Module 1: Overcome Obstacles to Discover Your Authenticity
In this first session, you’ll explore the parts of your story that are inauthentic, unclear, or dishonest. Identifying the obstacles to authenticity that are “baked” into your personal narrative makes way for insight and imagination. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “I want to unfold, I don’t want to stay folded anywhere. For where I am folded, there I am a lie.”
When you discover the lies you tell yourself on a regular basis, you reveal the truth of who you are. When you realize that you are the storyteller, not the story, and that what you’ve believed is a fixed identity is actually changeable, fluid, and open to interpretation… it imbues your life with greater meaning and frees you to live more happily.
This process is like removing blocks from a flowing current… once the obstacles to authenticity are removed, you increase power and potential. Exposing your inauthentic parts also invites you to explore the psychological shadow, where deeper truths remain concealed.
Module 2: Your Shadow Knows Your Wholeness
In this session, we consider the psychological shadow, that off-limits part of yourself where you hide both your pain and your gifts.
In exploring your stories, you come to realize that your narrative includes missing pieces that you keep out of sight. Only by acknowledging and investigating these shadow parts can you move toward a narrative of wholeness and self-integration.
Identifying the holes in your story helps you retrieve unique, irreplaceable aspects of your originality that you’ve pushed away, judged, and overlooked. You’ll notice how fears, doubts, and stress decrease when you explore the shadow with acceptance and care, making way for insight and imagination. You’ll also notice that perceived limitations and weaknesses are actually strengths in disguise, integral parts of your unique being.
You’ll see the ways in which you have compromised unnecessarily, and learn to pay attention to how the ego weaponizes shame and guilt to keep you small, safe, and a fraction of who you can be.
Module 3: Compromise Only When Necessary to Live Your Truth
How do you shrink to fit your narrative into what’s acceptable to your family, society, profession, relationships, religion, or political party? What do you fear losing if you change these stories? When is compromise useful, and when is it self-sabotaging?
In this class, you’ll look at where you’ve compromised unnecessarily in your life, creating an incomplete story. You’ll see how your desire to please others, fit in, and play small has diminished your enthusiasm, passion, and power. Whenever you compromise the truth of who you are in order to belong, you remain stuck in the middle of the road, where you’ll feel both safe and stagnant.
You’ll experience a writing practice that will help reveal when compromise becomes evasion. This awareness will trigger your desire to be free, take positive risks, and stop interfering with your personal growth.
How and why do you tame your own wildness? What would you do if you were free?
Module 4: Release Attachments & Find Your Freedom
To be free is to lose attachment to that which is inessential in you, and to accept your impermanence and the transitory nature of your story — which scares the ego to death.
Although we imagine that we want to be free, freedom can also be frightening.
In this class, you’ll look at the obstacles to freedom in your life. You’ll explore the ways in which you entrap yourself — and stay imprisoned — by resisting the call to freedom. Is it easier to stay in your cage than to fly out the open door? What myths do you use to deceive yourself into thinking you’re free when you’re really not?
Freedom is a spiritual opportunity and is fundamentally an “inside job.” You can be free in the midst of adversity, and imprisoned in the lap of luxury, depending on how you tell your story.
As you go within and tell your story, you come to face your shame — the shame of wanting to be free — and overcome the impulse to curtail, restrict, and keep yourself collared.
Module 5: The Past Can’t Control You If You’re Fully Present
How do you cling to the past to your own detriment? How do you define yourself more through the past than the present? In this class, you’ll explore how your story is controlled by the past and how you define yourself through your biography. The spiritual realization that you are not what has happened to you is a quantum leap in self-awareness.
Aside from mating trout, you don’t find fish swimming backward. Like fish, our natural way of being is in the present, in the flow of life… not living in or holding on to the past.
When you claim the power to be fully present, and drop the obsession with looking back or judging yourself through that backward lens, your story can remain fresh, relevant, flexible, and open. Writing from this fresh perspective is key to changing your story, healing your life, and realizing your true gifts.
Module 6: Silence Your Inner Critic & Find the Treasure Within
Every single one of us was born with a unique genius that no one else possesses. In this class, you’ll explore the nature of your true gifts and their impact on your authentic story.
Overcoming false modesty is an important step to awakening. Can you apply your genius to the challenges of your life and bring imagination to adversity? Can you drop the stories that compromise your ability to bring forth what is within you? When you see that your geniusis a gift, you realize the only appropriate response is gratitude.
Exploring your treasure is bound to bring up the voice of the inner critic. Yet, when you counter these voices in writing, you come to trust your enthusiasm and the richness of what you have to give.
You are one of a kind. There is no other being like you on this planet.
Module 7: Your New Future Story of Unlimited Possibilities
In this final module, you’ll explore the theme of intention and the link between desire and imagination when you compose a narrative that helps you flourish.
You’ve come to understand that you’re not your past and that your story is always changing. Freedom no longer scares you — instead you see it as an invitation, a promising open door to the unknown.
Expressing your inner self through the written word during these seven modules has helped you understand your shadow, which has freed repressed power and your true intentions for the future.
Writing has helped you focus your heart and mind, training you in present-moment awareness and the forward flow of your existence. You now understand that you can compose your life moment to moment without writing your story in stone. This frees you to live with fewer regrets and more opportunities for transformation.
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