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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:
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.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.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.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.
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
Exhaustion: It's Time to Tell a New Story by Karen Brody
I'm thrilled to bring you a guest post from Karen Brody this week for several reasons:
- I am in love with her work and am eager for her upcoming Daring to Rest: Wild Woman Writer - a 9 month online emersion in meditation, yoga nidra, and writing
- I want to see what you can create when you shed the "I'm so bloody tired" narrative - and I want the same for myself.
Let's face it, women today are tired.
Done. Cooked. Fried.
I coach busy women leaders, and this is what they tell me all the time:
"I spent years getting educated and now I don't have any energy to work."
Or "I love my work, but my kids keep getting sick and so I show up to my job and can't even remember what I'm doing."
This story of exhaustion is real and we could say it's simply an effect of modern life and leave it at that. But I sense there's more meat to this story. I believe women can re-write the story of their exhaustion and it starts with telling a new story from a new place.
Shedding Your Tired Stories About Sleep & Rest
Do I want women to lie about being tired? Well, actually, I see it more like the need to shed.
If we're going to bring peace and tranquility back to our lives -- and to the world -- we've got to shed ourselves of what keep us so tired. And that starts with our mind.
Our minds are useful tools that give us many gifts, but there's this other dimension that goes beyond the mind and it's urgent women begin tapping into this place. Why? Because no matter how many gadgets you use to measure the number of hours you're sleeping or how well you think you know your exhaustion, identifying with this story is ultimately draining. It won't make you feel whole, ecstatic and ultimately fulfilled.
Counting the number of hours you're sleeping at night -- telling yourself the story that you're just not a good sleeper or just not the kind of person who can get in eight hours of sleep every night -- is thinking that is done through ego-mind, and this is exactly what separates us from oneness.
People think ego-mind will free them -- counting those hours of sleep -- but most people who are counting the number of hours they sleep are not living fulfilled lives.
I'm not shaming science -- the research that tells us we should be getting a certain number of hours of sleep is often based on solid facts -- but instead I'm urging women to be cautious how we use it. Sleep deprivation is only an ingredient in your soup. It's urgent that we reveal the full recipe.
We must we teach women to tell the full story of exhaustion... to shake off this one-sided karmic drain.
When You See Beyond Exhaustion, You See Gold
It's time to stop reinforcing separation.
It's no wonder women are so exhausted. When we tell only one side of the story throws us out of balance.
In scientific terms we've lost the balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches of our nervous system. In human potential terms, we've stopped looking for our gold.
The story of exhaustion in women today keeps us stuck in a narrative that has taken us away from feeling wildly alive.
What if instead of being goal oriented -- looking for those perfect precious hours of sleep -- we searched for our gold? This is the story we must start writing. With technology extending our days and gadgets to tell us that we're not measuring up all here to stay, women need to take back the narrative on exhaustion and focus on our gold -- that place where were wildly ourselves and creative. This is the only way woman leaders of the 21st century are going to survive.
I remember a time when I was a young community organizer and all my mentors were exhausted bright women stuck in what I termed "the story of yuck." They were doing brilliant work, yet their stories were all the same: high output, but exhausted in mind, body, and spirit. Most were divorced, or not in healthy relationships. Nobody seemed to care or notice that deep down they were personally miserable.
Historically women's exhaustion story hasn't been much better. Exhausted women tended to go "mad" and take to our beds as a way to check out.
Today with so many creative forms of communication and the rise in popularity of mindfulness-based tools women have an opportunity to use our voices to change the story of exhaustion to one where we're fully checked in. We no longer have to hold on to the shame of exhaustion or identify ourselves as "exhausted all the time."
Create a New, Conscious Container for Your Life & Work
So how do we tell a different story? I suggest it starts with cultivating awareness, a deep consciousness. This is the "checking in" women so desperately need and it will only come if we rest more, specially using conscious tools like my favorite, yoga nidra meditation, a sleep-based meditation technique recently referred to as a "secret ... happy place" that's all your own.
Consciousness provides these gaps of nothingness and in the gap -- a deep pause -- this is when you can dis-identify with exhaustion. Not deny your exhaustion, but rather stay unattached to that story.
Think of it like a container. Your story of exhaustion is not the container, it's part of the stuff in the container. We tend to notice the stuff, right? We often say things like "I'm so tired all the time" or "I never sleep" because this is part of our stuff in the container. This is not the container. The container is your true story -- the gold -- and not everything moving through it. The story of your stuff is time-bound. You are not. You are timeless.
Yogis often talk about enlightenment as being when you are resting in the space of awareness. When you are the container.
I attended a training a few years ago at the Amrit Yoga Center and on my ride home on the airplane I found myself writing the words of my instructor again and again:
"You are the silence, not the sound."
This is the new story of exhaustion that women must start telling. A story born out of silence, not sound.
I believe that once women rest more, get silent, and start using tools that raise our consciousness -- that help us check in -- we will finally know without a doubt that we are powerful beyond our wildest imagination. Not Super Woman -- women aren't blind anymore, we know this isn't the gold -- but simply we'll begin to tell the version of us born out of awareness beyond our stuff. We'll tell whole truth in our own voices. A new narrative of women on exhaustion. It’s time.
Mother, writer & women’s empowerment leader Karen Brody is here to help you break the cycle of fatigue and reclaim your creative spark. She'll help you get some rest, chuck perfect & return to wholeness in your mission and purpose
Join Daring to Rest: Wild Woman Writer, a 9 month sleep-based meditation immersion for creative women starting March 15, 2017.
NOTE: If your exhausted, creative heart says "yes!" to Karen's offering, send me an email by March 12 (marisa@marisagoudy.com) and I will send you a special promo code for our community. You'll get an extra savings on top of the early bird discount!
Karen Brody is a dynamic mama changing the world, inspiring mothers, birth professionals and women entrepreneurs to “be the change” through their work, personal lives, and global commitment. She is the playwright of Birth - known as “The Vagina Monologues for childbirth” - and through Birth Karen founded BOLD, a global movement supporting birth visionaries to change the culture of birth. Today the BOLD movement includes The BOLD Method for Birth, a ground breaking “women’s empowerment meets childbirth education” approach, an advanced online yoga nidra meditation pregnancy and postpartum training and Bold Tranquility, a yoga nidra meditation company for women ready to wake up and be BOLD. Karen writes regularly for the Huffington post and has written dozens of articles and two health books.
Time, rest, work, and the shaping of a writing life
“Women can have it all, but not all at the same time.” Brilliant, successful people from Betty Friedan to Madeline Albright to Oprah to Anne-Marie Slaughter are credited with this line. I don’t think anyone is irritated about plagiarism because truth is truth and amplifying shared wisdom raises everyone up.
I need to come clean: right now, I’m not occupied with writing a seminal feminist text or running the State Department or establishing myself as the ultimate media mogul.
Nope, my reality isn’t nearly as high profile or quite so life and death. It’s just as real though. I’m dancing with the daily truth about the choices that must be made: “this, not that.”
The "thises" and the "yeses"
My “thises” include mothering sick children and tending to my own wintertime ailments. When I’m not tossing tissues in the trash, I’m taking on copywriting work and writing coaching commitments for healers who are changing the world, one client at a time.
I’m also immersed in the Practice of Being Seen community for therapists and its delightfully demanding sister project, the Practice of Being Seen podcast.
On the podcast, we talk a lot about the various roles we play as individuals, as professionals, and as change agents. Often, it’s about “you can do more than one thing, but let's think about how that will feel...”
That’s what we explored in the recent discussion we had about Resistance & The Princess-Rebel Role Model. You can be both princess and rebel because, let’s be honest, we often want to be saved just as much as we want to change the world. But what does that really look like in practice? (Listen in and decide whether it’s something you can really do at the same time.)
The "thats" and the "not todays"
But the act of podcasting - and doing all the behind the scenes work it takes to make it happen - creates a whole new bunch of “thises” and excludes a whole lot of “that.”
As you may have noticed, blogging about writing and the creative quest have been in the “not that, not today” pile for some time. That’s due to the concrete realities that contain our boundless universe and give our lives some kind of reliable shape. I assume you know these - very real the constraints of time and energy?
The shaping of the time. The container of rest.
All this has me thinking about time and energy more than ever. I’m thinking about as discernment too. And I have a couple of resources for you to check out that speak right to what I know is a very common concern for so many of us - particularly those who try to fit parenting and entrepreneuring and client supporting and creating and self care all into one day.
Jeffrey Davis of Tracking Wonder invited me to write about my tango with time. It felt good to offer up some of my finite number of hours to Stop trying to make time. Enter into relationship with time.
In the post, I talk about how “I enter into relationship with time so that I can see the relationships between my ideas and the work I want to manifest.” The patience and the resources it takes to enter into such a productive relationship rely on one essential thing: rest.
Karen Brody’s work with yoga nidra has long been a source of solace and support, and I’m thrilled to tell you that she has a nine-month immersion in yoga nidra coming up.
This sleep-based meditation is radically necessary and powerful, but that isn’t the only reason I am so excited to share the program… Daring to Rest: Wild Woman Writer is specifically for women who know they have a story to tell. A playwright and author as well as a yoga nidra expert, Karen is the perfect woman to combine story, sleep, and personal revolution.
Ultimately, yes, it does come down to balance
It's as trendy to scoff at balance as it is to strive for it. When the contemporary tussle over a word becomes too much for me, I look to the ancients.
This is the latest image in my #365MagicWords series. As I am thinking of shaping time and prioritizing rest, and I am also thinking of the Eqyptian Goddess Maat who was the keeper of universal balance. The daughter of the Sun and the wife of the moon, she had great wings and always wore an ostrich feather headdress. She was the embodiment of justice and the grounding of reality.
A fine spirit guide for these tumultuous, over scheduled times, yes?
Let's Unlock the Magic of Our Words in 2017
“Say the magic word, dear.” Maybe your first thought is “please.” Or maybe you’re thinking “abracadabra” or “open sesame!” There are as many magic words as there are tongues to say them. Luckily, there are only 365 days in a year.
Begin. #365magicwords by Writer & Storytelling Coach Marisa Goudy
In 2017, I’m launching #365magicwords.
It’s a daily project that asks for no more than a word and an image. Perhaps the word will wish to be wrapped in a story or anchored in a definition. Most often, I’m thinking I’ll let the magic work in the mind of the beholder (most often the be-holder of the smartphone who will see these images on Instagram and Facebook.)
What kind of magic lingers in your language?
We know words have power. We know a single word can resonate at countless frequencies, only finding its meaning and its truth when it lodges itself in a particular human mind and is held in a particular human heart.
We know that words form verses and books that shape faiths and cultures that dictate the fate of the world. We know that the Word came first.
And yet, we’ve also heard that talk is cheap and we live in an age when we don’t know if it’s safe to take people at their word. We're told not to be so sensitive about what people say and judge people by what they actually do.
It's time to redefine our relationship with our words
With #365magicwords, I hope to deepen my relationship with the language I use. I hope to open word-shaped doors for others so they can discover new magic spells for themselves.
Do you want to join me? You’re invited to savor each word with me, and, if you’re inspired, to send your own magic words to the collective too.
The why and the how of a 365 project
365 projects have become something of a New Year’s Day tradition for me. And, even though the 2015 and 2016 attempts were “failures,” I count them amongst my favorite mistakes.
A couple years ago, Saundra Goldman asked me to write about the 365 Project as Creative Process for her Creative Mix blog. I’d had great success with my 2014 #365feminstselfie project and I was an unabashed cheerleader for the daily digital enterprise.
Here’s what you need to know about creating and sharing something online everyday
A 365 project has to be sustainable.
You have to be able to keep it up each day in five minutes or less. It has to offer you some sort of creative or emotional sustenance to be worthy of your energy.
A 365 project has to help you see and be seen.
The goal isn’t just to “do the internet” with a new gimmick. You show up for yourself first. You bring your curiosity, your desire for your integrity, and your belief in everyday magic.
When you lead with that energy, you create ripples of truth and connection that nurtures those who see you.
Let's discover #365magicwords together
Find the #365magicwords project over on Instagram. And, if you decide to cast some spells and unlock the magic of everyday words, do use the hashtag and tag me so we can unravel the mystery together.
On Being A Transformation Professional During The Season Of Selling Stuff
On Being a Transformation Professional During the Season of Selling Stuff | By Marisa Goudy, Writer & Storytelling Coach
It’s hard be someone who offers creative transformation services when the emphasis is all on STUFF.
And no stretch of time is tougher for us evolutionary service providers than all these themed shopping days that hang about Thanksgiving like so many tantalizing, calorie-packed desserts.
Our sky looks different from the warehouse scaffolding of box stores and the online giants. We offer stillness and introspection. We offer healing that may sting before it soothes. These time-honored paths to growth and lasting peace seem absurd in our doorbuster, free shipping, instant gratification holiday climate. There must be a lotion or a pill or a fuzzy slipper set that can do the same thing, right? Sigh. Of course not. But sometimes it seems like we’re the only ones who know that.
First, remember what it means to be in the transformation business
This weekend, I went to a "Small Business Saturday" event with a group of local women selling a number of products. It was a lovely little gathering. I came home with some budget-stretching makeup, super cute leggings, and a huge case of "not enoughness." Everything seemed so fun and effortless and it all smelled delightful. Selling clothing and essential oils seemed so much simpler than sweating over sentences for a living.
On the walk home, doubt and Christmas budget worries started to take over. But then, a friend reminded me, “They're selling something, not creating anything. That’s not what you do, is it?”
Well, sure, selling is part of what every small business person has to do, but when you’re a coach, a therapist, a healer, or anyone else who offers time in support of another’s evolution... selling comes second. And it’s probably not the sort of thing that people are going for during the busiest shopping weekend of the year.
Time for a transformational reframe of all these "special deals"
I just came across the phrase "self-evolved small business." This feels like balm to my tired, over-extended entrepreneur's soul right now.
All of us could use the reminder that we've all done something tremendous in hanging out the proverbial shingle and essentially creating something from nothing more than our passionate, creative caring hearts.
Creating something, offering something that comes from the core of who you are and standing in your truth... that's a truly special deal.
So, in the midst of all the consumerism and the holiday's special offers, I just want to invite you to stand in what you've created this year, stand in the space that you have created for so many people.
Breathe into enoughness. Breathe into your evolution. Breathe into the evolutionary spaces you create for your clients. Just breathe.
What's your alternative to a holiday sale?
When you realize it's ok to sit out the late November salesy blitz, it's not an excuse to opt out of marketing your good work. Rather than creating reactionary social media posts about a sale you just thought up, use this time to plan how you'll promote and sell your service or other offering when the time is right.
Rebecca helped me see something else during our conversation this weekend… While we don’t sell stuff that’s going to look nice under the tree, we DO offer something that will help our colleagues transform their 2017.
If you’re a therapist, this is a great time to join our community, The Practice of Being Seen. And, since the one truly good thing about all these themed buying days is #GivingTuesday, we’re donating a portion of the community enrollment fee to the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center when you join today. Learn more & join us