I started blogging on Livejournal in 2002. I had to check Livejournal.com, which still exists, to verify this. And in so doing, realized there is a LOT of interesting material to explore there. What a gift to have significant record of my thoughts from my early 20s. I do have a smattering of journal entries from that period and before, but this is more robust. I’ll have to make time to archive it somewhere more stable.
So, if Livejournaling was, and is, blogging – I was doing it back then. I started a blog with the intent to professionalize my writing somewhat later, in 2006, with the creation of Deepesthealth.com. That would eventually grow to host my first ever online course, all about sensory engagement with Chinese herbs, that ran during 2010–2011 and allowed us to buy our first house.
Around that time, my energy had to shift to two things. First, my new career. I graduated with a degree in Classical Chinese Medicine and we opened Watershed Wellness (then Watershed Community Wellness) in 2009. I also began teaching at my alma mater that year. By 2011, my duties at the school had started to increase, my clinical practice began to pick up, and importantly, we expanded our clinical operations to include other practitioners. Things got BUSY, and blogging became just one more stressor to manage. It fell by the wayside accordingly.
I tried to resurrect Deepesthealth.com in various forms over the years, and I continue to run a Chinese medicine practitioner focused website, Wholelifepractitioner.com. Additionally, I do significant writing for our clinic website at watershedwellnessastoria.com. But, none of that fulfills the need that saw me writing in the way I did in those early days. There is an itch that I’ve been trying to scratch, and because of the busyness of my life, I’ve had to let the itching continue unabated.
Something shifted for me in this last couple of months. It’s one of the results of several concurrently running processes that include meditation practice, deeper engagement with my profession, therapy, and importantly, my recent enrollment in the Linking Your Thinking workshop put together by Nick Milo and his team.
During one of the exercises in LYT13, we were asked to think about whether & how we get feedback. This was in the context of discussing the value of feedback loops to improve our work, but also to serve as a “forcing function” to get us to do the work at all. This is uniquely valuable for knowledge workers, authors, bloggers and anyone who does independent work that doesn’t come with obvious external checks and balances.
I realized that this has been my goal with blogging since the beginning. I was never particularly interested in using it to make money – though that became a focus over time. I wanted to use blogs as a way to motivate myself to develop and clarify my thoughts in a written form & then have, at least, the possibility of receiving feedback on those clarified thoughts.
Thus, I will start leaning in here. To discuss my journey deepening into Zen. To discuss the next layer of my professional meanderings. To learn what I know by trying to tell others what I think I know. And we’ll see what comes.