Bit by Bit: The Healing Power of Our Stories by Sherry Sidoti

Bit by Bit: The Healing Power of Our Stories by Sherry Sidoti

I believe healing happens, of course I do. But I don’t believe healing happens like a bolt of lightning after a rock bottom, at least not in my experience. Healing happens bit by bit, only relative to the wisdom gained from healing that came before it.

I have been on a healing journey for the better part of my life. I’ve devoted myself to a twenty-plus year career teaching yoga and mysticism, trauma recovery, and other healing techniques. I’ve done years of therapy, been to shamanic ceremonies, and have a grounded daily movement and meditation practice. Put simply, healing is my jam.

But the healing that came with writing my memoir has been an experience like no other.

Writing found me ten months into the COVID-19 pandemic. A confusing time for all of us and I, as the rest of the world, was taking major inventory of what mattered most. Exhausted from pivoting two back-to-back yoga teacher trainings to online, I decided to take a sabbatical from teaching. Quite simply, I was “tapped out,” with little left to offer others on their healing journeys. 

I had just turned fifty, was menopausal, and on the cusp of empty nesting. I was in the middle of moving out of the home where I lived and raised my son for eighteen years (the home I busted my ass to keep after my divorce!). Newly engaged, my fiancé and I purchased a parcel of land where we planned to build our “second-chance” life, literally from the ground up. Every aspect of my life as I knew it, was up for review. 

Amid all of this, came the news: My mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. 

Unable to sleep, I’d wake daily at 3:22 a.m. (side bar: that is my mother’s birthdate, which was not surprising). Memories long-since forgotten came bursting to the forefront again. Creative, spontaneous inspiration followed the memories. During the dark time of the morning that the mystics call “the shamanic hour,” I’d get up, make coffee, do a little breath work, move my body, meditate, then sit outdoors, and cathartically write until the sun came up. 

Over the next two years, what started as disorganized, frazzled, written snippets of my life, shaped into my memoir, A Smoke and a Song.

I teach my yoga students that just like our food, our life experiences need to be digested. Some are sweet to the taste, full of healthy fats, proteins, and quality carbs — the triumphs, the laughter, the love. These are easy to “chew on,” easy to metabolize. But we also have the heartbreaks, the trespassing, the nights begging for mercy on both knees. These are often too painful to savor, so we often swallow these memories whole. 

This unprocessed residue of our lives gets lodged in the body, keeping us stuck. Worse even, it makes us sick. For true healing to occur, we must do all we can to pull out the nourishment of our life experiences and release the waste.

As many memoirists would agree, writing our stories can be healing, transformational, and liberating. As we move memories from our bodies into creative scenes on the page, we are given a unique opportunity to process our life from a renewed perspective. By remembering, we re-member— we take what once felt like broken pieces of ourselves and rearrange them into one whole again.

But equal to the elation that comes with writing memoir comes some very real challenges. The potential for harming is as great as the healing. There are the trauma triggers that can happen during the writing process, contending with fear of being exposed, “cancelled”, or called-out for sharing our truth, age-old imposter syndrome, potential push-back from family and friends, bad reviews, and harsh critics, to name only a few. The list goes on and on. It is enough to paralyze any writer from finishing a book, let alone publishing it! 

As a complete novice author and newby in the publishing sphere, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had to resource my healing practices and put them to the test! The process required returning to therapy, having some very difficult conversations with family and friends, and accessing new layers of self-compassion and support from the very core of my being. At times I truly considered pulling out of the entire project. 

But each time I almost did, there was a quiet nudging from inside that said, “Keep going. There is healing power in our stories.”

At times that voice belonged to six-year-old me— the little girl who felt alone and afraid and couldn’t find the right words to get the love and affection for which she so desperately yearned. It was the voice of twenty-something me, the young woman who guarded herself inside a protective, hard shell, too proud to speak her story. It became the voice of motherhood, sisterhood, daughterhood, and womanhood. It was the voice of every courageous storyteller who has walked through the fire of their own healing, bit by bit, transmuting old wounds into new wisdom.

And when I hear that voice, I remember: To share our stories is a courageous act of love! 

We write our pain to remember we have healed. 

So others can do the same. 

We write our tenderness to remember our strength. 

So others can do the same.

We write the loneliness to remember we are loved. 

So others can do the same.

As Ram Dass said, “We are all just walking each other home.”

—
Sherry Sidoti is an author and the founder and lead teacher of FLY Yoga School, a yoga teacher training program, and FLY Outreach, a not-for-profit that offers yoga and meditation for trauma recovery on Martha’s Vineyard, MA.
A certified yoga teacher, labor doula, addiction recovery coach, and somatic therapist, she leads spiritual courses, teacher training, and retreats globally. Her musings, infused by twenty-plus years of practicing and teaching yoga, healing arts, and mysticism have been published in Heart & Soul Magazine, The Martha’s Vineyard Times, and Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly. Her essay “Mosaic” is featured in the 2022 She Writes Anthology: Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis: Women Writers Respond to the Call.

A Smoke and a Song: A Daughter’s Memoir of Living in the Layers is Sherry’s first book. She currently resides on Martha’s Vineyard, MA.

A SMOKE AND A SONG

January 2021, ten months into the global pandemic, Sherry Sidoti’s mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer—so Sherry prioritizes a trip to Manhattan over long-awaited empty-nesting and her “second chance” with fiancé Jevon. With new life blooming and loss looming, she is beckoned to answer the question that has haunted her since childhood: is freedom found in “letting go,” as the spiritual teachers (and her mother) insist—or is it found by digging our heels deeper into the earth and holding on to our humanness?

A Smoke and a Song is Sherry’s story of her quest to make meaning from the memories homed in her body. Told with tenacity, tenderness, and wry humor, Sherry stumbles towards self-actualization, spiritual awakening—and, despite it all, love. This is a story steeped in art and spirituality that explores the complexities of transgenerational maternal bonds, attachment, loss, and leaning in to our wounds to find the wisdom.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing