Are you ready to write your memoir and heal yourself? – ENROL NOW →
INTRODUCING
Write Your Life Stories, Heal Your Past
A self-paced on-demand memoir-writing course to help you heal while writing your difficult stories – so you can craft a compelling memoir without getting overwhelmed.
“I spent hours delving into this work and absolutely loved it.
Your insight and wisdom shared is the best, most brilliantly facilitated writing workshop I’ve experienced.
I’ve been on a long healing journey and have only recently begun learning the connection to listening to my body in the process.
I feel like you and your training combine everything that resonates with my soul – the healing work, the grounding and body awareness, the creative process and my heart’s calling to write my story.”
Learn how to write your life stories.
Hi! I’m your teacher, Janelle, and I’m a transformational memoir-writing teacher and body-based healing therapist.
Writing a memoir, stories and healing should always go together.
Writing your personal stories by yourself without healing support is difficult, which is why I created this course.
I’ve been writing since I was a child, and have published my writing in newspapers, magazines and an anthology of single mother writers.
And, I’m a lover of stories; a lifelong apprentice to the art of storytelling, both written and oral, in both new and ancient tales.
In this course you’ll explore different story structure options, figure out the themes at play in your life, and start writing your stories down!
Heal from difficult experiences using trauma-informed body-based techniques.
Because sharing your stories shouldn’t retraumatize you.
I know a thing or two about the healing journey.
On the healing path since my early 20s, I’m trained in the skills needed to gently and effectively support myself and my students in trauma-healing from a gentle, body-based, nervous-system oriented perspective.
In this course you’ll learn how to catch yourself when you’re getting overwhelmed by difficult memories, then write through those stories without running away from them or freezing up.
You’ll heal as you write, and transform yourself in the process.
Write Your Life Stories, Heal Yourself
In this self-paced course, you’ll be guided through the process of writing and healing.
You’ll organise your many and varied life experiences onto a timeline, then narrow those options down to an intriguing theme or two. Then you’ll write!
You’ll explore different options for telling your stories and choose between a three-act or a four-act structure to write your first (of many) personal stories.
You’ll learn how to move through common challenges like creative resistance, writer’s block, overwhelm, procrastination and self-doubt.
You’ll use body-based nervous system healing techniques to shift challenges related to writing difficult life stories – including traumatic experiences.
Course includes:
- Lifetime access (in a self-paced video and written format)
- Guided process from start to finish
- Writing prompts to get you started
- Somatic (body) techniques for healing
- Exercises to clear writers block and keep momentum
- Guidance for those concerned about writing about sad or traumatic events or other people
Introduction
About your instructor Janelle (me!), my influences, and why this writing course has a healing focus
About memoir, autobiography, non-fiction and life story writing
Including a show and tell of different writing forms and a walk-through of the course process
Moving through fear, resistance and writer's block
Common blocks that get in the way of writing and healing
Outline your memoir
Using timelines, pattern spotting and more
Healing, memoir-writing and your nervous system
Taking a healing approach to your writing and stories plus gentle self-healing techniques
Structuring your stories
Learn about and choose a writing form that works for your stories
Writing, revising and planning tips
How to start, keep going, and return to your writing
Sharing your stories
Decide on the if, when and how you’ll share your stories
Celebrating yourself and next steps
Celebrate and plan the next steps in your personal story and healing journey
Everyone has an interesting story to tell.
Perhaps you worry that your writing is bad or your stories are boring.
The cure for ‘bad’ writing is practice. So write more. Don’t let perfectionism stop you. Keep writing.
As you commit to your writing, you’ll become a better storyteller. And then you’ll discover this truth.
There is no such thing as a person with a boring life story.
It’s easy to look at wildly dramatic life experiences and feel like you can’t measure up. But if your life stories are more internal, quieter, it doesn’t mean they’re boring.
It’s all about your storytelling skills. So keep writing.
“Janelle is a gifted teacher
with genius instincts on juxtaposing sources and materials to spark genuine creativity. Her body focus set light to what is now an essential part of my own creative life.”
Molly Pennington
Writer, Astrologer, Phd
baroquemoonastrology.com
Everyone has worries and fears too.
And these fears can stop you from starting. But how long will you wait? Months, years, even decades?
Maybe you’ve already put off your desire to write your life stories and heal yourself for so long it’s uncomfortable? Because it’s overwhelming, you don’t know where and how to start. Or continue. Or you’re afraid you’ll retraumatise yourself when you start to write your difficult experiences.
These are commonly shared worries, and they don’t have to stop you anymore. Let’s explore some of these worries and fears, and what might happen if you work through them with this course.
Your writing and healing journey before this course:
- Not writing your stories, just thinking about how much you want to write them
- Feeling overwhelmed and frustrated
- Worrying about what others will think if you start writing your stories
- Longing to change your personal myths, your inner narrative monologue
- Starting, then stopping, feeling stuck
- Feeling alone and unsupported, not knowing where and how to start
- Worried you’ll get retraumatised when you write about your difficult life experiences
Your writing and healing journey after this course:
- Writing your stories!
- Easeful, with somatic techniques to shift out of overwhelm and frustration
- Writing your stories and owning the truth of your experiences, no longer bothered by what others will think
- Rewriting your personal myths, understanding your life through an empowering mythic narrative
- Writing with ease and confidence
- Feeling supported and resourced, with next-steps for your writing and healing journey
- Taking a confident and compassionate approach to your own difficult life experiences, and knowing how to work with traumatic memories when they arise
So take the leap!
Sign up and get those stories out of your head and onto paper. Start getting those difficult experiences out of your body, and alchemised through the writing and storytelling process. Start resolving traumatic responses for good.
What you’ll learn in
Write Your Life Stories, Heal Your Past
- About your teacher Janelle (me!) and how my love of stories, writing and embodied healing began.
- Then explore what’s influenced my work over the years and how that’s shaped this course’s focus on writing and healing.
- Learn what memoir is, why it’s such a healing process, and the different forms both personal story writing and the healing journey can take.
- Learn and use gentle body-based (somatic) techniques for healing (and why they’re so helpful). Decide which story form is the best one for your story, and discover the obvious and the not-so-obvious themes of your life. Then narrow it down by choosing what you’ll put in your story, and what you’ll set aside for later.
- Optional – learn why and how ancient tales like fairy tale and memoir are such a support to memoir and healing, and how to build a relationship with a tale so it can guide your memoir-writing.
- Start writing your memoir while learning more about nervous system healing and how it’s connected to resistance and writer’s block.
- Connect the dots between your difficult life experiences and embodied challenges, then start shifting them, while writing your brilliant and wonderful transformational stories, using either a three or a four-act structure.
- To finish, I’ll shares some tips on planning, writing, revising and sharing your stories.
- More importantly, you’ll learn how to cultivate joy and celebrate your accomplishments on the memoir-writing and healing path.
1
MODULE ONE
Introduction
- Learn about your instructor Janelle Hardy
- Janelle’s writing and healing influences (and trainings)
- The healing process and why this writing course has a body and somatic focus
- How to write a literary bio
- Body healing technique
MODULE TWO
About memoir, autobiography, non-fiction and life story writing
- Explore the different forms memoir and life story writing take
- A memoir show and tell of different types of memoir
- A walk-through of how the course progresses
- How to choose a writing form and style for your stories
- Body healing technique
2
3
MODULE THREE
Moving through fear, resistance and writer’s block
- Explore how fear and types of resistance like overwhelm, procrastination, self-doubt and perfectionism get in the way of writing and healing
- Identify your ‘go-to’ resistance patterns
- Learn about common writing myths and how to avoid them
- How your excitement to write can help you deal with your fears
- Body healing technique
MODULE FOUR
Outline your memoir
- Learn about life story timelines, how to make them and what to put on them
- Pattern spot to identify core themes in your life
- Optional extra: do a second timeline process using a favourite ancient tale (ie: fairy tale or myth), then integrate it into your theme spotting and outlining process
- How to narrow down and outline what you want to write about (decide what makes it into your story and what gets set aside for later)
- Body healing technique
4
5
MODULE FIVE
Healing, memoir-writing and your nervous system
- Learn the basics about what trauma really is, how it lives in the nervous system (and to heal it)
- Explore gentle, self-healing somatic (body) techniques
- Discover how sourcing from your body, and doing trauma and nervous system healing makes you a better writer
- How to take a healing approach to your writing and stories
- Body healing technique
MODULE SIX
Structuring Your Stories
- Learn about some elegant story options
- Explore the 3-act structure and 4-act structure
- How to choose a story form, then write a personal story using your timeline
- Body healing technique
6
7
MODULE SEVEN
Writing, revising and planning
- Learn and apply writing techniques and strategies
- Consider how and when to revise your writing
- How to create a writing plan that works for you
- Body healing technique
MODULE EIGHT
Sharing your stories
- Explore reasons for sharing, and reasons for keeping private, your personal stories
- Explore getting published, and get submission tips
- How to decide on when, how and why you’ll share your stories and writing
- Body healing technique
8
9
MODULE NINE
Celebrating yourself and next steps
- Healing needs joy
- Make a plan for celebration (in whatever fun, serious or silly way you desire!)
- Recap your progress through this course
- How to plan next steps in your personal story and healing journey
- Body healing technique
Although this is a self-directed course, you won’t feel like you’re doing it alone.
Inside the course you’ll find a kind, straightforward process, with plenty of video guidance from your instructor on writing your life stories and healing yourself.
It’s a self-paced and very supported process.
Write Your Life Stories, Heal Your Past.
By the end of this course, you’ll have identified a short personal story and theme you want to tell, then written it using a three (or four) act structure, with plenty of body-based prompts to generate creative flow and healing.
Hurrah!
one time payment of:
$300 USD
payment plans available!
“Janelle’s writing process, with focus on embodiment, has been important healing work for me.
Her leadership is quiet and compassionate. Her writing process is gentle and healing.
She offers an abundant banquet and lets me choose what to try. She encourages me to go at my own pace, including information about resistance so that I don’t get stuck.”
Lisa B.
Colorado Springs
In case we haven’t met yet, I’m Janelle…
And I love all things memoir, body, healing and story.
I’m a transformational memoir-writing teacher and body-based healing therapist, and I’ve been exploring stories, writing and healing since I was young.
I studied Anthropology and Dance at university, then went on to get certified in Structural Integration, a deep-tissue hands-on bodywork that integrates fascial release with movement lessons and body-mind-heart dialogue. I’m also almost finished my Somatic Experiencing certification, which is all about trauma-healing through nervous system regulation.
Over the past 20 years I’ve juggled life as a single mother, artist and perpetually curious person with many wide-ranging jobs.
You could say I collect stories through experiences, and I love making sense of and synthesizing these life experiences into story.
I’ve published my writing widely (an anthology of single mothers, newspapers and magazines), I still submit my writing regularly, and I’ve run two artist-in-residence programs.
I also host a podcast interviewing published and in-progress memoirists, storytellers and healers. These interviews are interspersed with episodes sharing writing prompts and… telling fairy tales.
AS FEATURED IN
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Have a question?
Click here to submit a question if you don’t see an answer in the FAQs below.
When does the course start and finish?
This is a self-directed on-demand course, so it starts once you sign up, and it finishes once you complete the modules and the writing.
How long is the course? How long will it take me to finish it?
However, the amount of time it will take you to work through each module, digest the material, support your healing needs and write your first short personal story is variable and unique to you.
For some, it might be a fast process.
For others, it may take more time than you think. Your healing needs might be greater than you expected. You might find that each module opens up so many story options you want to explore, that you’ll linger longer, and write more.
Any of these pathways to completion of the course are perfectly appropriate to your needs.
If it takes longer than you’d prefer, try not to make that wrong.
Instead, notice where your attention goes, and allow yourself to enjoy the process instead of rushing it.
What are the course requirements?
You’ll need writing implements (pen/pencil/highlighters/pencil crayons) and substrate (paper, journal, a roll of paper).
You’re welcome to do this process on your computer, but I’ll be recommending and teaching on paper first!
What is the course format? Video, audio, written, etc?
The course will be delivered via bite sized lessons, mostly video, with captioning provided, and supplementary written materials as well as extra resources.
Do I need to be a good writer before I start? (No)
And, if you do have experience, you’ll still find this course is a refreshing approach to writing, creativity, stories and the healing journey.
What does the course include?
This course includes everything shared above – 9 modules filled with guidance on writing and healing, with extra resources scattered throughout.
What is the refund policy?
Due to the immediately available digital nature of this course, there are no refunds.
If you’re not sure if it’s right for you, before you purchase, spend some time exploring my (Janelle’s) work on my website, listen to my podcast, access the free resources I provide. Then make your decision.
Do I get a certificate?
I don’t issue certificates. However, I love celebrating my students’ wins.
If you publish one of your stories, whether it’s in a blog post, a public newsletter, an art exhibit, in a literary journal or eventually, a book, please send me an e-mail with the link, so I can congratulate you!
Is there a community component to this course?
No, this course is self-directed and self-paced only. That’s what makes it so affordable!
If you want community access, I recommend taking one of my other courses.
Do I get 1-1 access to the teacher in this course?
No, this course is self-directed and self-paced only. That’s what makes it so affordable!
However, if you want 1-1 writing and healing support from me, please explore my ‘work with me’ page.
“This work is so poignant and important in our lives.
I wish there was a curriculum to teach children techniques so they may have a head start!
I just wanted to thank you for the work you share. You are such a wonderful and gentle teacher.
I really appreciated the exercises you taught us.
Koreen
Writer, BC, Canada
Write Your Life Stories, Heal Your Past
It’s never too late to start!
one time payment of:
$300 USD
payment plans available!