Welcome to this space, a soft landing place that we make together for your writing
Welcome to Restorative Writing Season 1: Core Practices
The old jam jar, in which you saved buttons and beads.
The box under your bed where you kept special treasures – a shell from that day at the beach, a sweet wrapper from the road trip, a secret note, folded very small.
The journal fastened with a miniature lock and key, where you wrote all of your hopes and desires, that particular summer.
The old chocolate box, still fragrant, given to you by your Grandma and filled with photographs and letters.
The corner of your sock drawer.
The velvet-lined jewellery box, where your daughter’s hospital bracelet nestles against a faded daisy-chain, pressed between two sheets of tracing paper.
The dented cigar tin, in which your Grandad’s wedding ring still rattles.
And then there is your body. Perfect container of secrets, dreams, wants, memories. It holds more than you have forgotten. It knows things you haven’t yet remembered. It shape-shifts around new stories. It whispers to you in those moments between waking and sleeping, when you can let yourself be still and quiet.
Maybe you can do that now, find some stillness, perhaps by placing your hands on your stomach, taking a couple of deep slow breaths, feeling your fingers gently moving out… and in… out… and in.
What are you feeling right now? What do you carry deep inside you? What do you long for?
Cupped hands. Space beneath the ribs. Dip in the hip or collarbone where a finger just fits.
My invitation, dear friends, is to join us over the next eight weeks in creating a container that feels right for you – a container for your writing.
The page or the screen can be a personal, private container.
This community and our Zoom Writing Together sessions can be another - should you wish it.
Use this space and time in the way that works for you.
There is no right or wrong way to do this. Just your way.
Over the next few weeks, you might find yourself exploring ways of acknowledging and expressing some of the things you hold in the beautiful container of your body and placing them into the container of the page so that you can look at them in new ways.
You might gather up some of the frayed pieces and tattered fragments into one place so that they feel a little more whole.
You might write to look at things from another perspective, or to look deeper.
You might write for the sheer joy of making something.
You might write to express your rage, your fear, your sense of injustice or sorrow or despair.
You might write to dance, drum, sing, shout at the top of your voice or soothe yourself with gentle words.
You might write to slow down, to notice, to come to your senses, to reconnect with the aliveness pulsing through your human body in this very moment.
All parts of you are welcome here: the parts that want to be here and the parts that want to run away; the parts that feel they belong in a space like this one and the parts that feel that they don’t belong; the parts that want to write and the parts that don’t.
You belong here. Yes. You are welcome.
Along the way, you may want to share some of your reflections on the process of writing, but you absolutely don’t need to. This process is just for you.
Dear friends, when I check in with my body as I prepare to hit ‘Send’ on this post, I’m feeling a softly effervescent, pink-green-orangey feeling. I think the word I might find for it is ‘nervouscitement’, which is a word that my daughter and I invented when she was very small to describe that sense of holding those two feelings at the same time. Nervousness and excitement. Anxiety and exhilaration. Feeling fearful and bold. That pulling on your insides, that you want to answer both by stepping into what might unfurl and also curling up and hiding away from all the things that might be just about to happen.
What are you feeling in this moment?
If it feels OK for you, I invite you to share in the comments on this post.
Let’s begin.
Restorative Writing Season 1: Core Practices is a lovingly designed curriculum that will guide you through restorative writing techniques over the next eight weeks.
Today, we’re starting with exploring the Toolkit. There’s quite a lot to read and absorb, including some very short videos in which I offer somatic practices to support you as you move through the coming weeks.
Beginning this Friday, each week over the next eight weeks, you’ll receive a short video, a post containing a link to a text for us to read together, a short discussion of the text and a Writing Invitation, which is a structured prompt linked to the text.
Paid members, you can find a welcome video and the link to your Restorative Writing Toolkit below the jump, plus a reminder of the schedule for the next eight weeks.
It’s not too late to join us…