Transforming your perspective can be as easy as learning the alphabet Article

Article from ‘The Annual 2016’ Drake University

Healthy Handwriting

Transforming your perspective can be as easy as learning the alphabet

Written By: Jenny Krane

Shannon Poppie never felt like she was reaching her full potential. As a small business owner in the Twin Cities, she found inspiration doing something easy: she changed her handwriting. “[It’s] so simple but it can be so deep if you dive into it,” she says.

The program she used? “Transform Your Life Through Handwriting.” It was created by Vimala Rodgers, a handwriting expert, alphabetician, and psychologist. Rodgers has 30 years of research behind her ‘Vimala alphabet’ – a specific set of healthy formations of cursive lettering. “Transform Your Life Through Handwriting” is a kit that teaches users the meaning behind each letter formation in the Vimala alphabet.

According to Poppie, cursive handwriting, is one of the few things that people can do to engage the right and left hemispheres of the brain in a synchronistic manner. This also happens when playing a musical instrument or eating with chopsticks. Engaging both halves of the brain fosters creativity.

Using graphology and many other resources, Rodgers compiled an alphabet of what she calls “healthy formations.”

Poppie heard about the program two years ago while watching the video “I Can,” created by Louis Hay, a popular figure in metaphysics and personal growth. She researched Rodgers and bought a kit soon after.

“When I read that it could help with self-sabotaging habits and help get over fears, I was very much on board and wanted to dedicate a lot of time to it,” Poppie says.

For this program, learners practice writing two letters at a time for 40 consecutive days. According to Rodgers’ research, it takes 40 days to realign the neurons in your brain and allow the new letter formations to become a habit.

“As I started writing the ligature ‘Sh,’ I felt a difference; my awareness changed, and things were just drawn into my life that I wanted,” Poppie says. “Inspiration and creativity started flowing, and the name ‘The Choice Is Yours’ kept popping up in my head.”

Without yet knowing what a business called The Choice Is Yours would be, Poppie nevertheless reserved the name with the state of Minnesota. While she had previously tried reading other self-help books about finding purpose or passion in her life, nothing sparked inspiration like changing her handwriting.

As Poppie continued the program, she discovered that Rodgers offered a workshop in the spring of 2015, which was right around her own birthday. She flew out to California and was one of eight people in the workshop. There, she developed her ideas for The Choice Is Yours even further, and started the foundation of writing a book on personal growth.

“During the retreat, Vimala told me that I had the writer’s ‘R,’ and that I should start writing chapter titles for a book. So I did,” Poppie says. She wrote 12 chapter titles then, and now she’s completed five.

“By the end of the retreat, I had an idea of what I wanted to do with my business,” Poppie says.

Poppie says she tells everyone she knows about the program, and plans to incorporate the Vimala alphabet into her newly started company, The Choice Is Yours. The Choice Is Yours is now a full-fledged coaching and consulting program dedicated to helping people create positive changes in their lives, mainly through handwriting and other resources.

“To quote Vimala, ‘If you want to see validation in this, then you need to pick up your pen and try,’” Poppie says.