Exploring My Life Story: A Deeper Reflection Into Your Life Stories
7-Week Zoom Workshop
Wednesday mornings
January 14 to February 25, 2026
9:30 am to noon (PST)
Registration opens December 1, 2025
This workshop series invites you into a deeper reflection of your life journey. The Guided Autobiography (GAB) approach is not only conducive to legacy writing but is also an evidence-based writing method for self-discovery, growth and healing. Life story writing provides insights that can lead to a deeper understanding of your life journey. Writing your stories can give meaning to your feelings. Sharing those stories in a safe, supportive space with like-minded women can lead to a more profound knowing. The process is therapeutic; you will connect with others and yourself through sharing stories.
What You Can Expect
The group setting gives structure for your writing and, with a maximum of six participants, you have an opportunity to connect with other women rowing north.
Each week you will be introduced to a theme designed to trigger memories, uncomfortable moments, and creativity.
At home you will write a two-page, 800 - 1,000 word life story.
You will read your story the following week in a small, safe group. No critique; only encouragement and support. You only read stories you are comfortable sharing.
Themes
Pivotal Life Moments
“You can’t skip chapters, that’s not how life works. You have to read every line, meet every character.”
—Pillow Thoughts
Embracing Vulnerability
Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love.
—Brené Brown
Finding Resilience
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strongest in the broken places.”
—Ernest Hemingway
Love and Intimacy
“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
—Anne of Green Gables
Spiritual Values
“This is the time to begin to think of higher matters than looking ten years younger than we are, wonderful as that can be.”
—Joan Chittister
My Life As Lived
Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through.
—Rabbi Harold Kushner
“How many of us, I wonder, are walking around with stories inside of us that we are unaware of? Stories that speak deeply of who we are, ones that are waiting urgently to be told. Our life is a story, and our spirit needs to have this story in order for us to live.”
Note: These workshops are therapeutic but they are not therapy. It is helpful to understand how your life has flowed in certain directions, but that is not the same as analyzing your life. Women Rowing North is about gathering a personal history.
