As I wrap up the final pieces of my book, Living Deeply: A Transformational Journey Through Deep Pain, Loss and Abandonment to Healing, Self-Love and Miracles, I was thinking back to when I first started the writing process.
As I set off on the adventure of writing my first book, I was reviewing my notes from a Writing from Your Heart workshop that I had taken years earlier with my favorite writing teacher, Nancy Aronie. As we began to dive into the workshop, I found the wise advice she had given us:
Don’t edit yourself off the page before you’re even on it.
And, as I wrap up my book, I was reminded of this guidance the other day. It was then that the awareness popped in of how apropos this was, not only for writing, but for life.
How many times do we edit ourselves off the pages of our life and stop ourselves from doing something before we’ve even started? I know I’ve been guilty of this in my past, carrying stories that don’t always work for me into my present to create my future. And the biggest thing that’s helped me to shift this is this one thing:
Practice.
What does this look like?
For me, one way this practice occurred was years earlier around sharing my most personal stories. My coach at the time gave (only) me (in a group of 10 or so) the practice for one week of sharing my most personal pieces of myself with my peers, pieces that many of my closest friends didn’t even know. Now to be clear, these peers were really strangers to me, and it was my perception that my coach hadn’t set up a very safe container with our group. This was all perfect, though, as I realized I wasn’t going to (and didn’t) die sharing these and it was brilliant practice for rewiring my insides to share my most personal stories publicly.
And, while the above applies to writing (and even speaking) publicly, practice has also rewired the parts in me that would delay or stop myself from moving forward in all aspects of my life.
With this, too, while I went into writing my book with the above in my mind while also holding (and telling the little girl that lives within me) that at the end of the day that we could take out anything that we didn’t want to share, I’m happy to say that, I shared the deepest parts of myself and my life, unedited, resulting in something that I’m incredibly proud of, that I can confidently say that no matter where you are on your journey, will change you.
To the unedited versions of ourselves,
Deb