The newsprint paper filled the whole desk and had long solid and dashed lines running across it, creating a pathway for my writing practice. My small fingers clumsily held the extra thick pencil and began to trace the letter A that was outlined at the beginning of the pathway. The sensation of the pencil tip sliding across the paper in the shape of this lower case a, with its round belly and curling tail awoke in me a devotion for writing that was older than I was. Pleasure flowed up my arm as the graphite flowed out of the pencil tip onto the page. Ahhhhhhhhhh I chanted silently as I danced the shape of the letter onto the page over and over.
I was completely absorbed in this magical process of drawing letters, transported to another time when it truly was magical, an art that only mystical apprentices, devotees of the goddess, Inanna, learned. And just as those apprentices left their family homes to live and learn in the temple, I was transported away from the stress and suffering of my family to a temple of concentration and beauty in which I was gifted the keys to this magic called writing.
This magic allowed me to express myself through stories. It delivered the raw ingredients my imagination needed to create other worlds, other lives, to escape the dissatisfactions and agonies of the life I was in. I found intrinsic pleasure in spelling words correctly and constructing sentences that had meanings that others could recognize. I relished the connection this created between myself and others who expressed delight at my cleverness and creativity.
It also gave me a magical cauldron where I could gather all of the beauties of the life I was living and mix them together with the pains, and a dash of my imagination, brewing a spicy nourishing stew that made it all have meaning and purpose.
As a teenager, I received a beautiful journal as a gift. It had rainbows arching across the cover and every page, across a background of clouds and blue sky, and a rainbow ribbon place marker attached to the spine. This precious journal opened up space in my life to feel and express what was bubbling up from my belly and pouring out onto the page in the form of poetry. At first I wrote about crushes on boys, but soon grew bored of this. I wanted to write about divine love, apocalyptic dreams, and early morning birdsong. I distinctly remember one of the first poems I wrote in that journal, about the first bird to sing in the morning. I became that first bird, that Morningstar, singing the world awake.
From then on, my writing was a refuge, where I could express anything I was feeling, finding the exact right words to describe raging or subtle feelings. Sometimes I had to wait for the words to arise as I held the feeling in my awareness. They would rise up to the surface from the darkness below, much like the cube inside the divination 8 ball that floats to the window with the answer to one’s inquiry. My words would become clear and give me a feeling of great satisfaction, resolution even. This moment of feeling the rightness of the words to express my feelings gives me a great deal of pleasure. There is a joy in each moment with each word that fits just right. This joy builds until there is a rightness in the completion of a piece of writing.
This joy would overflow at times and would create a desire to share my writings with others. My early attempts at doing so, however, proved less than satisfactory. My early associates were not appreciative of my writing and this broke my heart. I learned quite quickly to be selective about who I shared my writings with due to the pain I would feel upon sharing it with countless eye rollers, whose breath would escape in heavy sighs, or who would stop breathing all together, as though it would prevent them from feeling what I was reading about. They would change the subject immediately after I finished reading to them, or remove themselves from association with me all together after hearing my writing. Some would even make an excuse to get up and go do something else in the middle of my reading.
This selectiveness has guided my life as I felt great satisfaction when I did find people and eventually communities who loved my writing.
The Goddess called upon my writing practice at a certain point by pushing a Goddess Journal off of a book store shelf into my hands and refusing to let me put it back. This began a blossoming into devotional prayers to the various aspects of the Goddess and Womb Wisdom channeling that continues to this day. It also inspired my search for communities that shared my devotion. I attended local goddess celebrations, joined a coven, and even started one of my own. I traveled to women’s gatherings and eventually moved to a community devoted to the sacred waters of Mother Earth where my writing blossomed. Most of the writing in my Goddesses, Lovers, and Dreams book arose out of my time at this community.
Now, as the focus of my life’s work as a holistic wellness practitioner has rooted and centered in the Womb, I have realized that I have been writing from this womb space all along. And as I step into my second half century, this way of writing has centered itself in my work. It is calling me to write from this place of deep listening. I must write not only poetry, but books about the Womb Centered Healing practices that have become so clearly the pathway to healing and evolution for all of humanity. And I must share about this writing process so others might also connect with their womb wisdom and let it guide them more and more, that we may all re-orient to life generative ways.
Sama Morningstar is the founder of the Womb Centered Healing Temple and creator of the
Writing from the Womb approach to creative writing. She shares weekly Writing from the Womb workshops online and is delighted to be co-facilitating a series of workshops that combine drawing with this writing process. The first in this series takes place on Sunday, February 28th at 2pm Pacific time. You can sign up below for this and subsequent workshops.
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