A MYSTICAL, MAGICAL
CREATIVE WRITING SEMINAR
A virtual, mystic, discussion-based, creative writing seminar with Baba Jaiya John to ignite a sacred relationship with your words.
This seminar series is a writing residency and sacred Indigenous gathering all at once. We immerse into far more than just the act of writing. We explore our relationship with nervous system caretaking, ancestral veneration, holistic healing, somatic well-being, freedom from oppression, memory and dreams, ritual and ceremony, and so much more.
Each monthly seminar gathering is its own unique, organic experience and ceremony.
All are warmly welcome. RACIALLY MARGINALIZED WRITERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO JOIN US.
This experience is for writers of all writing levels.
August 23, 2026
8am to 10am Pacific Daylight Time
September 20, 2026
8am to 10am Pacific Daylight Time
This unique discussion-based creative writing seminar is an Indigenous approach to creative expression, drawing on the intrinsic value of each participant’s life journey and cultural, ancestral wealth to fertilize and enrich our experience together.
This seminar includes:
Jaiya sharing intuitive thoughts and guidance on your relationship with your creative writing and writing life.
Group conversation about your relationship with your creative writing and writing life. This experience invites you to contribute your voice, questions, dreams, and visions to the sacred fire of our discussion, rather than to remain in silent, passive note-taking mode. More than anything though, we want you to be at your most comfortable, which sometimes may involve reflective listening. No pressure or expectation around this. Prioritize your comfort while stretching yourself to open, receive, share, and grow.
Sharing of personal and group practice ideas.
Together, gently, softly, and with reverence, we face your fears, insecurities, and burning passion fires. Within this clarity, we plant seeds of intention, illuminate your pathways, and affirm your journey and offerings. This is not instruction or correction. It is ceremonial wilding of your writing voice.
This is not your usual stiff, tight, tense mainstream (colonized) seminar. This is wildfire. Ancestral veneration and libation. Uproarious laughter. Rebellion tongue. Revolution fever. Show up delirious in your passion. We ride the fire-horse to personal and collective liberation.
HERE ARE JUST SOME OF THE MANY AREAS WE MAY EXPLORE:
The role of ceremony and ritual in writing
Dreams, prayers, and intentions
Ancestral encouragement and discernment
Silence, spaciousness, and nature as inspiration
Water, plants, sun, and earth as writing elements
Myths, legends, and stories
Mysticism, spirituality, and channeling
Writing as a form of painting, sculpture, architecture
Rhythm, flow, cadence, and pace
Sit with and root into your many true voices
What to tell and what not to tell
Approval, validation, and affirmation
Who’s cheering for you?
Who are you? How your identity serves or impedes your flow
Who are you writing for?
Comparison and inspiration
Idealizing and worshiping
Facing your writing fears and mental blocks
Trusting your instinct, intuition, and discernment
Not writing what need not be said
Writing what need be said
Breaking, mixing, and creating genres
INVEST IN YOURSELF AND EACH OTHER
The magic in these mystic seminars is in the way we listen deeply to each other, with compassionate empathy, to behold, support, honor, and nurture each other’s creative writing reality and projects. We are striving to clarify your writing priorities and path through a communal perspective-taking experience, a soulful ceremony of immersing in the art and spirit of writing itself. I value that you feel safe, affirmed, and assured in this experience.
BLESSINGS OFFERED
Serves as a dynamic, transformative creative writing retreat.
Receive soulful feedback on your relationship with your creative writing and writing life. We do not read each other’s works here. Nor is there any reviewing, editing, proofing, or correction of work. Instead, we gather together to highlight, celebrate, and nourish the beauty, power, fertility, and promise already alive in your creative writing life.
A safe, supportive, relaxed, playful, nurturing, affirming way of exploring your relationship with your writing.
Experience lasting breakthroughs with your creative writing.
Grow your self expression and inner awareness, and clarify your writing journey going forward.
Grow your writing voice. Release stress. Calm anxiety. Empower your well being.
Revitalize your creative writing purpose, passion, and peacefulness.
Develop skills and ways of seeing, feeling, and being that support your creative writing.
*LET’S PRACTICE OUR INDIGENOUS WAYS: Rather than to consider this seminar opportunity only for yourself, we gently encourage you to think of and invite others in your life who may also benefit. You may also gift someone for their birthday, as a humanitarian gesture for someone whose people are experiencing the trauma of genocide, war, or famine, or just because. Gratitude for joining us in this practice.
“Gathering with Jaiya John for the Wild Blackberry Creative Writing Playshop was an incredibly enlivening and potent experience, one that continues to feed me generously today. Jaiya has an eloquent, ancestrally fluent, and deeply authentic way of creating houses of belonging for diverse and communal spaces - he really knows how to coax the inherent genius that lives within folks to pour forth. His faithfulness to the Sacred translates into powerful transmissions that are such well-needed medicine for these times, both healing and transformative on so many levels. I am so grateful for any offerings that Jaiya puts out into the world. For me, he is an essential mystic, baba, and spiritual teacher for the critical times we find ourselves in globally. Ever grateful to you, Jaiya.”
“After many years of attending writing retreats and workshops, I quit. Almost every time I’ve attended one, I’ve been left rather messed up by someone else’s ideas of how I should write and what I should write about, and they’ve left me profoundly disoriented from my own ways, writing-callings, and voice. It usually takes me months to recover and return to my own soul writing. However, I knew it would be different when Jaiya offered a writing seminar. As Baba Jaiya offers wise soul words on writing in the context of a sacred communal ceremony, he shares not a prescriptive “how to,” but rather pours the waters of his contagious courage and opens doors to your own unique relationship with the spirit of writing, liberating what is aching to come through you. I can’t heap enough praise on the first gathering and look forward to many more. It’s such a gift to attend, to receive the soul waters poured so generously by Jaiya, and to hear from other writers as they share their souls and their process. It’s such a supportive and beautiful community. The transmission is beyond potent. It’s a profound gift to be present, to resonate, to be moved, and to take the gifts back to my writing desk. I’m so grateful for the chance to attend and drink deeply. ”
“The playshop was phenomenal for me! I can’t wait for the next playshop/ reading/ event! You are truly inspirational! From my Soul, thank you for this release! Overcoming my shyness and writers block was an unexpected, but immensely life changing, result from taking only one single Blackberry Writers Workshop with Dr. Jaiya John. Feeling safe enough to share my work was a blessing, and I thank you for providing such an inspirational space for self expression. The newfound flow of words and ideas has been so exciting, it’s like finally scratching the itch that has been bothering you for a lifetime! I can’t seem to put my pen down! Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!”
“Since the writing playshop, our lives have been transforming in beautiful waves. My dreams are so vivid and the pen is MOVING. Thank you for guiding us to our own paths of inspiration.”
“Each of these ceremonies has been so filled with tears, belly laughs, goosebumps of awe and truth and heartbreak, beauty and tenderness and hope and homefulness. Your writing reshapes me daily. Coaxes my inner-mystic back out from behind the veils of forgetting. Thank you for your presence in this world, at this time. I just have to say, and I pause, and say this out loud three times with my arms wide open. “Jaiya John, you light me up!” Your words, and your presence and the gatherings have changed me. I feel like I am drawn deeper into essence in your presence. Essence of unique genius, of love, of art- essence of what feeds life and heals. Essence of freedom. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the soul water. May more and more drink from this well. I think “dear artist” has made it to the top of my “most given away book” list. Right next to Martin Prechtel’s Rescuing the Light and Francis Weller’s Wild Edge of Sorrow. I am here to learn from you. My beloved, Erin and I both feel so grateful to be alive at the same time as you, are spread the seeds of your words everywhere we go. I feel I am being mentored daily, every time I open a book, or your presence comes to mind. The thread you are following feels like the medicine for these times, and I would love to support and be part of your brave revolution. WIth much love and gratitude.”
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WHO THESE EXPERIENCES ARE FOR
Please allow me to be as clear as possible: As an Indigenous soul, my life calling is to be of service to freedom from caste system oppression. Thank you for honoring that while I warmly invite and embrace all souls into these experiences, I hold this space in particular for those people who, due to race, experience the lifelong impact of generational, ongoing oppression, silencing, devaluation, and lack of access. Also, I work from an Indigenous perspective, value system, and way of life. Thank you for your sensitivity, humility, and grace in honoring these truths, whether or not your own lived experience leads you to understand them.
PRICING
Your investments allow me to offer these services to those who would not otherwise be able to afford it. This is how we behave in Indigenous, communal ways, sharing our resources so that the whole circle may be fed and well. When the whole is good, the elements of the whole are good. YOU MAY ALSO GIFT THESE EXPERIENCES to others, especially to racially marginalized youth and young adults.
INQUIRE FURTHER:
Please use the form to reach out to me below for questions and further details. I will do my best to respond swiftly. Please take wonderful care and may you feel the endless miracles blooming in your soul….
