Burning Man and Word of the Day
I’m happy to be back and had an amazing time at Burning Man. I stayed in a camp called Shamandome, which is a healing camp run by Barnaby Ruhe, who’s a professor of shamanism and art at NYU Gallatin and has run this camp for 17 years. Each camp offers something different such as all-day coffee and crepes, partner dance, free costumes, word puzzles, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Our camp offered group shamanic power, animal workshops, and one-on-one healings.
I had the great pleasure of debuting my Word of the Day Practice book at a workshop and then applied the techniques successfully to the twenty-plus people I consulted with in one-on-one healing sessions. Burning Man is a crucible and brings out everybody’s old problems and traumas.
What was new and exciting for me was this was not helping writers write better; it was helping people heal from life traumas and other serious problems. Burning Man is well-known for its transformational effects, and sometimes that brings up a lot of dark material from the past. The camp is designed to work with people going through this, and we probably worked with two or three hundred Burners!
I saw that whatever the Burner was dealing with, the first part of the solution was to reconnect the person with the natural self-love we all feel for ourselves before we are challenged by society. Reminding them that they did love themselves using some of my techniques almost magically put their problems into a more manageable perspective because they realized they had allies: themselves and how they described God, Source, or Higher Intelligence. For each person, not feeling alone was a solution unto itself.
I asked each Burner to create a Word the Day cluster and brainstorm around it. I could then figure out their core issue from the cluster and make suggestions to help them connect with a love of self and solve the issue.
It was an amazing and humbling experience because I saw people transform from distressed to peaceful in just a few minutes. Realizing that I could cure people at this profound level with the Word of the Day technique “blew my mind.”
My next book will definitely be about these techniques for a more general healing audience. Below is a photograph someone took of me doing a healing.
Aside from the healing, Burning Man is all it is rumored to be. Lots of travel, lots of dancing, lots of dust, and people who are ready to find their purpose.
Book to Script Summit Interview
In other news, I am being interviewed today as part of the Book to Script Summit-an amazing event that teaches writers how to adapt their novels into screenplays. I’ve worked on many such projects, which I guess is why I’m being interviewed.
If you have a book you’d like to see made into a movie, this conference will help you a lot!
Writing the Screenplay in Eight Weeks
My novel, which has now been renamed Bad Girl Pie, has moved forward, and I will have to devote myself to making some revisions and including recipes. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible for me to teach How to Write a Screenplay in Eight Weeks this semester. If you’ve signed up, please let me know if you’re interested in taking it in January 2023. If not, I will provide a full refund.
Please join me at the next Word of the Day webinar on Wednesday, September 21 at 7:00 pm EST.
I look forward to resuming these amazing classes.
Here’s to your successful writing,
Professor Marilyn Horowitz
