It has been one year since Writing: A Spiritual Voice was published. Every year brings significant growth as a creative of any sort. I have added a detailed 2022 Addendumto Writing: A Spiritual Voice. It includes:
Technical changes and challenges.
I learned how to make audiobooks.
I developed a different marketing focus.
The vision of my writing as a body of work became clearer and stronger.
I began writing a new fiction series, Nanima.
I have an ever-evolving idea of the body of work I want to offer the world. One day, God willing, it will extend beyond my lifetime. It’s not just about the accumulation of titles but, rather, the growth of an energy field. Along with the mark that each book and series makes, there grows a specific energy field that will ultimately carry our books, work as authors, and spiritual impact on the world. To some extent, the books don’t even have to be read. People who have never read them can still benefit. Many great authors form part of our collective consciousness without us even knowing the titles of their works. The energy field of their body of work extends beyond time and space.
Writing: A Spiritual Voice by Donna Goddard on Amazon
Somewhere along the way, there develops within the soul a yearning that can no longer be ignored; a craving for the great Love affair. We feel it drawing ever closer. It is the greatest of them all. It cannot fail. It is all-consuming. It is incomparable. It is the love affair with our own true nature and the source from which it comes. The desire is in all of us but, more often than not, it is ignored for other interests. We wrestle with each interest, trying to make it work, growing with each adventure until the light has grown bright enough for us to reach for it.
Charismatics and Pentecostals generally place their hands on the person’s shoulders. If we add to that the Eastern knowledge of chakras, it becomes a small step for the healer to place the hands directly on the body’s various energy centres, as in Reiki. It goes without saying that the healer must have the capacity to heal or, more precisely, the capacity to let the healing channel flow through them. Otherwise, to the client, it can feel like an invasion of personal boundaries or like nothing.
Before being a full-time author, I had a private practice as a spiritual healer and counsellor, for about ten years, in which I practised, among other things, hands-on healing. Healing is partly a selfish career, as the path must always be. I wanted to learn how to be completely healthy and happy myself. Of course, I also wanted to share what I hopefully found with a world which seemed deeply in need of it. Healer and author, John Hargreaves, who was a spiritual teacher of mine, at that stage, was particularly supportive of me starting a practice as a healer. He said,
This is the beginning of Writing: A Spiritual Voice (Book 2 of The Creative Spirit Series).
Chapter 1: Out of the Drawer
Like many people, I have always written. Like most people who write, I had no intention of being an author. I remember a university friend telling me that my birthday and Christmas cards were so long that they were like a book. Later, in my mid-thirties, another friend told me several times that I could write a book about my life. I didn’t think anything of that because everyone’s life is interesting to themselves because they are the star.
People often feel that they have a book inside them. They probably do. However, the effort it takes to write, publish, and sell one is so demanding that few do it. If the writing voice is speaking to you, then, in some manner, you should listen. You do not have to become a published author, but all constructive inner drives call for action. The fulfilment of anything is in its expression. The joy is in the moment-by-moment attention, the developing ability to reach deeply into the creative centre, and the nurturing of an inherent individual impulse to create.
I began writing my first book, The Love of Being Loving, in 2005. I was in my mid-forties. The book came from decades of spiritual work and lifetimes before that. It is a small book of 23,000 words, but it took me three years to write because I was a new writer and, true to my writing style, I like to make every word count. After finishing it, I tried to get it accepted by a few publishing companies. As is generally the case, that went nowhere. I gave up after trying four publishing houses, which isn’t many, but I felt I needed to go a different route. The manuscript sat in my desk drawer for another three years.
Life took a different turn, and a long-term friendship turned into a couple relationship. As often happens with the introduction of new people into our life (or old people in a new way), it brought something fresh out of me. The dynamics of our being and that of another independent being fires up life. As my partner was a caring and intelligent man, also on the spiritual path, it was not perhaps a surprising outcome that I took the dormant book out of the drawer and got the momentum to self-publish it. The process of forming the idea, learning about self-publishing, and rewriting the book took another two years. The massive advances in self-publishing, which sprang from the ability to print-on-demand, were very timely for me. Finally, my book was published in 2013, having had an eight-year journey from inception to birth.
All authors know that the birth of a book is a huge milestone, but it also marks the beginning of the equally challenging journey to get it in front of people. That involves making oneself into a public persona with a distinct voice. It involves marketing and selling. Otherwise, the manuscript might be out of the drawer and into the market, but it will be so invisible that it will not be doing much more than sitting in the drawer. The first of anything is the most difficult. Once that book is written, edited, published, and a marketing system is established, books will have a clearer channel to flow through you.
My book became part of a four-book series, Love and Devotion. Another nonfiction series was also written, The Creative Spirit Series, which includes the gentle offering of a poetry book. Poetry is so private and personal. To my surprise, five years ago, after never having been a fiction reader, I started writing a fiction book, Waldmeer, which turned into a seven-book series.
Now, eight years after the release of my initial book, I have fourteen published books. The output was exponential rather than a steady book production from the beginning. The last two years of COVID-19 have been a valuable opportunity for concentrated time at home and have seen the release of four nonfiction books and three fiction ones to finish the Waldmeer Series.
Writing is a long-term career. It takes a lot of time, money, perseverance, learning, and soul. Making a mark as a writer and having an influence in the world is a process which generally accelerates slowly.
Keep going.
Keep giving.
Remain true.
Trust your instincts.
Go with the flow.
Do your best.
Enjoy it.
If you know that the spiritual voice is in you, and you would like greater access to it as a writer, then Writing: A Spiritual Voice can help you to develop your capacity to hear and heed that voice.
After six months of living in Store Creek with the cold weather, it was good to finally arrive at spring’s doorstep. Merlyn wondered if that was why Ben had decided to visit today. He said it was a rental inspection. But that was just a joke. At least, Merlyn hoped it was a joke. Although it was two years since their separation, they had been married for three years. Nothing needed inspecting.
The fruits of serious spiritual devotion have an unmistakable flavour, sometimes even more retrospectively. It had been a challenging few years. I was twenty-six and had been progressing through an existential crisis, an involuntary falling apart of life’s meaning. I felt a profound human aloneness, and with all my praying, I failed to feel God’s love in any way that could help my state of being. Besides the care and protection of my two little children and my spiritual studies, I had no interest in anything. Everything seemed trite to me, meaningless and often painfully intolerable. I had lost faith in everything human to give solace to my soul. It was not intentional. It is simply what happened over the space of a few years. I was at the bottom of the valley—all things lost, but nothing gained.
How can we see things as they really are? It’s important, don’t you think? For example, honesty can seem like meanness, when really it may be love. Niceness can seem loving, when really it may not be at all. People can wish us dead and still be polite to us. And people can sometimes seem harsh, when they would give their life for us. The behaviour of a person does not necessarily correspond with their underlying intention. If we can’t see people clearly, we can end up trusting people and situations that are not in our best interest and dismissing people and situations which would make our life better and happier. It is not just in regards little things but if we understand the far-reaching and powerful effect of thought, we realise that it can even be a life and death matter. Thought is very powerful and the underlying intention is everything.
Donna Goddard 