Lesson 1
Open A Door
In this lesson we explore writing as an act of presence, a sacred declaration of ‘Hineni’ (here I am), a readiness to take on whatever is asked of us. Today, we raise our hands and proclaim our openness to begin and to find solace for our spirits in the sacred act of writing as medicine. We open the door and cross the threshold into soul space to receive guidance on the tools for this 30-day writing practice, and beckon new beginnings.
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Lesson 2
Close The Door
Let us turn away from the noise and chaos of the external world and burrow into our own inner depths. Today’s lesson is an antidote to distraction, noise, Netflix, social media updates, and the momentary flashes of dopamine we get with every like and retweet. We commit to consciously choosing silence, solitude, and quality time with ourselves, so we can sink inwards and go deep to hear our soul’s whisper.
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Lesson 3
Just Believe
In today’s lesson we write to cultivate self-belief and explore what it means to ‘take ourselves seriously’. We can no longer self-censor, shut up, be seen but not heard, and ‘tone it down’. Over time, these habits of self-abnegation have eroded our belief that we have anything worth saying. It is our human right to take up as much space as we need. Today we make a conscious act to retrieve self-belief, so we can begin to recover from perfectionism, self-sabotaging behaviours, self-criticism, and jealousy. We undertake to simply believe we have a voice worth listening to.
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Lesson 4
Nurture What's Here Now
What does it mean to truly ‘pay attention’? In this lesson I will share techniques for staying in the ever-receding now, and for holding each second briefly in our hands and hearts, and releasing our fear of impermanence as the present moment falls into memory. We look at our relationship with time – the past and the future and dig our heels in the soil of this moment, because it is ridiculously precious.
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Lesson 5
Breathe, Bathe, Bake Bread
Today’s lesson is an antidote to over-thinking, analysing, and abstraction as we come to rest in our bodies. We will step into our skins - this fleshy wetsuit - and wriggle around to get a feel for conscious, mindful embodiment. We peek through the five windows of our senses to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world as if we're visiting for the first time. Feel free to bring kindling for your senses – a strawberry, sprig of mint, coffee beans, feather, whistle, silk scarf.
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Lesson 6
Give It A Name
Until we give names to experiences or emotions, we can be at the mercy of a swirling, shadowy fog of feeling. In this lesson, we look at the act of naming as both an acknowledgement and an invocation. We can use names to bestow honour to a feeling or story in our lives, or as a summons or entreaty of something to be so. Naming is a powerful act of witnessing and can restore order, dignity, and meaning to our lives. It is also how we access the power of affirmations.
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Lesson 7
Save Time
In this lesson we will write to capture the past as a way of holding onto it before it disappears into the mists of time. We will explore our nostalgia, homesickness, and longing for everything that has subsided into memory. Writing is a tool for preserving, saving, honouring, and keeping something or someone ‘alive’. We will explore the non-linear nature of memories, their trickery as untrustworthy narratives, and their relationship to time, emotion, and the slippages of perspective.
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Lesson 8
Release
We can get stuck in our lives and find it impossible to move on. Often this is because we are caught in a story we cannot release. One reason we hold on tightly to our stories is because we’re afraid of who we might be without the ‘safety blanket’ of our old narratives. The paradox of writing to ‘save a moment’ is that we are simultaneously released from its grip and can let go more easily. Today we investigate how it is to when we write to unburden and empty ourselves. Writing can be an act of cleansing, ‘taking out the garbage,’ making space, and moving forward from memories and personal myths that have kept us trapped in their vice.
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Lesson 9
Be A Lover
Today we are writing as an act of devotion, to remain in awe, and to praise the world. Mary Oliver reminds us that ‘joy was not made to be a crumb,’ and so we will feast on what we love, desire, and adore. We will explore words, images, moments, other people, and of course, ourselves. This is a celebration of how words make us feel, and how much joy we can squeeze from the act of writing and being witness to the beauty and wonder around us.
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Lesson 10
Ask Questions
In this lesson we write to stoke our curiosity and lean into questions, without any attachment to finding answers. We will ‘love the questions themselves’, as Rilke suggests, and wander into wonder. Having a curious mind expands our empathy, irreverence, and ambivalence and helps us to transform, all of which deliver us from stagnation into regenerative states. Curiosity is a lubricant, a laxative to enable us to quicken from stuck states in our lives.
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Lesson 11
Catch A Dream
What mysteries visit us while we sleep? What are those stories that play out in our brains each night? Our dream lives are rich repositories of symbolism, opening up frontiers of meaning for us. From ancient times and across all cultures, dreams have been regarded as portals into the Great Mystery. Where do we go? What do dreams mean? In today’s lesson, we will learn how to catch a dream, that slippery elusive brain-dance, and hold it down as it forms on the page.
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Lesson 12
Steer
Can we learn to reclaim our personal power through writing? If we have suffered due to the behaviour or actions of others, had our agency compromised, been ‘victims’ of circumstance or cruelty, this lesson is our chance to take back our agency. We must believe we have power - this is the first act of taking back our personal authority. When we write, we take responsibility for our thoughts and feelings. We get clearer and clearer about who we are and in so doing, we take back the reins of our lives. We steer.
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Lesson 13
Kiss The Ground
When we feel lost and untethered, we can come back to ourselves by recognizing and reminding ourselves where we are, and how we came to be here. In today’s lesson we will locate ourselves, find the co-ordinates of our existence, connect with the ley lines and earth below us. This is a how we learn to belong to the place in which we stand.
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Lesson 14
Trust The Unknown
In this lesson we will write as an act of faith, opening ourselves to serendipity and surprise. We invite the mystery in as a source of inspiration, as much as it evokes chaos and mercurial energies that unsettle and discombobulate. Together with discipline and commitment, we need the unruly trickster of the unknown to enliven our thinking, creativity, and writing processes.
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Lesson 15
Take A Stand
Our words can break the spells of falsehood, invisibility, silence, and injustice. We can write to set the record straight, bear witness to suffering (ours or another’s), report a crime against our hearts or bodies, fight for our values and beliefs or make a victim impact statement. Writing can be a form of activism and advocacy when we take a stand. If we have felt taken advantage of, pushed around, and bullied, today’s lesson will teach us how to use writing to stand strong, resist, and refuse to give in. Here we learn the gritty, graceful gesture of boundary setting. Get ready to say 'No.'
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Lesson 16
Let It Be Light
Though we have to take ourselves seriously because life is sacred and people are precious, we can temper this awareness with levity (even humour) and not take ourselves overly seriously. Today’s lesson is to teach us to lighten up and write for fun. We can be playful, silly – even ridiculous. Writing lightly takes us into the delightful territory of rhyme and rhythm, where language tickles us and we stumble into what is funny, hilarious , and uproarious. We know too, that laughter is always on the side of healing, so get ready to have some fun.
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Lesson 17
Go Wild
Domestication and civility have tamed us, and in so doing, has dampened our creative life force. This lesson is our chance to reclaim the wildness both inside and out. We will unmuffle our respectability, relinquish our decency, howl with the coyotes, and run with the hunted. The natural world is alive. It speaks to us. We are not ‘special’ simply because we are human – we are only one small part of the great ecosystem on the planet. Get ready to unbutton your blouse and let your spirit dance to the beat of the deep wilderness.
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Lesson 18
Confess
Shame causes us to contract into ourselves. We become terrified of being vulnerable to stop ourselves from being humiliated or hurt again. But our secrets keep us as much as we keep them. Today we shed shame and roll our secrets out from the dark caverns of humiliation. In this lesson we will write into the bright light of self-acceptance and self-compassion.
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Lesson 19
Play With Fire
To live ardently, we must be connected to the blaze of our vitality. In this lesson, we inch closer to the fire inside ourselves to connect with Eros, anger, and passion. In writing, if we do not feel the flames, we are straying too far from the creative source. Fire is dangerous if it is not controlled, and it’s this edge that makes it a powerful tool of transformation and purification. Today we give ourselves over to the power of our passions, as we write boldly and fearlessly next to the licking flicker of our inner fire.
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Lesson 20
Go Back For The Orphans
We have all left versions of ourselves behind in our scramble to escape our histories. None of us survives unscathed from the chamber of childhood without bits of ourselves hidden away. These are the orphans of our consciousness which we must retrieve, in order to become whole. In today’s lesson, we go back for the parts we left behind. As we unlock this room of darkness, we begin to process emotions. Today I share my methodology for this rescue operation.
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Lesson 21
Ask For Help
One of the bravest acts we can undertake is to ask for help. It takes humility and vulnerability to admit we are afraid and are not in control. In today’s lesson, we call on the invisible forces and write to ask for ancestral and divine guidance. Our writing can connect us to our histories and to the worlds beyond and above the one we inhabit. We may begin to wonder if our stories are not echoes of intergenerational narratives and invite curiosity about the stories we are holding. Get ready to talk to ghosts.
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Lesson 22
Shake The Silence
In Lesson 2 we welcomed silence as a nurturer of our inner worlds. But sometimes silence is not nourishing or life-giving. If it has been imposed on us and has robbed us of our story, it can erode our sanity and souls. When we shake the silence, we choose how and when to speak. We decide what words to fit to dislodge a narrative that has kept us quiet. This lesson is about writing as an act of rupture and rewriting of our stories, this time, in our own voices.
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Lesson 23
Remake Yourself
The Japanese art of Kintsugi repairs broken vessels with gold resin, so that the break becomes the most beautiful part of the object. In our own lives, we can put ourselves back together when we feel shattered, because beneath the broken heart beats another heart that cannot break. In today’s lesson we work with our bruised, fractured selves and write to make ourselves whole while honouring our scars and wounds. As we write, we self-soothe and in so doing, we begin to heal.
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Lesson 24
Connect The Dots, Tie The Threads
In today’s lesson, we write to find patterns and discern the ways in which our lives are small fractals of a greater story. We begin to connect isolated moments and experiences and seek emerging patterns that speak to deeper spiritual issues. We are searching for the themes - the universal echoes that tie our personal stories to the stories of all others, as well as throughlines – golden threads of meaning that are woven through the fabric of our stories.
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Lesson 25
Switch
Our reality is determined by our vantage point. Everything we think, say and do is based on our subjective perspective. We believe this is the 'truth', but it is just a single point of view. Through writing, we can switch frames, swap shoes, change places, and begin to see with many eyes, from a multitude of angles and directions, and in this way relieve stress, anxiety, and heartache. In today’s lesson we are writing to reframe, to give us new perspectives, shake up old ways of seeing, and dislodge our point of view as ‘special’ or ‘preferred.’
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Lesson 26
Seek The Story
Our lives are often a chaotic fog of events we never fully understand nor have time to process. When we write, we are creating an ordered pattern – we place ourselves in a sequence of events, we locate ourselves along a storyline and in this way, we structure meaning. Today’s lesson is to share some storytelling structures, and in this way, help you to write meaning into your life. It's not as messy as you imagine.
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Lesson 27
Make Peace
Whatever we cannot forgive, keeps us hostage. Nelson Mandela famously said, ‘As I walked out the door towards the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.’ Resentment and bitterness erode our life force. In today’s lesson we write as an act of forgiveness and mercy – toward others, as well as ourselves.
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Lesson 28
Offer Thanks
When we are exhausted, stressed, and afraid, we forget to notice the blessings of an ordinary life – food, clean water, a bed, a roof, the smell of jasmine. We take people around us for granted. We waste food, water, electricity, without meaning to. Writing can be a practice of gratitude if we use it to accumulate minor blessings of sentience, mindfulness, mand the absence of pain. Today’s lesson is a retuning of our frequencies to notice what is good, beautiful, and honourable in our troubled world. When we feel as if we have nothing left to give, we can always offer our thanks.
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Lesson 29
Tell The Whole Holy Truth
Our writing reveals who we are – we cannot hide from ourselves when we undertake to bear witness to the truths of our lives. Today we are writing to come clean, to own our experiences, to be our own loyal witness. In this lesson we will explore how self-witnessing is a deep act of love, self-compassion, and companionship, and how we become whole – and come home - when we tell the whole, holy truth.
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Lesson 30
Make Hope a Habit
No matter our circumstances, we always have a choice: to despair or be hopeful. Whenever we come to the page, we are beginning again. Writing is a habit we can learn to cultivate. The words we choose to put on the page can retune us, like resetting a watch. They are places we can come back to. In our final lesson we learn how to make writing a habit of hope and how to build a writing practice into our daily lives to keep nourishing our souls.
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