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Changing Our Lives with Healing Poetry:
A Tool for Girls and Young Women To Create The Positive Messages and Images We Need

By Jerrice Baptiste, Creator and Instructor of Authentic Poetry


Poetry has been a tool that allowed me to express myself and to heal my deepest wounds. The poetry that I write helps me to achieve peace and fulfillment from my life situations. I call it Healing Poetry or Authentic Poetry. I write healing poetry about each area of my life that I feel I need healing. I create a positive experience through this writing which is uplifting, satisfying, and most of all healing. I wrote a manuscript titled If Only They Had Told Me… Healing Poetry And Affirmations For Your Soul. The healing process and poetry that I share in this article are derived from my manuscript.

I am finally able to give to myself the messages that I needed to hear and know all of my life, from myself and from others who affected me. I am able to release the pain, frustration, and hurt, while replacing them with positive messages and affirmations in the healing poetry. I can explore my underlying feelings in the writing and transform them into strong positive messages that I can read and start affirming everyday.

I wanted to become aware of all the areas in our lives that need healing, the relationship with myself, the relationship with my parents, siblings, mate, and friends, my relationship with my daily roles, my relationship with food, communication, career, illness, health, faith, self-confidence, discipline, success, forgiveness, fulfillment, self-image, guilt, shame, love, respect, courage, balance, stress, and trust. I use the word relationship because I am having an interaction with all these things, or they are having an interaction with me. In this sense an interaction allows me to have an effect, to change, to mold, to decide, to cooperate in our own way. I can determine what role that another person, event, situation and messages will play in my...