Writing Warmth for Anxiety

Do you struggle with self-doubt and do you often find yourself double-thinking your expression? Is it difficult for your creativity to make it through the internal gateways of vigilance?

Do you wonder what your expression would sound like if it got to be grounded in a calm flow of irrepressible discovery?

Anxiety is a state of nervous system activation that can range from mild agitation to overwhelming panic, leaving us with a sense of never quite being able to rest or relax.

It may show up as electricity, tension, shakiness, or hypervigilance—as though the world is made of rough roads and we must brace ourselves at every turn. As Jaak Panksepp discovered, anxiety is often difficult to trace to a single source. It can arise from fear (fear for our physical, economic, or health safety) and it can also be connected to separation distress: the nervous system’s alarm when we lack the warm emotional presence and responsiveness that social mammals require.

Many of us live with a near-constant layer of low-level alarmed aloneness without ever knowing its name. And in that state, we naturally turn to anything that quiets the internal noise: eating patterns, television, gaming, shopping, all useful but temporary strategies that soothe the anxious voice for as long as we stay engaged. But something profoundly different happens when we bring resonance, accompaniment, and unconscious contract work into our relationship with anxiety. The system begins to settle in a deeper way. We gradually reclaim our bodies for peace and steadiness instead of living in chronic activation, vigilance, collapse, or immobilized overwhelm.

Anxiety often disrupts creativity by stamping it with second-guessing, doubt, or scattered attention. And so, the compassionate turning toward our anxious selves creates unexpected openings in our creative lives. As we meet anxiety with warmth, clarity, and resonance, creativity and self-expression begin to flow again, unburdened by fear.

Over the course of six weeks, we’ll learn the neuroscience of anxiety, resonant healing tools to support our warm connection with anxiety and alarmed aloneness, and explore our writing and creating. Participants in this class will leave with a deeper well of self-compassion, grounded skills for moments of intense anxiety, and a clearer understanding of what actually helps the nervous system settle. They will discover practices that restore calm, strengthen self-connection, and open renewed access to creativity, confidence, and the pleasure of inhabiting one’s own body.

A warm space that creates room for the flow from thought into expression, support and resonant feedback, all in service of unblocking your creativity and more fluid expression. In each 85-minute class, we will:

• • Begin with a free writing period
  • Offer a resonance exercise or demonstration to support the movement toward free expression
  • Continue with a second free writing period
  • Create space for sharing and resonant responses to each other’s work

The classes will be recorded for participants in many time zones

Week 1: Finding the Roots of Anxiety
Week 2: Releasing Impossible Unconscious Contracts that Make Us Very Anxious
Week 3: Time Traveling to Where Anxiety Started
Week 4: Deep Drilling into Alarmed Aloneness
Week 5: Changing Anxious Patterns of Self-Talk
Week 6: Resonance for Our Anxious Cells

For writers, artists, explorers and creatives looking for a resonant space in which to support their creative expression. The creative process work that we’ll explore in this class is for anyone involved in, or longing to be involved in, any kind of creative pursuit.

Assistant support is available during classes. There are three ways this happens:

• In groups of three with one assistant and two participants, so that participants can practice the breakout exercises with support.
• In small groups, with 1 assistant and 3+ participants, with work with one participant occurring by lottery, and the remaining participants observing.
• Depending on assistant availability, the third option is 1-1 support to receive resonant processes like time travel and unconscious contracts for material that comes up during class.

$175-400

• This course is set up so that participants can contribute what they can.
• Please choose a variation that considers your financial resources as well as the contribution you would like to offer Sarah and her team.
• The standard tuition for this course is $300. If you choose to pay more, your contribution will go toward supporting those with fewer resources to attend.

• Your tuition payment is non-refundable (but it is transferable).
• This course will be recorded for those who want to learn asynchronously for some or all sessions.
• This work is not therapy and is not a substitute for therapy. If you have a sense that you would be destabilized by yourself or others speaking about difficult events, then this course may not be for you. While we hope that the processes and information that we share can be of use in your journey, we do not have the resources to support extreme psychological difficulties.