Sacral Sea Writing Prompts
Start Here | Journey Paths | Work From Felt Experience | Practices + Teachings | Seasonal Gates | Writing Classes | Archetypal Classes | Inner Territory Journeys | Recent Classes | Community Signal Chat
Between April 17 and May 1, we're writing together every day! This is a call to everyone within Wild Soul, not just the ones who call themselves writers. Tapping into the Soul of Poetry is only one way we carry our Inner Territory work out into the world around us. So, even if it's just for 5 minutes a day, I invite you to sit down and write as a ritual, as an evolving mapline, as a way deeper into the churning, alive, dark, cosmic sacral sea of your own soul.
Here's what you need to know:
1. All first drafts are shit. They’re supposed to be. The shit is fertilizer, and we are looking to create something that is ALIVE and dirt-soaked and ancestral and brimming with possibilities. We are not interested in sanitized writing.
2. Early editing is weed killer to the most medicinal of our words. If we edit too soon, we’ll choke the life out of the most potent of our soul’s growth. So we’re going to do our best not to edit as we write. There’s always time and space to come back and edit later.
3. You can’t mess this up. You don’t even have to ever let anyone else read it. But there is no right or wrong. There is no good or bad. And, if you want to share your pieces inside the Signal chat or on your socials/Substack, I would love to celebrate every single word you've drawn from that ancient ancestral well. But what you do with it is entirely yours.
April 17: Saltwater Hymn
The cosmic sacral sea within is a mythical force of creation, of monsters, of sirens, of gods, of new worlds, of mysteries. Can you remove human morality from the story? Begin with a saltwater hymn of sirens, selkies, shipwrecking creatures, and an unknown realm calling to you.
April 18: Sea Cave Creature
“‘Hello root,’ she murmurs, but what she means is, “Hello death.” And it’s true, it always has been. At the base of our living, the very tip of our tailbones, is a cave we struggle to understand has always been a grave.” Write a part of you that lives in the thin place where Root meets Sacral, where cave meets sea, where rock meets water. Be creative - give this part of you characteristics you normally shy away from. Again, forget morality. Look deeper.
April 19: Serpent-Shaped Memory
Within you are water serpents, Medusa serpents, living memories tied to older stories about goddesses and community, oracles and seers, earth-rooted wisdoms, and warnings about severing connection to them all. Before you write, call on a pre-conscious memory, something that comes from another life or from ancestral archives. Channel it. Don’t worry about doing it right or about whether or not you’re making it up. The practice today is to rely on the ‘other’ to lead you.
April 20: The First Cry
Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote that, when we evolved to walk on land, we left the sea, but we made sure we brought the sea with us. The physical womb and the cosmic womb are both surging with amniotic fluid, with the Mother Sea that enacts a miracle. It recreates us from specks. From nearly nothing. We are remade, transformed, made new in the higher silence of the world womb. Think of the many times you’ve been reborn into this life. Think about how startling, uncomfortable, and even scary the first breaths into a new version of you have been. Now rewrite that story as if it weren’t happening to you or at you, but wildly for you. Claim the power of that wobbly first moment and make it a little feral.
April 21: There Is No Good. Only True.
We will always contend with whiteness. Even here, in the deep inner sea. Out here, whiteness is a man-made ship dumping oil into our waters, poisoning our ecosystem, choking our animal life. Out here, whiteness wants us so small, so thin, so frail, so turned inward that we concede our waterways and tidal rhythms and deep trenches. Floating oily across our waves is an invented belief that we are either good or bad, a shifting and fragile morality that clings to our character and suffocates us slowly. Disrupt it. Drown it. There is no good out here in the cosmic sea. There is only what is true.
April 22: Take Your Pelt And Run
In selkie stories, the pelt is stolen. A man - a fisherman or sailor or any ordinary man at all - finds selkies dancing under a full moon, their pelts carefully discarded on the rocks while they momentarily take the shape of women. Knowing the power of the pelt, what it means for the whole soul of the creature, the man steals it and hides it. He tells the distraught selkie woman that he’ll return it to her after 7 years if she’ll marry him. She does it. What wouldn’t we do for a piece of our soul returned to us? But after 7 years, his lie is obvious. He was never going to give back to her what is hers. She has to find her pelt and, when she does, she has to choose. This life that has grown dry and cracked over her skin, but has also given her legacy (children or a beautiful thing she’s built) or the smooth return of her own skin, waves pelting her slick back, freedom in the abyss. What will you choose? What has it cost you?
April 23: Friction
Because of the sacral chakra’s constant overlap, communication, and collaboration with the root chakra, the gates to the Great Below and the World Womb create a necessary friction. Between the two, a regenerative force sparks and agitates. Name that sacred friction.
April 24: Entrance
Remember that the sacral sea, the world womb, the cosmic womb, the belly of the whale - these are ways we describe metamorphosis. And each of us, as we approach the entrance, must decide what we will encounter when we step through. Will it be a desolation, a devastation, an endless pit of nothingness? Or will it be a new world, an unexplored realm, a reimagined way of being? Where is this entrance in your sacral sea? What does it ask of you before you pass through?
April 25: Dark Mother
Within the temple, the womb, the void, is the unconscious realm. The unconscious, the dark realms of the mind, the soul, the being have been - across cultures - perceived as female. Not as in gender or as in sex, but as in a realm all its own. It is fertile, alive, cunning, seeing, understanding, unmaking, and birthing all at once. All the time. It is a circular existence where time melds into itself, creating a world that asks us to contend with our programming, our conditioning, our clung to stories. It is not one half of a whole. It is the void where the whole is held. Write yourself into the unconscious. Try to avoid stereotypical or gender norm assumptions. Write as if gender ceases to exist. What might be in there? In you?
April 26: Ninlil
Ninlil, the Sumerian goddess who swims with her opalescent tail and determines the destinies of men. Ninlil, the patron of Ninevah where Jonah was sent to declare the wrath of his god. Ninlil of the sea, perhaps even the first embodiment of Lilith, who left her garden, her man, and her god for the Red Sea. For a wild that demanded she step up and recognize what had been true all along. Her own power rivaled El’s. Both Lilith and Ninlil were free enough to draw the wrath of a vengeful god. He didn’t get what he wanted either time. So write that story, or write one parallel to it. All the versions of us a man-made god has sent someone else to try to wipe out. All the times they’ve failed.
April 27: The Heartbeat Is A Whale Song
Maybe whales have been our libraries all along, their sonar songs the long story of the earth being woven around the planet in migratory patterns. Maybe we’ve forgotten how to listen, how to understand, but we have somehow not forgotten how holy these priestesses are. Their sheer size, their bodies breaching, their migration paths, their gentleness. Now remember that they’ve been hunted, caged, made to perform, left in isolation. Write as if you are a story held inside a whale song, a heartbeat pulsing through their sonar voice. Tell the whole truth of it.
April 28: Erotic Whirlpool
Write the navel of your sacral sea, the place where everything caught in the current funnels down into a vortex of the erotic. Creation waters take what they want, tear it apart, and spread it out for miles. They give back to the sea, to the living world within. Imagine the erotic in you as a place of transformation, but as a place you have to be willing to dissolve what once was before even catching a glimpse of what might be. What will you give to the erotic force, the endless whirlpool in deep, dark waters?
April 29: Alien
We look out into the cosmos for signs of alien life, forgetting that only 5% of the oceans have been explored. We know nothing of what lives below. We have only the faintest idea. So dig into Octavia Butler’s living example and write something strange, something otherworldly, something that makes sense of life on earth, but only if you’re willing to see it from a strange lens. As a deep-sea alien, an unknown creature.
April 30: Dethrone Him
In Greek myth, Poseidon is king of the sea. And, like other male gods, he flippantly drowns, rapes, and takes from mortals. I want you to dethrone him. Maybe even give Medusa, who was famously punished for having been raped by Poseidon, his power. His domain. His sea. Think about who Poseidon might represent for you - whether you know them or not - and write from a rocky island in the middle of nowhere. Write as if the only way through is to dethrone a god and divide up his power. Who will you give it to? This is your Inner Territory, so the sea itself conspires with you to end the reign of a dangerous god.
May 1: Shoreline
Shorelines are boundary layers, places where the veil between the seen and unseen are thin. These are places where we can commune with the spirits of the land and sea, with our dead, with ancestors, with guides and spirit allies. At the end of this Journey, write from the shoreline. Write from land, but from a thin place where you can see wide into other realms. Tell us what you see.
