Thank you as always for being here. I will keep things short today (am I capable of this?!). Mainly I want to offer an update about where I am right now and what summer seems to be demanding.

If you’ve been following along you know that I am in the shift of creating the Alignment Library for us. I say for us, because these somatic videos will be as much for me as they are for you. Creating them is transformative for me, calming, healing, etc.

At the same time, I am in no rush. If anything, I feel that my priorities have shifted so deeply over the last few years that I don’t relate anymore to this feeling. A feeling that at one time I’m sure was very prominent. That my worth is dependent on outward achievement and yes, output.

What I am focused on now is making quality content that is helpful for you and I. And to do that, I want to gather myself a little, think through what this looks like, and really integrate deeper learning. I had the most wonderful call a few weeks ago with one of the original practitioners of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique—tapping). She is seventy five years old, and in her forties made a shift from being a French teacher to entering a career in the alternative healing arts.

She was so generous to talk to me about her path, and I left so inspired. She offered to mentor me, which feels like the biggest gift I could imagine. She was really excited about my vision for bringing modalities like EFT to writers in a new way.

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She is an expert in her field, and I am so inspired by her vast work in EFT and her own creative approach to it. Something she calls Inner Theater that I’m obsessed with and feels like a heart sister to the Fountain. She shared some recordings with me and offered some suggestions for trainings. Once I complete a training I hope to be mentored by her.

Why this matters, and why I mention it is because this process takes time. And it takes depth. I have no hot takes about it to share. I have no quick fix. As I start to record and imagine how the Alignment Library will look, I can’t be focused on output. It’s an input season.

From a psychic standpoint I know that this season for me is about gathering information, practicing in private, daydreaming, and finishing my novel. I don’t know how some people manage pumping out multiple posts a week on here, other than maybe they are not also writing big whopper novels that are taking everything from them, being present for multiple kids all day every day, running a business, AND mentoring other writers…the list goes on. I mean I’m finally at a place where I can see it’s unreasonable to imagine all these balls can be kept skillfully in the air at once. I don’t make enough money on Substack for this to be the place I pour the time into—which is a catch22 right, because if consistency is key, then I’m screwed.

This is why I know deep from my depths that I’m not meant to write as much here anymore. I’m meant to write long form—novels and books. I’ve always known this and it’s no different today.

But here, I see this fun opportunity to create video content. But to do that I want to come super correct (I love this phrase “come correct” hehe) and I want it to be a beautiful experience for us both. This is why I’m pausing your paid subs for the rest of summer.

My fear of course, to be transparent, is that you will unsubscribe and I’ll lose the wonderful community I’ve built here for the last three years. I hope you won’t leave. Know you will not be charged as long as I am not publishing new content. When I return in the fall, I will change it back. I have decided that the alignment videos will most certainly be paywalled beyond perhaps a few sample videos to give you an idea.

But right now, you don’t have to do anything. I just don’t feel right charging subs if I’m not posting.

And there may come a time where inspiration strikes and I do sent out a post before summer’s end. Who knows. I just really feel the intuitive pull to listen to the voice that’s telling me to go underground, study, be, move, and finish the projects I know I must give all my heart to.

Before I go, please know that in just a few days our Writing Reset begins and there is still time to sign up before our first live coaching call Monday, August 3rd at noon. This is a beautiful course I am so proud of and is going to be equal parts deep, fun, and very witchy. Think a card deck, salt, and…raisins? You have to be in there to get it!

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Okay, more on the other side. Enjoy the rest of summer. My daughter turns twelve tomorrow. I am putting all my energy into creating magic for her. Twelve years ago I became a mother?! How can this be? I’m so so so glad I did.

She’s old enough to absolutely roast me now which is fun for us both, like the below video where I explain the planes of hell and she decided to film me lol.

Here’s to your alignment,

Chelsea <3

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Thank you for being here. I am writing post trip from California where I went to LA to do Allie Rowbottom’s beautiful LOVERS XXX event at Skylight where I got to see some of the Fountain crew IRL which is always such a treat and so beautiful to see these writers build friendships. I stayed with my childhood best friend in Playa Del Rey where we immediately got into mischief very reminiscent of middle school and had to get ourselves out of a…jam.

Honestly it was so fun and refreshing to spend this sort of time with an old friend. I felt possessed by the thirteen year old version of myself and was put in touch with my…resourcefulness. I wish I could explain more, but trust me, I CANNOT.

Carly and I swam in the ocean—well, I did, because I can never resist, and we saw dolphins and many a sea otter. It was much needed time together after too long apart.

From there I drove a little blue rental car north to Avila Beach, a beach I spent a lot of time at in college. I went to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and studied journalism working on the daily paper there. My husband recently cleaned out the basement and showed me my framed degree, noting I have a Bachelor in SCIENCE. That’s right biiiitch. I’m a scientist.

SLO is such a beautiful small town. It can feel like a movie set. I was transported back to the college version of me who refused to listen to anyone tell me writers don’t make money.

Oh, the stories people want to project. They mean well. I can only say I’m so glad I didn’t listen to a single one. I learned in AA—you knew an AA nugget was coming!—that you shouldn’t take advice from someone who doesn’t have what you want. I stand by this today and it has never served me wrong.

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel, Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically-aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the unconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

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The purpose of Avila was to celebrate my granny’s 101st birthday, which she has since coined “101 off 101—Touch of Heaven.”

It really was a touch of heaven as we spend so much time in the sand. It’s been an intense return to Portland and the last week has felt like a lot of dealing with the less fun aspects of life—my TMJ (more on this in future posts), tax stuff, logistics, and lots of driving. But anyhow. I wanted to dash this off. Trying to get better at consistency here, and repeating the mantra, done is better than perfect.

YOU ARE THE GIFT

This was supposed to be a little voice note from me to you, but the sound ended up being terrible, so now I’ll make it into a post instead.

A big theme that’s been on my heart lately, and one I hope will bolster you as you move through the summer and think about your creative work, is this idea that kept coming to me as I taught a very talented group of writers: you are the gift.

We all possess gifts. We all have things that come naturally to us or that we’re drawn toward. Often, those gifts are meant to take us on a journey that reveals our innermost selves to us.

You’re probably here because one of your gifts is writing. You’re a writer.

But if we zoom out a little further than that, we can recognize something even deeper. That you yourself are the gift. All of your writing and your other gifts come through this first layer of your inherent worthiness. You, by yourself, are worthy. You, by yourself, are a gift to the world.

Usually our art or our writing is simply the way we transmute that inherent goodness, that inherent beauty we possess into something other people can recognize and receive.

The writing isn’t what makes us worthy. The writing comes from our worthiness. It’s an expression of it.

I think about who I was when I was first starting out as a writer, and honestly, I don’t think I could have heard this.

It’s hard for me to remember now, but there was a time in my life when I couldn’t even fathom my own inherent worthiness. I certainly could have fathomed my performance based worthiness. So when a sponsor suggested I do affirmations, I didn’t understand. On top of this she wanted me to talk to myself in front of the mirror.

I said, “Okay...what does that mean?”

She said, “Think about things you really love about yourself and just say them out loud.”

And I could not imagine what it would mean to love myself without having earned it first. So I came back the next day and said, “Okay, I did them.”

She asked what I’d said.

I said things like, “You have legs. You are able to see and smell and hear.”

She started laughing. She said, “Chelsea, that’s not what I meant.”

She wanted me to say things like, “I am worthy. I am loved. I am wonderful. I am beloved. I am divine.”

And I remember thinking, Oh my God.

It was so hard to imagine saying those things to myself.

I had not yet developed that deeper self-love, that deeper self-trust. It wasn’t my fault. I had literally been abandoned by my parents! I mean. That really fucks your sense of safety and trust in your own inherent goodness.

Blessedly, these things can be developed. They really can. I still feel the acute pain of my childhood but I no longer fall into self blame over it. Instead I am an confident advocate for my inner child and I don’t self abandon. I am certain of my inherent worthiness.

If you feel very far from this idea that you are a gift, I want you to know this isn’t something you’re either born believing or you’re not. It’s something you can practice. It’s something you can grow into. And when you work with the unconscious like we do in the Fountain you can experience permanent and amazing changes in terms of your own thinking.

And when you do, your gifts begin to flow so much more easily. Life becomes more possible, more fun, more alive and more conscious.

You move from a place of expansion instead of contraction. You become more generous with other people because you’re no longer spending so much energy wondering if you’re enough. You become more able to receive and more intuitive too.

So this is my Self-Soothe invitation for you: I want you to spend some time noticing the light you bring into the world. Could be anything, small or large. Let’s fix our mindset to all we bring so beautifully instead of our perceived lacks. Remember, as we grow this muscle of self love we are wise not to always trust our default perception.

Maybe you might even try saying a few affirmations to yourself in a very loving voice. Why not? What’s there to lose?

So, what gifts do you bring?

Maybe you had an immediate reaction when I asked you to think about that just now. Maybe you thought, I’m such an encouraging friend. That is a gift.

And then maybe, almost immediately, another voice chimed in.

Yeah, but I wasn’t that nice to Susie the other week.

I really should call people more.

I don’t know if that’s actually true.

Watch for those places and how quickly you edit your own goodness.

So, in what ways are you a gift to the world?

Not just what are your gifts. Not just what you provide to other people. I’m talking about the inherent, beautiful things about you that exist before you’ve accomplished or proven anything.

Can you name them? Can you let yourself believe them?

I’d love to hear what comes up for you in the comments. What are the beautiful, inherent things about you that have nothing to do with productivity or achievement? What do the people who love you already know about you that maybe you’ve forgotten?

I can’t wait to read your answers.

Here’s to your alignment,

Chelsea

PS: we have a brand new Fountain offering, The Writing Reset and it’s insane. Think a virtual oracle deck, Writing Clearings (guided audio journaling) and four live coaching calls!! So much more. Check it out.

And don’t forget you get 15 percent off if you’re a subscriber to Make Up Your Life and First Breath! with code substack15 <3

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Alright, onto the reason I’m writing to you today. We are launching a new course and I cannot stop thinking about it. It’s called The Writing Reset, and I am OBSESSED. For a few reasons. The main one is that we made a deck called The Prisms Deck to go with it that is so special. I just. You have to experience it. It’s at the heart of the course. But there’s so much more.

and I have known for awhile that we wanted to launch another course. The success of our book writing intensives has been so incredible—watching writers over a long period of time actually draft books, wow!—but we’ve known we wanted some shorter offerings too for writers who aren’t in a place in life where they can be in a 100 day container.

We deeply considered (as we always do first)—what course we would most love to encounter and what aspects would make it special enough to invest resources in. It’s sort of like, write the book you most want to write. We create the courses we’d most love to take.

We knew we loved the idea of a mid-season reset and so with that in mind we entered the portal—where we achieve total alchemy and our energies collide to create something we could not have before dreamt of—and came up with a four week course that would revolve around The Prism Deck plus a new kind of Clearing. A Writing Clearing, a binaural audio experience that guides you through a writing session. We also will be debuting our new Cord-Cutting Clearing™ that will help you release and repair your auric field.

We thought a lot about the rituals we use and adore, and how we could make integrating blocks and shadow parts in the spirit of play. Like, how do we play with these aspects of self and actually make all of this a playful process that doesn’t feel like therapy? No shade to therapy. We love therapy. Most of our work surrounds really deep diving into these inner truths.

But I think with this we were really asking—how do we get quickly into the work in a fun way? How do we do this in a ritualistic way? How do we take all of our interests—this course really encapsulates the interests of Kim and I and the true things that we really do lean on and utilize, including a deck. I consult decks of all kinds. I love tarot. I love dream oracle decks, I love archetype decks and I love the sort of playfulness that comes with pulling cards and using them as a prompt to see the situation differently.

And that’s when I really thought, okay, what do cards do for me when I use them? Like, what do they do? Well, they center me. They bring a focus somewhere outside of the scramble of my mind. They pull focus into a place that is interesting and helpful. They organize thought. They give psychic insight. They bring me to understandings that are new. They invite.

This reset is about re-seeing. Re-seeing the work, re-seeing the self, re-seeing what’s possible, and beginning again, and not beginning in the old, right? Beginning something fresh.

And so this deck is instrumental in this. We are artists. We’re making art. That’s an unwieldy, mysterious, and magical process. And I think everything about the reset gives so much homage to that aspect of it, the magical part. Stephen King says in On Writing that it’s best that we don’t forget that above all, we are working with magic.

That’s the main craft rule I subscribe to above all, that writing is a divine act of mystery. And Prisms are an instant way into this mystery and create new neural pathways by making you do something weird that you wouldn’t normally do that will naturally spur new thought and new ideas.

When we named these prompts Prisms, we were thinking a lot about what transmutes something. The way that the light refracts through a prism across a room is the sort of imagery that always incites magic, even in adults. I remember being a kid, and my grandmother had these beautiful prisms in the corner of the dining room and the way they would sparkle and dance over the room at certain hours was never short of mesmerizing. I could watch them for hours.

What I love is that prisms are just clear glass, but then light goes through them and they become rainbows.

When the practice is rooted in play, even if that feels counterintuitive, it becomes free and it becomes enjoyable. We’re humans. We will keep doing what feels good. Let’s make writing feel good again.

Okay. I hope you will sign up and experience this mid season reset with us in a dedicated 4 week container and community.

And if you are a paid subscriber to both and my Substacks you get 15 percent off the course with the code substack15!!!!

I have much more to say about this course and Kim and I will be doing a Substack live class soon to give a taste of the practice, but I must be off to resume duties as mom in pool with kids!

All my love and care,

Chelsea

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Well. You delivered.

Fifty-plus of you showed up in the comments with stain removal magic (so much stain removal magic—life is messy, apparently), foolproof quiche, spicy lemon ginger tea for when you’re sick, phrases from grandmothers and therapists and one very wise Tulum masseuse named Marco, budgeting apps, tulip bulbs, Marco Polo friendships, and the kind of hard-won perspective shifts that stop you mid-scroll. I learned so much reading these. I will be referencing this book often — probably forever. Sometimes the internet can feel so impermanent to me so here is my way of crystallizing something beautiful.

So here it is: The Book of BEST THINGS. My free gift to you, in the spirit of mothering ourselves.

Book Of Best Things

112KB ∙ PDF file

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Download it. Pass it to a friend who needs to know about the boiling-water-on-berry-stains thing. Comment here if you have something to add and didn’t get to on the first round. If it keeps going I am happy to update it!

Keep it somewhere you’ll find it again. And there’s a blank page at the end for you to add your own—because you have one too.

A note on names: I kept everyone’s names exactly as they appeared in the comments, otherwise I would have driven myself insane. If you contributed, you’re in there. And if I missed you, I’m so sorry it was not intentional. I am doing my best! Thank you. I’m always asking what it really means to parent ourselves. So many of you I know follow me because we share in this yearning. Well, this felt like a small, tactile way.

Happy reading, and happy mothering yourselves for today.

Here’s to your alignment,
Chelsea

I believe the first line of any great novel, short story, or memoir should contain the DNA for the entire book or story to come. And lately, as I realign myself mind, body, and spirit on this platform, I realize the first line of this newsletter—my first post two and a half years ago—never let you know who I am. Never contained the DNA so to speak of what it is I’m doing here.

Mostly because I didn’t know yet! I was only following an impulse to blog like I did as a twenty year old and I had some notion that it would be fun to combine the things I love most—writing + all the rituals, practices, and products that make a (joyful) writing life possible for me. Showing up to the practice over a lifetime, making a career out of your soul’s imprint—WE NEED TREATS—this shit is intense!

But like any writing project, over time it evolves as we evolve. When I started this newsletter I had yet to really envision what was possible, or…what I wanted it to be yet. Which makes sense. This is often how we work as writers. All my books started out as something quite different than what they became.

But now, a few years into having a newsletter, and many dark nights of the soul about this newsletter (ask my poor friends), I am doubling down on the vision I truly have for it. This comes out of a season of a lot of self work around being truly seen, my authenticity, and deep alignment.

So in that spirit, I want to introduce myself. I remember when I got an influx of subscribers after The Cut mentioned Make Up Your Life in a newsletter (bless!) and even then it did not occur to me to write a post like this. But of course I should have. Well, here it is now.

And if you see yourself in what I write I hope you’ll continue on this journey with me—trust (as my daughter would say)…the best is yet to come!

My purpose beyond writing books

I have known for many years that my purpose beyond writing novels and short stories and essays is serving writers through helping them walk through the complex terrain of building energetically-aligned creative practices and (for some) making a career out of your soul’s work—which are not easy things to do.

Ask any writer who’s been at it awhile. I heard Lauren Groff say once there is the Writer Self and the Author Self and they are two different people.

And yet, both must be nurtured and honored to thrive as the whole.

Writers write. Maybe they teach craft, too. (I hope they read!) But I knew from DAY ONE of my teaching career as a twenty-three-year-old reluctantly standing in front of a college composition 101 class, I would never be able to teach the material I was supposed to teach the way I was supposed to teach it.

Because nowhere in the curriculum seemed to account for the emotion that was very clearly on every student’s face: Fear. And what’s under fear? Oh, about a million complex layers of formative self-stories, some of which are working to prevent creative expression at all costs.

Even the football players in my class who were openly just getting their credits were nervous about writing. Faced with a blank page, a certain spell seemed to be cast over them—did they have anything to say? Who would care anyhow? Maybe these italic lines sound familiar to you. We as writers know them well as the inner critic, the ultimate psychological hammer that causes us to censor ourselves, worry, and ultimately either write work that feels uninspired or perhaps not write at all.

But it’s never been enough for me to accept that I possess this inner critic and I just have to write in spite of it, though. I desire something more than abatement. I desire true freedom. I want to know where the inner critic comes from, where it gets its ideas, and then I want to nurture it, get down deep in the subconscious and reprogram it so that it becomes my ally, my greatest team member.

It’s sort of like when I got sober and also quit smoking. Everyone was like good god don’t also quit smoking!! But I didn’t like this—it felt so limited. If I was going to do all this work then I wanted to do it all the way. If I was gonna get free I wanted to get FREE.

The same goes for writing. I don’t want to live in a state of stuck misery, talking about how hard this practice is. I want to do the inner work necessary to make it feel AMAZING.

It didn’t matter that most of these comp students would not become literary writers or that most of them didn’t harbor creative ambition. To me, it was clear the blocked nature of their emotions would wreak havoc in whatever area of expression they one day did want to partake in—jobs, relationships, etc. and the writing class was a way to work on it in real time.

I quickly started teaching the art of self love and alignment.

I didn’t call it that at the time but looking back there is no better way to describe the room I aimed to build. Simultaneously I was getting my own education in my MFA program, getting workshopped myself, and reading like crazy.

In my own workshops I craved the direct and honest feedback I received about my stories. I loved it. I wanted it. I had started the program with the ultimate beginner’s mindset, truly wanting to learn and become better. Become great, in fact. I walked in with a combination of no pretense at all and a growing sense of connection to my inner world through recovery. I was young but had already lived several lifetimes.

I was young and also had a lack of classical education around literature—I read anything from Stephen King to Toni Morrison to Emily Dickinson to Mary Gaitskill to the latest pop thriller author with equal abandon—and I had already been humbled quite a few times in my short life. I had seen catastrophe and I felt lucky to be alive. Maybe this is why the attention I received from peers and instructors, be it harsh or kind, helped me soar during those two years.

But some of my peers did not flourish. There were some that dropped out, there were some who were rumored to have been traumatized by the harshness of a professor’s words, and some still who seemed to find at the end of the two years that writing was actually quite hard, and that maybe this was not the life they wanted to pursue. Fair.

And so, while I personally was hungry to become excellent, and I was used to fierce criticism as a sort of lovedrug (thanks to my years as a competitive gymnast) I saw that by in large, my students would not really benefit from a rigid, critical education around writing, that in fact they would probably never be able to write well or at all if we did not work on the part of writing that was fun, that was exploratory, and ultimately was theirs. If we did not address the matters of the heart.

I have never felt more free than at the keyboard, and I wanted them to feel this, too.

I learned early on as a teacher that each person really does have something only they can bring into the world, their unique mark. But the work lies in wiping away the dust on top of the treasure chest.

Soon my office hours were swarmed with students coming to sit with me and talk about their lives. I had not established boundaries at this point in my life so I talked to them at length, one after another. Soon I began joking that really, I was their therapist.

We talked about their fears and created plans of action. I told them, looking in their eyes, that they were worthy. Gosh, how many of us feel so unworthy. Hold someone’s eye contact and say those simple words, and watch the tears. The tears say everything.

But what I saw over that first quarter was that alongside this emotional work, this practice of vulnerability, they were writing.

They were reading what they wrote in class proudly, hands shaking, sure, but they were doing it. They were coming up with ideas. Some students who dreaded the class initially were eager to sign up for another writing class, asking me what I was teaching next.

It was only Composition 101. But it was also kind of everything.

And for me it illuminated what I was really good at as a teacher: presenting things in a way that is both rigorous and also tapped into the personal, the spiritual. Afterall, where else does good writing come from?

New Paradigm state of mind

What was born in that classroom has evolved many times, but the core has always been the same—the DNA. The original loves of my life are movement, writing, teaching, and the mystical arts; the unconscious and the unseen and the creative ways we can dance with these parts to create enhanced creative connection, healing, and expansion.

We are so much more than our formative stories may tell us we are.

Over time, I’ve made these things more and more a part of how I teach mainly because to me there can be no separation. Just as in my fiction, I am a channel for what wants to come through, and in my teaching life this is the same.

And perhaps where this all comes together for me now in the most public way, is here, with you, on this platform.

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I think for a long time I felt the things I practiced and loved and that genuinely helped me the most felt fringe or woo woo (that dreaded phrase!) but now it’s quite commonplace to meet writers I meet who are pulling tarot and writing surrounded by crystals and doing all the things that I do, but maybe we just won’t talk about it much, lest we be seen as less serious. Or we cut ourselves off from these things out of fear.

Honestly, everyday I’m so grateful to have been brought to the underworld totally, that as a young person I had to really ask myself if I wanted to live or die, and I chose life. When you’ve been that low you’ll do anything to feel better. We call it the gift of desperation. I’d rather have been given this gift than stay in a comfortable stuck hell of unwillingness. Because nothing is harder to work with than that.

Most writers though I think are willing. They want to write, they need to write. And if they can get themselves to the place of willingness, then miracles can happen in the creative practice. You might even be willing to look silly, do something weird. As an artist, is this not your duty?

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I feel in my body so much freer than ever before. Hello, Aquarian age! Hello New Paradigm! What a relief. If you follow human design, you know that we’re tipping into the new paradigm which officially begins in 2027 but of course we are in that transitional phase now. The thing with the New Paradigm is that people no longer need to have one niche they are going to be known for and this is a huge, wonderful shift for someone like me who as a writer, feels that I’m an absorber and observer and obsessive of the world around me and I do not fit neatly into one box and I doubt that you do either.

What I have honed over the years is a really strong sense of myself, my purpose of my voice and a commitment, and a ruthless commitment to my own craft and process. Each book requires its own box of tricks and lessons that you’re going to have to learn for that book, and they’re not easy easy lessons and I do think they require unique support.

They require a sustained commitment to exploring the inner world which if you don’t do alongside, can lead to burnout, discouragement, and even if you do succeed, it might not feel very good. It might not be sustainable for the long haul.

Introducing…The Alignment Library

So, in honor of this continued clarifying process of my own path, I’ve thought hard about what I really want to bring to this space, and the answer surprised me. The answer includes less writing, and more…video.

(not a sentence I could have imagined writing even a few years ago!)

Yes, I keep having the express vision of a library of guided energy alignment sessions here for you on topics for writers specifically.

These will be easy to follow, short, and they will not require you to buy anything special. We will do them with our own bodies as a way to connect deeper with our inner worlds, quiet the noise, heal old wounds, and create new beautiful stories. We will disrupt old patterns and replace them with new ones.

We will do this by moving energy together using various modalities that are simple and effective. They are what I’ve used in the quiet of my room for many years that have moved me through great periods of grief, trauma, and burnout, and stay connected to my writing through it all.

For me the word Alignment has taken on an epic meaning in my life and I can feel instantly when something is out of alignment. The more we hone this intuitive skill (I believe we ALL possess deep intuitive gifts) the more the practice becomes an effortless extension of who we are, and so too all areas of our lives seems to become marked with more clarity and ease.

It doesn’t mean we cast a spell and it’s all easy. It just means we become ever more curious and courageous in our quest to live the lives and do the work we came here to do.

The message I keep getting is that the Alignment Library needs to be delivered in a way where the user just presses play and follows along.

How often do we pause and really connect with the wisdom of the body as it pertains to our work?

So, my goal is that in the coming months I will start releasing my Alignment Library here for paid subscribers. My ultimate goal will be to post weekly videos but we will see as we go. You’re here at the very start of all of this, and I am grateful.

Right now I’m in the process of having important conversations with practitioners in the lineages I am in love with (EFT Tapping for one!) to make sure I am delivering the modalities with a lot of accuracy and reverence.

And like anything else, these channelled experiences will be an intuitive creative act on my part, informed by two decades of deep inner work, years of experience of co-creating guided visualizations in The Fountain, and over fifteen years of teaching and supporting writers toward their dreams. <3

This is the work I want to be doing, and have for so long. So, I’m going to do it! I’m planting my stake in the ground for how I want to authentically show up here in service to the whole. For a long time I have felt unaligned on this platform and not really known why. Now I feel much clearer.

I will also be doing a yoga training in the fall along with and I cannot wait to find out the ways this will deepen and inform this work! I’ve wanted to do a training like this since my early twenties but I had kids and wrote books instead. I’m so glad I did things in this order, though—it feels like everything is unfolding the way it is meant to.

So this is Part One of my background, and shortly I’ll release Part Two which will get into the deeper areas of energy work in my life. I hope you’ll tell a friend and we can all connect <3

Up next…Intuitive Gifts and the body crisis that led me to energy work…Who is Chelsea Bieker? Part Two!

And before I go, remember, YOU ARE THE GIFT. You are enough. I can’t wait to hear from you and go on this journey as we blend the beauty of somatics, writing practice, and spirituality in one creative space. Tell me how you’re doing below, you know I always want to hear it :)

Here’s to your alignment,

Chelsea

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Neuro-Magnesi-Om Matcha

I’ve long been a Moon Juice girlie. I hit the cafes in LA like some people line up for rides at Disneyland. I worship at the church of Erewhon—it’s truly my version of a theme park. Maybe because I’ve been sober for so long, adaptogens are genuinely thrilling to me and because I’m a sensitive little freak! and I were just discussing our strange alien ways, like how certain words create different flavors in our mouths and how images of the dark side of the moon recently gave me vertigo and sense of primordial panic.

In any case, I have to keep my health pretty front of mind or I’m saddled with barfing migraines. (When I read in Famesick that Lena Dunham would walk to the ER with a migraine and get an IV of Benadryl I can’t say I haven’t been fantasizing about doing that. Part of me was like, you can get help for these? I could just walk into a place and be like this hurts so bad I’m thinking life may be over for me. But another part of me would be unable to get up and get thyself to the ER only to incur a giant fucking bill. I suffer alone, alas.)

But I suffer less when I’m on top of my shit. Moon Juice is part of that regime. I have loved this brand of supplements since the old packaging days. They are so high quality and they actually WORK. As in, I feel a difference when I take them. I am a huge Super You, Super Hair, Mini Dew (salty watermelon!) and Magnesi-om stan, but let me tell you about the product that has quite literally been life changing. I was noticing some brain fog stuff over the past few months and shitty sleep. I think a lot of factors were playing in but one was that I had become borderline addicted to coffee again which while I love it, always ends up doing me dirty over time.

When Moonjuice released their Neuro-Magnesi-Om Matcha I jumped right on it. It is specifically made to address brain health, give you that nice (no jitters) alert feeling I want from coffee but with no crash, no weird wiry feeling, no acidic energy (I feel the energy of what I consume really acutely and coffee vibrates at a slightly below-health vibration for me, even though I do still drink it because I love the flavor) just sort of the perfect awake and focused vibe. It has Lion’s Mane and Magnesium L-Threonate known to cross the blood/brain barrier. I was taking the Matcha religiously and then Amanda Chantal Bacon (she is so brilliant and kind) sent me the lemon to try, and suggested making Matcha Lemonade with it for summer. It blends into any liquid seamlessly, is perfectly delish and I genuinely feel like a new person after about two months of taking it. I am preaching from the rooftops about this one.

Iris and Romeo Lip Cocoon

Okay, I was lucky enough to try Iris and Romeo’s relatively new peptide lip treatment. Their tagline on this one is “not your daughter’s lip balm” which made me laugh because I’ve been stealing Harper’s Summer Fridays all year. Which I like, but I did notice that they don’t pass the toxic test on that one app that shows you gross stuff. They got a really bad score! I was disappointed to see that. But these Iris and Romeo balms are clean, fresh, and come in really pretty colors and just feel super nourishing. I think they are special for sure. Remember we get twenty percent off with code CHELSEA20! I think the creator of I&R is so conscious and creating beautiful products that really work and also aren’t full of crap.

Tapping Solution App

I’ve been LOVING lately is using this Tapping app with Harper before bed. She’s really taken to it and it’s become a special ritual where she gets to choose the topic (there’s a ton on there for kids, which was so cool to see!) and we will follow the tapping meditation together. It’s so relaxing and connective and then we both sleep really good. I was also hitting these hard when I had a series of sort of rebounding migraines in May and it was causing me to feel a lot of anxiety (will it always be this way? will I always be in pain? you know, panicky thoughts) and it was sooo good. I love how guided it feels. You can know nothing about Tapping and jump right in. In general what I love about tapping is that it’s so simple, is free, and I feel so much better after I do it. Tapping is all about stimulating specific meridian points on the body and really just works. Try it. It’s also a very generous app with tons of content including full audio books and daily inspiration cards, and all sort of things.

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The Fountain’s OG Course stream

I go through our course stream at least twice a year because no matter how many times I do the Clearings (audio visualization tracks) and Channels (written prompts), there is more to uncover. Doing the stream itself in order is the BEST tune up for my writing practice and emotional, energetic, and spiritual (to me) health. It’s just in our normal membership and takes you through a series of progressive lessons that clear blocks and illuminate what you want from your practice, your projects, what’s standing in the way, and how to build the emotional resiliency necessary to walk through the marathon that is being a Writer with all its myriad ups and downs. I’m such a firm believer that the work we do as writers who put work into the world is so specific and requires specific care. It is not for the faint of heart. Below you can see the titles of each course in the stream.

And here is a closer look inside my personal favorite course “Deep Dive”. This is where the deeper work happens to uncover and integrate any limiting patterns or beliefs that get in the way of your writing.

Mary Ruth’s Lemon Balm

Finally, a major discovery for any of us who deal with anxiety or a racing mind before sleep. My pregnant friend told me her midwife suggested she start taking this Mary Ruth’s Lemon Balm. After my friend raved about it, like really raved, I had to try it. I wondered if it would help me sleep more deeply and…quietly. I have really struggled over the past few years to let go of the day and move into deep rest. This does it. I don’t take much at all, just the smallest dose. One ingredient. Where has it been ALL MY LIFE? I imagine any lemon balm tonic will do but I just went ahead and got the one my friend is taking for now.

The Fountain’s Opportunity Calendar

I’ll keep this simple and say we made the thing we wanted to exist (our entire ethos for the Fountain) and created a beautiful organized calendar of important deadlines for writers. Check it out, it’s our free gift to you!

Alright, I am going to send this out now because I’ve been stalled for weeks trying to think of more things for you, but why is more better?

In general, life has been very busy with the Fountain’s Summer Intensive starting (amazing group!!) and some travel. I will be in Los Angeles at Skylight Books with to celebrate LOVERS XXX on July 10th. If you’re in the area I hope you will come out!

In my reading life I have decided to read the Neapolitan novels straight through, and am currently on the second one and so in love. What are you reading and loving?

I’ll be back here soon with a more detailed post about writing and life (so many ideas I want to explore with you all!), but for now, I hope you are resting, moving, writing, and living well.

With care,

Chelsea

I’m in the work, I’m plugging along and out of nowhere my hand directs the little arrow to another tab. Honestly Substack Notes has been killing off my brain cells, too. What does my curious little mind think it’s going to find? Salvation at last?

What’s strange is that this happens most intensely not when I’m far from the book, but when I’m dangerously close. Close to completion and close to visibility. Close to letting the thing exist apart from me, I guess. I don’t know! It’s the last thing I want to be doing and then there I am in another tab. What do I hope to find there? Again and again I find nothing but more anxiety, more fractured thinking, and a helluva a lot of wasted time. Reminds me a lot of addiction, where you get your fix and look up like what just happened?

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It is for many of us an addiction. But it’s also some form of self-sabotage/self-protection. I wonder often when will it end. I know all the tricks, too. It’s not about the tricks. I have the Brick! It’s the confounding thing where you know the tricks and you aren’t doing them. This is how I know it’s an internal block issue and not logistic. I’d say almost never is something truly logistic.

I can feel, almost physically, that something in me runs into the road at the exact moment I begin approaching the creative life I say I want. I say I want a slower, distraction free life where I can hear myself think, and I do it some days, sure, but then the impulse returns to go and fill my brain with the noise and anxieties and energies of others. Sometimes it’s beautiful energy and sometimes it’s not. Either way I’m absorbing it all and spending my own life force on digesting it.

I’ve seen time and time again that writers assume they have a discipline problem when what they actually have is a pattern problem and a nervous system problem. Maybe a self-protection problem.

Every day, we feed something right? We feed urgency, distraction, other people’s lives, fantasy, resentment, exhaustion. And sometimes, almost without noticing, we starve the work we love most. The versions of self we love and want the most.

But the greatest way to interrupt these patterns is to pause, see what’s under them, and take accessible and reasonable action in a better direction. Which is what I’m doing today. Changes are afoot for me, simple things like walking the dog sans phone. Doing my tapping meditations every day and jumping on the rebounder to uplifting music that reminds me to be grateful. I’m also doing some pen to paper targeted journaling around this to really see the part of me that’s in teh driver’s seat when I click out of what’s actually important to me. Care to join?

A writing prompt for further freedom

Set a timer for ten minutes and answer honestly these two simple questions:

• What currently receives the best of your energy?

• If your creative life reflected your actual patterns instead of your intentions, what would it look like?

When you finish, circle the sentence that feels most uncomfortable. What’s under it, and what’s under that? Keep going.

One of the deepest shifts we see inside The Fountain intensives is that writers stop treating creativity like a distant identity and start building a real relationship with the work.

I for one am relieved we kick of a new intensive on June 7th. I am never more in flow and more held in the energy of the Work than when we’re writing books together, in a state of intentional community, and making TRUE connections that last a lifetime with people who SEE us the way we desire to be SEEN.

The Fountain’s Summer Intensive begins June 7th, and there are still some spots left. If you’ve been waiting for the right time to devote yourself more fully to your creative life and to writing a book length work, consider this your invitation to stop waiting. And if you think a friend would like to join, please consider forwarding this to them. We are a two person women-owned business and word of mouth is by far the best way we can continue to grow and reach writers who truly need this work.

Happy writing! And let me know in the comments what’s been receiving the best of your energy lately and if it feels aligned…or not! I love to hear it all.

And if you missed it, I wrote what I now realize is only Part One of my journey with manifestation. So many of you wrote to me about this, and as soon as I hit publish, I knew I had only scratched the surface.

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Today’s post will delve into the personal so it is, like most Deep Water posts, paywalled. Thanks for subscribing and making this work possible!

Let’s talk about Manifestation

I’ve always felt hesitant to share my process with manifestation in the writing world. For a few reasons. I think in general the word manifestation for those of us who don’t want to spend the afternoon at the New Age Bookstore, can read as spiritual bypass-y. Maybe The Secret comes to mind, and ideas of staying in the frequency and all number of think positive rhetoric comes into play. And this can be tricky territory for many of us, myself included. It can warp, start to make you feel like if something bad happens to you, you are at fault because you didn’t vision board well enough.

I am SO not into any of that. To me, manifestation is a whole psychological perspective that changed my life drastically in 2018. In today’s post I will break down this journey (flyover version because it would literally be a book to talk about it all!) how I define this word for myself and why it’s been so powerful, and hopefully you will come away with some tools that might help you in all ways but especially in the Deep Waters of career and art making.

Okay. I could start with birth and the fact that I was born to parents with very low-self worth and a total victim’s mindset that bad things always uniquely befell us. This idea was hardwired into me in those mush-brained formative years and lodged deep. My mom would often say, of course this is happening to us. I believed, because of this, that there was just something about us, me, that was destined for bullshit. That there was something inherently wrong with me, something unlucky about me, and definitely something unlovable. These core beliefs, (that are commonplace among the children of alcoholics) whether I could have come close to articulating them or not, were running like a radio show in the background of my entire life.

It’s not that things were not shitty! They were, and my mom was a victim to a lot of violence of systemic patriarchal shit that is undeniable. But cut to me, later, trying to make a life for myself and I’m unconsciously working with that faulty programming. Not only is this a painful way to walk through the world, it affects EVERYTHING. It affects the situations you will put yourself in, the jobs you might apply to, the colleges you think you’re worthy of, what relationships you engage in, where you live, it can lead to addiction, and just generally accumulate to create a life you don’t want.

Something that was helpful for me to learn early on in my journey is that you are ALWAYS manifesting. Might as well become conscious around it.

Now, because we are of the searching souls types (I am assuming if you’re here you are of this type, hi :) ) we dig deep and figure this out. I knew from a young age because of books (thank you books!) that other worlds existed, that plenty of people did not live in the paradigm that my parents had created for me. That maybe I could get out.

The journey really starts with sobriety because for me nothing was gonna happen until I could be clear headed and out of absolute descruction. But sobriety did not expressly teach me what manifestation later did. Sobriety and the twelve steps taught me like 50 percent of what I needed to know about how to move through the world in a better way, but therapy, somatic and energy work, and yes, manifestation, have comprised the rest.

So, it’s 2018. I’ve been sober at this point for ten years. I’m pregnant with my second child sitting outside on the New Seasons rooftop. For some reason this memory is very visceral and I can remember the sun pressing in on my skin, the various snacks surrounding me, and my hot laptop, the screen a bit hard to see for all the sun. I am on submission for my first two books and for the first time in years do not have a writing project in front of me. I have a four year old daughter, and the sweet life of a young parent in many ways. I think that perhaps this book deal will change my life and pull us out of the financial strain we are always living in. Our house is 700 square feet with two tiny bedrooms. It’s shaped like a square divided in four. It was okay with one child but now I’m scared it won’t work with two. We probably need to move soon, but how?

I didn’t have grand assumptions I would get a book deal big enough to go buy a new house (though why not?). I vaguely hoped I’d be paid fairly for the work (but had no idea what “fairly” meant to me) and I just wanted it all to work out. Mainly I wanted enough money to not have to teach SEVEN classes as an adjunct and moonlight as a dating profile writer. I knew some of the things I didn’t want to do anymore but not a whole lot about what I actually wanted. Let me just note that had I found this practice years before this, everything about this paragraph would have been different

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A friend sends me a blog post by a woman named Lacy Phillips. I have never heard of her or the blog but am instantly interested in her herbology and general lifestyle vibe. By this point I have shed my Christian upbringing enough and am down a path of alternative spirituality enough for this to land. This woman offered courses. One was called Re-Parent. One was called Shadow. And one was called How to Manifest. (I think! it’s been awhile and they are re-named now but they are still basically the same). They were very basic online passive courses and you bought them a la carte. I bought Re-parent right away and got to work while I waited for sub news.

I didn’t know at the time this would create a paradigm shift for me in how I thought about EVERYTHING. My MFA program didn’t teach us about how to move through something as stressful and potentially emotionally fraught as a book submission process. Literally ZERO words in this regard. Therapy wasn’t teaching me about the power of deep imaginative visualization for true healing and I was circling the drain. I sure as hell was carrying around a deep story of basic unworthiness around the things I wanted in life without knowing it. And I’d unwittingly made many decisions from that place, leading me to that moment there in a sun.

I’d also made a bunch of good decisions, just to note. The fact that I’d written two books, had two wonderful kids and a partner that was healthy for me, lived in a city I loved, had an agent, and even had the friend who would send me a blog like that, proved that I was not at all starting from zero. I’d done a lot of work already. But nothing like what I was about to do.

Before we jump in, I want to alert everyone there is still time to register for The Fountain’s Summer Book Writing Intensive. We only run these twice a year. They are the best way to get regular, sustained craft and coaching support from Kimberly King Parsons and I, and go deep on a day-by-day guided process of writing a book length work (novel or memoir). We still have one spot left at the early bird rate!

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the subconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

Make Up Your Life is a reader-supported publication. To read further please consider becoming a paid subscriber and never miss a Self Soothe or Deep Water moment.

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I have long had the sense that I’m catching up to common knowledge. Perhaps this is due to my “unconventional” childhood which was marked by addiction and being poor. No one is like teaching you about good olive oil when you’re busy calling the cops on your daddy, ya kno?

When later in childhood I lived with my grandparents, they did know how to do things that seemed impossibly adult but it all sort of passed me by. My grandmother grew up in the back woods in Oregon where they had no electricity, no car, a shotgun by the door for hunting, and the entire day was geared toward survival. The nearest neighbor was three miles away. No telephone. You get the picture. This woman knew a thing or two about how to cook anything and everything, how to mend something, etc.

But when I was living with her, we did not have a smooth mentor/mentee relationship. I remember frustrations running high in the kitchen especially, her snapping spatulas and whisks from my hands when I wasn’t doing something just right, same with cleaning, same with sort of everything. I learned to avoid the kitchen entirely, coming away with a feeling that I just wasn’t good at those things, leaving me as a college student surviving on lean cuisines and Diet Coke, Marlboro lights and ibuprofen. Cool.

I longed then and now to be someone who sort of effortlessly maneuvers around their tasks, oh just something my mom taught me. To know how to get a stain out of something, to know how to manage money. The tips and tricks that get passed down in families are a sort of currency. This has always seemed to me a privilege perhaps greater than wealth.

So I want to try something with you:

What is your BEST THING?
One thing you know how to do that makes life easier.

One thing my grandmother did pass on to me was that self-presentation matters. A crisp button up with a classic trouser will take you far. Denim is classic. A fine black leather slipper loafer can elevate you in a second. We don’t wear pajamas to the airport! I could go on. For her it was not about beauty. It was about self respect, and I could feel that. She is nearly 101 and still works out in a pressed top.

I think my BEST THING in some ways is that I have learned to be resourceful. How to gather information, teach myself something, and get on with it. If I don’t like my life, I change it. If I want to develop some part of me, I show up to a new class, I read a book on it, I take action toward a new reality. I get uncomfortable to get comfortable again. I have long had the belief that I can figure out almost anything.

In this spirit of this, I wonder what it would be like to collect a bank of everyone’s BEST THING. It could be a recipe that has never failed you, it could be a phrase of advice that has guided you in your darkest hours, it could be a how-to about getting rid of ants, or a cheap alternative to something expensive. The best mascara you’ve used for years, the Trader Joes dupe that is just as good as the pricier brand, how to get oil out of fabric (please god someone tell me!) The perfect salad dressing. That weird thing that works when you’re coming down with a cold.

Some of us weren’t handed down this kind of knowledge and that’s okay. So let’s give it to each other!

I love watching my friend cook because she just seems to know things. I absorb the little things she does, I note the pans she uses, I take in every detail to steal for my own life. I wonder what Anne’s best tip would be for throwing together a quick and nutritious meal?

My friend seems to just KNOW how to create a warm and welcoming space in her home (drop the BEST THING Ambs!) said once that when she goes to sleep at night she closes her eyes and sees “black fur” and that is often a comforting image I reach for as I quiet my mind before sleep. My sister makes the best whipped cream (lots of vanilla). My friend says “feed the well” with your writing and talents. taught me how to practice effusive affirmation of another person. My acupuncturist alerted me to the best facial spray ever. My friend Katharine Blake said “what’s working and whats at work?” opened the door for me to think about my dreams in a new way. opened up the world of astrology to me in a way I could finally grasp onto. taught me how to walk into a room with confidence and swagger (she did not do this on purpose, I gleaned this just from watching her!) I could go on! My friend Sam defies convention in a way that is contagious.

I am always hungry to figure out how people know what they know, how they have what they have, how they do what they do. As a kid if I encountered a rich person I was not put off. I really just wanted to know how did they get this money? What do they know that I don’t?

This desire for know-how is what draws me so much to because Leslie is doing this Lord’s work twice a week sharing SO many great tips and BEST THINGS. A line she has said that stays with me is “there’s no such thing as an easy return.” It’s so true! It can help me pause before buying something I don’t need. So simple and yet powerful.

As we approach Mother’s Day season, I say let’s mother ourselves and each other a bit.

Drop your BEST THING in the comments.
One tip, trick, or piece of advice that has made your life easier.

If it helps, you can use this:

My BEST THING:
What it helps with:
How to do it:

Share this far and wide. I want to hear from a lot of people about the BEST THING they know. I’m going to be reading every single one this week.

And if we get enough maybe I’ll compile them all into a little fun book of BEST THINGS. Can you imagine what a gem that would be?

Okay, internet gods, I leave this with you to find the people it should find.

Chelsea

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Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the subconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

I am a projector in Human Design, which is a modality I am both enamored with and somewhat mystified by, as it’s A LOT. But what I have read about being a projector has been true to my lived experience like almost nothing else I’ve ever encountered.

Essentially in human design there are five types—projectors, manifestors, generators, manifesting-generators, and most rare, reflectors. Each type has a strategy associated with it. This is the general way things happen most easefully for them in career, relationships, life in general. The strategy for projectors is Wait for the Invitation.

When I encountered Human Design probably..hmm… eight or so years ago, I was able to recognize that nearly every major thing in my life in terms of career, relationships, opportunities, etc, had come by way of unexpected invitation and not me initiating/asking for. Now, this strategy should not be confused as passivity or sitting around. In fact, it requires you to be doing your work in the background, making the effort to make said work available while also knowing that you will not be heard, appreciated, or recognized, unless an invitation from the other is present first.

Let me think of an example. Early in my career, like many writers, I submitted work feverishly to journals and sometimes the work would be accepted but often not. My career did not begin to lift off however, until I won the Rona Jaffe award (no longer exists) which is an award that required someone to nominate you. The whole thing was a process I had no awareness of or control over. However, for years I had been doing my work, making it as available as I could, and it attracted this sort of opportunity on its own which led to other things. I have a series of examples I could sketch out that are similar but basically I started tracking that things for me came in through a side door, and we’re usually not obtained through me waving my hands around trying to be noticed.

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Before we jump in, I want to alert everyone that we have opened up registration for The Fountain’s Summer Book Writing Intensive. We only run these twice a year. They are the best way to get regular, sustained craft and coaching support from Kimberly King Parsons and I, and go deep on a day-by-day guided process of writing a book length work (novel or memoir). We still have one spot left at the early bird rate!

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the subconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

Over and over I can point to how this has worked in my life, and how it also operates in relationships. For instance, I have learned not to give advice or offer my opinion about someone’s situation until expressly invited. I will not give feedback on a friend’s work for instance until they have explicitly said, “I would love feedback on this,” and then I will ask clarifying questions about which sort of feedback they are hoping for. Only then will I offer my honest thoughts because I know they have been invited. If someone signs up for a class, I believe they have initiated the invitation that they want to hear my specific take on a topic and therefore I can give that take freely and it will be received. The key is recognition first, then engagement.

Projectors are built to see. To read people, systems, and energy often with striking clarity. Many times I have seen how a situation will play out in a friend’s life but unless the invitation is given to deploy this sense, I now know to hold onto it. 9/10 times I sensed correctly.

When a Projector offers guidance without being recognized it can be dismissed or misunderstood, it can create resistance in others, and it can leave the Projector feeling invisible or undervalued. This is where the classic “bitterness” (my “not-self”) comes from. It’s usually not because the insight is wrong, but because the timing and receptivity aren’t there.

When I don’t wait for an invitation from someone basically I can tell my thoughts and advice is not received, and or that I am not going to be perceived the way I’d hope. In essence, being misunderstood is a high likelihood which in turn is a drain.

Human Design is the sort of a system you have to spend a bit of time—or a lot!—with to get it, but once I realized how my strategy was already operating in my life, I could more easily work with it. It has allowed me to build a lot of trust in keeping my blinders on, making the work only I can make, knowing that being in my own energy of creation will attract the right invitations and opportunities.

In this sense, the dream group came through this way for me. Totally unexpected in some ways and then also I could see that the energy I was emitting in the world had pulled this in. I was longing for a space to have really particular and deep conversations about the unconscious, about psychology and art and mysticism, about channeling and about spirit. A place where conversation would vascilitate easily from the practical to the magical and no one would flinch if you mentioned casually that your ancestors had delivered a message that morning. Ya kno?

The friendships I’ve formed with the women in the dream group have been so integral to me stepping into this midlife shift in ways I could not have imagined. It’s truly been an avenue to be witnessed and to grow in new ways and also dispel my own deeply hidden shadow around dream work which was completely tied up in patriarchal oppression.

And a theme I’ve been talking about with Katharine Blake, a writer turned BFF I met in the group, is this idea of noticing 1. What’s working? and then 2. What’s AT work? Which is what I want to bring to you today in hopes it will be in some way useful and deepening.

So let’s break these two questions down as it’s been one of the more grounding tools I’ve been using during this time of really intense astrology. (Drop in the comments the way you’ve been experiencing it!).

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God I really loved it. It was so simple! And physical. Completely centering and dare I say fun? The yogi in me needed to do both sides for balance of course, but it felt SO GOOD to just do this. Why? Well, I think it’s because…how often do you really just stare out a window and stand on one foot? We’re in a time where we have to sort of reclaim stuff like this, ya know?

No one was filming me do it, and no one took a photo because the phone was whereabouts unknown. Side note: Why does it feel like my entire mission in life is to battle against technology wanting me drained and addicted and blank AF? I’m so tired of it. For years I’ve wished I could raise my kids and experience my adulthood life pre-internet. Every day it’s my wish. Alas. It’s not my reality.

I often think about what I would hope someone might “get” from reading my newsletter, like what’s my thing? Well, I want you to stand on one foot and look out the window, I guess. I want you to quiet the noise long enough to see what wants to pour forth. I want you to look back on your life and think yes, I was really THERE. I felt it, I saw it, I was sometimes uncomfortable, but I was there. I made the things I wanted to make. I asked the questions I wanted to ask. I faced myself in the mirror and I did the work long enough to like what I saw. I saw my kids. I really saw them. And I showed them how to see, too.

Minute four I started to get a foot cramp on my left side. The practice then became breathing into the cramp and seeing how I could accommodate it versus avoid it, judge it, or simply put the other foot down. I knew I wasn’t injuring myself, I knew it was safe, and so I could keep going trying different things to stay up.

It’s a metaphor for writing a book. Mid way you might get a cramp. It might feel like it’s time to quit. But I assure you, it’s just time to breathe more deeply into that discomfort, to ask it what it wants, and to go forth curious and seeking.

I mean, or quit. It’s up to you. That option is always there and no one can say if its valid or not but you.

But say you really don’t want to quit. Then you have to stay. You have to keep holding. Most of the experiment I held a tree pose. But at different points I kicked my other leg out in different ways. And at some point I knew there was no way in hell I was going to give up. Some sort of competition kicked in, too, which is fun.

(The clock says 4:44 as I write, a sign to keep going. ;) )

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel, Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically-aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the unconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

It was in some ways a 14 minute meditation. Meditation is at the heart of everything for me and it’s not because I am some exalted master. It’s only because I KNOW if I lay down for 10 minutes in silence or listen to a Clearing™, I’m going to feel different (read: better) on the other side. There are very few guarantees in life, but I believe this is one of them.

So, in honor of this, and in honor of a special offering and I are cooking up (sign up for our Fountain newsletter so you don’t miss it!) I decided to write out a list of the ways Clearings™ can be used. So often people ask what The Fountain is and recently Kim and I were just like, "It’s meditations for writers.” Knowing of course it’s also MUCH more (community, courses, and our beloved book writing intensives) but at the heart of everything, YES, it’s about meditations for writers.

So, if you’re meditation adverse, or you think, oh, I tried that already, hear me out. These aren’t your normal meditations. These are designed by writers for writers to quiet the noise and get you into flow fast. They are also designed to clear old stories that aren’t working anymore and allow you to be in creative control of your life. They are, in a word, transformative.

So here are some fun facts about Clearings™ I jotted down.

Ways Clearings Help Writers

• Dissolve the gap between “regular life mode” and “writing mode” by creating a threshold, or a buffer between worlds

• Quiet and soothe the inner critic and learn to work with it

• Access emotional memory and sensory detail that the rational mind tends to bypass

• Move stuck energy when you’re mid-draft and spinning

• Help writers locate where in the body a block is living

• Release shame or fear attached to a particular project or theme

• Re-establish trust with the subconscious after a hard writing day

• Ground you back into your why; why this story, why now

• Support shadow and difficult material by creating a container that feels safe

• Restore a sense of spaciousness when writing feels urgent or pressured

• Regulate the nervous system so creativity can actually flow (the neuroscience angle)

• Help with transitions between drafts, between projects, between scenes

Creative Ways to Use Clearings

• Before a writing session as a ritual warm-up

• After a session to “seal” the work and come back to yourself

• Before writing a scene you’re emotionally avoidant of

• To inhabit a character, drop into their body, their worldview

• As a way to access a specific emotional register you need for a chapter

• To “meet” a character who hasn’t revealed themselves yet

• To visit the world of your book (we love our Cinematics series for this!)

• To write toward an image that surfaces during the Clearing™

• Paired with a specific prompt immediately after, while you’re still in the liminal state

• As a reset mid-writing day when you’ve hit a wall

• To process grief, loss, or intensity that’s blocking the work

• In community: a shared clearing before a workshop or intensive session as a collective drop-in

• As a bookend to revision work, which tends to be more analytical and left-brain

• To help with the very first line: getting out of your head and into instinct

How Clearings Work with the Nervous System

• The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one so Clearings™ use this to create new felt-sense memories

• Guided audio brings the brain into a slower, more receptive brainwave state (alpha/theta) where new information can actually land differently (we make our own binaural beats set to specific Solfeggio frequencies!)

• In that state, the brain’s default mode network, the part that runs old stories on loop, becomes less dominant

• The rational, editorial mind quiets, and the more associative, imagistic right brain comes forward (this is where the good stuff lives)

• This is the same window that opens in REM sleep, hypnotherapy, and Clearings™ create it on purpose

Rewriting Old Stories

• Traumatic or shame-based memories are stored somatically (in the body), not just the mind, and Clearings™ work at that level

• When you revisit an old story while regulated (calm nervous system, safe container), the memory becomes temporarily malleable. This is called reconsolidation

• The new emotional experience you have during the Clearing™ gets woven into the old memory, softening its charge

• You’re not erasing the story but you’re adding new data to it, new possibility

• Blocks often aren’t intellectual. If they were you’d have no problem writing everything you want to write. They’re the nervous system pattern-matching to an old threat (shame, failure, exposure) and hitting the brakes; Clearings™ interrupt that pattern.

The crazy thing is that I could keep going, and if you’ve used them I’m sure you could weigh in with some additional takeaways too. I have had major revelations during Clearings™, I have visualized whole scenes, I have tapped into information that it might have taken years to get to otherwise. I have used creative visualization as a healing tool since my twenties and I honestly think it’s why I have never once had “writers block.” Believe me, I have a lot of other shit I deal with, but being blocked creatively is not a thing for me. I say this only because I believe it is possible for us all to feel this way.

And this is the secret. It just is. You should see the texts and messages we get from users about their magic. :)

Okay, I hope you’ve had a restful weekend. That’s all for me. If you want a sample of a Clearing™ here you go.

And put May 1st on your calendar. We have something special coming for you so soon!

Happy writing this week, all. Thank you for being here.

Chelsea

P.S. we still have two spots left for our early bird pricing for our SUMMER INTENSIVE!

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Before I jump into today, I want to make you aware that I, along with are running The Fountain’s bi-annual 100 Day Book writing intensive starting June 7th! Doors are open for early bird pricing now. If you’ve been wanting to write a book in a brilliant container, with brilliant community, and get in touch with your deepest artistic intuition through guided visualizations and curriculum that will unlock your story in a new way—this is your chance! This will be our third time teaching this and it’s really the most beautiful teaching experience I’ve ever had. I think it’s because beyond watching manuscripts take flight, we witness bonds form and connections made that will sustain the long haul journey that is the writing life.

Our program attracts writers at all levels—from award winning published authors writing their third books, writers wanting to switch genre, to writers just beginning to answer the question Do I have a book inside me? This creates such a diverse and beautiful group experience.

We also had a really beautiful Fountain monthly class called Beyond Publishing Anxiety and the recording is up now! You can access all past class recordings and attend future monthly classes with a membership!

Okay! Onto this week’s Self-Soothe.

In thinking about what’s been soothing to me lately, the very simple idea of BOOKS keeps coming up. What a concept—reading! But really, in my darkest days of anxiety I have comforted myself with the simple thought that I have books. When I was in the thick of post-weaning hormonal meltdown, and I developed a horrendous case of insomnia complete with intrusive thoughts, I would lay awake and catalogue the stack of books on my bedside table, even place a hand on them as if they might prevent me from floating away. For hours I would read by the light of my kindle held completely by the words, getting a reprieve from the storming seas of my mind. I am so glad that was a phase and not a permanent state but I still feel the same about my books.

I usually am reading several things at once, but if something is really really good everything will distill to just that. Occasionally I will buy a book in each format so I can seamlessly move from Hardcover, to audio, to e-book. I did this with Demon Copperhead, Whidbey, and The Correspondent so far this year.

As a writer I can get in my head about posting about books. I receive a good amount of books in the mail from publishers, I receive books in electronic form to blurb, and I receive netgalleys and manuscripts from friends (my favorites!). If I post one it can feel like I must post them all, and while I’d like to, there are not enough hours in the day for me to organize my thoughts for public consumption.

Instead I text things like holyyyyyyyy shiiiiittttt this is good to friends if I feel that way. Often this means I end up posting nothing about anything which is actually fine. I’d rather keep my internal light on than give over too much to making posts—could say more on this but you get it!

But today there are a few books I’ve been wanting to highlight and also show you maybe the wildest free pile haul I’ve ever come across.

And so this list are some (NOT ALL!) books I’ve really, really loved so far this year and some I think you should 100 percent order/preorder (plus one book that I want everyone to read by a true master and I want to proselytize as much as possible). I recently set up a nice little Bookshop storefront, and if you order from it I will donate any affiliate payment to The Raphael House in Portland which provides so many needed resources to survivors of domestic violence. I love the work they do and what a great three-for-one—Buy life changing literature, support a wonderful cause, AND support indie booksellers at the same time!

Okay, here are some of my thoughts on these stunning books in no particular order. Please understand how type B I am. You think I have an order? nah. We’re free wheeling around here. You saw the inside of my drawer. These are books that have taught me so much, have brought me into new depths of thinking, and are all around just major achievements by women. One is an anthology (Notes to New Mothers) I am so proud to be included in that is a beautiful gift object full of fragments of wisdom from mother writers. The book I’d have loved to have during those insomniac nights! You can pre-order that now!

1. Famous Men by Julie Buntin.

   Where to begin. If you loved Marlena (and who didn’t) then you will love this book. It feels connected tonally and yet it’s also a major departure into the slippery territory of literary success and the true cost of imbalance of power over a lifetime. I think what this book did SO brilliantly was show the very way consent, desire, and ambition cannot be simplified. Or at least Buntin refused to simplify it, which is why the book rings so absolutely true. At one point, a character describes a story as feeling like it’s talking directly to them—and that was exactly the sensation I felt while reading. I felt a deep, disorienting sense of recognition. This is a novel that understands power—not just in its most visible forms, but in its subtler, more insidious permutations. The way admiration can blur into devotion. The way attention can feel like oxygen. And the way a young writer, especially a young woman, can mistake being chosen for being loved.

   What Famous Men makes clear is that once those boundaries blur, everything becomes entangled. Not just in the moment, but for years. Possibly forever.

   So many of us, I think, can count our own versions of those figures who shaped us in ways we’re still metabolizing. And there’s a reckoning with how much of girlhood involves learning to survive these dynamics, often without language for them at the time.

   What I loved most beyond the beautiful writing, is that Famous Men does not flatten these experiences into easy moral binaries. Instead, it lingers in the uneasy terrain of consent, choice, agency—asking what those words even mean when power is unevenly distributed from the start. Will is such a precise and compelling voice throughout, and the emotional architecture of the book is extraordinary. The tenderness between her and the man in question, an older and lauded professor, is rendered with such care, and it’s exactly that tenderness that sharpens the more difficult questions the novel asks. Nothing is isolated; everything is in conversation.

2. Lovers XXX by Allie Rowbottom

   Let’s put it this way—imagine if Fates and Furies met Boogie Nights and then was infused by Allie Rowbottom’s singular vision, generosity, and ruthless attention to the line, and you might start to understand Lovers XXX. But to fully understand, this is a book that must be read. There are no summaries and no blurbs that can possibly capture its masterful rendering not only of a specific era (the 1980s video porn world) but of the nuances of female friendship across a lifetime. This was the era when porn was moving into a different stratosphere via home video and at the same time, the lessons of the book are timeless. It’s funny. I’ve read so many drafts of this book—Allie is in my writing group—and I almost always forget the book is in some way about porn. I am not interested in porn at all personally and so if I was told oh, this is a book about porn! I’d pass probably? But somehow, as a book about porn, this book is NOT about porn! What a sleight of hand. At least in my reading, I did not come away feeling that’s what it was about. It’s like the most literary, tender, true telling of two girls embroiled in a scene with no way out and the aftermath of their choices. Told in two exacting parts from each girl/woman’s perspective, Rowbottom builds a world you will not be able to look away from. I think some readers might not want to hedge out of their comfort zones but trust me when I say, this is one of the finest works I’ve read in SO long. It’s gutsy too, to take such a taboo topic and humanize it, and to reveal the heart at the center. Isn’t this what we want books to do?

   As a writer who chooses to write about “dark” topics, I know it will alienate some readers who want to stay in Emily Henry land. I think we choose our readers, and that is okay. Like domestic violence perhaps, porn is one of those worlds we’d rather not look at too closely at but stay at a superficial distance. This book is asking you to look at two women in a man’s world. Two women who will love, betray, and reckon with each other. It’s beauty through and through.

3. Whidbey by T Kira Madden

   My favorite kind of book, and one that is so, so, so very rare. A smart, literary thriller that takes me through all the loops and swoops but does it in a way that is captivating, honest, true, and deep. Those four words rarely describe the commercial thrillers out there but I wish they did. I lie in wait hoping and praying for a book like this to come out and when it does, rejoice! Here Madden has done the incredible feat of immersing us in a moral question about revenge, about the aftershocks of violence, and the ways it implicates so many more people than just the victim. With rotating perspectives, a tapestry is woven that is unlike any book I’ve ever read. It’s so, so powerful. This is one of those books that everyone will want to trigger warning in instagram, but I prefer Madden’s own optional content warning in the back of the book that you can turn to or not, that quotes Sarah Shulman’s sentiment that there is art about what could be, what should be, and then there is art about what is. This is that art.

4. The First House by Avni Doshi

   Okay, imagine if Liars by Sarah Manguso met The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante and then a dash of what people seem to like about Strangers by Belle Burden, and then add in astrology and myth and you get The First House by Avni Doshi. I loved this book for its wisdom about marriage, identity, and motherhood. Where Strangers fell down for me The First House picks up with an unmistakable energy and literary mastery. This book goes there. What are the results of a union torn apart unexpectedly? What happens when a woman is financially dependent on a man and doesn’t have massive generational wealth to fall back on? What do you do with the remnants of self when the relationship that has underpinned your very life has been undermined? How do you navigate the dynamics of family that no longer serve? The husband character in this book is deplorable for his utter unaffectedness, his icy remove, his secrecy. And the spiral to the heart of a character who has to face all parts of herself in order to move on is a stunning achievement. The book often deploys paragraphs of such stunning clarity and wisdom on marriage, identity, that you will want your highlighter ready.

   I also included Squandering the Blue by Kate Braverman on here. I read it years ago and have gone back to it a million times. I consider Braverman somewhat of a godmother to me. I recognize something in her words that feels transcendent to me and wholly true. White Oleander by Janet Fitch was one of the first books that made me want to be a writer, and when I found out that she had taken classes with Braverman it all made sense. You can feel Braverman’s influence on White Oleander. I recently got a used copy of her novel Wonders of the West and WOW. I can’t believe I’m only just coming to it. I want someone to reissue it. It’s wildly good. Searing to be exact. Braverman feels in some ways like an IYKYK author and I just want EVERYONE to know about her if they don’t. She is no longer in physical form. I am so grateful we have the work she left behind.

   

   Yesterday on a walk with friends and Finn and the pup, we stumbled on crates of new thought spirituality books. CRATES. Vintage. The books started to tell the story of a life. I brought a few with me and then went back later to spend more time pouring over them. Inside some of them were slips of paper about 1990s Wise Women gatherings around Portland, admissions to writing workshops, etc. Overall they tell the story of a woman who, like myself, is curious about the deeper realms of existence. Who desires a creative, free, and abundant life. Who wants to peel back the layers of their own psychology and end unhelpful patterns. It felt like such a gift to find them. Here are some I came away with.

Alright, I think that’s all for now. I will report back any wise findings from these books in a future Self-Soothe. And please, tell me what you’re excited to read in 2026!

xx,

C

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Also join me for a one hour class called “Beyond Publishing Anxiety” that is open to Fountain members, and this month, to everyone! Here’s the zoom link if you’d like to attend.

Okay, let’s dive into Deep Water, shall we?

My therapist recently sent me a podcast that felt very in step for the things I’ve been contemplating lately regarding the ways I have bought into the wellness world’s promises that a product or powder or supplement was going to just be the thing that sort of patched up the hole of spiritual yearning I’ve had my whole life. I think there really is something to making sure your vitamin levels are all good and you have your iron/ferritin figured out and the B12 light is on. Vitamin C is awesome. I love me some adaptogens in a latte. But nothing, nothing is a substitute for simply eating enough calories. For nourishing mind, body, and soul.

Stay with me. It’s not really a post about eating. It’s a post about why writers move through the world differently and that’s okay. It’s about a lot more, too. I’m going to resist writing an algorithm friendly little thesis here and trust that whoever needs to read on will.

I’m going to try to put into words the conversation of my inner world here. I’ve been steadfastly revising my novel since January. I have compared the past few months to “transition” in childbirth, which I remember clearly from both of my birth experiences. Essentially it’s the moment right before pushing, where generally you think you can no longer go on. The moment where both times, desperation peaked, and I felt death was a reasonable exit. And then, my body started the satisfying work of pushing out life.

Something about completing this revision has felt that painful to me and symbolic to me. But it’s not painful because of the work itself. I have been really unpacking what has so felt so hard this time and I’ve come to a few truths I’ll try to share today. Maybe you will relate, maybe you will harbor ill will toward me for some reason I’ll never know. The truth is as I round the bend toward forty I find myself wholly not caring. I know that on my final day (likely much sooner) I will never lament not being more concerned about the internet.

One thing I have stated here before and will state again, I feel that anything that does not feel authentic to me on a deep level produces extreme discomfort to engage in now. So lots of stuff is getting re-ordered.

In this time I have relied on friendship to see me through. I said to a close friend this morning that actually the gift we get from this life of writing is that our work finds the ones we are meant to know. Across oceans, across cultures and ways of being, our work connects us. I am best friends with people I likely would never have encountered had I not chosen this path. Our work connects and accelerates our depth of connection. The books do a lot of the talking so that we can get to the heart of soul matters. And so as difficult as it can be to weather the disappointments and indiginities of having a career so entwined with one’s soul, the true connections I’ve made have been the gift.

And in these conversations with my nearest, I have been repeating the phrase, writers are just different.

Because we are. Think about the sheer fact that we manage not only the world we are embodying, but also the entire world with all its internal logic of a book. An imagined land, with imagined relationships. The emotional excavation that goes on. I am rendering murder, familial lineage and transmutation of trauma, writing dialogue in the wake of one’s deepest fears, all at my kitchen table every day. I emerge like a troll from beneath the drawbridge of the underworld to pick up my kid at school.

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And then factor in the caregiving, additional paid work (whatever that may be) the calendars, the requests for free labor, etc. I mean. I sort of giggle writing the list (the list goes on, btw!) because it’s too much for any one person and yet we expect ourselves to do all of it, every day, and look hot while doing it. No wonder I double booked that field trip at the same time I teach. No wonder I got a migraine the other day “out of nowhere” and no wonder I have had thoughts lately like what is food?

I’m a daydreamer but I have no time to daydream. I’m a creative who must create or the world feels uninhabitable, but there is a dinner to make every night—or not make as the case may be, believe me, I often just opt out entirely—and depletion is coming for us all if we don’t simply recognize our enoughness. If we can’t make bold boundaries.

I have compared myself to other mothers who have pristine homes and meal plans (I’m sorry whattttttt) and seem to know when registrations are for spring sports, and it is my husband who oft reminds me that they are not writing books. I must remember this or else I feel insane. I have chosen a path as have they, and there are things that fall by the wayside no matter what we choose. Of course there are. But society makes us feel nothing should fall away, that we should do every single thing, which is part of the brainwashing woman are subject to all the fucking time. I am resisting this.

Recently my dentist informed me that one of my front teeth is longer than the other. Would I like him to fix it? I am aware of this slight imperfection in my mouth, but I had no desire for him to fix it by sanding my longer tooth to match the short one. It seemed to me a recipe for disaster and regret, like when you just keep cutting your bangs to even them out. I told him I’d just go on being hideous and we both chortled. But that’s true. I will not be making modifications that don’t need modifying, and this applies to accepting my human capacity, too.

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically-aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the unconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

Make Up Your Life is a reader-supported publication. To access the rest of the article and the practice, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Okay, onto this week’s Self-Soothe.

Last week an intuitive healer asked me a question about my writing that I had never once considered.

I had come to the session feeling drained and wrung out. My brain was foggy and dull around the edges, and there was this persistent sense that I had somehow run out of life force. I’ve been diligently showing up to the work each day but I was starting to experience my practice as…parasitic? I know that sounds really intense and it is, but there has just been this sensation that the book is taking everything I have.

I can romanticize this feeling as just part of it. A writer I love and admire once said when she was deep in a project she almost stepped out of a moving car. Wow, do I relate. It’s the plague of the fractured self that most of the time is manageable and even fun—I can be anywhere doing something mundane, but also in the world I built in my mind! Magic!

But lately I was just feeling like the lights had dimmed or something. I was left asking if it is possible to find support for this sensation without stepping away from the work. Can I change the sensation and still meet my deadline?

My friend sent me this photo from Danzy Senna’s Colored Television which has felt all too true lately.

These are the questions that led me to book an appointment with the healer.

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically-aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the unconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

Make Up Your Life is a reader-supported publication. To access the rest of the article and the practice, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

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Which leads me to today’s Self Soothe which involves a somewhat reasonable retail moment. (We’ve done energy the last three weeks, we deserve it!) I love nothing more than that moment when a woman stops me and is like what is this? I do it all the time, gleeful to get hot tips, to evade the endless search online for something. This week’s thing falls into that category of didn’t know I needed it but now can’t live without it. It also is a huge body-consuming item under which no man nor being would be able to decipher my body in anyway lol. Just how I like it. With the combo of my husband’s hoodie and big horseshoe pants I am basically in an invisibility cloak. And, yet, this item has that factor where many people come up asking what is this?! One dear friend showed up to our kids’ climbing class wearing the blue version after seeing it on me at the Great Wolf Lodge (hell has a name!)

This last week for me has been a really pretty crazy time of revision, I have been subisting on chocolate peanut butter cups, feeling generally like trash, waking at all hours jotting things down. Not to mention the hellstrom of the news, or the K-hole conspiracy theories about Justin Bieber, Jon Benet, and Jim Carrey I felt down. Uh oh! Suffice it to say, I am safely Bricked from instagram once more.

Alright, without further ado, you may love it, you may hate it, you may say why are we wearing this so close to spring (to that I’d say it’s still cold AF where I am) and you can never go wrong with….

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically-aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the unconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

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In essence, Wake Mom Up is one of those lectures that isn’t just about craft—it’s about the places we hide, and the places our stories are asking us to go if we’d only listen. Essentially, I think the concept touches every part of our stories.

For background first: In that first MFA fiction workshop, I had written a story about an adolescent boy and his alcoholic mother. The piece took place in their apartment complex as he explored his burgeoning attraction to an older male neighbor, dressed up in his mother’s clothing, and basically starved from neglect. The mother remains asleep throughout the story, behind a closed bedroom door, or passed out on the couch.

As I wrote the piece I am sure I thought I was accurately capturing what it was like to be raised by an alcoholic mother. I mean, in a way, I was. Surely I’d spent many days alone in our apartment, many days where my mother was unaccessible behind a locked door. The experience was true and I felt it was true to the story.

Around the table, everyone gave their ideas. Toward the end my professor finally spoke. I’m sure he said many more wise things besides this, but the main thing was simple. “Wake Mom up.”

He knew I’d taken an easy route and he was calling me on it.

For this story—for these characters—keeping the mother asleep wasn’t cognizant literary restraint, it was unconscious protection on behalf of the writer. Readers are smart, and they can sense it. I tend to think once you are privy to this concept you will sniff it out easily in your work and others’ work (more on that soon). In the story, I had carefully built a structure in which I didn’t have to write the scene that frightened me most: the one where the mother becomes a living, breathing whole character and I’d have to contend with what she might do and say. That would require some chops. Maybe even some chops I didn’t have yet.

And the other truth was, of course, that my mother wasn’t always asleep.

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As I came to understand what I’d unconsciously done—built an escape hatch—I couldn’t unsee it. I had to write the harder, truer thing. I had to wake her up and see just how her son, in all his complicated love and anger, would deal navigate their home when it wasn’t just him awake.

Let’s consider for the sake of this idea, that perhaps every story has a sleeping character we are not aware of. Sometimes it’s literal—someone unconscious, absent, dead, unreachable. Sometimes it’s energetic. It’s the fight that happens offstage and is summarized after the fact. It’s the apology that almost occurs but is interrupted by a phone call. It’s the lover who leaves before the question is asked. It’s the parent who dies before the reckoning. It’s the secret that hums beneath every scene but never quite enters the air.

On the surface, these can look like intentional choices. And sometimes they are. There are brilliant stories built on omission, on silence, on what remains submerged. But there is a difference between choosing deliberate restraint, and hiding from something you are not yet willing to write.

For our purposes I’m interested in the latter and making sure we are clear on which we are doing.

Readers know the difference because they feel it in their bodies. They can sense when the writer has gone all the way down and chosen to leave something in shadow, and when the writer has stopped just short of the descent.

To me, nothing is more difficult to overcome than a writer who is unaware of the things they are avoiding. Usually this avoidance is born of a lack of deep self exploration. This is literally why and I built our foundational stream of courses in The Fountain, in order to uncover those sleeping patterns in us and awaken awareness so we can make grounded artistic decisions.

As I revise my novel right now, I keep encountering these places where I have swerved. And it’s thrilling because I can see now that the book has always known what it was about, and I am merely catching up. It has always been carrying deeper themes than I consciously articulated at the beginning. There are messages braided into it that I didn’t set out to write, questions that have been echoing through the chapters long before I realized. They are most of the time the questions I am asking myself.

When we press into this idea, usually what find is not more plot necessarily, but more depth, more honesty, and more risk. I think often of Animal by Lisa Taddeo for lots of reasons but one is that the entire novel seems to be an act of marching headlong into difficult terrain. There are many moments in this book where she could have kept things off page or not stepped fully into the rage Joan feels. But she did not. And it’s why I love the book so much. There is a scene with Joan involving a coyote and I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read it, but if you have read you know what I’m talking about and you know Taddeo went all the way there.

I’d invite us this week in our work to consider scenes you might sense you are protecting yourself. The fun thing is that we usually know which they are. Often in my writing I will almost write a stand in scene for the truer scene I know will come later. Maybe I am not yet equipped to write it yet, maybe I don’t know enough or need more time. Sometimes I just write TK and pray. In Madwoman I knew there was a scene needed toward the end of the book with Clove and her father. I knew, intuitively, that it was a key scene that would usher in the final movements of the story. For a very long time I didn’t know exactly what needed to happen there, where it would be, or how I’d be able to access it. It was indeed a very emotionally difficult scene, I already knew.

And then, during a Clearing, I heard the phrase, dark water, my father. It sort of repeated and reverberated in my mind again and again, dark water, my father, dark water, my father. And sure enough the image of the two of them very far out in the ocean arose in my mind, and I saw them in this final face-off moment. I knew it would be a moment where the father would almost nod to what was going to happen next, and a moment where the narrator’s rage would clarify into streamlined action. The story was always leading me here. It’s a moment, in another form, I’d had with my own father; and also, it’s a moment I never got to have. It’s sort of both, and when I saw that they were in the deepest depths of the water, that was right. I remember my mother telling the stories of how far my father would swim out with me, so far she could no longer see us from the shore.

If we allow a character to deflect, or summarize, or exit prematurely or wrongly the work becomes…bad? It becomes forgettable. We want the emotional voltage pressing into our own discomfort. But how do you know if you don’t…know?

I tend to think our avoidance shows up in lots of ways. A sudden fatigue while at the desk. An urgent desire to research something irrelevant. A subtle disenchantment with the project itself. The desire to give up and start something new.

Note when you start feeling like that. Is it coinciding with the part in your story that is getting hard?

Are you building elaborate escapes on the page and or using a few too many artful silences/looking out the window, describing the sky once more? Bring it back to the character’s body. Sometimes that’s all it takes to start to wake the scene up.

Okay! Let’s write. Here’s a practice you can try this week, and as always, let me know how it goes. I know the world is really heavy right now, and I have purposely avoided even commenting here on everything I’m feeling and processing, but know I am reaching out from a place of grief, anger, and still, desire for a better future.

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically-aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the unconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

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My self expectations are sky high right now—afterall, a friend and I had dubbed this month REVISION FEBRUARY, and it seemed the moment we exalted the month with this label everything fell right the F apart. A sort of darkly comic make plans and watch god laugh moment. It’s been active work to be like, even though this month hasn’t looked the way we’d hoped (revising every single day and listening to a specific Clearing to accompany the work) the truth is, I still have gotten good work done somehow; I’ve just had to do some major releasing around the way it has looked and felt. It’s all been little struggle bus-esque, but hey, today I’m focusing on the fact that I’m still on the bus.

I have noticed this week, and honestly, often during the luteal phase, my usual “tools” don’t seem to have the usual desired effect. This is when I have to turn back to the body in a different way and the tools at my literal fingertips.

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In 2022 I started seeing an energy alignment therapist. My experience with her on the table marked a shift in my life. I always joke that it was like the difference between reading about platform 9 3/4, and walking through the wall at the station myself. One is in the realm of theory and idea, and one is an embodied, undeniable experience that leaves you forever changed. I knew after seeing her that there was a world of energy I could actually work with in a very real way. Prior to this I would have told you I believed everything was energy but I don’t think I truly knew it yet.

One thing I know the patriarchy has tried to shut down in us all is our own access to power and magic and resources, and in a way, this sort of energetic work and developing our intuitive and energetic gifts is a way of reclaiming that.

And our nervous systems are all too happy to comply. I am encouraged that each time I have genuinely done this work in the quiet, I have received some response. The body wants to communicate and energy wants to move. The psyche is not static, it is energetic. And when that psychic energy is blocked or repressed, it doesn’t disappear. It shows up somewhere else. In mood. In fatigue. In chronic tension. And yes, in artistic blocks and avoidance.

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Okay, so let’s connect this to writing.

Blocked creative energy mirrors blocked psychic energy. When we’re not writing what feels true or when we’re overriding what we actually feel, the body registers it first. From a young age I’ve been prone to migraine. I used to think, oh, what terrible and random, maybe even bad genetic luck. Not now. I now know migraines to be my body’s way of waving the red flag of desperation. (Ask yourself, what are your body’s ways?) For me to slow down, to rest (god forbid!) or for me to pay attention, or to quite literally prevent me from doing something I’d agreed to do. When I was young, I believe they were an attempt to protect me from harm and also a signal that there was a pile up of stuff that would have to one day be processed. In any case, they are a clear signal that something requires my attention. A few weeks ago I mentioned Dr. John Sarno’s work in this regard if you want to read more about this idea and go deeper there.

So if we believe energy wants to move toward balance and integration and expression, then the first step to this is more listening. When was the last time you just sat in silence for five minutes? I have been turning this question to myself as well lately. Often it feels so out of reach when things are hard to do just that, and to ask the body, what do you need right now?

We know when we’re overriding ourselves and when we’re pushing past a boundary. And once we know, it’s impossible to ignore. Energy work has been some of the most effective work I’ve ever done because it returns me to that knowing and then I can take aligned action.

So this week, when my usual tools weren’t cutting it, I went back to something simple and I hope it can be of use to you. These practices are inspired by many traditions and thought schools. I didn’t make them up! But I have isolated them for our purposes as writers and created this exercise for us to try this week to deepen our processes and rebalance our energy so we can make the work we need to make in the world and reclaim our bodies, minds, and spirits from patriarchal hijacking.

Below is the reset practice I’m using right now—including the movement sequence and the writing integration that helps lock in the shift. I hope it moves something for you. Please let me know in the comments! I have LOVED hearing your experiences with all of this, and I believe there is such power in the collective doing these things at the same time.

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically-aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the unconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

A Baseline Reset for Writers

Step One: K-27 (Collarbone Points)

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Most days, on the short drive to school, I’ve been engaging my son in a little practice. It started as a way to try to lighten our mornings, which can feel so hard and weighed down with everything that doesn’t seem to be working—the early start time when his body wants more sleep, for example, and then the various other aspects of the school day that he’d rather take a hard pass from (those details are his, so I won’t be too specific about it here, thank you for understanding!).

Prior to this, we religiously played Snoop Dogg’s Doggyland affirmations (really good, btw), but lately I’ve sensed we need a little more pointed connection.

“What do you think is going to be good about today?” I ask.

Sometimes he needs some help, but usually he can start to find some things.

“It’s pizza day.”
“I’ll play kickball.”
“I’ll see ____.”

We name a few more—as casually as possible, because if it starts to seem too much like a practice, he’s out. (Though crystal healing sessions in our house are still very much in demand.) Then, when I drop him off, I say the same thing I always do: Keep track of all the good today so you can tell me when I pick you up.

The thing is, my son has no trouble telling me what’s hard about school, so this isn’t a bypass thing. (Trust me—if you’ve been here even a second, you know I’m alllll about expressing our most shadowy shit.) But I do think it’s helpful for kids—and, you guessed it, for us—to also acknowledge what is working, what feels safe or good, and to remind our bodies, especially in these wild times, that not everything is a total dumpster fire.

Because it can be really, really hard to be creative if you believe everything is beyond repair, or that everything is shitty.

We know our nervous systems are exquisitely tuned to threat, so sometimes we have to do an active job of noticing the good

I noticed at the start of this how much effort it took for him to locate what was good unless I asked. How the good needed a clear invitation.

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What the Nervous System Is Always Asking

According to polyvagal theory, the nervous system is constantly scanning—beneath conscious awareness—for cues that answer one primary question: Am I safe right now? This process is called neuroception.

We tend to talk a lot about triggers: the cues that signal danger and send the body into fight, flight, or collapse. We are fluent in them, culturally and personally. But less familiar—though just as real—are glimmers.

The term glimmer was named and developed by therapist Deb Dana, LCSW, who offered it as a way of describing the small, often ordinary cues that signal safety, connection, or ease to the nervous system. Where triggers constrict, glimmers soften. Where triggers narrow attention, glimmers widen it—just enough.

That widening does require active noticing, which is something we as writers should be practicing all the time anyway.

Some examples of glimmers:

Sunlight moving through trees.
The press of a dog asleep against your leg (I’ve been enjoying the major nervous-system benefits of this—much missed since I no longer have babies sleeping on my chest).
A song that comes on at just the right time, carrying a message you needed to hear.
A moment of competence as you receive a service.
A sentence that opens up your understanding of something inside yourself.

Some damn good chocolate or something you love to eat. The perfect Saffron latte (obsessed).

The way it feels to watch rain out the window with tea and a good book.

The heat of a sauna. Watching my kid at her gymnastics meet. Stretching and strengthening the body. Moving intuitively to music. A great writing session. A deep conversation with a friend, a belly laugh.

(Notice that I NEVER receive glimmers from Instagram, lol.)

The common thread here is that glimmers are often moments of observation and presence—quiet moments that happen when we’re in our bodies (and not on our phones) and actually engaged with our day.

I think a lot about how our bodies were never designed to receive as much information as we do. We are meant to take in the events of our immediate community, to process those, to help where help is needed, and to rely on support from others. We are not meant to carry a worldwide onslaught of every tragedy on every continent.

And yet, somehow, that has become the expectation.

It’s mind-boggling, and I think it explains why so many of us feel anxious, depressed, addicted, and paralyzed in the face of it all. But I’m getting off track.

Okay, back to why glimmers matter. Glimmers are not dramatic. They can even feel a little…not actiony enough? But they create room—for the things you actually want to be doing, whatever that is.

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Not Bypassing, but Balancing

This practice is not about pretending things aren’t hard. At home, we still talk about what my son didn’t like about his day. What felt unfair. What hurt. What sucked. What was boring. But I’ve started to see how easily the difficult parts can become the entire story if we’re not careful.

I was raised in a kind of negative soup—programmed to believe that the world especially did not like me. That my mom and I were somehow chosen for unluckiness, disaster, and calamity. That nothing we did would ever be good enough. When something bad happened, my mom’s response was often, Of course this is happening to us.

I know my mom didn’t have the tools to process the oppression and abuse she was enduring at the hands of men, or a roadmap for how to shift that mindset. I want to honor that. It is really fucking hard to pull yourself out of a hole under those conditions.

And also—there were gaps. Places where choices born of that worldview created more pain to contend with. A cycle that, even as a child, I could plainly see.

It has taken a tremendous amount of work for me to reprogram myself out of victim consciousness, and there is still more work to be done. I can slide back any old time. But now I sense it quickly—and do my best to course correct.

The work here is not to erase what is hard in our lives, but to balance the ledger. To teach the body that safety also exists. That not everything is wrong all the time. That there is still room for creation.

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Before You Continue

Below, I want to slow this down and make it practical. I’ll share how glimmers function not just as a nervous-system support, but as a writing practice—how to work with them deliberately, how to stay with them long enough for the body to register safety, and how this kind of attention shows up on the page. I’ll also walk through the simple ritual I return to when everything feels like too much. Let me know how it works for you, and what sort of room it creates!

Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically-aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the unconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

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So thrilled to be doing this column with you all and I just want to say, thank you for being here. Alright, onto things!

Lately, and perhaps you can relate, my desire to write and work on my novel feels eclipsed by the needs of others and/or other projects. I’ve been complaining lately to my husband that I’m never “closing the loop” on on my “resets” (resets to me are things like a long walk, a great writing session, meditating, yoga, really anything where I’m not interrupted and I feel I’ve finished whatever it is). When this happens, I start to feel myself creeping into “not-self” territory. My not-self in human design (I’m a 2/4 projector) is bitterness. And oh yes, is it accurate. When I start to feel bitter about things, I feel it in my body as much as my mind: scattered, braced, and generally on edge. I start making dumb mistakes, losing things, dropping things, and everything feels in general disarray.

When things feel like this, I know it’s time for some special engineering. Which brings us to today’s Self-Soothe practice. If last week was about an intuitive and primal clearing and releasing of energy, then this week is about expressing and articulating what’s been accumulating in our minds, whatever, and I MEAN whatever, that might be.

I’m a big fan of Dr. John Sarno, who believed that many forms of chronic pain and blockage weren’t structural problems, but the result of unexpressed emotional pressure (TMS). His work suggested that when feelings—especially anger, grief, resentment, and fear—don’t have a safe outlet, they find other ways to express themselves (through chronic pain symptoms). He did fascinating work and I highly recommend you read up on him if you’re curious. I believe his work helped cure one of my major ailments years ago, and also has greatly reduced my experience of migraine.

builds on this work through what she calls JournalSpeak: a form of expressive journaling that is about letting the nervous system discharge what it’s been holding. I have used this baseline idea with writers in classes and coaching sessions for years, and we have a form of it in The Fountain (our AMAZING Impermissible Emotions Guided Journaling Clearing™ and an entire class recording dedicated to this idea).

In the past I’ve thought of it as rage journaling because for me, most often it’s anger that needs to find its way out. It’s unedited writing, and it’s like really unhinged. It’s suuuuuppppper insane sounding. But that’s great because we all have these sorts of feelings and pretending otherwise is what gets us into the blockage in the first place.

I was thinking this week about adapting it further to be about getting to the page for your work. We are in a time of such intensity. Every single day I’m having to explain the atrocities of the world to my kids. Writers are particularly sensitive. But we must do this work on ourselves so we can show up and create the world we desire. It’s just a fact. Oppressors would really rather we didn’t, though, and that’s what keeps my fire lit on hard days to still do the work, my work, the only work I can do.

The underlying principle of this practice is that any sort of emotional pressure needs expression.

Writers carry a lot of pressure. Pressure to be productive, year after year, often writing with no guarantee anyone will read our words; to be good (good parent, good partner, “good literary citizen”, good writer); pressure to justify the time we take; pressure to make that time “worth it” through external achievement. Do I need to go on? Insert your own here.

This pressure doesn’t disappear when we sit down to write. Sometimes we can use it and channel it into the work. That’s ideal. But not everyone works this way. Often, this unexpressed emotional pressure is the very thing that turns around and blocks us.

Writing doesn’t feel hard because we lack ideas or skill, it feels hard because there’s too much unspoken strain in the system.

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Expressive writing gives that strain somewhere to go. Expressive writing in analog form, that is. This feels like an important detail. Not that you can’t get benefit from using a device to do this. But consider that a notebook doesn’t optimize and it doesn’t suggest edits and it doesn’t resemble the word/Scrivner/googledocs you’re using for your “real” projects, projects that you DO hope will one day be read by others. It doesn’t ask you to be reasonable, generous, or evolved because there will never be an audience!

So here’s this week’s Self Soothe: a writer-specific expressive journaling practice, inspired by Sarno’s lineage, my experience healing myself and also working with others. It’s designed to relieve internal pressure, release any stuckness in the body, and gently bring you back to a receptive, centered, and creative state.

Please note that you may feel more activated immediately after doing this but that feeling should subside in a short time giving way to a feeling of relief. Have a glass of water on hand, don’t do it on an empty stomach. Pause and see what your body might need before you begin. Baby yourself a little, ya know? Also, repeating this several days in a row will yield ideal results. Let me know what you think in the comments!

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Hi, I’m Chelsea. I’m the author of three books of fiction—Godshot, Heartbroke, and the national bestselling novel Madwoman. I’m the co-creator of The Fountain, a platform that helps writers build sustainable, energetically aligned writing practices through courses, audio-visualizations, community, and more.

I have two kids, eighteen years of sobriety, and over fifteen years of experience teaching, editing, and coaching writers. I’m endlessly fascinated by embodiment, the subconscious mind, creativity, healing generational trauma, and the ways I chose to live brightly—sometimes through deep inner work and movement, and hey, sometimes through the perfect mascara.

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