My name is Rachel Jamison Webster, and I am the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed, Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family. I am a Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where I have taught full-time for the last 17 years. I also did a decade of meditation practice, energy work, and training through Invision of Chicago. I love helping people to access the poems, stories and essays that only they can write. Meditative Creative Writing forms the foundation of my practice as both a writer and instructor. Through this process, we learn to access the spaciousness and specificity within ourselves. We develop our intuition , and learn to connect the material of our own lives to wider historical and social contexts. We uncover the stories that are imprinted in our deep memories, and then we expand them with our imaginations and curiosity. By working with our stories in this open and agile way, we learn to both honor our lived experiences and transcend them. This process leads to more embodied writing and more liberated consciousness as we release and reshape the stories we once called ourselves.