A Healer with a Pocketful of Wild Violets

It was a pretty rough one at the Goudy house. I had major dental surgery on Friday and my husband realized he had Lyme the night before. 

Suddenly, there were a million prescription bottles on the counter and someone was always asking “did you remember to take your antibiotics?” 

We were the walking wounded, though neither of us should have been walking anywhere. My husband is notoriously terrible at taking it easy, while I am rather skilled at shutting out the world and taking to my bed when I’m sick or need to recover from something as massive as a 2.5 hour tooth extraction. 

Nonetheless, we got through and we’re somewhat less pathetic now that it's Monday morning. (Though it’s still tough for me to talk for more than a few minutes. It's like my face is recovering from an ultramarathon I didn't train for.)

Fortunately, we had a healer on call

Seeing her parents weren’t themselves, our seven year-old took it upon herself to start making remedies. 

A neighbor, a consummate garden witch, had told our daughter that the little purple flowers that grew wild in the spring grass were edible.  

So Mairead scoured the yard (a marvelous collection of wild plants and useful weeds we mow and call a lawn) and filled her pockets with wild violets. Turns out, they’re very high in vitamin C, but she didn’t know that when she started to forage.

My husband and I each got a glass full of water and a healthy handful of the sweet purple flowers. She came in at regular intervals to be sure we’d drunk our healing elixirs and she was always ready with refills.

(After I texted my friend and verified that the plants were both non-poisonous and actually beneficial, I actually started to take a few tentative sips rather than surreptitiously pouring the love-drink down the bathroom sink!)

When I wasn’t utterly obsessed with my own aching jaw I could see the healer blossoming in this girl.

She has grown up in the house of an energy healer, after all, and she knows we’ll treat a sickness with both an herbal tincture and a drug from the pharmacy, when necessary.

The light in her eyes made me realize it was more than nurture, however. She has the nature of a healer and is offering skills and insight that she has gained over lifetimes, not in a mere seven years.

And she’s dedicated. Before she got ready for school today she made sure to set up my day’s tonic. I’ve got to make sure that my husband and I appear to have taken our full doses before she gets home!

Why am I telling you this story?

In part, it’s because I couldn’t possibly focus on anything else as my body tries to recover from the trauma and my mind tries to integrate the insanity that is having a dentist spend a morning in your mouth.

As I am finally coming back to myself and feel able to sit up and type, it was either tell the story of the moment or say nothing at all.

Plus, it’s part of my job to model how all the little real life moments - the painful experiences and the sweet love - can be and want to be part of your stories.

As a healer - or as a creative entrepreneur or transformation professional whose work makes like a little more beautiful, bearable, or bold - you’re here to meet people in the midst of their struggles. 

As a writer, you’re here to tell authentic stories, either from your own life or from our gorgeous, terrible world. You guide people toward you and your life-renewing work based on the stories you tell.

You're a healer with a pocketful of stories.
You're a storyteller with a pocketful of tales.

A rough weekend at our house gave our girl a chance to offer her empathetic magic. And on Monday morning, that floral concoction gave me just what I needed: the bit of beauty and hope that makes a story worth telling.

Next Monday at 7 PM ET we’ll be visiting the Story Source. In this free workshop I will be offering a series of exercises to help you find your own source of inspiration so you can tell more of the stories that have meaning for you and your audience.

Join us for the free workshop.

What are you doing with your Monday evenings this May? This free workshop is a preview of the storytelling course called Sovereign Story, Sovereign Brand I am teaching next month. 

The Alchemy of Story: Write to Heal Yourself and Your Reader

I don’t teach writing. I teach alchemy.

I don’t coach writers. I coach transformation professionals ready to make magic with their words.

Part of me rolls my eyes at what sounds like a bit of hubris and exaggeration from a writer who has taken the thesaurus too far.  

But there’s a wiser part of me that waves her wand and smiles. It’s ok to make such wild claims when they’re true. The Word Witch in me remembers that I have seen this alchemical transformation happen more often than I can count. 

What if Alchemy Isn’t Just for Fantasy Novels?

The ancient alchemists were devoted to changing base metals into gold. 

Those magician-philosopher-scientists were also interested in the transformation of the self. They were on a quest to liberate the human ego and open themselves to the limitless potential of the enlightened soul.

Since a well-written book or article that speaks to the dreams and fears of a reader can translate into new business, writing can surely be considered an alchemical act that turns passion into livelihood. Good work becomes gold. 

And, since the people I work with are in the business of healing the mind, body, and spirit, that sacred spiritual alchemy is always part of the mix, too. Words are medicine for the soul.

Creative Alchemy & the Magic of the Self-Focused First Draft

When we work on a piece of writing, we’re also performing an act of creative alchemy. 

In its simplest form, “creative alchemy” describes the movement from inspiration to manifestation. You turn a jumbled collection of ideas into a flowing, finished story. This is what you might think of when you move from what Anne Lamott calls the “shitty first draft” to a piece that you’re proud enough to publish.

I frame it differently for my Sovereign Writers. Rather than using a term that speaks to the quality of the writing, we think about the kind of feelings that get poured onto the page. We talk about the “self-focused first draft.”

The self-focused first draft describes that welter of words the writer puts on paper for herself. This draft includes your personal details, digressions, backstory, and burdens. You’d never want to publish the majority of it, but it needs to be put on the page. Think of this like the buried foundations of a house: they’ll never see the light of day, but they are utterly essential to the strength and endurance of the structure.

It’s not to say that quality isn’t important - the writing coach in me always wants to help writers make their way to clear, elegant prose. But I always want my clients to remember: when you’re in the business of transformation, “good copy” is useless if it lacks your own signature transformative magic. You might write a series of perfectly crafted sentences, but if they don’t come from the heart and soul, it’s just noise.

The Self-Focused First Draft Is More Than Just a Journal Entry

Wait, first take the “just” away. Journaling is an art unto itself and it’s vital to our becoming. We’re talking about a slightly different practice here, however.

When you’re sitting down to produce a self-focused first draft, you’re not there to unload your brain or make a written confession.

When you sit down to pen a self-focused first draft, you come with clear intention.

You’re devoted to that alchemical work of transformation. You’re on a mission to take the raw materials of your experience, including the frustration and the pain, and make some sort of lasting change. Once these raw sentences do their work—the transformative magic that heals you, the writer—then it just might be time to polish things up and press publish.

In fact, for the Sovereign writer who also happens to be a transformation professional—a healer, a therapist, a teacher, a coach—that next step into using your words becomes almost inevitable. 

You write to heal yourself and you write to heal your reader. These two goals weave round one another and inspire you to go deeper for yourself and for the people you serve.

In the midst of all the extraneous details and detours of your private story, you’ll find a whole lot of universal truth. The lessons you’ve learned. The strength you’ve gathered. The reasons you do the work that you do.

If you’re doing any public writing at all as an entrepreneur or private practice owner, this is what you want to express to your readers. This is part of the gold.

The Self-Focused First Draft Is the Foundation of Your Sovereign Story

Amidst the tangle of “small s” stories that catalog our hurts and fears and failures, there are the Sovereign Stories, the stories you must tell. 

Your Sovereign Story emerges when your own preoccupations and passions intersect with the needs and interests of your readers. And every Sovereign Story begins with a self-focused first draft.

Not every Sovereign Story is a magnum opus. You have countless stories like this within you. Your Sovereign Story does its job when it brings a smile to someone’s lips, helps them see they are not alone, or casts new light on a problem so they understand that there is a solution on the other side. 

What is a Sovereign Story?

A Sovereign Story is your truth and you share it to reveal the truth within your readers.

A Sovereign Story conveys a truth and makes a connection with a narrative that only you could weave.

A Sovereign Story is the core narrative that integrates the essential parts of who you really are. 

A Sovereign Story communicates your mission and message to people who want to work with you and grow with you. 

A Sovereign Story is a declaration of what matters to you. To tell one is a brave and beautiful act.

You Never Know What Form a Sovereign Story Might Take

I teach the structure of story and help people uncover and craft their stories in my class, Stand In Your Sovereign Story. There, we talk about website copy, blog posts, and how to be authentic (or, you might say, “how to stay gold”) on social media.

This Sovereign Storytelling work is about so much more than smart, well-constructed marketing copy though.

These days, Sovereign Stories are emerging as poems, too.

A few weeks ago I had a chance to do a 1:1 coaching session with a member of my Sovereign Writers Circle named Dawn. Each Wednesday, our online community gathers for writing practice. We do the kind of “alchemical” writing that is intended to support the work of transformation.

One writing prompt asked the circle to really examine and answer the question “how are you?” Dawn’s response came out in the form of a poem. Her self-focused first draft was from the heart and spoke to what it meant to watch her life and livelihood change due to Covid. She was fine and not fine.

The poem was honest, but that first version only kissed the surface of all Dawn had to explore and say. Shortly afterwards she brought the poem to one of our group coaching calls where we reflected what we heard and offered the sort of gentle, conscious workshopping that makes our community so special. Then, two of us revisited it in our session together. A few weeks later, she brought the piece back to the group during another SWC coaching call.

I think there was a part of Dawn that simply couldn’t believe she was still working on that collection of stanzas. The wiser part of her—the Word Witch within—who had grown accustomed to the alchemy (and the time) that’s involved in telling a Sovereign Story was there for the ride, showing up to question, to wonder, to craft and re-craft.

Dawn has been learning from herself and from her own process, seeing the depths that were held inside the common words, choosing new images that got her closer to the story she needed to unfurl, the Sovereign Story she longed to tell.

It has been an honor to hold this process and have a front row seat for the entire transformation.

Dawn is still working on her poem, asking what more it has to reveal and who most needs to hear it. She’s making choices about which elements to emphasize and all of this is helping her decide where she’ll submit this labor of love. I do hope it will be published someplace. People need to read it. I trust that she’s already experienced the alchemy, however, and her healer-poet’s pockets are already lined in gold.

 You understand that transformation professionals are writing because we want to heal ourselves first and then we want to share our stories to support others in their healing.  We want to touch the heart and soul to make a difference in the world.  It is about the process/journey,  not about performance or notoriety.  The magic and medicine you offer is the encouragement, support and challenge to venture into  new areas with our writing so we can confidently and skillfully express and communicate our work out in the world.

• Dawn Goforth-Kelly, Writer & Reiki Master

What about you? Are you an alchemist seeking the space and the support to uncover and develop your own Sovereign Stories? If you want to learn the art and practice of storytelling in order to build your world-renewing business, consider joining us for the Stand In Your Sovereign Story Program that starts on September 30.

Are you trying to build a writing practice in support of your professional practice or to get a big project into the world? We’re welcoming new members to the Sovereign Writers Circle through September 1.

Forget World-Changing, We Need World-Renewing

Once upon the time, I used to use phrases like “world-changing” and “change the world” with wild abandon. 

In a 2018 blog post I dared to say: 

Your magic will change you. It will change the world. That is both a promise and a warning.

In every case, you’ll need courage. And probably unicorn memes. And novels that transport you to another world from time to time. And chocolate. And movement that connects you to your body. And probably some more chocolate.

And, in The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic, published just two months ago, the chapter called “Crown the Queen” includes this passage:

As you come to believe in your own inherent power and get to know the archetypes that dwell within, you’ll realize that talking to goddesses and focusing energy on changing your own consciousness in order to change the world is more potent than sheer practicality and planning alone ever could be. The magic that lets us manipulate time and space might not quite look like stepping through the standing stones and entering another century like they do in Outlander, but it looks everything like the life I crave. Real life is full of real magic and it’s available to all of us who dare to look for it, treasure it, and conjure it. 

It’s not right to look back at words written in a simpler time and allow yourself to be filled with regret. Instead, I try to look back on these passages with kindness and understanding. (And maybe a little nostalgia.)

Now, we all know so much more about what “world-changing” really means.

We know that reality can change in the blink of an eye because we’ve collectively watched “normal” as we’ve grown to love it (and hate it) vanish in a matter of weeks.

Now, we know that “world-changing” means utter disruption at every level, from school routines to yoga classes, from presidential primary elections to global supply chains. It means massive spikes in unemployment. It means a terrifying increase in domestic violence. It means death.

The World Gives Us Change, We Give It Renewal

I’ll always remember the final time I used the phrase “world-changing” without feeling the crushing weight of such an idea. 

In February, I announced a new online storytelling program, Stand In Your Sovereign Story. The subtitle came out long, but doable enough: Learn how to use the healing power of storytelling to discover your truth, share your authentic message, and build your world-changing business.

Even though there are lots of opinions about whether it’s OK to sell anything in a time like this, I have come to understand that the course is more necessary than ever. (Seeing people sign up even in the midst of this crisis solidified that belief.) 

I’m leading the first session on April 14. The content we cover and the stories we uncover will focus on the work of healing and rebirthing that needs to happen in order to get us through and then thriving on the other side of this pandemic.

We’re going to learn about storytelling, truth, and how to share an authentic message and we’ll talk about how to use all those to build a world-renewing business.

The Story At the Heart of this Offering (and At the Heart of My Belief in Renewal)

This program (and all my work) relies on the story of Sovereignty, and what it takes for women to stand in their full  personal, creative, and spiritual power. My quest is to help all women (and all who identify as women) figure out how to balance and be all three archetypes of Sovereignty.

Free the princess
Crown the Queen
Embrace the Wise Woman

We are called to give ourselves permission to embody the princess, maintaining our innocence, optimism, and sense of adventure. 

We are called to allow ourselves the courage to embody the queen, building our confidence, competence, and compassion. 

We are called to allow ourselves the grace to embody the wise woman, surrendering to stillness, presence, and intuition.

We are called to be princess, queen, and wise woman throughout our lives. We are called to be all three before, during, and after the trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The book offers a path for women to trace this Sovereignty magic in their own lives.

The course is designed to help creative entrepreneurs and transformation professionals use the archetypes to access and use their stories to create connections and build a livelihood.

Learn more about Stand In Your Sovereign Story, the online program that begins on 4/14.