Writing Your Spiritual Memoir: An Expressive Arts Experience

All of us have a story to tell about how we find ourselves where we are at today spiritually. For some of us, that story includes invalidating or even abusive experience in organized religion or other spiritual communities. For others, spiritual practice and religious engagement has been and continues to be a vital part of how we heal from the trauma and wounding experienced in our lives. Many of us have both threads in our story, and untangling any mess with these threads in order to weave them into a metaphorically beautiful tapestry can be a spiritual practice in and of itself. 

In this mini-retreat experience, Abbey of the Arts Wisdom Council member, clinical trauma specialist and expressive arts therapist Dr. Jamie Marich uses several expressive arts facilitation strategies to help us start or continue the process of writing our own spiritual memoir. Such a memoir never has to be publicly shared–it can be a personal aspect of your spiritual practice and growth and in the spirit of expressive arts can take on a variety of expressions (e.g., written word, song, visual art, poetry, dance, film, etc.) Fresh off the experience of writing her own memoir You Lied to Me About God about her experience of growing up in a mixed Catholic-Protestant home and experiencing spiritual abuse in other settings, Jamie has a great deal to share with you about the power of expressive arts process in embracing your spiritual story.

We will turn on closed captioning during the live Zoom session (which you are able to turn off in your settings if you find distracting) as well as provide a video recording with closed captioning available and a text transcript of the session.

The program will be recorded for those who pre-register but are unable to attend at the scheduled time or who want to view again. You will be sent a notification when this is ready to view.

You have lifetime access to all online programs.