Burning to Write the Truth with Renee Linnell

One of the big takeaways I have from this conversation with Renee Linnell was when she reminded me that shame dissipates as we tell our stories. When we tell the truth about an experience we feel shame about, that act of speaking up breaks up the shame, the same way a frozen river’s ice breaks up in the spring. Telling the truth is like sunshine and warmth on that river of shame. Even when we just tell the truth to ourselves. Perhaps especially then! It’s hard to tell the truth sometimes. It can be scary and it can make us feel vulnerable. But it is always worth doing. Renee talks about her journaling practice and how full of anger it was when she first left the cult. I’m glad we talked about that because expressing those feelings is SO important, especially after a cult situation where we’ve been told our thoughts and feelings and our very being don’t matter. It’s healthy to get the river of feelings flowing again. Another thing that Renee points to in this conversation is that writing a memoir about a traumatic experience like being in a cult is difficult. If you’re trying to do that – to write your story – and you’re finding that it’s hard, you’re right! It is hard! But that doesn’t mean you should give up. Just because something is hard or has difficult moments doesn’t mean it isn’t worth the effort. Ask anyone who’s ever raised a child. Renee Linnell is an author, inspirational speaker, entrepreneur, and lifelong adventurer. She has been featured on The Today Show, BBC, NBC, NPR, and numerous other media outlets. Before becoming a writer, she traveled the world as a surf model, danced tango professionally, earned an MBA from New York University, and founded or cofounded six wildly different businesses—from tango shoes and dance companies to fitness, fashion, tech, and publishing. Through her writing and speaking, Renee explores freedom, self-trust, and what it means to return to who we were before the world told us who to be. Learn more about Renee Linnell at ReneeLinnell.com This episode of Creative Alchemy is supported by the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. This free ebook guides cult and other trauma survivors into the healthy and healing practice of journaling. With a gentle hand and relying on her decades of writing experience, cult survivor Alexandra Amor encourages readers to develop a journaling practice as part of their healing path. Click here to get your complimentary copy. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes Knowing early on that a punishing deity didn’t make sense Starting a spiritual quest at age 15 Creating the perfect life and still feeling empty and sad Falling under the spell of a toxic teacher Beginning to write as a way to deal with the difficult emotions after leaving a cult Finding that shame dissipates as we tell our stories Lessons learned about how to write a personal story Working with an editor and getting what was needed from that collaboration Moving through the painful process of working with edits Resisting suggestions to change the book for a publisher and telling the true story How writing helps us to see our part in what unfolds in life Remembering the joy of creativity for its own sake Resources mentioned in this episode Renee’s books The Burn Zone and Still On Fire The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron Transcript of the Interview with Renee Linnell Alexandra: Renee Linnell, welcome to Creative Alchemy. Renee: Thank you. It’s so nice to be here. Alexandra: It’s nice to have you here. Why don’t you give us a little potted history, as they say in the UK, about yourself and about your time in the Buddhist cult? Renee: I lost most of my family when I was young, and my father died on Thanksgiving Day when I was 15. And so there had just been so much death around me that. He was like my best friend and my hero, and so I just was like, there has to be more out there than what I’m being taught in church and in school. I was raised very Catholic, and I remember sitting in church when I was like five, and I was like, “It doesn’t make sense.” I loved American cheese slices, and so when they said Jesus, I thought they were saying cheese-us. So I pictured like this big American slice of cheese in the sky, and I just remember thinking like, if Jesus, like if God made me and made all of us, then He would love us. Like we’re not sinners. That doesn’t make sense. We’re not flawed. So I was like, okay, the adults have holes in their logic, and so even from a young age, I was like, “Doesn’t make sense.” And then when everyone was dying, I was like, “It doesn’t make sense that we would fall so in love with people, and then they would die, and we’d never see them again.” Like that’s just cruel and horrible. When my dad died, someone gave me the book *Many Lives, Many Masters* by Dr. Brian Weiss, and that introduced to me the concept of reincarnation and souls constantly finding each other, and loved ones always being reunited. And so that was like, okay, that feels good to me. I started, without realizing it, a spiritual quest at that age, and then I started to question everything. My mom was very Catholic, and she said, “You don’t have sex unless you want to please the man, and that’s the only reason women have sex.” And I was starting to learn about my body, and I was like, that doesn’t seem right. I mean, I think sex is probably going to feel really good. I want to go out and have as much sex as possible. Then I started traveling. And then the more that I traveled around the world, the more that I realized what I was hearing on the news wasn’t really accurate. And so I became a mystic more or less. I wanted to know for myself what was real. I ended up creating this great life where I was surfing, traveling around the world surfing, and I was a model, so free surfboards, free bikinis, free trips, lots of pro surfers to play with. Then I became a professional dancer, and I was dancing Argentine tango and traveling dancing, and I was still unhappy inside. I was well educated. I graduated magna cum laude with a double degree, so it was like I had everything from the outside looking in. My life was perfect, and I was empty and sad, and I felt like everyone else out there had it figured out, and I didn’t. And so I read all kind of self-help books. I studied all different religions. I traveled all over the world. I slept with all kinds of guys. Nothing was filling the void inside, and nothing was answering the questions. Then I walked into a meditation seminar, and which is the opening of my first memoir, *The Burn Zone* I sat in front of the teacher, and we started to meditate. And I realize now that I went into samadhi, which is the highest mind state you can go into meditating, apparently, according to books I’ve read. I erroneously attributed that to the teacher, and so I was just hooked, like hook, line, and sinker. I was in. I didn’t care who she was. I didn’t care what she said. I was going to be her student for the rest of my life because that peace that I felt inside my mind, I realize is what I’d been searching for my whole life. Alexandra: Wow! Take us forward to when things went sour with that teacher. Renee: Well, they went sour. Okay, it’s like after I’ve done so many interviews with the book for the book tour and everything, I compare it to any toxic relationship where it’s like, well, if you went on a first date and somebody verbally abused you or hit you, you would get up and leave the table. You have nothing invested, but they love bomb you and they make you feel like loved and seen and cherished. And adored and safe. Then slowly over time they start removing your foundation and the things that empower you and the things that make you you, and then slowly they start introducing the self-doubt, the gaslighting. So it’s like in hindsight, I could say things started turning bad like within the first three months, but I would say, well, I am an extremist, so I became the number one student. I ended up kind of running the company and working with the teacher, who was a woman, with her right hand man, who ran the company, and then he and I were together all the time. He was 15 years older than I was. He started seducing me, and I became his consort. So that’s when it really started to turn ugly. But at the time, I was-I don’t know-I-I also was raised with an abusive mother, so the love pattern that I learned was like neglect and abuse followed by love bombing. So this was just all these patterns were being mimicked and recreated. But it turned when I became his consort was about a year in. Alexandra: When did you end up leaving the group? Renee: Well, I got thrown out of it, which saved my life. Alexandra: Me too! Renee: Did you? Yes. Probably not for the same reason I did. Maybe not. It turned out that the right hand man was her boyfriend and her lover, which I didn’t know. So my joke is, if you want to get thrown out of a cult, sleep with the leader’s boyfriend or girlfriend. But I it saved my life because what happened was I think, let’s see, I joined in 2006 in September. Oh, it’s probably this is probably today might actually be my 20-year anniversary. It was probably summer 2010 when my teacher called me and she said, “I have a new task for you. Your task is to go get into one of the hardest business schools in the country”, she said. “That’s not the task, though. The task is to then graduate and make $10 million profit after taxes, and once you do that, you can come back to the group.” And she said, “But you have 48 hours to say goodbye to everybody and to leave.” At the time, I didn’t have anybody outside the group, but I was such an extreme student that I said goodbye to everybody, and I left and I went to the East Coast. I was living in California, and I tried to get into Harvard, Yale, Columbia. I ended up getting into NYU, and that was fall of 2011 is when I started, but so I was technically kicked out in 2010, but I stayed completely loyal until 2013. So like seven is that that’s about seven years. Alexandra: When did it occur to you that you might want to write your story in book form? Renee: It didn’t really. I had a great therapist, and she because I was like, well, everything happens for a reason, and I know that this all happened for a reason. Because of the cult, I ended up in a business venture in New York, in which I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I ended up smeared all over the tabloids. It was a disaster because I was no longer listening to my intuition, and so my whole life shattered. I was suicidal. I didn’t know who to trust. I didn’t know what to believe. I remember talking to my therapist, and I was like, “I know everything happens for a reason, and I know that it’s all part of the divine path.” And she said, “Renee, you’re trying to handle this kind of like a spiritual bypass, and you have so much emotion that needs to come through and out and be felt and expressed.” She talked me into journaling, into screaming into pillows, and into pounding my mattress, like getting the rage out. So I was journaling and journaling and journaling, and a lot of it was like vitriol. Just I hate her and f bombs. You know, mother effer, like screw that woman and hundreds and hundreds of pages. I ended up with over 1000 pages of my processing. Then I had so much shame around the story, so I wasn’t telling people about it. But then I slowly started to tell. It’s funny. I have a twin brother, and he’s my only living family. And I, of course, distanced myself from everybody while I was in this group. And he, at one point, said, “He said, I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t care how weird you get. Just don’t cut me out of your life. I won’t reach out to you. I won’t contact you. I’m not going to question you. But please don’t cut that lifeline to me.” And so I finally called him and I said, “Okay, I have something to tell you. I was in a cult.” And he goes, “I know you were in a cult. We all knew you were in a cult. You’re the only one that didn’t know you were in a cult.” But when I told him the story, he was like, “That’s incredible.” So a little bit of the shame went away. And then the more I told the story, the more people reacted the same way. Like, “That’s incredible! You should write a book. This should be a movie.” And that’s when I realized I had over 1000 pages of journal entries that I had actually been writing a book. One of the tasks-the task to get my MBA-I was at the NYU Executive MBA program, and one of my colleagues was the editor in chief of Penguin Random House. I went to lunch with her one day, and I told her everything that had happened, and I said that I had been journaling, and that I was maybe writing a book, and I had no idea what I was doing. And then she said, “Okay, it sounds like you need an editor.” So that’s how it started. Alexandra: You didn’t have any experience at that point writing? This was the first memoir you’d ever thought about writing. Renee: I didn’t have experience, but I always loved writing as a child and in school. And one of my favorite teachers was my English teacher, and he was really strict. He actually has a cameo in my first book, and he was really strict about learning all the rules and everything, and then once we learned them and did well on his exams, I remember the day he called us in. He goes, “Now I have a new assignment, and now that you know all the rules, you have to break them, and I want you to break them because you have to develop your own writing style.” And so, people tell me that my writing style is really conversational. It’s like sitting in my living room, or just having a conversation. And it’s because of Mr. J. I loved writing because of him, because of the freedom he gave us to express ourselves. And then I did in 2004, right after my mother passed away, I found a whole box of my father’s letters from World War II, and so I had all of those transcribed, and I wrote an intro and a conclusion and created a book that was published. But that’s the only writing experience I had had. Alexandra: What a gift from that English teacher, to teach you that to follow the rules and then to break them Renee: To give us the freedom at such a young age to express ourselves however we wanted to. Alexandra: Yeah, and find your voice. That’s amazing. What were the biggest hurdles do you think you encountered when you began thinking about turning it into a book? Renee: Oh my gosh, so many. The first one was definitely wondering, thinking too much about the reader, and wondering how will this be received, and then censoring myself or doubting myself. Once I decided I wanted to have a book, it took all the free form. Like I tell people now for advice, I’m like, just vomit it all out. Everything that you have inside you, vomit it. Make it a mess. Say the same thing over and over. Don’t worry about punctuation, don’t worry about spelling, don’t worry about redundancy. Like, just get it out. What I had done is I had written my rage over and over and over, so it was like I don’t know 100 pages of kind of the same certain events, and so then that seemed like such an unbelievable mess that it was like, well, how do I even turn this mess into a book? So, at that stage, if I didn’t have a writer, an editor, I don’t know if I would have been able to move through it. She was incredible. Now it’s funny because I just discovered Chat GPT. I was super anti AI, but for my third memoir, I have another about 1000 pages of its vomit, and it’s been so daunting going through it without an editor, and then I finally was like, oh, I fall into ChatGPT. I had to immediately say, “Do not write for me. I cannot have my own writing changed. It’s very important that it’s my voice and my energy.” But that is such a good tool for taking all the vomit and pulling out the gold. The hurdles were self-doubt, worrying too much about how it would be received, and the redundancy of expressing myself over and over, trying to get the same concept out. Alexandra: I interviewed someone a few weeks ago, and she introduced me to this Terry Pratchett quote, which is, “The first draft is for you, the writer.” I love that takes the worry away of it doesn’t have to be perfect when it comes out the first time. Renee: Well, and the truth is, it’s never going to be perfect, right? Like, isn’t there another quote? Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good or something. Alexandra: Yes. Renee: I remember getting to the point where I had printed the whole manuscript out, the first kind of like real manuscript, and I was reading through it, and I got so upset. I threw it in the trash, and I dumped all my coffee grounds on top of it, and I quit. Then I went to school because by then I had moved here to Colorado, and I was commuting to New York every other weekend to finish school. I was talking to one of my colleagues at school, and he said, “How’s the manuscript going?” And I said, “Oh, I just threw it in the trash and dumped all my coffee grounds.” I had quit school. I had a total breakdown and quit. Unfortunately, I made myself go back. He was like, “Renee, what is the deal with you quitting when it gets hard? You’re not allowed to quit. You’re going home to Colorado and you’re pulling that disgusting thing out of the trash with all the coffee grounds, and you’re finishing this book.” I’m just so grateful. When I was quitting NYU, my colleague said because my last class was world economics. It was so overwhelming. I was with all finance, Wall Street guys, I didn’t even understand the lexicon, and they were like, “You are not quitting. We will carry you to the finish line.” I just feel like these angels showed up each time to not let me quit. Alexandra: Oh, that’s so beautiful! I love hearing that. What do you think the editor that you worked with was able to help you with? Renee: I think I really needed validation, and so she was really able to validate me that it was a fascinating story. I didn’t understand how to create how to create a book. For example, some of the hardest, darkest mind states that I was in, or childhood trauma, for example, she was like, “Renee. Every time you bring up your mother abusing you, you apologize for her immediately after. I need you to take the reader on the journey of what it was like growing up with your mother.” Or with the male teacher. She said, “You keep saying how repulsed you were by him, but I don’t believe that you would have ever ended up in a romantic situation with him if you were truly repulsed.” I had forgotten that I was originally attracted to him, and so she was like, “I need you to pull the bring the reader through that journey. I need you to remember what it was like when you did find him attractive.” And then towards the end of the book, when I moved to Colorado, I thought I was going to heal, and I was going to write, and I was going to be a best-selling author, and everything was going to be fine. And instead, I fell apart like totally and completely. Life came with the sledgehammer and hit me a few more times. And so I had all of that in the book. She was like, “Renee, your reader really needs you to heal. Your reader is exhausted at this point, and I know these other things happen to you, but we have to take them out of the book. They can come in at a later book or a different memoir, but right now your reader needs you to start to rise.” Those things I never would have known without her. Alexandra: Oh, such a good point. And so then you wrote Still on Fire. Did you include some of those things in that book? Renee: Yes. Alexandra: That’s such great advice. It’s so great to have that second pair of eyes that can just help you to see because we’re so close to it, we can’t see what’s happening. Renee: It’s interesting because when I first sent her the writing, no one had seen it, of course, and it’s like the deepest, darkest secrets of my heart. And then when she would return it to me with her edits, I would get furious. I was like, she doesn’t know me, and she doesn’t know what I’m been through, and she doesn’t know my voice, and she doesn’t know my story. Unfortunately, I would sit with it. I think I had two weeks to turn it back around, and by the end of the two weeks, I would realize that she was right in 95% of her edits. But it took the whole process of every time I got that editing back, it just hit my heart, and I went straight into defense. I also learned through the process of that and Still on Fire, don’t show a bunch of people. Don’t talk for me. Don’t talk to a bunch of people about it. Pick one or two people who I truly trust, and only show them because everybody has an opinion. And when it’s something that’s so personal, it’s like we have to trust our own inner guidance. I think, on how it gets delivered out into the world. Alexandra: That is such a good point. I made the same mistake sharing it far and wide initially, and then realizing, oh no, no, no, this is not the way to do this. Such a good point. One of the things I love about your book is that you interweave. It goes back and forth between the past and the present in the cult, and you weave in your childhood and your 20s, as you said, in traveling the world and becoming a dancer and all that stuff. How did you come up with that structure? Renee: I knew what I wanted the opening of the book to be was that scene when I first sat in front of my teacher. And then I knew I loved the story about the sandbar with the sharks when I was 10 years old. That’s such a great story. I think when I presented it to the editor, because she said send me 15 pages because the editor was the editor in chief of Penguin’s Plume division and she had just started freelancing so it was a really big deal that she took me on as a client, and the timing once again was incredible. When I only had 15 pages I could send her as my audition, and so I think I sent her those two back to back. I feel like she was the one that decided to interweave the flashing back and forward. And another thing I do want to say is that the first publishing house I went to, they really wanted me to sanitize my story. Make it a Christian cult that I joined, which I never would have joined. And they wanted me to change my writing style because they wanted to appeal to a larger target market. I started having so much anxiety and crying all the time. And I was like, “This feels like the cults all over again, where I’m trusting experts who to guide me, and I’m ignoring my own inner guidance.” And so I made the choice right then: I’m not doing this to be a best-selling author. As of course, I feel like it’s probably every author’s dream. But I realized it was more important for me to tell my story my way. Singer-songwriters who we truly love, they’re not thinking about a target market. They’re expressing what’s deep inside their heart, and people are resonating with that because it’s truth. And so I made the choice then that I’m writing my truth, and some people will love it, and some people will hate it, and that’s going to have to be okay. I think that’s an important thing for writers to hear: forget about the target market, and write from your heart. Give your gift out into the world, and trust that the people who are the who will benefit from receiving it will find it. Alexandra: Great advice. I absolutely agree. Because if you had changed it, changed those important details, the authenticity bleeds out of it, and then nobody would resonate with it. Renee: And you think about those of us who are seeking, or those of us who would end up in a cult. We do so because we’re super sensitive. I have a feeling we’re probably evolved to the point that when we incarnate here, we’re like, this place doesn’t make sense. There’s something wrong with the mainstream paradigms, right? Like, where do I fit? I kind of feel lost. I just want tribe. I just want family. I don’t want to feel like an alien. So we’re already turned off by what’s fake, and we’re already desperately seeking what’s true and what’s real, and so then it’s like, well, if we’re going to write our stories to help others, they’re going to be attracted to what’s real, so we cannot dilute it just because some person tells us that it will sell more books. Alexandra: 100% Totally agree. You talked a little bit about what I’m calling it the first draft, the beginning origins of the book were the were journaling. Did you develop a writing practice in order to get the book finished? Renee: I didn’t. I tried to. I read the Writer’s Way. Is that what it’s called? Alexandra: The Artist’s Way. Renee: The Artist’s Way. Yeah. I tried to do the morning pages, and what I realized is it didn’t work for me. What happens to me is when it’s time for me to write, I can’t stop. It just comes through me, and I like I’ll forget. I’ll sit down at my computer at eight a.m. and I’ll look up, and it’s two, and I haven’t even had a glass of water. And then otherwise, I’ll go months or years, and I can’t even write at all. I’m thinking about what I’m writing, and I’m living the experience. But when I go to write it, if I force it, it’s crap. It took me through two memoirs to understand that when I’m in flow, I’m in flow, and when I’m not, I’m not. And trying to force it when I’m not just doesn’t work. So for me, I stopped with any type of routine. Alexandra: I love that too because I think it’s so easy when something works for us, for Julia Cameron, for example, with The Artist’s Way, it’s tempting to try to put that onto other people. This will work for you too. But it’s so much more important to help people to trust themselves and their process. Morning pages every day might not work for everybody. Renee: Well, and also we have now we have the cell phones where we can dictate right, and so that’s another thing. I can just be going about a normal day, and then suddenly I’m washing dishes, and a whole like two chapters is coming through me. So then I’ll just grab my phone, and now and I’ll dictate, and it’s a mess. But now I’ve captured that whole idea. Alexandra: That’s amazing. My follow up question was going to be: Does your practice is it different now? But we’ve sort of covered that. So you don’t have any kind of regular routine of journaling or anything. Renee: No, because when I was journaling so much, it was so dark and so much agony and so many mind demons. And then when I would go back to read it, it just was so sad. I kind of have a bitter taste in my mouth about journaling. And then the rigidity of my meditation practice was an hour every morning, an hour every night, sitting in the same spot, not moving. And then the whole group I was in was like a it presented itself as personal professional development, like corporate development. So really rigid rules, and so for me now, it’s like anything that’s rigid, anything that’s structured, feels like a cage. So I can’t. It’s like I have to allow. Every morning for two hours I give myself total quiet before I interact with my cell phone or the world. Even if I have to leave at six a.m. for a flight, I’ll wake up at four, and I slowly make a beautiful breakfast, and I luxuriate over coffee. And then, if I can be outside, if it’s not dark, I sit outside. Those two hours are my time in pristine quiet. I think that is kind of like journaling, where it’s like I’m just in touch with my thoughts, and I’m feeling my feelings, and but that’s about as structured as I can get. Otherwise, it just reminds me of a cage. Alexandra: One of my favorite questions to ask my guests is: Was there anything that you learned about the cult by writing about it? Renee: Definitely, I learned. The writing process made me forgive everybody, and my first drafts were so filled with hate and anger. I had to keep writing, and then I had to keep editing, and then I had to keep reading, and then I had to keep revising. Then I had to share. Then I became quite desensitized to some of the really painful stories and then I was able to see them from a much higher perspective and. It’s interesting because I say, like, at first the book was about hate and anger, and at the end it was about love, and I realized all my hate and anger wasn’t. I mean, for I was I hated the cult teachers, I hated my upbringing, I hated God. As I started to heal, and as I had to keep reading what I was writing over and over, I realized I was really angry at myself. I was angry at myself for allowing myself to be so taken advantage of, and to not love myself enough to have the boundaries to get out. But it’s so interesting because I wrote two memoirs about healing and being totally healed, and then I finally felt healed enough to enter into a romantic relationship. He turned out to be the cult all over again, just disguised as muscles and tattoos, which is what my third book is about. I realize it’s an underlying pattern of self-abandonment in order to be loved and accepted and included. The writing process has helped tremendously because it helps me see my own part in everything that unfolded, and so I could no longer truly blame. And then when I stopped blaming, it became so empowering to go. I made the choice to stay. I made the choice to give all my money. I made the choice to burn everything I own. I made the choice to start a business with no operating agreement with some thug guy that I met in the karate dojo in New York, and that’s incredibly empowering. So yes, it was so cathartic. It was very cathartic. Alexandra: Was it easier in any way writing Still on Fire, your second memoir? Renee: It was still just as hard. But what I realized was I understood the process better, and what the process taught me was that, like I said, just vomit it all out, and then trust that the book ends up taking on a life of its own, and the people that are meant to help actually come out of the woodwork and help. If you just keep going, it’s like the book ends up as a book. It’s an incredible process. I did start with the same editor, and then because she works with so many famous clients, I kind of got bumped further and further back, and then I started with the same publisher, and they messed up my publishing date by a year, and then another six months. Being the rebel I am, I was like, “Well, screw them! I’m just going to publish my own book with no editor.” I love the book, and it’s great book, and I’m proud of myself for doing it. But it definitely, I wouldn’t do it again that way. And in fact, I’m now doing a revised version because it does need an editor, it’s kind of like Renee gets the microphone and doesn’t put it down. An editor could come in and be like, “You made your point. You don’t need to make it 67,000 times. Your poor reader is ready for the next.” It does get easier as you go because the self-doubt kind of goes. I trust the process. I’m just going to keep going, and I’m not so attached to having a perfect result. Alexandra: How far along are you in the third one? Renee: Well, and then that’s the crazy thing about discovering this Chat GPT help because I had been writing the third one off and on for five years. Because there was so much trauma around the relationship with the man, every time I went back to sort through it, I just was like, I feel great now. I don’t want to relive all that crap. And then when I got the idea one night, well, I could take all 1000 pages and put it into ChatGPT and have her sort through it for. I call her a her, yeah, because I’m already so attached. It’s like I don’t need to start making her a man. I had five years of spurts of writing, like in a cafe, in an airport, on a plane, and then months and months of I can’t even look at it. I have no inspiration. This book is probably never even going to happen. And then it was three weeks ago when I had the idea to load it all into ChatGPT, and then it was 12 hours a day every day for three weeks. And not only do I have the third book ready to present time, I also have the revision of Still on Fire. And I have another book based on all my blogs. So I went from no motivation, no energy to I can’t even get up to go have something to eat. So the third book, I’m at the point now where I can send it to a publisher. But it’s time to live the plot because I realize I created such a safe cocoon in my healing that my cocoon became a cage, and so now my task is to go out into the world and live, and live the plot. Alexandra: Wow! Oh, that’s nice. Wow, amazing! Renee: It’s fun. Alexandra: I love hearing about all this creativity and inspiration, and you are on fire. It sounds like. Renee: Thank you. Alexandra: So, just as we start to wrap up here, is there anything that we that you’d like to share about creative alchemy, creative expression that we haven’t touched on yet? Renee: I think I would like to say that I believe we are here on this planet to create. I think it’s vitally important that we create. That you think of the joy we had as children with our little whatever it was, dances and drawings and finger paintings, or like picking up the mud and putting it all over our faces and in our hair. I think as adults, it’s just a shame that we’re taught as we grow up that if what we create isn’t perfect or isn’t beautiful, or doesn’t appeal to the masses, that we shouldn’t create. I think it’s so important for us to return to that childhood bliss of just going, “I don’t care if it’s ugly, like I don’t care if it’s not perfect. To me, it’s beautiful.” You think of like the joy that children share their creations. They’re so proud, and so I do think it’s really important that we create, however it is, and I think our souls start to sing again when we do it. Alexandra: Beautifully said. I totally agree. I noticed a theme on your website is about rewilding, and regaining touch with the wild parts of ourselves. Renee: Yeah, especially as women, because I think that feminine energy is scary to the patriarchy, right? We’ve been taught to hold it in and shut it down and turn off the light and all of it. I think it’s up to us to just turn that light on bright, and if people don’t like it, let them move away because the people who love it will come closer. Alexandra: Yes, absolutely. Well, this has been such a pleasure, Renee. Please tell us where we can find out more about you and your work. Renee: You can find me at reneelinell.com and my beautiful website designer. She’s so lovely. She is upgrading my website right now, and I just created free downloadable readers’ guides and companion journals for both books. Alexandra: Nice. Renee: She’ll be adding them to the website, I think, this week. Alexandra: Okay, great. I will put links a link in the show note to your website. Yeah, thank you so much. Well, thank you. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you. Renee: It’s been lovely to talk to you. Click here to grab your complimentary copy of the Creative Alchemy journaling handbook. The post Burning to Write the Truth with Renee Linnell appeared first on Alexandra Amor Books.