The Art of Ensoulment: Here Comes the Playbook on How to Create From Body and Soul

with some spiritual dilemmas of self-publishing

I'll publish The Art of Ensoulment: A Playbook on How to Create from Body and Soul this month. Unfortunately, my audacious, performative self is curled up at my feet like a cat.

Life has a funny sense of humor. The word publish means to reveal, divulge, announce, and make public. Oy! The "me-me-me" of publishing one's spiritual practice is awkward, yet the publishing and marketing worlds require self-promotion. Self-promotion is an art in itself, and for many creative souls, it misses the point. We inhabit realities that appreciate but don't focus on the "self."

I feel my cat purr and roll over, belly up.

I have to remember what and who I serve to put this Playbook in a public forum. I uncovered the InterPlayful, beautiful, rich, whole-bodied spiritual intelligence that helps lots of people thrive no matter what suffering or dilemmas we confront.

And, aren't we all in need of a more pragmatic soul wisdom? Our dancing bodies are like keyholes. Our dancing souls are keys that unlock the door to the Marvelous.

Is the Playbook unique? I find others who are on a similar track. But it’s a hard track to follow. As a white woman in white-centric institutions, it wasn't easy to find ideas and practices that deliberately uplift humans as beings endowed with a dancing consciousness. My culture nearly extinguished the intelligent legacy of cultures who dance, sing, and embody the power of their collective, living soul.

Nonetheless, I’m here to harvest gold and followed many clues in and out of a dance department, West Africa, seminary, psychic meditation programs, churches, stages, workshops, therapy, arts non-profits, grad schools, and treatments for workaholism and family addiction. I took an artistic joyride that danced beyond fear, played hard, sought truth, supporting each body and soul to remember what the ancient wise guy, Irenaeus, said, "The glory of God is a human fully alive."

I wrote and wrote to make sense of my life. When the Playbook coalesced, it showed me it wanted to be an actual book, something people could hold in their hands.

So I prepare to send this beautiful map full of creative prompts to those who pre-ordered it. I’ll offer a campaign with a heavily discounted e-version and position the book with the smart keywords in the correct Amazon categories. I'll do my part to get it noticed.

Do I want a best-seller? To really "launch" (missile metaphor?) the book? That sounds exhausting and antithetical to The Dancing Center I’ve come to trust. I'm recovering from moving house twice, Covid, a harrowing dance with family addiction, a new cohousing culture, grandmothering, and navigating the impacts of aging. Gratefully, I am dancing still.

Reveal? Divulge? Announce? Yes.

Launch? Not so much. 

I plan to dance small, bow, and invoke the spirits who guided me to create The Art of Ensoulment Playbook to carry the book. May whoever values it share it with other gifted and sensitive people, anyone who secretly suspects "the soul loves the body." 

Meow.