Unapologetically Me: A Healing Writing Practice to Reconnect to Self & Own Your Story

Four years ago, when I lived in a palatial California basement apartment with French doors that opened up onto a lush garden with lemon, orange, and fig trees, I found myself lying face down on the earth, in mourning. My father, my number one fan of my writer Self, had died a few months earlier. But my writer Self felt long dead. It died when my son was born soon after I published my memoir. And it died again at my job writing cutesy copy for a coaching company. And it was dead now or so I thought. 

A few weeks later, an auspicious visit from my father’s close friend—a speed walking champion, mother of four, no B.S., go-getter woman—changed everything. Seeing me stuck she asked me straight: “What do you want?” just as my father would have done. I mumbled something about wanting to write again and help others write their stories. “So…she said, “go after the things that are important to you in your life!” The very next day I found Laurie Wagner of 27 Powers (27 is my lucky number) who was about to start her next Wild Writing teacher training. I contacted her and a few days later I was on a call with her, and two other women, writing altogether for 15 minutes to a simple prompt: Let’s start here… 

I wrote about my cold neighbors who put up a fence the day I moved in and how they slouch around their yard in slippers while their Alaskan puppy yelps and never say hello. How my other neighbors drive a red BMW and are gray haired with gray spirits and paved the entrance to their home like a tombstone and never say hello. And how my other neighbors, an Italian soccer lover and African nurse have a giant pizza oven in their yard imported from Italy and play ping-pong and entertain their bank executive neighbors with cocktails on their lawn while I lie face down, supine, and barefoot on the grass in my tie-dye hippie leggings entranced in my grief.

I wrote about ordinary things around me. From my heart. From my gut. I wrote raw. I wrote wild. I wrote like there was no tomorrow and then I stopped and listened to every other woman on the call share her writing —hearty, gutsy, wilded. I was hooked. I signed up for Laurie’s teacher training that day because if just 15 minutes of writing in a group of female strangers to a simple prompt could release the floodgates of my creative writing self that had been blocked for so long then what could leading this awesome healing writing practice do for others too?  

What’s unique about Wild Writing (I call it Journey Writing) is that we use poetry as prompts. I discovered a mother lode of decadent, down-to-earth, edgy, insanely brilliant poets like Kim Addonizio, Ellen Bass, Lyn Lifshin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sarah Freligh, Alison Luterman, and Rachel McKibbens to name a few. I was transported into another world of tailored words seamlessly flowing from one wild write to another alternating between retreating into myself on the page and sharing bravely and then listening deeply to others’ journeys. I wrote about how my ex tried to squeeze me into a matchbox like a wild horse, my father’s beautiful death, my sister’s abusive marriage…I wrote my way back to a place inside me rich with life memorabilia and reconnected to my writer Self whom I had left for dead like roadkill. 

I then put my first call out to close friends and later to my community of a couple hundred people I met along my life’s path and held my first Journey Writing Circle in that palatial basement apartment for a handful of friends and witnessed how, over the weeks, each woman’s shame and dreams poured out of her and overflowed into the circle and we were at once connected and interwoven, writing about our trans teens and the okay sex with our husbands and abandonment by our birth mothers and our husbands who sleep with hookers, spurred by the poems we poured over that poured into us, connected by our humanity, womanhood and truth-telling that gave each of us strength and courage and permission to just be ourselves, unapologetically. 

Now, three years later, I’ve shared this practice with dozens of women aged thirty to eighty from London, India, and South Africa to fellow Americans from coast to coast who unite online to experience the power of writing to help us release what we may not even know is inside. We come for the love of this virtual cauldron of voices that gets stirred when we as women speak our truth, lift the curtain, and part the veil that we are told to hide behind. We come to feel safe to open up and be seen, heard, and accepted no matter how dark and ugly our journeys. We come because it feels damn cathartic to cut the chains, show the stains, and let it all drain out and onto the blank page white and open, empty and holy that receives all that we have to let go of in the moments when we own our stories. 


Bio:

Shani Raviv is the author of the award-winning book, Being Ana: a memoir of anorexia nervosa, a Copy Coach, and the creator/facilitator of Journey Writing Circles. Shani believes that writing truth heals and leading women’s circles is her calling. Shani is South African/Israel, a yogini of 25 years, and lives in a semi-rural co-housing community in Lafayette, Colorado in the US with her 10-year-old son and boyfriend. To read more about Shani and Journey Writing Circles, visit: www.shaniraviv.com

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing