Come On, Let's Play

Heyyyyy you guyssss!

(Did you hear that come through in my best playground voice?)

I’m going to use that outside voice a little more often, ok? It’s not that I want to yell at you, it’s that I want to spark the kind of joy and movement all too many of us left behind on the playground.

This morning during a deep talk with a deeply insightful coach of mine, I came to realize how careful and delicate many of my communications have become.

Somewhere along the line, I traded sales pages for “invitation pages” because that felt less pushy and gross.

Somewhere along the line, I also traded the copywriter’s tricks (bold headlines and emphasizing pain points) for the gentle voice of a tea party hostess.

In many cases, my soft voiced suggestions seem to have gotten lost in the din of the digital world. With the chaos of the daily responsibilities and the worries about the wider world, it’s no wonder the people I most wanted to reach weren't hearing me.

Here’s What’s True

I am a multifaceted creature who offers up the magical and the practical, the tender and the snarky, the sacred and the mundane in equal measure. I value tears and empathy, but sometimes we all just need to laugh until it’s funny and find the way to healing with a megawatt smile.

And so, I say, come play with us, come write with us on Friday, March 1 at noon ET.

You need to make it to this free Community Writing Practice because you need to meet yourself on the page. You need to make space for the stories, the old memories, the sorrows, and the surprises too.

Choose Creative Commitment Over Chronic Overcommitment

It's the first of February and the end of a long week, and I have a few of questions for you...

What if you could stop tying yourself in knots of overcommitment? 

What if you found the strength and the structure to work toward your creative dreams?

What if you felt held and whole whole and full of possibility rather than chronically chased by "all the things"?

Here we are one month into this still fresh year. 

Here we are on the Celtic festival of Imbolc that marks the start of spring in Ireland, Scotland, and Britain and marks winter's midway point here in the upper latitudes of North America.

It feels like the perfect time to evaluate our relationship with our promises and our shoulds and the stuff we say want to do.

This is all related to my new year's resolution: radically rebirth my relationship with (over)commitment. I'm very much a work in progress after a lifetime spent saying yes to all things.

I talk about creating a new relationship to commitment during this week's video.

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!

Thanksgiving Writing Prompts: Grappling with Gratitude and Feasting on Story

As a writing coach who crafts two prompts each week for members of the Sovereign Writers Circle, I look everywhere for inspiration.

Conversations with clients and with my kids. The latest headlines and the real-life ripples and unfounded fears they create. Tarot cards, symbols from nature, and the song I can’t get out of my head.

And sometimes, I just look at the calendar and it feels as if the prompts have already been written for me.

Though I stressed a little about offering something so basic as gratitude and feasting on this week of American Thanksgiving, I allowed myself to take the path that seems to be more travelled.

Based on the feedback from my writers this afternoon, it was exactly the right move.

To tell the story of where you are right now… It’s the hardest thing to do sometimes. In the quest to “go deep” we ignore the very real, very powerful, very necessary stories right in front of us.

And so, before you pack the car or find yourself elbow deep in a bird, I invite you to pick up a pen and write into the not-so-obvious stories that are hiding in plain sight.

Prompt 1: The Gratitude Story

Gratitude… We know it’s essential medicine. We know that gratitude transforms the mundane into the magical. We know that gratitude is the glue.

And gratitude… Sometimes it seems to trendy, too easily preached and too rarely practiced. Sometimes it seems at once too simplistic and too damn hard.

Grapple with gratitude, with all its light and shadow. Search out the sweetness and dare to explore the bitterness too.

Prompt 2: The Feast Story

Write the story of a holiday gathering. It could be a specific Thanksgiving meal.  It could be a composite of all the times the family gathered around the table. It could be the yet unwritten story of 2018 or a dream you have for years in the future.

Try to write it from your first person point of view. And then, consider stepping outside yourself and tell the story according to the view of someone else or from an omniscient narrator’s perspective.  

Write with us on Thursday, November 29

The next free community writing practice is coming up the week after Thanksgiving. Expect some brand new writing prompts and the warmth and wisdom that gets generated when healers, seekers, and creatives gather together to make time to write.

Plan to us at noon ET on 11/29. If you can’t make it live, please do sign up anyway and you’ll get the prompts and the meeting recording later that same day.

Think your community could use some writing prompts that will help them review their relationship with gratitude and see the Thanksgiving gathering in a new way? Please forward this message or share it on Facebook.