"I write to find out what I didn't know I knew."-- Audre Lorde
The Writer As Shaman offers classes, retreats and coaching to help you write what you know -- and what you don't yet know that you know -- with joy, depth and ease.
Hi. I'm Ruth L. Schwartz, Ph.D.,
award-winning author of five books,
professor, healer, therapist
and shamanic practitioner.
In each of these roles, I've seen how words can help us open portals
between our ordinary consciousness, and deeper levels of
knowing --the part of ourselves that some call the soul.
Writing
can help us express our personal selves, what poet Seamus Heaney calls the "essential watermark" of our own perceptions. This is joyful and freeing! Writing also offers ways to mine meaning, even
beauty, from the most difficult events in our lives. A mysterious alchemy occurs when we put our pain and confusion
into words, then usher those words out of our bodies and onto the
page. In this way, writing can facilitate the kind of healing
shamans call "soul retrieval," restoring us to wholeness.
Don't go
outside your house to seek flowers.
My friend, don't bother with that
excursion.
Inside
your body there are flowers.
One flower has a
thousand petals.
--
Kabir
Many of us love writers
like Rumi, Hafiz, Kabir, Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver, because that
quality of deeper knowing is so present in their work. Those writers,
along with many others, have blazed inspirational trails in
consciousness that nourish and inspire us. But the happy truth is that
we, too, can access that level of knowing! Every one of us can make our
own deep connections with the natural world, with the Divine, and with
our own souls. The Writer As Shaman workshops and mentorships
are designed to help you do that, leading to transformation both in your
writing, and in the rest of your life.
Through writing, we can become more able to see ourselves,and
others, and all things as they are –- imperfect, and yet perfectly held
within a continuous process of growth. We can view that
process, and the constantly shifting, churning, transmuting flux of
ourselves and all things, with more compassion. We can become more alert
to the magic of life, more able to recognize and celebrate the many small blessings offered up to us each day. Writing can help us to honor ourselves and each other, even in our most painful moments.
As Bruce Weigl says in a poem about his own childhood abuse,
“Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.”
You don't have to "be a writer." You just have to write!
These
gifts come about through the process of writing, rather than as the
result of a finished product. Understanding that the real goal
is that unfolding, that flowering-forth of the self, can help us make a very
important change in our personal process. Rather than putting pressure
on ourselves, we can draw back, relaxing into a posture of invitation,
of interested curiosity toward the self and all it contains. We can
learn to pay closer attention to our own creative process, noticing what thoughts, feelings or observations move us, intrigue us, delight us,
leapfrog us into new places – or shut us down. As we open in these ways, our creativity emerges, unhampered, unrestricted... and flows!
In this way, you may also enter a state
in which, in the words of the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, you grow more able to "love the questions themselves, like locked rooms" -- so that someday you may live your way into the answers.
"I
don't ask
for the sights in front of me to change --only the depth of my
seeing."
-- Mary Oliver
Whether you are well-published already, new to writing, or anywhere in between, The Writer As Shaman workshops or mentorships can help you fulfill your deepest creative potential. Join us!
*Researchers
have documented amazing results - including reduced anxiety and
depression, better immune system markers, higher rates of finding jobs
(for job seekers), better grades (for students), more positive outlooks
on life, and more - as a result of writing just ten minutes per day.
(For more info on these studies, check out a book called Writing Down
Your Soul, a wonderful resource in itself.)
