Welcome to Elise Photini’s online home where you can find all her latest news and writing or speaking releases along with fun reader previews, and more about her personal journey from desperate emptiness to thriving and effective single mom and ultimately ever-expanding wholeness.
Who is Elise Photini?
Elise Photini is a Registered Nurse, an Eastern Orthodox Christian convert, and most importantly a woman approaching her 5th decade, who has experienced divorce three times among other losses and traumas, who is now on her 3rd career (at least), and who has always loved writing, public speaking and articulating big ideas into actionable bites. After years of marketing writing, website publishing, and virtual training leadership for online entrepreneurs Elise has shifted to lead her own intimate and powerful groups as well as her private coaching clientele to “writing your own happy ending”. Elise’s favorite hobbies, aside from writing and doodling everywhere and anywhere are playing with her laying hens, wrangling plants indoors and out and cheering on her horse-crazy teen girls and Boy Scout middle-school aged son.
Nurse, Mom, Author, Writer, Speaker
After setting writing and speaking assignments to the side in order to attend nursing school and establish herself as a home health RN, as well as to invest in her own healing practices and habits, Elise Photini was called back into the inspiring narrative writing and speaking arena when Summer Kinard at Park End Books tapped her to write a chapter in “The Grace Of Being There.” The experience of praying through writing that chapter re-awakened Elise’s love of writing as well as bringing her to a personal encounter with Saint Sophia and her Daughters, Saints Faith, Hope and Love.
Why Elise and Why now?
I know the struggle to believe hope exists is real because I’ve spent more time on a knifes edge between hope and despair than anywhere else in my lifetime. The Light shared with me through other’s experiences, strength and hope via books (my first view of life outside my very isolated fundamentalist childhood), men and women speaking in 12-step meetings (my first glimpse of broken people actively healing) and countless pastors, priests, and leaders (in sermons, podcasts, homilies, books) prepared the soil of my heart to eventually bring forth the fruit of my own freedom. From this mixture of inspiration and challenge has come my own developing voice writing and speaking my freedom out of nothing into existence. No longer are despair or hope my only options.
So I share via whatever open-doors show up in front of me–sometimes on radio, by video, podcasts or in person, other times by writing “in my secret place” or here in front of you’all or for bigger projects–my message is always the same: “Come and see the Man who told me everything I ever did…and who offered me Living Water!” Just as my journey is full of detours and dead ends yet is ultimately ever growing in Wholeness I know that each of my listeners has a unique journey and I find that as we write them out, speak them out, and uncover whatever skeletons or hero’s we’ve been hiding from that we all have the Power and Peace to combine our efforts with the Creator to “write our way to freedom!”
All this to say…
The struggle to speak Hope more clearly, and the battle to write Peace more powerfully, is worth all the stumbling I do along the way.