The Writer’s Weave: A Journey of Returning

The Long Thread

Writing, like healing, has its own rhythm. There are seasons of clarity and movement, and there are seasons where everything feels slower, less certain, more hidden beneath the surface. Over the years, I have come to trust this rhythm more. Or perhaps I should say I have stopped fighting it in the same ways I once did.

When I first wrote in 2019, I was trying very hard to write a helpful book. I had joined a coaching program that focused on getting a book written quickly, and while I remain grateful that it helped me bring something into the world, I could feel the strain of trying to shape myself into a voice that was not fully my own. The book carried sincerity and care, though parts of it felt compressed, simplified, almost hurried toward transformation. At the time, even the language around psychedelic integration still felt difficult to speak openly about, so much of the work was framed through the safer language of “transformational retreats.”

I remember feeling both proud and unsettled after it was published.

Something in me knew the work was incomplete. The book was useful to people, and I heard from readers who found comfort and support in it, which touched me deeply. Still, I could feel there was another layer waiting beneath what I had written, one that required more honesty, more lived experience, and more trust in my own voice. Eventually I took the book down from Amazon. At the time, I could not fully explain why. I only knew I needed space to listen again.

Looking back now, I see that period as the beginning of a much longer apprenticeship, one that had as much to do with becoming myself as it did with writing.

In early 2023, after completing my year-long Compassionate Inquiry training, something in my work began to deepen. Sitting with clients in such tender places changed me. Again and again, I saw that the most important part of healing rarely happened in the peak moments of revelation. It happened afterward, in the slower work of integration. In the conversations after ceremony. In the honesty required to stay present with grief, longing, fear, or change once the intensity had passed.

I began rewriting from that understanding.

What emerged was no longer simply a book of practices or ideas. It became more personal than I expected. Stories from my own life found their way onto the page. So did the years of meditation, yoga, nervous system healing, spiritual seeking, heartbreak, and repair that had shaped me. The writing became less about offering answers and more about telling the truth as I had lived it.

The process itself was slow. At the time, I believed I had endless room to wander inside it. I wrote in pieces, following threads when they appeared and leaving them when they disappeared again. There was no urgency yet.

And then another thread began pulling at me.

As I continued working with women through Compassionate Inquiry, I noticed how often conversations returned to a similar ache. Different stories, different families, different lives, yet underneath them lived something deeply familiar. Longing. Grief. Adaptation. The complicated tenderness of the mother-daughter relationship.

It was impossible not to recognize myself there too.

By early 2024, I could feel my attention shifting almost completely toward what would eventually become . I set aside the unfinished draft of Integration Alchemy and entered a different season of writing altogether. I read constantly during that year. Books on the mother wound, trauma, archetypes, attachment, Jungian psychology, alchemy, the sacred feminine. Some of them nourished the work deeply. Some became beautiful distractions from the harder task of actually finishing the manuscript.

By the end of 2024, I found myself holding two unfinished books and very little sense of how long either one would take to complete.

Then 2025 arrived and changed everything.

Early in the year, I received an invitation from Sentient Publications to publish both books. By March, the contracts were signed and suddenly there were real deadlines waiting for me. My days took on a different rhythm after that. I wrote constantly. Early mornings before dawn became sacred in their own way. I would wake around 3:30 or 4:00, make coffee, and sit in the stillness before the day fully began. There is something about those hours that feels different to me, as if the mind has not yet fully entered the world and language can arrive more honestly.

Some mornings the writing flowed easily. Other mornings I sat with confusion, resistance, exhaustion, or grief moving through me alongside the work. Still, I kept returning. Before sessions. After sessions. Between walks with Ben in the foothills. In the middle of ordinary afternoons when the light shifted across the room and something in me suddenly understood how a paragraph needed to unfold.

Over time, the writing itself became a form of practice.

That summer, after completing the final draft of and sending it to my editor, I traveled to Peru. Somewhere during that journey, another image began taking shape inside me. The metaphor of basket weaving arrived almost all at once. I could feel how it connected the body, the feminine, ancestry, healing, relationship, and the slow process of reweaving what had been fragmented or forgotten. Suddenly the structure of The Motehr Ache became much clearer.

I remember feeling relief more than certainty. As though I had finally found the form the book had been asking for all along.

Now, as I complete the final edits, I find myself sitting with a kind of gratitude that is difficult to describe fully. Writing these books has changed me. Or perhaps it has simply brought me into a more honest relationship with myself. The process has asked for patience, humility, discipline, surrender, and trust. It has also asked me to remain close to what feels most human in me.

More and more, I see these two books as part of the same weave.

One asks how we integrate profound experiences into ordinary life. The other asks how we return to the places in ourselves that still ache for love, care, and belonging. Beneath both lives the same deeper question: how do we come home to ourselves with honesty and compassion?

I do not think writing has given me answers as much as it has taught me how to stay in relationship with the questions.

And perhaps that is enough.