“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.”  ~ Karen Blixen

Writing is an extraordinary tool for liberating the mind, healing the heart, and empowering the human spirit.

In this illuminating six-week course, award-winning writer and teacher Mark Matousek introduces participants to the power and practice of spiritual memoir. Viewing your life as a soul’s journey, he teaches — from wounding to wisdom, and ignorance to insight — reveals the mythic dimension of your personal struggles, confusions, affinities, and longings. This increases your spiritual aliveness and creative power. 

Mark begins each 90-minute session with an introduction to the week’s topic, followed by two guided Writing to Awaken practices designed to prompt healing and personal growth. Known for his provocative questions and friendly teaching style, he creates a safe, enjoyable atmosphere for self-exploration and mutual support. During this course, Mark will also provide you with personalized deepening prompts on request as well as practical advice for the memoir-writing process.

Whether you’re interested in writing for publication or for personal growth, this course can be of great benefit to you.  In these six weeks, you will learn to:

• View the experiences of your life through a spiritual lens. Understand your personal journey as a pilgrim’s progress.
• Reframe loss and pain as necessary components of spiritual growth.
• Shape your personal journey into an archetypal, mythic narrative.
• Free yourself of destructive beliefs and self-sabotaging stories.
• Harness witness-awareness as a doorway to insight in writing.

This course helps you recognize that every life is a hero’s journey, and that — in the words of Roman philosopher Seneca — “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”  Spiritual memoir assists you in building that courage, placing your life in a cosmic context, connecting the details of your personal journey to the universal story we all share.

Schedule

Session One: Who Am I?

In the first class, we explore personal identity — where it comes from, what it isn’t, and how writing can help you move beyond the limits of your biography.

Session Two: The Wound and the Gift

In our second session, we examine the truth that every spiritual journey begins with wounding or a fall from innocence. This wound is also the source of your gift, as you’ll learn, and provides fuel on the path toward awakening.

Session Three: Disillusionment is Progress

Third lesson invites you to investigate the positive impacts of disillusionment, and the value of expanding beyond your comfort zone. When you learn to drop your mask and bless your losses, you discover that truth is disruptive and contains the seeds of transformation.

Session Four: Self/No-Self

Our fourth session is focused on revealing your true nature and recognizing that the permanent Me is a fiction. This endows you with a liberated, spiritual perspective based on unity, balance, and interconnection.

Session Five: Why Sacredness Matters

In this penultimate session, we look at cultivating sacramental vision, perceiving and framing everyday life as an exercise in reverence, gratitude, and awe. This opens the seeker-writer’s eyes to a whole new way of being.

Session Six: The Journey Home

In our final class, we consider homecoming as the purpose and destination of spiritual life. When you learn that what you’re seeking is already within you, the struggle for external authority ceases. You recognize that you’re already home — awake, alive, fully connected — and remember your essential purpose.

These lessons reveal the timeless connection between spiritual memoir and the hero’s journey of awakening.  Please join us for this uplifting course!