Hello and Welcome to July! Two important things I want to share with you today, on the cusp of the Solar Eclipse in Cancer. First: there will be a Free Sacred Writing Circle this week: the first Wednesday of the month, July 3 @ noon Pacific Time, 3 pm Eastern Time. Register here. I apologize for the late notice. My computer crashed a few weeks ago and it took a little while to get set up with my new computer. Plus I’ve been preparing a program to support your writing, and in the process some of my own deep wounds have emerged, asking for attention and healing. Ultimately, it’s all been support of the work. I’m being asked to grow more fully into my soul’s purpose, as I prepare to support you in moving more fully into yours. I’ve written about it in the article in this newsletter. What Does Your Soul Think About Your Desire To Write? Second: if you’re looking for deeper support for your writing, and you want that support to come from your own soul, I’m preparing a powerful program for you that begins end of July. The program offers consistent guidance and structure to get you going again in your writing, as well as deep Soul Level Inquiry and processes to help you heal and transform what’s holding you back from your writing dreams. Wednesday’s Free Call will be a time to experience some of what can happen when you bring your soul into your writing life as well as a brief opportunity to learn about the upcoming program. The bulk of the call will be what we usually do every month: gather to create a sacred space to write. The last fifteen minutes will be time for information about this program. Please remember: these free Sacred Writing Circles are a chance for you to be held in sacred space and write. Sometimes you’ll go deep! It’s important to trust the depths to hold you. One of the ways you can be supported to hold whatever emerges when you write is to cultivate a practice of bringing your Soul Self into your writing process. That’s the focus on Wednesday’s call. It’s also the focus of the following musings, which I call, “What Does Your Soul Think About Your Desire To Write?” Writers are exquisitely sensitive beings. You feel deeply. You’re profoundly self aware. You often notice things that other people don’t want—or aren’t able to see. This is a wonderful thing. It’s what makes you the kind of person who can touch someone’s heart with your words. Mary Oliver’s poem “Lead” ends: I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world. It’s what we need now...all of us...to find the ways to keep letting our hearts break open, so we can keep moving toward what matters in our own lives, and in the world. There’s a challenge though, with being a sensitive writer who wants to keep opening your heart to what matters: It’s vulnerable. Let me tell you a story: lately the wounded child in me has been asking me to listen to her experience of her deepest wounds. Fears that I thought were long ago resolved have been rising up again, to be healed on another level. The most effective way for me to hear her is to write. So lots of my writing has been in her voice. I honor and respect this healing. I’m surrendering to it. And...it’s been making me feel kind of insecure about everything else. Like my own teaching. And the class I’m getting ready to offer you. Opening to all this vulnerability, I can forget that it’s not the whole truth about who I am. Today I say down to ask, am I really ready to teach this course, while I’m doing this deep healing work? Immediately my soul spoke up and asked me to listen. My soul said: “Your awareness of your own terror is a gift now, to everyone who is ready to take the next step in honoring their writing. Because that is what happens when you move toward a dream: fear comes up. For sensitive writers who have a history of trauma and self doubt, it’s going to come up even more. It’s going to feel like a wall they can’t get past...just like it is for you today. But tell them what you’re learning about that wall...that it’s a doorway that gets opened with love. It’s the most exquisite kind of power you can imagine, the power to love the most scared part of you, and realize she doesn’t really want to stop you, she wants to fly free...but she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t know how when she’s left alone. But when you invite me...your own soul...into the picture, then the magic starts. Because this is the real alchemical power of writing: you tap right into your most vulnerable, broken heart. Your heart that can’t pretend it doesn’t feel. Your heart that can’t pretend it’s not about to cry. Your heart that wants to sing but only when it’s safe enough to also be silent, for as long as you need. Your writer’s heart needs everything, every part of you, in order to write what’s true. So the fact that you’re afraid...the fact that your most terrified self is rising up to speak right when you’re on the verge of saying yes to writing is a very good sign. It means you’re being honest, with what matters most to you in the world.” So now it’s your turn. You’ve been feeling the call to write. And you keep putting it off. You stop and start, stop and start...you get inspired but then you don’t follow through. What if you had your soul on board, as an ongoing guide, to help you understand what’s going on? What if your fear has something to say, but ultimately, it’s not “STOP” but Go. Keep Going. Come closer to me and hear my heart beating. Yes I’m scared and have been scared for a long time. But what I really want is to learn to not be held back by these fears any longer. What I really want is to feel this beating heart and keep moving forward. As Rumi once said, “Keep walking, but not the way fear makes you walk.” My soul wants you to know that your voice matters. And if you’re afraid, turn toward that fear, with the ears of your soul. Maybe your soul is whispering, “Don’t give up, don’t give in, I’m with you, all the way, calling you to remember who you really are. Calling you home. To the truth of your being. Which is that you’re the one who came here to liberate yourself from fear. I will help you. And together, we can shine a light that touches the heart of this world...which is also ready to be liberated from fear.” It starts with you. One heart at a time. Breaking open the walls that have kept you in chains for long enough. Opening to the words that long to be said by you, and can’t be said by anyone else. Opening to the call to write. And moving toward it, one small step at a time. Like Rumi said, “Keep walking toward it, but not the way fear makes you walk.” The course is called Homecoming: A Soul Writing Journey To Uncover the Full Power of Your Voice. Its purpose is to give you a foundation for honoring your call to write that’s unshakable, while you heal what’s kept you silenced in the past. It’s a four month deep dive starting at the end of July. I’m gathering names now if you’re interested. The full course description will be up on the website soon. I can send you the program material now if you’re ready. And you can come to Wednesday’s free Sacred Writing Circle to experience some of what happens, when you bring your soul’s power into your own writing process. P.S. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sending more emails than I usually do, to share the teachings of this program. My hope is that all that I share will be useful to everyone, whether or not you’re ready for a course right now. So I invite you to tap into my sharings on whatever level serves you...and open to the insights, gifts and revelations that come as you read and perhaps write in response to what’s coming into your inbox. … [Read more...]

An invitation to Wednesday’s Free Sacred Writing Circle, plus some thoughts on why it matters.   Once a month, on the first Wednesday of the month, I offer a Free Sacred Writing Circle via teleconference. The calls are based on themes drawn from the principles that guide my Soul Writing Journeys. This month’s theme is Writing the Body Home.  The call takes place on Wednesday, June 5 @ noon Pacific Time, 3 pm Eastern.  You can register here.   The calls are an invitation to enter sacred space. They are designed to be a  healing time.  A nourishing time, for your creative soul.   A time to write. A time to be held in the safety of A time to offer your words as a prayer to a world in need of healing.   The call begins with a grounding, centering meditation.  Then I offer a teaching based on the theme, which leads to writing exercises. You’ll write on the call.  We usually have time to hear a few people’s writing.   The calls will last one hour.   One hour for you to step away from all the tasks in your busy life, and turn inward.   One hour to give voice to what’s stirring inside you.   Each month you’re invited to join together with other kindred spirits and open the doorway to listen to your soul.   Register here for the free Sacred Writing Circle on June 5th.   Whether you can attend the call or not, here are some thoughts about why it matters to write and to free what gets in the way.   The gift of creative expression is both our privilege and our birthright. In oppressive regimes, freedom of expression is often one of the first things to be taken away. Freedom of speech and the freedom to write are things that many of us take for granted, yet they are privileges that people have risked their lives for.   In healthy indigenous cultures, music, dance and storytelling are woven into everyday life. They’re an essential part of the ceremonies and rituals that honor life cycles and changing seasons.   When we gather to write, we do so as a celebration of our freedom to do so, even as many of us are also healing the wounds and blocks that hold us back.  It’s important to remember that your own challenges to write are both highly personal and individual to you, and also connected to a whole history of people’s voices being silenced.   When you free your voice, you do so for your own sake, and also for your lineage, and also on behalf of so many people who do not have the freedom to use their own voice.   That’s the power of the world we live in today.  Our lives are so deeply interconnected.  If you’re here as a lightworker…if you are here to be part of the Love Revolution, as Matt Kahn calls it…if you’re here to be part of creating a world where everyone thrives…freeing your voice is a powerful act that impacts your own life and the lives of many, when you accept and honor that as part of your intention.   Freeing your voice is also usually about freeing the child within you.  The child who knew who she or he was, but didn’t feel safe to fully express what she knew. This month’s call, when we focus on the body, will be specially designed to free up more of that child’s innate wisdom and beauty, which still lives within you. This child has a gift to share which our world desperately needs…and which you need, to become the full expression of who you truly are.   When I offer a writing circle, I offer it for you and I also invite you to be part of a movement where everyone living in our world today has the freedom to express their own voice. Because only when all of our voices are heard and valued will we be able to heal and restore the life of our planet.   Your soul is asking you to honor your call to write.  Your soul, and the soul of our world, is thankful when you listen to that call.   Listening to that call, you heal and restore your world as you heal and restore the wider world in which all of us live. … [Read more...]

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, Thus opens Mary Oliver’s poem,  “The Journey.”  I’ll print the whole poem below. I wanted to start though, with just these lines, and an invitation to you to read her poem as if it’s a call to your soul today. I imagine you’ve heard by now that Mary Oliver died on January 17, 2019.  I will share some of my favorite poems of hers with you over the next few weeks, both to honor her legacy and call you to your own. When a poet is so great, both as an artist and a human being, we sometimes forget that we, too have seeds of greatness within us.  Mary Oliver took her life seriously.  She took her dedication to poetry seriously.  She woke most mornings early and took long walks in the woods, or along the shore, and those walks were the foundation for her writing. You, too, have the possibility of greatness within you, if you’re willing to devote yourself to cultivating it.  Most of us use only a small portion of the potential within ourselves.  Yet each of us is born to be a creator. As Mary Oliver tells us in her beloved poem  “Wild Geese” Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.   Your Writing Practice: When you have time to write for 5- 15 minutes,   spend some time with her poem The Journey. In The Journey Mary Oliver speaks of all “the voices around you…shouting their bad advice…until little by little, as you left their voices behind,/ the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,/ and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own…” Listening for that voice is the work of a lifetime.  It is the work that will give you back to your self, because it is the voice of your own soul, which is longing for you to hear it.  When you write with conscious intention,  you can hear that voice. Every day that you write is a journey home to your own soul.  Mary Oliver’s poems have been guiding many of us to write, and to live, for decades. It takes time to read a poem and receive it deeply enough to let it change you.  It takes time to write your own poem, or novel, or memoir.  But when you take that time you become more fully who you were meant to be…who you always wanted to be. In her poem  “Mockingbirds” Mary Oliver says Wherever it was I was supposed to be this morning— whatever it was I said   I would be doing— I was standing at the edge of the field— I was hurrying   through my own soul opening its dark doors— I was leaning out: I was listening.   Give yourself the gift of leaning out into your own soul, opening its dark doors, and listening.  Let The Journey be your guide. Read the poem (printed in full below)  to yourself, out loud if possible.  Then, take the first line,  "One day you finally knew/ what you had to do, and began..." and write it down as your first line.  Let that line be your prompt to write whatever comes for 5- 15 minutes.  Do your best to keep your hand moving on the page and try not to censor yourself, even if your writing doesn't entirely make sense. It always helps to set a timer for your writing practice. After you write, pause, stretch, breathe a few conscious breaths, then read what you wrote.  Notice what images, thoughts, revelations particularly move you.  Circle those.  Give thanks for the gift of writing.  When you have time, in the next 24 hours, read your writing again. If it's time for you to deepen your own journey home to your soul through writing, let's have a conversation.  Just reply to this email or contact me at DeboraSei@gmail.com  Enjoy your writing practice! The Journey One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice— though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations— though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do— determined to save the only life you could save. … [Read more...]

Your voice is a sacred gift of your humanity.  In these times, when so much is at stake, it’s your connection with your humanity that will give you the motivation, inspiration, and vision to bring forth your greatest self. When you lose this basic connection to your humanity, you lose hope.  You feel lost, disconnected from your self and the value of your life, and the contribution your soul longs to make to the world. It’s easy to feel drained and slide into despair, when you lose your connection with your own voice. When you find it, and forge a relationship with it that’s strong, solid and yours, you have come into possession of your self in a way that no one can take away from you. Your voice is a sacred gift to you.  It is part of the spark of divinity that gave you life when you were born, and it is part of what helps you grow and evolve into the unique expression of divinity that you are.  It is a bridge between your humanity and your divinity, and if you recognize it as such, you understand more about its power and potential. Your voice is as singular as your fingerprint, or a snowflake:  no two are alike. Even if you’ve been silenced in the past, and feel your voice has gotten lost, or squelched, or taken from you, it’s still there. The call to claim and use your voice, especially through writing, is a call to be more connected to the truth of your beautiful, quirky, irreplaceable self. If you’ve been feeling silent, your voice will gently whisper to you, asking you to let it be heard…asking you to write again, so you can come back home. Your voice matters. Using your voice helps you to know that you matter. When you write to come home to your self, all sorts of things begin to fall into place in your world, because you’re remembering the truth of who you are.  You come back into connection with your own humanity, and that allows you to remember the humanity of other people.  You need your voice for your own life, and you need it to help all of us restore life to a more humane expression of what’s essential, for life on earth to flourish. It’s time to remember that your voice matters. A five minute daily writing practice is a good place to begin.  Your voice is waiting for you.  It hasn’t left you, but it needs you to reach out, say hello, ask it, today, what it most needs you to know. What will your voice help you to know?  Many things about your essential self.  And, what’s being held in your silences.   All those things you haven’t yet been able to say aloud are exactly what becomes revealed when you write. If you’ve been silenced by trauma, shock, injury or loss, that silence holds the cry of your soul that needs to be heard. If  a silence has grown around the innermost chamber of your heart, because you felt you needed to protect its sacred beauty, isn’t it time, now, for you to get past the wall that keeps you out of touch with your own heart’s voice? Whatever is held in your silence, your journey to move toward your own voice is a journey toward your humanity, and makes space for another person’s humanity to be freed as well. Begin Now:  Your writing practice: You can start writing today by simply asking a question to your own self—especially the self in your body: “What do you most need me to know today?”  Start writing, whatever comes, and keep going for at least three minutes.  Your voice will know you’re paying attention, and the flow will begin. Trust the flow of your own words and your words will feel that trust, and the flow will continue. Know that every time you write, you’re making a choice to use one of the  sacred gifts of your humanity.   As you do so, you’re part of making this world a more humane place for all of us.       … [Read more...]