The Writer’s Weave: A Journey of Returning

The Long Thread

Writing, like healing, has its own rhythm — a cycle of unraveling, returning, and reweaving.

When I first wrote Integration Alchemy in 2019, I let it go. It wasn’t the perfect book, written through a book coaching program, and not really from my voice. The book was out in the world, as an offering to help people seeking integration support for entheogen experiences, disguised as integrating “transformational retreats”. Oh dear. But something in me knew the work wasn’t complete. It was a good book, helpful perhaps, but not yet the one that I wanted to be born through me.

So I took it down in 2020.

What I couldn’t have known then was that I was stepping into a long apprenticeship — not only with writing, but with myself.

Learning to Listen Again

In 2023, after completing my Compassionate Inquiry training, my work with clients began to deepen. I saw, again and again, that the real ceremony wasn’t in the peak moments of transformation but in the tender integration afterward — in the daily practice of honesty, embodiment, and compassion.

As I began rewriting Integration Alchemy, I realized it wasn’t just a book on practices to help integrate anymore. It was a story — my story — one that could hold both the psychological and the sacred, the mind and the mystery, and all that I have learned about healing and meditation over the long years of my healing journey.

That was the beginning of the new book, and it was slow going as I eked out a draft, knowing how hard it would be to get it published.

The Unexpected Pivot

But something else was quietly forming beneath the surface. Nearly every client I was working with through Compassionate Inquiry was carrying a tender, familiar pain — the ache of the mother wound.

It was one I knew intimately.

By early 2024, I felt called to focus on it fully. I put aside the unfinished draft of Integration Alchemy and started The Mother Ache. What began as a small exploration grew into a complete immersion. I worked on this draft throughout 2024, quietly and slowly. I read books on the Mother Wound, the Great Mother, reread Jung’s studies on archetypes and alchemy, which were all fascinating and helpful but also distracted me from the task at hand, completing the book. 2024 ended with two manuscripts adn no end in sight.

A Year of Weaving

Enter 2025, which has been a wild and beautiful ride. Early in the year, I was invited to publish both books with Sentient Publications, and by early March, I’d signed the contracts. Since then, I’ve been writing and editing almost every day — seven days a week, before and after sessions, between walks with Ben, during quiet afternoons when the foothills hum. I have been writing almost every day — often beginning at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning, before the world wakes up. I light a candle, make my beloved coffee, and sit in that sacred quiet before dawn, where words come like prayer. Some mornings were clear and flowing; others were tangled and raw. But the thread kept pulling me forward.

It’s been a rhythm of devotion: create, rest, refine, return.

When I traveled to Peru this summer, after finishing Integration Alchemy, the next thread revealed itself — the ancient metaphor of basket weaving for my mother ache book. It connected everything: the body, the feminine, the lineage, the medicine. Each strand — the archetypes, the ache, the weave — found its place.

It felt like coming home.

The Thread Continues

Now, as I complete the final edits of The Mother Ache: Healing the Wounded Daughter Within, I feel the same gratitude I often feel at the end of a ceremony — quiet, tender, humbled by the mystery that moves through us when we allow it.

Writing has been my deepest teacher, showing me that creation is never separate from healing. Each sentence is an act of remembering; each revision, a new layer of integration.

Both books have become one weave — two threads of the same story:
How we come home to ourselves.
How we turn experience into wisdom.
How we remember that love is what remains.

Invitation

If you’ve walked with me through these writings, thank you. You’ve been part of the weave — reading, reflecting, healing alongside me.

In early 2026, both Integration Alchemy and The Mother Ache will find their way into the world. May they serve you as companions on your own path of remembering, and may they remind you that every ache, every pause, and every word is part of the same sacred weave.

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Integration as Relationship: Healing Through Connection