Write Your Story for Yourself: Jaime Fleres on Your Messy Brilliance® Show

I’m honored to introduce you to a new friend of mine, author and fellow advocate of women’s stories and truths, Jaime Fleres. This episode of the Your Messy Brilliance® Show is especially close to my heart because we talked about so many of the things that Women For One is based on: the power of considering how the stories of our lives continue to impact us today; how we can explore the mess of our trauma through writing and also heal it; and why, in Jaime’s words, “it takes more energy to suppress our truths than to express them.”

As a champion for women’s embodied, authentic, creative expression, as well as a former professor, an author, and a healer, Jaime helps creative souls use writing as a tool of expression and transformation, either by writing books or through personal therapeutic storytelling. Jaime is the author of the book Birth Your Story: Why Writing about Your Birth Matters, which explores the value and how-to of using writing to remember, process, heal. and honor women’s experiences of giving birth.

In this conversation, Jaime shares about how she discovered writing at the age of 13, and how it saved her life and allowed her to break through years of silence to finally express her truth. She also talks about how writing can give us a supportive witness and safe space that helps us to tell our stories unfiltered—and why it’s so important to write our stories for ourselves rather than an audience.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your voice matters or if you really have a story to share, you’ll want to listen to this episode. (BTW, the answer is a resounding yes!) And be sure to check out Jaime’s work at jaimefleres.com.

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Timestamps:

2:00    How Jaime came to the sacred work of writing and coaching after breaking through years of silence

5:30    How to make writing a safe space (no critics welcome!)

7:42    How writing helps us process, remember, and gain a clear narrative

9:30    We might not be in charge of what happened to us but we are in charge of

            how we get to tell the story

11:15     Claiming our truth and standing in it

13:50    The power of discernment (and who we choose to share our stories with)

15:30    What the collective reclamation of women’s voices means for all of us

17:20    Birth as a transformational rite of passage

19:11      The power of simplicity when it comes to finding ways to write our stories

21:15     The power of embodying our experiences in our storytelling

23:27    How your birth story is the personal equivalent of the creation myth