Writing WOMEN

In this first lesson, we will set up a meditative practice and ritual container that will invite new writing to arrive. We will do an opening meditation that allows us to attune to earth energy and cosmic energy, as a way of clearing out old blockages and inviting in the new. We will cultivate receptivity, and we will talk about creating new forms for carrying insight into our present times.

This week, we will talk about the energetic anatomy of female creativity. We will do another meditation designed to clear our energy and tap into grounded awareness. We will acknowledge our own lives as our central sources of meaning and wisdom. And we will engage in writing exercises that allow us to work with the stories that our bodies remember. We will externalize and free ourselves from their patterns as we work with them them in new ways.

This week, we will look at women’s role as carriers and conduits of the generations. We will begin with a meditation, attuning to healing energy. This will help us to work with multigenerational stories without getting stuck in their pain, denials, grandiosity, or confusion. We will do some writing around how our foremothers’ stories echo in our own lives. We will honor women’s reality by writing humble, sensory specifics, which will help to rebalance a gendered pattern of shame/grandiosity.

This week, we will deepen our ancestral work with a meditation that allows us to commune with an ancestral guide from our female lineage. Our lineage stories do not just exist in the past, but are available for reshaping and learning in the present. Undertaking ancestral writing with the help of a healed guide helps us to choose and enliven those stories that are most needed now.

In this week and next, we will commit to writing about a specific ancestral line and/or theme in our own lives. Whatever the subject, we will undertake this work within the presence of an ancestral guide. We will develop methods for staying committed, for banishing fear, for seeing and hearing scenes, and increasing our freedom through focus. We will work on witnessing and recording passages without getting pulled into them somatically, or flipping into self-judgement.

No story is just a single story. Stories—like lives—always arise in relationship. We will bring this understanding of relationship to our meditating and writing this week, developing a sense of relational ethics to further develop our writing. We will consider the social and historical contexts of our material, and we will do writing exercises based in collaboration, research, and grounded imagination.

This week, we will think about creative work as a gift received and then given back to the community. After a meditation and writing exercises based in inner listening, participants will have the option to share their work as a group, and to cultivate the community and reception that allows the work to season and deepen. We will shift notions of perfectionism into ideas of flow, and we will welcome our work as part of a widening conversation and lineage.

This week, we will again meditate and freewrite. We will connect our guide to an archetypal energy, and will write into this awareness of mythical storylines. We will acknowledge that there are (at least!) two sides of every archetype, which will help us to become more honest about non-duality in our own stories and our ancestral stories. We will continue to honor sweetness and humility by writing from the five senses, connecting the beyond to the embodied.