At the end of a beautiful spiritual retreat on the sacred Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, I received a message from the spiritual realm to stay one more day; they wanted to talk to me. I extended my stay one more night and woke up at dawn to a beautiful sunrise and walked to the end of the expansive beach. There, in the wall of rocks that overlooks the famous Salt Island just offshore, I found a small indentation with a built-in seat. I have probably walked and meditated on this beach a hundred times, and I never saw this indentation before that day. In awe, I stepped in and sat down to watch the beautiful waves and the majestic island. Once settled in my seat, I asked the Divine, “What’s next?”
They replied, “Do you think that individuals on the spiritual path who have lived crazy, magical, and often complicated lives have lived them for their entertainment only?”
I laughed aloud and said, “They might think so. For sure, the experiences make such great stories to tell others.”
“Our request,” said the Divine, “is for you to teach them how to find the courage to tell their stories to a greater audience. In essence, to become the spiritual teacher that they came into this life to be.”
“How will I do that?” I asked.
The Divine replied, “Since you dared to tell your story in your three books, start there. Become a writing coach for those who wish to tell their story in the written word.”
“Got it, thank you!” I replied. I stood up and walked back to the Blue Shutters Inn to begin planning how to teach others to write from the heart.
Was the Divine talking about you?
The best way to know if you “have a book in you” is to ask your Soul. Your Soul has been leading the way through all your crazy, magical, and complicated experiences. It could be time to pause seeking on your spiritual journey and start serving others from your wealth of wisdom and life experiences. Perhaps you may not want to write a book, but you are assuredly here to teach others what you know.
The most common way to access your Soul is through meditation. Learning to listen for guidance and trusting the advice is the hard part. Another way to discover your Soul’s direction is to review your life experiences and see the patterns which emerge. Your pattern-experiences are the backstory to your book. And, if you cannot access your Soul on your own, you may want to consider approaching the work by developing a blueprint by creating your “Soul Plan.” Your Soul Plan is a conversation between you, me, and your Soul’s Collective to discover what you are here to learn and teach others.
Healing your past traumas
Once you have revealed your trauma pattern, you will undoubtedly realize that you have a lot of healing to do. Healing your past and present life traumas are never easy, but so very worth it. It is like lifting a veil that has been obscuring almost everything as you walk through your life. For me, I had to heal my pattern of humiliation and disappointment, which contributed to a 40-year addiction to obsessive-compulsive food disorder and bulimia.
Healing your past traumas takes a team of professionals who honor an integrative approach (mind, body, spirit, and emotion) to healing your past. This approach helps you to see the all-encompassing impact your past has had on your life. When you surrender your pain, you receive the gift of grace. A natural outcome of this approach is to write from a place of wholeness and not from a place of unresolved emotions.
If you have not healed your past wounds, you spend most of your time in regret of the past. As a life coach, I guide others to live in the present and not in regret of the past or fear of the future. Yet, sharing about your wounds is very juicy content for a writer; it helps your reader to relate to you as someone who can help them. The question now becomes, are you courageous enough to share your life stories?
Becoming an author
The process of writing a book starts with the desire to be fully committed to this project. Honestly, once you commit to writing the book, your life becomes about the book. It does not mean you have to leave your day job or your family; it just means writing becomes one of your highest priorities for two reasons. The first reason is that you will awaken to receiving grace in the form of knowing what to include in the book. The second reason is that not finishing the book will create frustration in your life – and you will want to avoid that.
As a writing coach and an author of self-help books, I see the writing process in four phases:
· Phase I – Share your unique life experiences from your past (your backstory) that make you the ideal person to write this book about the topic of your self-help book.
· Phase 2 – Describe your current life struggles and victories on the self-help topic in a way that will encourage your readers to say, “She (or he) gets me!”
· Phase 3 – Reveal what integrative solutions you discovered on your healing journey that brought you out of struggle and into the ease of grace-filled healing.
· Phase 4 – Design your practical advice and processes for your self-help topic to be relatable to others to help them to have a more positive present and future life.
Finding Courage
Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the ability to do something anyway even when you are afraid. Yes, even courageous people feel fear and, perhaps, for some of them, it is the fuel for achievement. Does writing about your life take a different kind of courage? I believe that it does. You must be willing to reveal your deepest wounds, your deepest regrets, and your deepest desires. Even if you do not want to do this, revealing your wounds may give others the courage to heal.
In my current book, Feast & Famine: Healing Addiction with Grace, you will see that there was no place for me to hide from my past. I chose to share my 40-year addiction, my relationship with my parents, and my intimate relationship with the Divine. The premise of the book is that we are first addicted to suffering, then we choose a substance or vice as a secondary addiction to perpetuate the misery. Until we surrender our need to suffer and heal our trauma, we cannot welcome the grace of recovery into our lives. Even the book’s premise challenges the accepted conversation on the source of addiction.
Was writing Feast & Famine easy? Absolutely not easy. Was it worth it? Yes! If I can help even one person to live a more loving, joyful, peaceful, and abundant life, then finding the courage to write my story will have been a gift to both the reader and myself. If you have ever had anyone say to you, “Wow, you have lived an interesting life, you should write a book!”, then now is the time to write your book. I would love to hear from you about your story and discuss how I can support you on your writing and healing journey.
