How Do You Know You’re Living Your Sovereign Story?

If someone asked you "what were you born to do?" would you have an answer?

For a long time, I thought I did. It’s all about the writing, I'd say.

I would count myself lucky to be so sure. Some people take years to figure it out, and some may never know it all.  I was one of those kids who understood why I was here, and all it took was putting words on paper.

"Writing" was the first answer and the easy answer. Sometimes we need to stick with the original impulse. Sometimes we need to celebrate that things really can be easy.

But, sometimes, we need to keep searching and honor the complexity that urges us to go deeper.

Writer is a tidy word to claim, so compact and understandable. (It can be a long journey to claim it, I know, but we'll get to that.) 

It was harder to get my head - and my words - around the greater truth:

Writing itself wasn't ever the end goal. The act of writing didn't define or even fulfill me. It was about everything that writing made possible within me. 

Ultimately, writing has always been about discovering what I really cared about, worried about, and wondered about. Writing is there to help me talk to the divine, to figure out my stand on social and political issues, and to help me sort through my feelings.

Writing is the sailboat, the sexy car, the horse drawn carriage. It's the vehicle that takes us where we long to go. This vehicle may offer great joy, but the whole experience is about so much more than the thing that transports us there.

But this “writing vehicle” certainly has carried me a long, glorious way

Last January, the Sovereign Writers Circle was formed. This was the digital gathering place where healers who loved to write discovered how they could use their words to heal others. We’ve gotten together to write every week in 2018. And it has been awesome.

But that's not all we did.

We laughed and cried. We shared stories that we'd barely ever spoken aloud. We talked about business strategy and what it really meant to care for and nurture ourselves. We explored spiritual beliefs the weight of our ancestral line. 

We have always used writing to get us to the place of sovereignty.

Writing is our vehicle. Sovereignty is our destination. (And the most important part of the sovereignty journey is realizing we've already arrived in so many ways. There's never one destination anyway, we realize.  We'll never fully arrive until this life journey reaches its end, and it likely keeps going on well after that too.)

The more complex, hard won answer to "what were you born to do?"

When the words flow through you like they’re being channeled from some cosmic source, it’s never as sudden as it seems. Something powerful has been incubating within, disguised by doubt and anguish and all the feelings of “everyone else has this figured out but not me.”

This fall when I recorded The Sovereignty Manifesto while driving to pick up my little one from preschool, I was a little stunned when I named myself “Word Witch, Story Healer, Priestess of Sovereignty.”

The first title was fun to say. I’d been playing with the second title for a long time after long study in energy medicine. The last thing? The whole “Priestess of Sovereignty” thing? That was as surprising as it was natural and inevitable.

Leading this group changed me. Leading this group named me.

Holding space for so many brilliant women who wanted to make writing a tool for personal discovery, professional growth, and deep, meaningful evolution helped me see my own evolution more fully.

And so, the group has been renamed too.

The Sovereignty Circle is here

This group is intended to help you write your way into “what is it you were born to do?”

To engage with this question is to begin to write your Sovereign Story. When healers, coaches, and creatives know and embody their sovereignty, the world begins to shift.

Really.

As I said, the Sovereignty Circle is built on a the strong foundations of the vibrant community we have built over the last year. The best aspects of the group remain unchanged. We still meet for weekly writing practice dates (Wednesdays at noon ET) with new prompts each time. We still gather for monthly writing coaching & story healing sessions. We still bring in guest experts each month who talk about self care, publishing, marketing, the spiritual journey, and more.

Now, the title is simply more honest and more complete. To call this group of brave, brilliant souls The Sovereignty Circle conveys the truth of what the mother of writing practice Natalie Goldberg once said:

To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.

And so, I invite you to consider joining us for the next season or the next half year.

The details about the group are all here, along with kind words from many of our members.

We’re closing the doors at midnight ET on January 1 because our first meeting of 2019 is on Wednesday, January 2, so don’t wait to apply!

Find the Power of Sovereignty Within the Dream of Community

Dream is an Irish word that doesn’t actually have anything to do with nighttime visions. (One of my favorite Irish words for dreams is aisling, but we’ll get to that another time.)

In the Irish language, dream is actually associated with “tribe” or “community.”

Once upon a time, I must have known this, back when I carried a Gaeilge/Bearla dictionary in my backpack, rushing from the dorm to an early morning class. But it’s been so long since my days at Boston College and the National University of Ireland in Galway. It’s like another lifetime, those years when modern poetry and ancient myth were the most important things in the world…

Since then, I’ve forgotten most of my Irish. And in those two decades since I knew enough of the Gaelic to know when the lads were talking about me at the pub, I know I have forgotten the power of community over and over again too.

Forgetting is a gift

Here’s the thing… whether it’s a random word from a language spoken in a small corner of the world or whether it’s something essential to our own well being or to the entire of the human race, we’re going to forget. In fact, we forget in order to understand the important things.

I find that the miracles come in the rediscovery, in the looping back to something you once knew and now have a chance to really know.

Life conspires to remind us of the words, feelings, and experiences that used to feel magical and significant. We get a fresh chance to make meaning and root into wisdom that’s at once eternal and brand new.

This is the joy. This is the point. The knowing, the forgetting, the re-membering reveals what wants to matter and guide the whole rest of the journey.

But Losing Track of a Sense of Community is Just Painful

I wandered alone for so many years, but I don’t think I ever really knew it.

When I was in my early twenties, living in a new city and trying to make a shaky relationship work, a therapist diagnosed me as “lonely.” She wasn’t wrong. (She wasn’t helpful, mind you, but she wasn’t wrong.)

A few years later, when I rooted myself into a “real job” and had moved in with the guy who’d become my husband, I would have looked the opposite of lonely. Yoga classes, the bustle of the campus where I worked, the grown-up tasks of a busy woman with stuff to do. I was in the mix of it all.

But then I remember our wedding and how I needed to piece together my old life, pulling people from around the world for a week of parties. For a short time, I was living the dream, thriving in a big circle of the people I loved best.

(My friends are too wonderful to tell me how bridezilla-esque I often was through all this desperate gathering of the tribe for that marathon celebration… Bless ‘em!)

After the honeymoon, things sort of folded in on themselves. Our world of two became small, and sometimes the coziness felt claustrophobic.

It’s Time to Reckon with the Isolation Habit

Now, I realize I have a lifelong pattern of losing track of everybody else when I devote myself to “the one.” (Yes, you can call this codependency if you want. It’s not a pretty word, but when we pull the unbeautiful words out of the shadows we can rewrite the limiting stories we once crafted with narrow, unsavory phrases.)

Having a couple of kids would actually make the whole thing worse before it got better. The house was full, the experience felt hollow too much of the time, and our little commune didn’t necessarily feel held by a larger community.

This isn’t just a personal flaw or a way of functioning that is unique to my family. It’s a phenomenon that has take over much of our society, particularly with all the screens that substitute for human interaction and the substances that are supposed to help us cope with modern life.

Many of us have lost track of a wider sense of belonging because of our relationship and family structures, because of our demanding jobs, because wine is easier, because there are so many things tugging at our attention that seem more important than connections with soul friends.

Recovering the Dream of Community Begins with Acknowledging We Need It

In the last year or so, I have connected with my original self. More than that, I have connected with my Sovereign Self.

After years of wandering and wishing and half-living my dreams while trying to live according to someone else’s guidelines for success, I’ve recovered the magic and the truth that’s long been hiding in my core.

Reconnecting with my Sovereign Self is about reviving the passions of the younger me (the princess I once was had a confidence problem and drank too much, but she had the right idea about a lot of things).

It’s about standing proudly in the experience and knowledge I’ve gained and declaring myself queen of my own life. It’s about leaning into the wisdom of my future self even as I stay rooted in the magical, insightful self that was my birthright.

(We all have the princess, the queen, and the wise woman playing within us all the time, you know… This trinity of being is at the heart of The Sovereignty Knot, the new book that’s coming out in October 2019.)

And, in the midst of all this personal discovery, I have discovered how much I’ve missed community. Somehow, I had begun to feel unworthy of it.

Community was a garden I had stopped tending. I came to believe I had to be a permanent exile for letting the weeds choke out the beds and the gate.

All through the years when I let endless responsibilities and the tendency toward self-isolation rule my life, I didn’t realise that community was actually dream that I couldn’t quite name.

It think it’s easy for many of us to miss this realization. After all, when you’re a mother of young children, a partner trying to keep a relationship together, or a woman running a business, your life is just so jam packed.

It’s easy to misunderstand an overflowing life for a full life. It’s easy to confuse the packed calendar with an inherent sense of belonging.

We Practice the Dance Between Individuality and Communality

There’s another reason I didn’t sense my own yearning for community, and it’s rooted in this idea of sovereignty that guides my life and work

It’s easy to assume the quest for sovereignty is a solitary journey.

After all, at the heart of this work is a call to discover who you really are and what you really want. You’re called to go beneath and beyond the expectations and the demands that have been imposed upon you. You’re called recognize all the ways you’re letting others write your story. Sovereignty invites you to unhook from what “they” say about how to live your life. Your Sovereign Self is inspired by your own inherent worth.

Sovereignty is about entering into personal relationship with the earth beneath your feet and with the air in your lungs. It’s about finding a home in your own body and in your own company. It is about the silence you find when you slow down enough to connect with the divine tides that guide your life.

Living Sovereignty Is about Living in Relationship

But after that personal discovery, after all that inner silence and natural stillness, there’s the vital step that is living sovereignty.

You are so secure in your story, your identity, you skin that you’re able to reach out and offer your help and your embrace. You can hold the stories of others and allow your story to merge with theirs.

You can heal and love and offer and receive care with wild abandon when you’re truly standing in your personal and creative sovereignty.

We Find Sovereignty in Community

There’s a gorgeous paradox in the the Sovereignty Knot: in order to truly root into yourself so you can build strong, healthy relationships, you need the support of others.

You fulfill your dream of individual sovereignty within the circle of a community.

It’s been a parallel journey for me. As I’ve opened myself up to all the ways I’m worthy of being part of community and creating community, I’ve understood my own sovereign worth and the worth of my own sovereign story. As I’ve stood sovereign and rooted into my own inherent truth I have found myself in true reciprocal relationships that matter and that sustain us all.

You embody sovereignty when you’re held by community. You uphold strong communities when you show up as your sovereign self.

You may have heard of the Sovereign Writers Circle, the online group I have coached and curated for the last year. You may have thought that it was intriguing but instantly felt scared off by the name. (“Me, a writer?” you might have thought.)

I want to (re)introduce you to my online community because it offers something different than you might have expected from a writing group.  

I’m renaming it because I know that our work has always about so much more than “just” writing. We use writing as our primary tool and we rely on words to help us make and explain our magic, but the ultimate goal is not blog posts or book chapters.

The ultimate goal of the Sovereignty Circle is to help you dream into the ways you’re called to stand in your own power. We do this work into order to know, embody, and tell the stories and do the work that can change the world.

Our weekly writing sessions help you make the time to do the individual discovery work. Our group writing coaching and story healing sessions help you draw from the support and wisdom of sovereign sisters like you.

The Sovereignty Circle is welcoming new members through January 2. Find out about the group and let me know if you have any questions. We would love to have you with us!

What to Say to the Forces and Fears that Keep You From Writing

To every secret shame that silences you, say: “Thank you. I see you.”

To every overscheduled day that squeezes out your writing time, say: “Thank you. I see you.”

To every messy relationship that is too in-the-middle to describe, say: “Thank you. I see you.”

To every stomachache and sniffle and trip to the ER with the kids, say: “Thank you. I see you.”

To every fear that it has all been done before, say: “Thank you. I see you.”

To every Netflix drama whose plot line supersedes yours, say: “Thank you. I see you.”

To every shred of doubt that these words aren’t worth the effort, say: “Thank you. I see you.”

To every story that you’re living too fiercely and fully to pin to the page, say: “Thank you. I see you.”

To every whisper that you’re not clever enough or unique enough or creative enough, say: “Thank you. I see you.”

Our writing gets lost in the forest of shoulds.

Our writing gets drowned in the river of comparison.

Our writing gets scorched in the desert of distraction.

Our writing gets blown away by the winds of everyone else’s agenda.

You are responsible - deliriously, deliciously responsible - for your own stories and your own writing practice.

Your mission as an agent of transformation and a force for good is to share your ideas, your experiences, and your dreams with the readers who need your message. You need to reach out with your stories and welcome those potential clients who yearn for the wisdom and support only you can provide.

It’s time to (re)claim your right to tell and explore your stories

Now is the time stand sovereign at the center of your own stories. All the shameful and the messy ones. All the half-formed and the crazy ones. All the commonplace and mystical ones.

Now is the time to stand up for the time and energy it takes to dream and draft and craft those stories into insights that help someone else.

Now. Now is time to claim the time it takes to do all this righteous writerly reclaiming.

And, it’s time to make the space for the words that want to come through you

Tell every excuse, valid or otherwise, that you understand it has its place, but it exists on the other side of the door to your sacred writing space.

Wait, do you have a your sacred writing space?

It may be a room. It may only be a journal and a pen and an intention to find a chair where you can rest and think without interruption.

Your sacred writing space is a space in time as much as it is a place you can pin on a map. It’s the space when your heart spills open and your mind reorders chaos and your brilliance bashes up against your most foolish beliefs.

In order to find yourself in that space, in order to create that space for yourself, you must first unburden yourself.

Say: “Thank you. I see you,” to every item on the litany of resistance that pulls you away from that sacred appointment with your creativity. Ask all of those shoulds, comparison games, distractions, and demands to sit aside while you do the work that you must do.

This is how you create sacred writing space

Try it. Make your own list of the forces that pull the pen from your hand and slam the laptop on your fingers the moment you try to write into your truth. Can you say “Thank you. I see you” to those forces and politely ask them to wait until you’re done drafting into a piece of writing that matters to you?

You may need to do this exercise again and again. And you might find you need support to keep bravely staring down the hobgoblins of writer’s block…

That’s why I've created the Sovereign Writers Circle.

Learn more about the online writing group for healers, therapists, and transformation professionals. This is how you're doing develop the writing practice that supports you, your creativity, and the brilliant work you’re here to do.

What an Irish Goddess Can Teach You About Writing & Marketing Your Practice

If I had one wish for you, it would be that you would stand sovereign in your life, in your story, and, yes, in the marketplace.

Sovereignty is at the heart personal fulfillment and professional success. When you are Sovereign, you are the confident, compassionate ruler of your own life. You don't assume that you can control everything, but you are sure of your worth and guided by your dedication to the greater good. 

For the healer, therapist, or coach who wants to change lives with her vision and her work, sovereignty is a beautiful thing to aspire to.

A quick Irish history lesson (and a good story to tell over a few pints of Guinness!)

But, before it was applied to the modern individual, “sovereignty” has belonged in discussions of royalty and statecraft.

Goddess by Moira age 5

At the heart of Celtic myth - and particularly Irish myth - sits the Sovereignty Goddess. She is divinity made flesh and an embodiment of the land itself. In order for the king to take the throne and guarantee the fertility of his realm, he had to win favor with this otherworldly woman. And then she took him to bed to seal the deal.

Across mountains meant to be her breasts and across rivers meant to be her blood or tears, battles were waged in her name. The Sovereignty Goddess did not rule, you see. She was the power behind the throne. Or, perhaps, it's better to say the power before the throne.

She supported his royal cause and she crowned the king, but then, she had to stand aside and let him define his own destiny.

Centuries later, when the Irish farmers struggled under English rule, the Sovereignty Goddess reemerged in the folk tales. This time, she was a fairy woman representing dreams of independence. The goddess would appear to young men in a dream and incite them to take a stand for themselves, their people, and their country.

(Does this sound a but like what you do for clients? You help them along their journey of becoming and giving them the tools to succeed on their own, right?)

What does the Sovereignty Goddess have to offer the modern transformation professional?

History is starved of powerful women, so this influential creature is a welcome shot of the feminine. Certainly she got my attention when I was a student, just as she got the attention of the people who used these myths to understand their world.

But a couple of generations of feminist literary and cultural criticism has taught us that “and then a woman appears” is not always a sign of gender equality and empowerment.

Though seducing mortals and actually being a country is all very fabulous, it’s quite disempowering. The goddess is momentarily star of the origin story, but then she is pushed offstage until the hero decides to invade a neighboring kingdom in her honor.

With this in mind, what can a king-making, rabble rousing Sovereignty Goddess do for the transformation professional on their own quest to change the world?

Well, being an essential part of the prologue or “just” having a recurring role in the supporting cast is actually what being a healer is all about.

5 Lessons About Storytelling & Marketing that Only a Sovereignty Goddess Could Teach You

When you’re a therapist or healing professional writing in support of your own work, the Sovereignty Goddess can be the perfect model.

As the writer or the healer, you’re not the star. The reader is the hero. The client is the hero.

Your role is to awaken, inspire, support, facilitate. Though you hope to sustain a long term relationship with your readers and your clients, the focus is on their process and growth, not your role as guide.

Here are five ways to embody the Sovereignty Goddess and make a difference in your business and in people’s lives:

1. Live the Legend: Like the Sovereignty Goddess, you need a powerful legend.
   
   Through your writing and branding, you can build visibility and a strong reputation that invites people to learn more about what you offer. Intrigued by your story as well as the social proof (what people are saying about you), prospective clients (or, perhaps, perspective heroes) will be excited to explore how you can help them rewrite their own stories.

2. Embrace the Magic: The Sovereignty Goddess used magic to turn commoners into kings and warriors.
   
   In our contemporary world, we have our own kinds of magic. After all, there’s something just a little mysterious in that alchemical process that turns ideas into words that help your ideal clients understand that you're the one who can help them become healed and whole.
   
   We create and connect to magic through stories. When you sit down and write out your vision for your clients, describing what sort of transformation you know is possible, you are taking the first step in making heroes who, in turn, can be Sovereign in their own lives.

3. Exercise Choice: Just as the goddess has the power to name her consort, you have a similar power when you decide on your ideal client and reader.
   
   Choose someone who has the life experiences that your stories can speak to. Write for people who seek the outcomes that your work can promise. It’s in being choosy and specific that you’re most effective, telling stories that go deep and doing work that changes lives.

4. Seek to Empower: When that young man laid down with the goddess, it was guaranteed that he’d arise an empowered man ready to make his own way in the world.

   Your hero client/reader is going to use the seeds of your story to create his or her own great narrative. Ultimately, this is what you want: your audience’s new sense of success and happiness originates with you but does not permanently depend on you.

5. Practice Trust: The Sovereignty Goddess understood her role in the grand scheme of things: kings would pass on and young upstarts would need her to help them take their place. She trusted that in every king’s court, her story was told around the fire - the modern equivalent of being shared on the Facebook wall, the Pinterest board, and the Twitter stream.
   
   Create content that matters to you and is designed to speak to your ideal readers and you can trust that your good work will inspire your hero client to share on your story (most likely by crediting your supporting role in their own remarkable journey).

This St. Patrick’s Day, as we celebrate all things Irish (both pagan and Christian), I’d be grateful if you shared the Sovereignty story with your community - who knows what getting in touch with their inner Celtic Goddess might do for them!

Do you need help discovering and telling your own Sovereign Story? The new program, Stand In Your Sovereign Story begins April 14.

2020 update: This post is three years old now, but some of these phrases ended up in my newly published book, The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic

The Moment a Princess Becomes a Queen, #365StrongStories 26

The woman drew her spine straight though no one would accuse her of slouching. She glared at the shoulder blades of the retreating clerk but soon sighed deeply and settled her face back into its usual expression of benevolent calm. It wasn’t this dreadful man’s fault that the news he carried was so bleak. She had never known an officer from the merchants’ bank to come bearing anything but vague threats and insincere apologies.

In truth, she had inherited an impoverished realm but wasn’t given a single clue about how to rescue it. For more than two generations the family had eked out an existence on the afterglow of remembered opulence alone. But even that dance with delusion had ended, finally and without ceremony. She smiled wryly to think that there wasn’t money for ceremony anyhow.

Regardless of what the bankers said, there would always be enough to keep them fed and clothed. Mostly, she didn’t care if they had to move to the castle gatehouse because the roof of the Great Hall finally caved in. Though she hadn’t realized it at the time, she had made that decision long ago.

Before she ever wore her father’s heavy crown upon her head, she married a good man who would always be able to provide the essentials of life. But, of course, she had always been raised to expect more.

Nothing but the finest dreams and most gossamer promises were good enough for the young princess. She had been permitted to marry a man for love and was still allowed to keep the expectations of a bride who had made a strategic match based on riches and position.

Only now that the princess’s fantasy had dissolved into a sovereign’s reality did she see the weakness in the story of happily ever after. Now, she had her own daughters’ legacy to consider. And what about the ancestral ghosts that would lose their home if this palace was allowed to slide into the sea?

She took off her crown and looked at her reflection in the rosy gold. Her mind made up, for the first time in her life she looked into the eyes of a queen.