It recently occurred to me that women have no language…. no syntax, no ready-made system or body of words to communicate the substance of a woman’s subjective life experience within a one-sided culture that values logos, or reason — that which is practical, concrete, scientific and provable — at the expense of eros, or feeling.* The current world order and the language that upholds it is based on a split between these two dimensions: thought and feeling, body and soul, human and other-than-human. 

Woman is born in the birthing pangs of these interwoven dimensions.

The culture’s split alienates a woman from her own feminine body, language, voice, and soul — those dimensions which are based more on an intangible, pulsing eros and the felt-sensed-known oneness of spirit, nature, and flesh which so much weaves the fabric of a woman’s inner life. 

This is likely why many women struggle to explain themselves: because the essence they are trying to communicate lives more in what cannot be explained in daily language… it lives more in the silence, in the invisible currents of emotion, in the body’s cries of grief, and in the images of the living (and dying) world.

One transformative and revolutionary way for a woman to heal the split within herself and the culture is to inhabit her whole, feminine body – her flesh and spirit, eros and logos, pain and joy – through learning a feminine language. A language beyond reason: rooted in the body, in the imagination, in the eros of the living world, in the Wordlessness that preceded the Word…. emerging from the birthing pangs of one’s subjective life experience. 

This Gateless writing salon is about that. Helping us write our way into the sacredness of our ordinary lives through cultivating a feminine body of words — words of images and feelings that are big enough to hold the interwoven realms of our inner and outer lives. By learning to speak a language that weaves worlds (rather than disconnects them), we rebirth ourselves in the dance of opposites… we reclaim our lives and as well as often prophetic value of our everyday life experiences.

*Writing and realizations inspired by Marilyn Sewell and her anthology of women’s poetry “Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women’s Spirituality”

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Across the 8 weeks of the salon you’ll be encouraged to inhabit the everyday moments of your life with a full-bodied presence that weaves the sacred in the ordinary.

Along that time, we will gather for ~2 hours each week online to write in this salon’s theme: writing in the feminine — meaning, in a language beyond reason, rooted in the images and eros of the body, imagination, and living world. With the support of meditation, authentic movement meditation, and embodied poetry/prose we will drop out of ordinary consciousness into an embodied state. From there you’ll be given a writing prompt and we’ll write down the sacred bones of our lives.

Mondays: 6-8:15 pm ET
October 24th - December 19th

(we will have a creative break between calls 3 & 4, during week of November 14th)

Limited to 8 female participants.

$300

*Bring a friend who has never participated in Gateless before and both of you receive $25 off

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
— George Elliot

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“All writers must be creators, but women writers must create twice: we must re-create our materials — the very words and word-patterns of our medium — and at the same time we must create our individual pieces of writing.”
— Marilyn Sewell