In The Arms of Angels: A Healing Prayer for those Raped by Hamas You are now in the arms of angels. Soldiers who touched the most sacred part of your body did nothing to your soul. The holy breath of angels remained with you who were tortured and left naked by Hamas the seventh of October. Angels bless all who have been raped. Fourteen year old girls splayed open before they were killed; Every woman whose body has been plundered when rape has been a weapon of war. Let us build a mikvah wide enough for all, for we are one body. The only hands that will touch you now will be the hands of angels. Angels will guard you with their wings. No soldier No terrorist will ever claim a woman’s beauty as his own. Women’s beauty belongs to Shechinah. Let every child be safe. Archangel Michael, protect them. Archangel Raphael, heal them. Let beauty be honored as a treasure so rare it will only be touched by someone who has bathed in the waters of prayer. Let us be made holy again by remembering each other’s names. We were all born from the breath of G-d, created from the dust of stars. Whatever we do together until the end of time began as a holy act of creation. Let us never again forget that we were not born for war. We were born from love and for love. We were born to be a blessing to each other to this earth. Mikvah: in Judaism a pool of natural water in which one bathes for the restoration of ritual purity. Shechinah: Hebrew name for the feminine indwelling presence of the Divine. … [Read more...]
Writing to Come Home
A Crisis of Forgetting: An Invitation to Remember Through Writing The Crisis of Forgetting The crisis facing our Earth is a crisis of forgetting. Writing can be a way to remember. Writing can be a way to come home. The epidemics of overwhelm, burnout, so many of our chronic illnesses, and despair, are crises of forgetting. We would not be alive without the trees that help us breathe, without the water that cleanses and nourishes our blood, without air that we breathe every day. Yet most of us live without remembering our essential interconnection with the web of life, of which we are a part. Ice is disappearing. Forests are suffering. Storms and droughts are reshaping our world. Still, we live as if it doesn’t matter. I believe you know what’s at stake in our world, but you might feel helpless to do anything about it. My invitation to you, through an earth-centered, body-centered, sacred writing practice is to help you remember. Remember your connection with the earth. Remember your connection with your own body. Remember your connection with what’s sacred. Remember your connection with your self. Creative expression is as ancient as human culture. We have always needed a way to express our connection with what’s ineffable. In this way, a creative writing practice can be central to your own practice of coming home. Writing will help you remember who you are. But in our world today, it’s not enough to know who you are as an individual living in a vacuum. It’s essential that you remember your place in the web of life. Why? Listening to the Earth Nature is begging us to remember. The rivers, drenched with sewage and pesticides, are crying out to us. The ice caps, melting, causing rising sea levels and flooding, are crying out to us. The pelicans, covered with oil from the latest oil spill, are calling out to us. How will we respond? How can a sacred writing practice help? Pause now. Take a deep breath. Feel your feet under you, and bring one hand to rest on your heart. Breathe in, feeling the connection between your hand and your heart. Let your own heart beat soothe you, calm you, remind you that you’re safe. I want to acknowledge the crisis unfolding on our Earth, because I feel that it’s the elephant in the living room now—the unspoken, looming problem that most of us don’t know how to face. But I’m not writing this to overwhelm you, or to add to your despair. I’m neither a scientist nor a pessimist. I am a woman in love with the natural world and my life’s work has been to listen to the earth. And the trees. And rivers and streams. And the rocks at the river’s edge. The blue heron who stands on one leg at dawn. The bald eagle nesting on the branch of the oak tree in winter, scanning an ice-covered river below, for fish. These trees, rivers, stones and birds need us to remember our connection to them. Their call to me has been a kind of prayer. These words are my prayer back. Many things are needed now, to heal our relationship with the Earth. The first step, though, of any action, is to listen. Listen to the cries of the earth, the cries of your soul, the cries of your heart. Writing as a Way Home If you are homesick for your own soul, your soul is also homesick for you. If you long to write as a way to come home to your self, writing also longs for you. This homecoming, in our world, will always have frayed edges, if we continue to forget the home that Earth is for us. The soul needs the body and the body needs the earth. When we forget, as deeply as our species has, to get us to this moment of planetary crisis—we need to return to the Root. The root of what we need to remember, and why. Our origins. Our source. This is the power of prayer. When we turn to prayer in the way I’m suggesting here, it’s the ultimate act of homecoming. Not the home of religion, but the home of your soul. Timeless, eternal, one with all of life. Writing is a practice of remembering, even as it allows you to discover, create, explore and understand. Those things are possible because first, you remembered the truth about who you are: you are a person capable of writing, capable of creating worlds. Prayer is a practice of remembering. To pray, through writing, allows you to remember the deepest threads that bind this life together. It’s those deepest threads that we need to find now, to repair the torn fabric of our world. Returning to Our Origins I invite you here, to start again. To return to your origins in the body of this earth. To return to your origins in the vastness of the heavens. To recall your brothers in the massive bodies of whales. To recall your sisters in the sleek silver bodies of dolphins. To know we are one body, praying for each other with every breath. To know we are one spirit, writing each other’s prayers with every word. To reclaim our love for each other, we begin by loving ourselves. And know that in loving your own life, you do so for the sake of all life. Life on earth needs you to come home to yourself, through writing and prayer—through writing as prayer. You will learn here to care for yourself as you would care for the earth. And to care for the earth as a part of yourself. Each act of writing, each practice of self-care, is done for your own sake, on behalf of the whole. For your own sake, as a part of the whole. So that you learn that you are not just “you.” You are we. We are all that is. The dolphin’s cry is your cry. The melting ice, your tears. The impulse to pray is older than organized religion.We all need it to restore the sacred to every aspect of our life.Because that is what will allow us to make choices on behalf of the whole. Your writing practice will nourish you, teach you, remind you, and heal you—even as it nourishes and heals your connection with life itself. Every action taken with awareness of the sacred thread connecting all life will help us remember who we are. When we remember who we are we know what actions to take on behalf of our own lives, and all life. The Earth’s Call The forests, the oceans, the mountains, and the streams have not forgotten. They are asking us to remember. Their life on this earth is a prayer to us, to come home. … [Read more...]
On Writing a Healing Scroll
Intro This piece is from my book-in-progress and tells the story of how illness, the natural world, and the Amazon rainforest shaped my healing path. On Writing a Healing Scroll There are cultures where prayer is seen to be a necessary food for the gods. Where words—the words of writers, the words of those who talk to spirits, or to spirit, or who talk from the place of spirit dwelling within them—are seen to be food, sustenance for the gods, or God, the One who creates our world. There are cultures where prayer is a form of daily practice that must be done three, four, five times a day or more. Facing Jerusalem, facing Mecca, facing the sun: prayer, honoring the sacred, is seen as necessary, for the world to go on. There are cultures where the ill are seen as messengers, as chosen for a life of the spirit, chosen perhaps to become shamans, people who travel between the worlds for the purpose of healing. Part of the training of the shaman is often a time of breakdown, dissolution, a separation from the ordinary world where most people live. Only certain foods can be consumed. The normal tasks of daily life, including the usual relationship to time, become impossible, while the shaman in training passes through many stages of breakdown, a rending apart of the fabric of her being. In Ethiopia, a person afflicted with an illness engages in a process of making a healing scroll. The scroll is made in collaboration with a cleric, whose role is to listen to the story of the one facing the illness. In my tradition, the Jewish tradition, the text we read every week is a scroll. In order to be properly clothed to approach this scroll, one wears a prayer shawl, a Tallit. I find that my illness is both text and shawl: the scroll I read and the scroll I write, and also, the prayer shawl I wrap around my body to prepare for my daily work. In reading the text of my illness, in writing the story of my life as an act that might heal me, I am aware, again and again, of how the body is not wrong in its relentless litany of symptoms. How the body always has something to say. How what is wrong, if something is wrong, is the culture in which we live. In our culture, the body is objectified and trivialized, anything but heeded. If I lived in Ethiopia and were making my illness into a story that would be wrapped around my body to help me heal, I would say first to the cleric, to the one who was assisting by listening and witnessing, “Help me to pray, friend. Help me to make of my story good food for the gods.” Sunderland, Massachusetts to Peru, 1992 “What is healing but a shift in perspective?” —Mark Doty I am being stripped down so that some other way of being can be revealed. I take a trip to the center of the world. I wear a mask at the airport, use oxygen on the plane, and find myself in the Amazon rainforest swimming with pink dolphins. I choose to become a sensitive to all of life. I did not choose consciously to be so chemically sensitive. I can't change my body to become something other than what it is. I can change my relationship to life. My relationship to all of life—my relationship to life itself—my relationship to life on Earth becomes the focus of my days. All around me I see the evidence of a broken relationship with life on Earth. Most people in modern culture aren't even aware that they have a relationship with the Earth. For the indigenous, this relationship is the heart of life. When I became too sensitive to take part in the structures and edifices of the modern world, I turned to the world outside my door. The path that led to the river, across the street from my house in Sunderland, took me into the world of oak trees and willow, blue heron and bald eagle— I leaned my face into the ridged bark of a maple, rested my hand against the trunk of an oak— In this world symptoms did not rule me. In this world the language that mattered was touch. I needed to be held by something that would not cause me harm—to walk in a world where I did not have to be constantly on guard. I was soothed, comforted and embraced when I walked in this place. The river bank, the grove of trees that lived there, became my companions, my friends, the company I sought. I knew in my bones that what we were doing to the Earth we were doing to our own bodies. I gathered prayers in my hands to carry home. My lungs were sick, quite often. Infections came with fevers and coughs that wouldn't go away. I read about the ozone being depleted, the rising numbers of childhood asthma in cities with the highest levels of pollution. In college and in my twenties I was a political activist, protesting nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons. In my thirties, the protest became more personal but I had no energy to march in the streets. Fatigue shaped my days. My whole life became a kind of protest. I became Cassandra: the woman with a message no one wanted to hear. We are dying. We are killing our world. All our lives are at stake, just not as obviously as mine. Cancer comes from the same things that cause chemical sensitivities. It seemed to matter so much—how I saw the world. No one listened. I kept going back to the trees. I had a dream one day while in a workshop for people living with serious illness: a dream of pink dolphins. A few months after this dream, I got a brochure in the mail from a woman who leads canoe trips for women around the world. She was leading a trip in the Amazon in Peru where there were pink river dolphins. I had never heard of pink river dolphins but I knew I had to go. I went for the dolphins and also because the Amazon is called the lungs of the world and we were cutting down the great trees of the jungle at an alarming rate. I went out of solidarity and wanting to protest. What I found there was not what I expected at all. Yes, I saw clear cuts that broke my heart. But what I found mattered more and stayed with me and healed my heart in ways I could never have imagined— All that I knew and loved about trees and rivers was magnified in the Amazon. The Connecticut River was outside my door in Massachusetts. I came to know the oaks and willows at its banks. In the jungle I was in the center of the world. A primordial life force hummed and buzzed in the air. Countless tree frogs, blue morpho butterflies, bright orange-winged parrots, a canopy of so many shades of green—the river itself—the dolphins. Life itself was alive and well here, right beside the blackened stumps of the trees that had been cut down. Unlike the wasteland I expected to see, my eyes instead were filled with the evidence of life unspoiled. Yes, damage was being done. But the life force itself was stronger than what was being destroyed. This is what my body responded to. Joy was palpable for me when I watched the pink river dolphins leap out of the water and spin back in. Joy filled every cell in my body when I slipped into the water beside them. I had forgotten about joy—this kind of joy. My best friend Linda had died, my mother was someone I could not recognize; my own life had become a study of loss and survival, letting go and caution. But life is more than that. Only I had not had a way in. I loved the trees outside my door at home, but they were refuge more than celebration; solace more than ebullience. I couldn't stop the joy when I saw the dolphins or swam in the water beside them. If joy still existed, if joy and bliss were the essence of life itself, I knew there was something resilient at the bottom of this environmental crisis I seemed to be embodying. Cassandra crying out in warning was one part of the story but not a place to stay. Life wants to be lived and despair is not enough to live on. Despair still filled my days and seeped into my nights but the Amazon changed the conversation inside me. Hope had a place at the table even if I didn't always have a place at the table beside her. Hope was no longer foreign to me. I tasted it in the air in the rainforest. Life was too strong to be destroyed, even when trees were cut down, even when lives were lost. Life itself was indestructible and worth living for. Green and beautiful and luminous. A light filled my heart when I left the Amazon that had not been there before. I was still sick but I was finding my way back to life. Even now I rest my heart on the heart of the Earth and find myself there, in the Amazon, on the banks of the river listening to the pink river dolphins leaping and spinning through the water. I am held. I had become the broken Earth, the damaged Earth, the laden-with-pollution Earth crying out in distress. Could I also become the resilient Earth? The life everlasting Earth? The inviolable, ever-returning Earth, the beautiful Earth? Make of my story good food for the gods In Tai Chi I learn life is a circle. Movement is an unbroken circle. When I lose the use of my hands and can't do yoga, can't hold myself up in downward-facing dog, I learn a practice called Continuum. I learn we are— I am— movement. When I write in order to write a healing scroll, to make of my story good food for the gods, I learn I am prayer. I am the breath I take in. I am a song singing that renews itself. Life renews itself. I can renew myself. If and when I become a prayer for the rainforest, I become a prayer of the rainforest breathing. Despair lives deeper in my bones than I could have imagined. I don't yet know how to pray. I do know that I have become a prayer. I am a prayer. I pray to become life. “Make of my story” I pray to you, God, gods, who I tell my story to now. “Make of my story good food.” I am your food. I am. —Debora Seidman 1992–2017 Ideas in this piece emerged from Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing and Martin Prechtel. … [Read more...]
Freeing Your Silences, Fulfilling Your Destiny
A New 8 Week Soul Writing Journey: Freeing Your Silences, Fulfilling Your Destiny Plus A Poem, When The Lost Ones Come Home I’ve been doing some deep healing and writing recently, connecting with parts of me who had gone very far away in order to survive. The resonance of the reunion has been profound. I recently wrote a poem about this journey, and I share it with you at the end of this newsletter. I’ve also been inspired to create a new 8 week program, focused on this work of calling your lost parts home, and giving them a voice. Please keep reading to find out more. If you have any questions about the program, or if you would like to discuss private mentorship on these themes or to support your writing project, just send me an email in response. I look forward to hearing how I can serve you in your journey of freeing your voice and fulfilling your writing dreams. Freeing Your Silences, Fulfilling Your Destiny When it comes to freeing your voice and finding your way to a sense of wholeness in your life, few things are as potent and pivotal as giving voice to parts of you that have been lost, and calling those parts back home. Usually, those parts are your younger selves, or an aspect of your inner child. And sometimes we get silenced later in life through trauma or even through the course of profound spiritual growth. In these times many of us are going through the fire and the process of ascension can feel as challenging as it is exhilarating. Whatever the cause, those parts of you long to come home. Or, it may be that you’re being asked to let go of what used to be home, so that a new level of wholeness—a true home for your soul—can emerge. What gets in the way of writing is often the fear of the silenced self—the one who never felt safe to express his or her own truth. When you start to give that part a voice, the energy that was held in silence becomes fuel for your creativity. It’s also often true that what you need to write about is held in that silence. Listening to and giving voice to what’s been silenced thus becomes not only an act of healing but also a process of renewing and regenerating your writing life. This process is a key component of Homecoming: A Soul Writing Journey, that I announced in July and offered as a four month program. Engaging in a longer program is powerfully transformative if you’re ready for that kind of commitment. If you’re ready for a deep dive, let me know by responding to this email. But I know that it’s not right for everyone, and so I’ve developed a shorter, more affordable option, based on the ideas I’ve just described: Calling your lost parts home Giving them a voice Allowing that re-connection to regenerate and renew your writing As it brings you to a deeper sense of wholeness in your life This is powerful healing work and powerful creative magic. It’s a way of remembering who you are and why your writing matters, and clearing what gets in the way. It’s an eight week course where we’ll be writing together on our group calls, and you’ll have optional exercises to do at home to support your process. A Sacred Journey To Reclaim Your Voice and Your Wholeness The journey you take will be guided by your own soul. Every class will be an opportunity to enter sacred space, so you have access to the highest level of consciousness, healing and love every step of the way. If you’re ready to allow your writing to be your guide to personal growth, spiritual evolution and creative fulfillment, this course will be food and fuel to re-ignite your dreams. Please contact me for details by responding to this email or contacting me DeboraSei@gmail.com What follows is the poem I wrote out of my own journey of reconnecting with lost, silenced parts of me. It’s a brand new poem and I’m sure I’ll revise it over the next few weeks and months but I also want to share it with you when it’s fresh, because so many people I know are going through intense journeys of their own. May it nourish you. When the Lost Ones Come Home When the lost ones come home, no trumpets blare-- no banners are unfurled-- no crowd gathers at the roadside to clap and cheer Instead it is a quiet ripple of soundless light a golden ribbon unfurls within the spine reaching up to the heart and then the arms open wide to embrace-- what—the air? The silent shadow of a girl? A whole stream of girls who reach out their hands saying—Take me, I am back the journey has been unfathomable The abyss so dark the breaking of my spirit felt at times irreversible Yet now comes the spring rain Now the swift river of hope carries me—and me—and me—to the other side, where arms wait for me. Your arms, they do wait for me, yes? An embrace. I see it, though my eyes have grown dim so long did I dwell in the darkness of an underground cave. Yet now— Hallelujah. Rescue comes. And yes, I hear the song of water, of wind, and wings— You walk with me again and I am glad. My eyes see colors: red, pink, orange and green— all the flowers of the garden greet me. I carry you now in my heart like you carry me in your arms. Return is sweet, like nectar. The reunion tastes of honey and myrrh. Silver footed gazelles leap And I hear them now, yes, the winged ones— They sing to me, they sing the song they’ve prepared for me The song they created to welcome me back home. … [Read more...]
Homecoming: A Soul Writing Journey To Uncover The Full Power Of Your Voice
Come Back Home Through Writing and Uncover the Full Power of Your Voice A Soul Writing Journey to your deepest Self Begins Tuesday, July 23 What if your call to write, for any reason, is a true call from your soul? And what if, in honoring that call, you also honor what’s stopping you from writing, so you can heal and transform at the deepest level? The journey you take to come into the full power of your voice is a journey home to the truth of who you are. It’s a journey that allows you to find your way through the silences that have held you back in the past, and know those places as holy ground. As you restore the holy ground of your creative self, as you free your voice and write what’s yours to write, you open the way to shine your light in a way that’s truly infused with the power of your soul. The world needs the light of your voice. You need your whole self to have access to the full power of your voice. This homecoming honors the most tender, frightened, silenced parts of you and teaches you how to give those parts a voice. While also honoring the magnificence and fullness of who you truly are, and offering tools and practices to cultivate your relationship with that magnificence. This program is an opportunity to heal and transform your relationship with your writing, your self and your life when you’re at a passage which is calling you to evolve, and you need to turn inward to do that work. … [Read more...]
