A Six Week On-Line Writing Group

Weekly Wednesday Meetings: May 11th-June 22nd, 2022

The deepest purpose of this writing group is to provide a sacred, creative space in which we can fall more deeply in love with our Muse, with Silence, and with the art and medicine of skillful truthtelling.

Writing As Medicine serves, invokes, and celebrates writing as a healing, awakening, transformational practice through which we can embody and transmit our authentic, intelligent voices into our world.

Musings include:

• Relationship with The Holy: Silence and Sword
• Contagious Co-Inspiration, Creative Coherence 
• Availing Ourselves to Our Muse: Getting out of the Way
• Sacred Honesty: Truth-telling in all its Glory
• Medicinal Storytelling: Evolving our Narratives
• Writing as Gift, as Personal Healing, as Transmission
• Writing beyond being Read: Traps of Objectification and Performance

Inspiration 

If you know me at all, even peripherally, you know that I love words! Especially the written word. My relationship with the written word has been a profound love affair of my life since I was a child.

Writing is one of my very favorite aspects of human incarnation.

I’m not a certified writing coach, a copy editor, or even a published author (yet!) but I am a passionate wordsmith, an enthralled mystic, and a longtime devoted lover of The Muse.

I’m eternally intrigued by the invitation to get out of the way for what wants to move through us.

There are inherent limitations in language of course, but there’s no denying the incomparable power of words to transmit and convey the most intimate facets of human experience.

Words, when infused with soul and intention, have the power to move us to tears and laughter, to inspire, challenge, heal and awaken us.

Words ignite a field of resonance. They encourage exquisite rapport between the writer and reader, creating connection and coherency.

In this group, we’ll explore the challenge, craft, and soul of writing.

We’ll beckon the interface between silence and our words; inviting silence to intimately inform what’s said.

We’ll celebrate what’s spoken in between the lines; what’s extended boldly through what’s withheld.

We will fall in love with the breath inside our written words; the pause, caress, and purpose of punctuation.

How humbling words can be. I’m often struck by the sheer impossibility of writing; the unavoidable failure in saying anything perfectly.

How can we learn to cherish this impossibility, and even get off on the juicy tension that this challenge represents?

I chose “Writing As Medicine” as the title for this course, because of the double meaning contained within it: What does it mean to write words that are as healing, catalytic, and medicinal for the writer to write, as they then become for the reader to read?

Medicinal Storytelling

I’m passionate about all the ways we can find to make medicine of our lives. What a task: to make medicine of what has bloomed us and broken us, of what has disillusioned, healed and humbled us.

I’m intrigued by our human capacity to transform our wounds into sources of compassion and inspiration. I’m heartened by how we can allow our inevitable mistakes and failures to refine our discernment and our integrity.

Our writing has the capacity to clear the space, to empty our minds and hearts of pain, like feathers and smoke clear the space of what’s ready to be released.

In our conscious willingness to reframe and transform the wounded narratives we carry, we can allow our stories to become potent wisdom stories, teaching stories, informing the evolving narrative of our times.

Writing as Healing 

Clearly, writing has countless roles and uses in our lives, but the one that holds the greatest pleasure and power for me is the alchemical way in which writing asks me to get out of the way of what wants to be said.

It’s the writing “assignments” that come from our own deepest hearts and souls, in craving deeper exploration, expression, and resolution.

It’s the treasure that can be gleaned from our own life lessons, our growing edges, and breakthroughs.

It’s the way writing poignantly and mysteriously serves as a vehicle through which we can truly receive, metabolize, and integrate our own life experiences.

Writing as Service & Transmission

We are living in immensely challenging and heartbreaking times. Life brings us to our knees, and often leaves us speechless. There is something uniquely healing about what is shared from the heart of honest revelation, insight, and humility.

I’m continuously encouraged by the ways our words can serve the transmission of what we each are here to offer.

When I write, it is always first and foremost for myself. I write the words that I myself need to hear. But what gives these words wings is the mysterious possibility of the writing landing with useful resonance for others. There’s nothing better than the experience of allowing our own authentic voice to serve the possibility of realized peace in our world.

Attuning with this potential of our writing to resonate and serve, without then objectifying our muse, or becoming a slave to “likes”, is a sacred challenge we face as  medicine-writers in these times.

Writing as a Gift to Ourselves

Writing is one of the primary tools of expression we’ve been given in this life, covering an immeasurable field of communication—from texting our friends, to marketing copy, to dissertations, to books on countless topics, to letters of thanks, apology and forgiveness, to multi-dimensional art such as poetry and story-telling. We can use it to make grocery lists, and social media posts, and we can use it to say “I love you” in a million different ways.

It’s possible that the writing you create in this container will lend itself well to chapters for a book, or a blog, or articles or posts. But that’s not the primary purpose of this container.

The primary focus of this Writing Group is on writing as a spiritual practice of emptying, listening, and surrender, and as a life practice of discipline and sacred truthtelling.