Establishing Your Practice

Week 1
Find Your Voice

The elephant-headed Ganesha sits at the threshold, representing transformation and new beginnings. Choosing to write is stepping through a doorway into a deeper place inside your self. Find Your Voice will guide you into this place, where you will investigate your individual habits, passions, and the qualities that make you you! Here, you will begin to find your voice.

Week 2
Create Your Practice

In order to grow as a writer, you must continually create and self-edit. But how do you sustain it? Shiva’s ongoing process of Creation, Maintenance, and Dissolution shows that in order to grow, we must establish a foundational practice. Create Your Practice will help you to design a firm weekly practice for yourself and to strategize how to balance your creative output with your editorial eye. In the words of Pattabhi Jois, “Practice, and all will come.”

Week 3
Just Write!

Kali is primal and uncensored, the ferocious embrace of every possibility. Before you narrow your subject matter and refine your prose, you have to open the floodgates. Just Write will teach you techniques for getting unstuck, overcoming your fear of the blank page or opening sentence, and letting your words flow with wild creativity and without judgment.

Week 4
Access Your Potential

Hanuman is a shape-shifting yogi whose devotion is unwavering. He shows that everything you put out into the world is an expression of what you care about and who you are. In Access Your Potential, you will investigate your own gifts, uncovering what you want to write about, and expressing it unwaveringly.

Refining Your Focus

Week 5
Refine Your Practice

Shri means abundance, but also refinement. Once your words are flowing, it’s time to look more closely at your writing style. Refine Your Practice will show you how to expand and tone your descriptions by using words with precision. With more linguistic and stylistic choices, your words will come alive.

Week 6
Expand Your Voice

The most skillful writers access a wide range of mental and emotional states. The Rasas, known as the flavors of experience, show us that in writing, we draw upon all our experiences. In Expand Your Voice, you will explore from the comic to the grotesque, from the ecstatic to the peaceful, recognizing that they are not always far apart.

Week 7
Set Your Goals

In The Gita, Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that he must step up and do his job – to engage on the field of life. Similarly, as a writer you need to own your purpose, pinpoint what you want to express, and insure that your details compel it forward. In Set Your Goals, you will learn to be decisive in your editing so your ideas glitter with precision.

Owning Your Voice

Week 8
Show Don’t Tell

To write powerfully, you need to show something rather than tell about it. The Goddess Durga demonstrates pure action, using every tool she has in order to dispatch demons with finesse. As we tell our stories, we will differentiate showing from telling so our narratives contain power.

Week 9
Embrace Your Diversity

Writing helps us to know ourselves better, nurturing our inner dialogue so we recognize our vastness. We are multifaceted beings shaped by both life experience and biology. Embrace Your Diversity presents Subrahmanya, Ganesha’s brother, whose prismatic nature demonstrates how we can and must draw from all parts of ourselves.

Week 10
Make Yourself Heard

Publishing your writing involves balancing day-to-day practicalities with the often-unpredictable creative impulse. Make Yourself Heard uses the concepts of Karma (action) and Lila (chance, play) to get your writing out into the world. Whether you write for your website, a magazine, or Instagram, you will strategize to expand your audience.