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Your Personal, Creative, and Spiritual Sovereignty
Every creative being has a soul-deep passion, some kind of unique magic that is just waiting to be expressed.
What’s yours?
And then there comes a day when you can no longer say "someday" and you laugh into the fresh spring air and tell the singing birds, the blossoming trees, and anyone who will listen: it's TODAY.
Every creative being has a soul-deep passion, some kind of unique magic that is just waiting to be expressed.
It might be art on a canvas or words on a page. It might be the way you fill a home with good smells and even better energy. It might be an idea, a lived philosophy that you long to embody and share with the world.
For me, it's this whole idea of personal, creative, and spiritual sovereignty. It's the desire to empower other women to say "I am the one I have been waiting for. I choose myself. The time is now. I am here to make the world more beautiful, bearable, and bold. I do this by first grounding into myself and then into the earth and then reaching out my arms to heal, help, and start a revolution."
Want to find you magic? Want to discover how to free your princess, crown your queen, and embrace the wise woman within you?
The new nine-week workshop series, Your Sovereign Awakening begins Monday, May 13. Will you join us?
Find the Power of Sovereignty Within the Dream of Community
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.
It’s time to look at our need for community, our need for sovereignty, and how the two blend together.
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!
Are you dreaming the dream or doing the dream?
It's Friday, and that means I am breaking a rule by breaking out of my writing bubble, but I trust that it's ok to give myself permission to do that.
My current work in progress describes how the Celtic Sovereignty Goddess guides women through the transitions of modern life. Why write a book about crowning the queen within if you can't rewrite a few rules along the way? Especially when I'm taking these moments to write to you and the rest of my beloved community of healers, writers, and creatives.
My little one is home with me today, and it might make more sense to hit the grocery store and put away all that laundry so I can empty the baskets and start the whole process again. But, instead, I'm giving myself permission to let her watch Moana for the twelfth time and I am using this stolen hour to do the dream.This is new for me. Until just a few weeks ago, I'd never allow myself to sit down and work on my creative projects before the kids' bedtime. It seems the Sovereignty Goddess is whispering: it's time.
Dreaming Time and Doing Time
This life I lead, as a mother and a creative entrepreneur, it offers ample time for dreaming.
Driving the kids around, throwing together yet another soup, dealing with all that laundry... When the girls amuse one another and when I remind myself that it's ok to turn off NPR (the madness in Washington will go on whether I listen to every news report or not), I find new vast new territories within my own mind.
Yes, this life with small children may give me time to dream, but it often leaves very little time to do. I have time for my clients, of course. I have time to co-create the podcast. But time to actually do my own writing? That has often seemed impossible...
But then, this book project awoke within me. Re-awoke, I might say, but I am not 100% sure that's a word.
With the spring rains, with the rising tides of my own life, and the churning waters of these tumultuous times in the collective, the Sovereignty Goddess rose out of the earth, out of the past, and out of my own past studies and told me it was time. (Get a taste of her magic here.)
And so, the S.G. gets my creative doing time every Friday, and she gets lots of dreamtime in between. And I feel more alive than I have in long, long time.
Out of the Barren Territory of "Just a Dream"
I'm realizing how much effort I have put into dreaming the dream, and how little I devoted to doing the dream. This long time habit has left me feeling barren and lost... I was terribly accustomed to the bitter cycle of feeling inspired and then feeling disappointed as all those ideas just faded into the ethers.
What about you... are you able to dream the dream but just don't have the time and space to do the dream?
I'd love to talk with you about how I can help you capture that creative energy and turn it into words on a page that touch the hearts of your readers and potential clients.
Book a 15 minute session and we'll talk about how writing coaching can support your creative practice and transform your professional practice.
Writing Lessons From the Berry Patch
As is often the way with everyday magic, you don’t notice it even when it’s right under your nose. Or encircling your back yard.
We lived in the house for a few years before we realized we lived in wild berry heaven. Our land bursts with joyful, succulent gifts every July, but we never noticed until we slowed down to a toddler’s pace and humbled ourselves to look at the world through the eyes of a child.
And now our second girl is a passionate berry picker too. She’s insatiable, really, but at least we know where to find her when we say “but I thought YOU were watching her!”
This need to chaperone a two year-old in a fruitful paradise that also features thorns, concealed ditches, ticks, snakes, and poison ivy brings life to a halt a few times each day.
When at my best, I'm a merry companion willing to tear my dress to reach that perfect cluster of sweetness. Then there are the moments when I’m itching to start dinner or do some writing or simply go find some shoes so I can satisfy the incessant requests for “Berries! Berries! Mama, ber-RIES!” without injuring myself.
We’re not just picking fruit in the berry patch. We're taking lessons in patience, creativity, and picking the perfect moment.
There are also the in-between times when it’s possible to be the present parent and take an expedition into my own creativity at the same time.
As I said, it took us a while to notice we even had something so wonderful to harvest. But now that we know what to look for and we’ve come to expect this annual burst of Mother Earth’s abundance, we have a chance to learn the berries’ stages of growth. And impatient pickers that we may be, we try to act accordingly.
We know the tight fists, tough beginnings, sparkling jewels, and shining stars. These are the prickly buds, the unripe fruits, the ultimate treat, and the beauty left behind when a berry has been picked.
You can develop and enjoy the harvests of a writing practice in the same way.
Now, think about that story you’ve been longing to tell, the idea that you long to pull out of your head and put on paper. Consider the post that you want to see take root in the hearts of your audience…
At what stage are you? What can you do and what can you expect?
Is it a prickly bud? Perhaps all of the energy still needs to be aimed inward. The idea still needs more time. Though things look quiet from the outside, there’s tremendous growth and organization happening within. The reward seems terribly far off, but the promise is huge.
You need to give yourself time to write some meandering first drafts and to let yourself spend time on the self-focused first draft. Allow. Explore. Practice patience.
Is it unripe fruit? Maybe the structure of the piece of writing has emerged and now you’re tempted to push it out into the world, even if it’s not fully ready. This is when you must remember that the surest way to a disappointment - and a sore stomach - is found when you force a still-in-process post or product in the world. Perfection isn’t the goal, but putting out something that you know is unready is a way of devaluing yourself, your story, and your audience.
Walk away from the piece for hours or days and return with fresh eyes. Call on a friend or think about hiring a writing and storytelling coach who can help you see the big picture and fit all of the vital pieces together.
Is it the ideal moment to harvest? With love, time, and attention - or water, time, and sunshine - that piece of writing is ready to emerge in all of its fullness. Oh, it tastes so sweet on your tongue and it will bring such pleasure and nourishment to those you share it with!
Hit publish and savor the sweetness.
Is it time to share the beauty? There’s a bit of sadness when you release a treasured idea into a world where it might be gobbled up or left to rot on the shelf. Trust that you nurtured your idea with attention and patience. Trust its inherent nurturing nature and promote yourself.
Let other people know about your little shining star. And what if you put it out there and no one seems to notice? Try again. We live in an age of media saturation and a lack of response isn’t a judgement of your work’s worthiness.
I wish I could have you over for a chat down in our berry patch. Let's try the next best thing: set up a free 15 minute consultation to discuss how I can help you get from first shoots to a brilliant harvest.
Refame: Those who know better than to do every day, teach
Everyone has heard that snarky line “those who can’t, teach.” The updated version is said with even more venom: “those who can’t, coach.”
I have no use for the throwaway cruelty that lies at the heart of both phrases. Such statements either come from self-loathing or the petty judgement of those standing outside the arena. “Not good enough” never serves anyone and never gets anything done.
And think about it for a moment - this whole idea has a flip side: “those who can, must.”
Whether you’re teaching or doing, “can’t” and “must” are limiting and damaging
My 2016 project, #365StrongStories, has taught me a great deal about what it means to do something every day just because you can. It very quickly becomes a dangerous "should."
I’m a born writer. It’s what I do for work and for fun. But when writing becomes a massive obligation - I must because I can, I must because I committed, I must because I am not good enough if I don't… Then you run the risk of making every word a punishing, impossible chore.
In the process of all this doing, all this daily writing, I remembered why I took up teaching and coaching storytellers and writers. It wasn’t because I couldn’t do the writing myself but because it doesn’t make sense for me to do that full time. My creative resources won’t stretch that far. And I do not think they are supposed to.
Remember the value in teaching and coaching others
When Melvin Varghese of Selling the Couch interviewed me, I had a chance to share my insights into why storytelling is important to clinicians in private practice and how to use it to connect to clients. I also talk about making a sane, compassionate commitment to your writing practice.
As I listened back on our conversation, I was struck by the value that lies not just in doing but in supporting the process of those who are trying to find their own way. Humbly and gratefully, I fell just a little bit more in love with the work I get to do.
Save your resources for the stories that matter. Support your creative process by guiding others. When all else fails, support your creative process by pulling out the earbuds and going for a walk as you listen to someone else discuss her craft.
