we have, and most of us spend it without noticing where it goes.

If you finish your days feeling perpetually busy yet completely unfulfilled—like you are moving fast but arriving nowhere—you already know the problem. The world is not getting quieter. The pulls on your focus are not shrinking. And willpower alone was never going to be enough.

Focused Fire: The Five-Fires Method to Build Lasting Focus is built around five essential fires, each one a stage in how real focus gets lit, fed, and kept burning long after the initial spark fades.

Ignition: Spotting the scattered mind and lighting the first clear point of intention.
Stoke: Building the small daily habits that keep the flame alive before momentum fades.
Blaze: Entering deep work and linking your focus to something that actually matters.
Forge: Hardening your attention into identity—rituals, environment, and resilience under pressure.
Smolder: The steady glow that outlasts fierce flare-ups and carries your focus across the long seasons of life.

This is not a rigid system imposed from the outside. It is a practical and deeply personal guide to working with attention as it actually behaves—recognizing what scatters it, building what steadies it, and finding your way back without judgment every time you drift.

Blending hard-won personal experience with tools that hold up under real pressure, Focused Fire is for anyone ready to stop reacting to the noise and start building something steadier.
You already know why you should return. Focused Fire just reminds you how.

There is something about the way color moves that can stops people mid-scroll. This piece started as a study in contrast: cool teal against hot pink, a quiet lavender holding its own next to bold orange. The swirls at the center almost breathes.

I keep coming back to how well it reads at scale. Framed large over a neutral sofa, it turns a whole room warmer without saying a word.

New painting up on Pixels! You can customize the frame, matting, size, and more there.

Colourful Flowers. Link in comments below. 🌺👇

You Are Not Breaking Down. You Are Breaking Open

When the life you built no longer fits - and the quiet, necessary work of becoming begins
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There’s a particular kind of suffering that doesn’t come from loss alone — it comes from losing yourself in the loss. From waking up one day and realizing that the person you used to be, the one who knew where they were going and who they were going there as, has quietly left the building.

No fanfare. No formal goodbye. Just an absence where a self used to be.

If you’re in that place right now, I want to say something directly to you: you are not broken. What you’re experiencing isn’t a malfunction. It’s a metamorphosis. And metamorphosis, by design, looks a lot like dissolution before it looks like anything else.

The Self You Thought Was Permanent
Most of us build an identity the way you build a house — slowly, over time, adding rooms as life demands them. A career room. A relationship room. A “this is the kind of person I am” room. We furnish these rooms carefully. We hang pictures on the walls.

And then something happens. A relationship ends. A role falls away. A version of the future you’d been quietly assuming evaporates. And suddenly you’re standing in a house that no longer feels like yours, surrounded by furniture that belongs to someone you’re not sure you still are.

The disorientation of that moment is profound. And it is also, I’d argue, one of the most important thresholds a human being can cross.

Why It Feels Like Falling Apart
When your identity is in transition, the nervous system doesn’t register it as growth. It registers it as threat. The ground you were standing on is gone. Of course it feels like danger. Of course the mind races, catastrophizes, reaches backward for something solid to hold.

This is not weakness. This is the body doing exactly what it was designed to do — signal that something significant is happening and demand that you pay attention.

The mistake most of us make is trying to outrun that signal. We stay busy. We optimize. We look for the fastest route from “lost” back to “put together.” We treat the in-between as a problem to be solved rather than a passage to be moved through.

But the in-between is the work. The not-knowing is where the real becoming happens.

Grief as the Doorway
What makes identity transitions so hard to talk about is that they don’t always look like grief from the outside. There’s no clear event to point to, no casserole-bearing neighbors, no socially legible reason for the weight you’re carrying.

But make no mistake: losing a version of yourself is a real loss. It deserves real mourning.

Grief, in this context, isn’t just about sadness. It’s about the willingness to acknowledge what was real — what mattered, what shaped you — and to feel the full weight of its ending before you reach for what comes next. You can’t leapfrog that process. Or rather, you can try, but the grief will wait. It is patient in a way that we are not.

The people who move through identity transitions with the most grace are rarely the ones who moved the fastest. They’re the ones who were willing to sit with the discomfort long enough to actually hear what it was telling them.

The Body Knows First
Long before the mind catches up, the body is already in the process of letting go. You feel it in the exhaustion that doesn’t lift after a good night’s sleep. In the strange flatness of activities that used to light you up. In the sense that your own life feels, somehow, like a costume that no longer fits.

These aren’t symptoms of something wrong with you. They’re dispatches from a self in the middle of reorganizing.

Learning to listen to those signals — rather than override them — is one of the most important skills available to anyone navigating a major life transition. The body isn’t betraying you. It’s ahead of you. It already knows that something needs to change, and it’s been trying to tell you so in the only language it has.

What You’re Actually Becoming
Here is the strange and difficult gift hidden inside every identity collapse: you get to choose what comes next.

Not immediately. Not while you’re still in the thick of the disorientation. But eventually, when the dust begins to settle and some clarity begins to return, you’ll discover that the old house — the one with all those carefully furnished rooms — had a floor plan that someone else largely designed. A floor plan built from others’ expectations, inherited beliefs, and early decisions made before you had enough information.

The transition you’re in right now is an invitation — unwanted, uncomfortable, and often painful — to build something that actually fits who you are becoming. Not who you were told to be. Not the version of yourself that made other people comfortable. The truer, stranger, more specific version that was always underneath.

That version doesn’t emerge fully formed. It emerges slowly, tentatively, through small acts of honesty and small experiments in living differently. Through noticing what feels alive and what feels like performance. Through the gradual, unglamorous work of learning to trust yourself again.

You Are Not Behind
One of the cruelest stories we tell ourselves during periods of transition is that we are somehow behind — that other people have figured something out that we haven’t, that we should be further along by now, that the confusion and the struggle are evidence of some fundamental inadequacy.

They are not. They are evidence that you are human, that you took your previous life seriously enough to actually grieve its changing shape, and that you are honest enough with yourself to not simply paper over what’s real.

That is not failure. That is integrity.

The work of becoming — real becoming, not the performance of it — is slow. It’s nonlinear. It asks for patience and self-compassion in quantities that feel almost unreasonable. And it is, in the end, the most important work any of us will ever do.

You are not broken. You are in the middle of something. And the fact that it’s hard doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.

It simply means you’re doing it.

I've been very busy writing a lot lately (more on that later), so I took a break yesterday and started painting again. I'm also going to begin building out a storefront—or at least a better one than I currently have—so that I can try to sell my art.

Last year's life theme was about eliminating things in my life that weren't serving me, whereas this year and beyond are about moving toward the things that do.

As I was painting yesterday, it occurred to me how good I felt doing it. I really mentally stepped back and took note of it. The only other things that have ever given me that kind of focus and joy in my life are music and yoga. I do enjoy writing too, but that's a more frontal-lobe type of thinking.

Art, music, and movement are, in a way, very primal. Much less "critical thought" has to occur, and in this world of "shiny object syndrome" and decision fatigue, I'm leaning more toward reptile-brain type thinking lately.

At any rate, I should hopefully have this new work done soon. Here's a glimpse. 🍄

Acquired Skill #1: Learn how to write a book.
Acquired Skill #2: Learn how to edit said book.
Acquired Skill #3: Learn how to format that book.
Acquired Skill #4: ... not entirely sure yet. (cover design, ISBN numbers, more editing, another proofread, marketing... 🤪)

It's a long list of things that I've never done before...

And that's exactly why I'm doing it. Life's much too short to dwell in the would'ves, could'ves, and should'ves. If you want to do something thing, do it.

For me, this book is the physical representation of "a whole lot of not being on social media in this last year of my life", ignoring the news, AKA "things that I can't control and make me ill", writing, and tending to my yoga practice instead.

And I feel much more complete because I made that choice and stuck to it.

Here's the last page and now I have to learn how to assemble all of it. The first time is a challenge, but now I have a new skill that I didn't have a year ago and the next one will be much more fluid.

I'm almost tempted to entirely rewrite this one now that I have a handle on the process, but at some point done has to be better than perfect.

Enjoy your Sunday and the first day of Summer.
🔥

Well, my Sunday afternoon is busy.

I've spent more time in the fear line than I'd like to admit.

It moves fast, that line. Everyone's in it. It feels normal. Safe, even. You tell yourself you're being responsible, practical, mature.

But there's that other booth. And something in you knows.
For me it showed up as a persistent whisper I kept trying to ignore, that the life I was building wasn't quite mine. That I was making choices from anxiety rather than from anything that actually felt true.

The Bhagavad Gita has a word for this: svadharma. Your own path. Your own nature. Not borrowed. Not fear-shaped.

I'm still learning to trust that quieter voice. But I've noticed: every time I have, something opened up. Every time I didn't, something closed down.