selkie coaching
curiosity•collaboration•connection
The myth of the selkie is a story about rediscovery and edges. It is a story about returning to ourselves. It asks us to reconsider who we are, where we came from, and who we are becoming.
There are lots of ways we lose connections to ourselves, and there are just as many ways we can find our way back again to our own skins. To return to our selkie selves, we must brave the uncomfortable edges of change and growth. It takes courage, perseverance, and support.
As a creativity coach, I will support your journey back to your selkie self.
returning to our
selkie selves
The goal of creativity coaching is to help you gain an understanding of your creative process. During our time together, we will use a wide range of intuitive and practical tools to help you reconnect and deepen your relationship to your creative process.
I will help you to set goals towards specific projects you might want to start or complete, and work with you to move through blocks, build confidence, and look at the stories you tell yourself that are keeping you from re-claiming your creative self. We will re-imagine those stories, so you can once again slip into your selkie skin and reclaim your birthright of creativity.
sarah’s story
In 1993, I was nineteen and attending a small Catholic college in Austin. I mostly skipped classes and hung out in the college’s library archives, where I had a work study job. I spent the rest of my time getting stoned, going to punk shows in bars that used horse troughs for toilets, reading poetry, and writing down everything I experienced in my journals. I still have all of those journals.
I lived in an apartment in East Austin with a few friends I’d met in the dorms. They had the bedrooms. I got the living room and slept on a single futon my granny bought me.
That fall, our neighbors had a party, and I met a boy who drew a fetus on my thigh with a ball point pen, its umbilical cord wrapping around my calf. Three months later, I was pregnant, and he was finishing time in the county jail for breaking probation after getting caught breaking into a skateboard shop.
the selkie’s story
When my daughter was about five months old, I snuggled her tightly next to my body with the sling my mother gave me and went to see The Secret of Roan Inish. That afternoon, in the dim hush of a movie theater, I felt a kinship to the woman who, during a bright full moon, swims to the water’s edge and takes off her seal skin to dance in her human body with her selkie sisters.
A fisherman sees her skin lying on a rock near the shoreline and steals it. She is forced to leave her sisters and join the human world as the fisherman’s wife.
Years later, her oldest daughter finds her skin tucked away in her father’s jacket, dried up and shrunken. She knew her mother longed to return to her sisters and the sea, but she also knew the pain it would cause her to leave her human family.
It was time for the daughter to come into her own, step into her own story, and it was time for the mother to return to her selkie self, reclaim her true skin. Her journey back to self was difficult—cold and wet, and full of steep trails and lost paths. She felt scared, unsure if her sisters would take her back or if she would even recognize them. But they did, and she did.
In 2018, around the time of the winter solstice, my daughter returned my selkie skin. I was forty-four and newly empty-nested. She tattooed a selkie on my forearm, a ritual that was painful and beautiful. We listened to Beyonce and Janelle Monet; we drank wine, and she laughed at the way I grimaced and breathed as if I was giving birth. Of course, I was giving birth. I was birthing myself.
The selkie’s story provided me the images and archetypes I needed to connect with my creative power. What stories speak to your deepest creative needs? Together, we can seek out those stories and use them as a foundation to help you re-connect with your unique creative self and start the journey towards prioritizing your creative projects.