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.
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.
