What happens when we write truth
Authenticity and Body as Writing Sensorium (+Video)
Headwaters Writing Course Announcement:
On April 3rd, we start a 6-week authentic writing course, Headwaters.
The six weeks are designed to take you through an arc: tending and healing the parts of self that hold you back to writing and expressing yourself with authenticity, honesty, and depth.
Through the 6 weeks, we will connect to the writer within and will learn how to write from the place of truth. To learn more about the course and secure your spot, click the button below.
Morning thoughts about authenticity, inner critic, and reestablishing your connection with your inner writer from my balcony in Berlin. (Trying something new) 🤍
Authenticity is a strange, but deeply magnetizing thing
Both of my teachers shared that his year is going to be a year of shedding. That which is no longer aligned with the authentic essence within our lives is going to be shaken up and banished. Life is not going to look the same at the end of the year, as we step into 2026, which 2025 prepares us for.
Essence and authenticity is that wild, undiluted nature of our being. It’s the instinctual, intuitive animal self that holds our deep core values and the ways we are here to show up in the world. It is the part of us that is the most vulnerable, open and the part of us that is not entangled in identities, expectations, or societal programming.
Writing from a place of inauthenticity is not going to work anymore. Writing from a place of ‘what will appease those that I look up to’ is not going to work. Why? Because we are experiencing the great quickening. The systems that are built on false narratives are breaking down on a collective level, they are also breaking down at the individual scale.
Perhaps a part of you whispers to you that it is tired of pretense — online and in real life. There is a particular kind of exhaustion and a feeling of dragging your feet within your writing, or any creative output or work when it’s not aligned with your essence and authentic values. What you used to write about might not feel enough, might not satisfy your deeper soul’s calling. (I share about my own process in the video above.)
This is why in week 1 of the Headwaters writing course, I ask my students to really tune into one question: how can your writing support the vision of the life that you truly want — and most importantly, your authentic essence?
But to write from the authentic place, we must be willing to face shame and our desire to hide ourselves away. Telling truth, healing our capacity for vulnerability, and practicing to show up from the essence is the work of a writer in 2025.(Performative authenticity or vulnerability-baiting is also not going to work.)
In writing, authenticity is the topics we choose to write about, it’s the language we use, it’s the energetic state in which we write and share. It’s the intention that stitches itself into every aspect of writing and publishing. It’s the truth we bring to every single sentence.
It’s what we come alive for to write, it’s the curiosities that we dare to investigate, risking to embrace things that gift us with more energy rather than staying with things that drain it. It’s choosing a risky state of being opened. It’s choosing the risk of demasking, and leaving the built-up persona behind. It’s choosing a creative, vital life that is written by our essence.
From what I know, when we mute ourselves creatively, we prolong the fast of the soul-driven life. When we amputate our sentences and stretch our words, so they can fit into the Procrustian bed of the critic within. A writer who gives into this twisting of the self is not writing for herself, she is writing for them, whoever they are.
As
shares: we should be wary of sacrificing our excellence for the sake of fitting into a calcified language of the internet, easily relatable, understandable, pre-digested. Excellence is not relatable. It can’t be, and it shouldn’t be. Excellence emerges out of a deep commitment to our very personal authenticity and essence. It’s weird, and surprising, and eerie.Following your excellence will scare you but in a vitalizing way. It’s where excitement mixes its fresh waters with the salt water of fear, call it a delta or an estuary of aliveness. That threshold is a prayer altar to a newness that is trying to be born into this world through you. It’s also a place where our ancestral lines rise to support us, and if our sensory capacity is attuned, we can recognize that it’s happening.
The choice to move into the space of truth and honesty condenses a magnetic field around us (and our work) and energetic momentum builds, inviting new people, new ideas, new ways of perceiving the self and our lives. A rate of synchronicity increases — this is the time of personal magic.
Training the Truth Sensorium Within the Body
If you are a writer your body is your instrument. If you are a creative or an artist, your body is your instrument. It will tell you everything you need to know about the work that you’re producing. It’s a place where your taste resides. It’s the place where you can re-sensitize to feeling Yes or No when you read a sentence you just wrote.
To move beyond inner critic, expectations, and inner and outer pressure to produce a certain piece of writing, we must re-sensitize our instrument.
To do that, you need to be very specific about what you let into your periphery, to go on a certain media-fast, where you don’t ingest information that dulls your own thinking and feeling. To only feed yourself psychically with sources that feel aligned with your current desire for an energetic state you want to encapsulate in your work. In a way we must become membranous—able to read what is in front of us, to let it in and be porous, or to strengthen our imperviousness.
It’s incredible how quickly the psyche soaks up everything it sees and hears, assimilating it, mutating it within.
To recognize what your body and your soul are asking you to write is to allow yourself to be in the darkened, unknown, undefined periods, where movement is not visible, but is felt and heard. Where a certain accumulation of energy condenses and makes itself known through whispers, curiosity attempts, dream time, or a certain feeling of aliveness.
In week 4 of the Headwaters writing course we will dive deep into the topic of how to write from the body. Attuning to your personal sensorium of communication can feel like coming home, it’s a process that we can initiate ourselves into, and the practice never ends, but gets better as we learn to translate the invisible into visible, felt into tangible.
I can resonate so much dear!
What makes it more confusing is that running a business and making art are two separate things, but when we fusion them together by making a living of our art, things get blurry and blend together. I've noticed how much my writing has become "practical" and lost in poetry, and my wish is to know and separare when I am making purely artistic/creative work and when I am writing or creating for my business. Some might argue you can make both the same, but I find it healthy to separate them for now, so instead of behind half in each, we can pour ourselves fully into the different forms of expression.