Why I Wrote The Book
A Pre Launch Tale & Invitation To Be On The Advanced Reader Copy Launch Team
By Samantha Keen
It is great to have you here on the Transformation Catalyst newsletter train. This is an exciting train right now.
We are launching the newsletter. We are preparing for the book launch. And I am asking for people who want to be in the Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) team for the upcoming pre launch of my new book to personally email me back.
The book titled Reclaiming Vitality: A Healing Journey Through Chronic Fatigue and Burnout that is coming out early October 2024. The Publishers are working on the layout right now, and so the deadline is a bit of a fluid target.
Wow though, I am so happy to share this with you. (You might read that a few times in the coming days, weeks and months because it is true!)
So what is an ARC team? You might ask.
The ARC team is a group of people who will receive the advanced reader copy of the book free-of-charge a couple of weeks ahead of the launch. The group is kind of like a cheer leading group for the book. You read it, and if you are inspired (no obligation) then you share on social media and leave reviews on Amazon, or whatever you like to support the launch.
If you want to be on the ARC team, just email me at info@samanthakeen.com and apply. We can take it from there. I am looking for a group of about 20 to 45 people who want to be involved.
Inspiration
For now though, here at Transformation Catalyst Newsletter I am going to share a few things with you over the coming days and weeks about the process behind writing the book and it’s inspiration. This will include some things about understanding your own subtle energy, and recovering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and burnout that will hopefully inspire, help and inform you too.
The first thing that I want to share with you is about why I wrote the upcoming book Reclaiming Vitality: A Healing Journey Through Chronic Fatigue and Burnout. This book is about giving people with CFS and burnout a pathway forward to real healing. And it is about shining a light on a spiritual and transformation path that is real and works at a very deep level.
The inspiration that I had to write this book is a deeply vulnerable thing to share, but also I think informative about both the healing intent of this project and the way the creative process can unfold. (I learned so so so much along the way about both of these things.)
My heart was full of joy on a 12-hour drive in my old subaru through the red Australian desert landscape, surrounded by the magnificent vast blue sky, when I had the first flash of inspiration for this project. It was 2004/05 and I had been living in a retreat center in the outback of NSW Australia, in a place called White Cliffs doing full-time spiritual practices. After those 18 months the level of my recovery from years of CFS was such that I felt better than I had since I was in my early teens and energy was endless. I felt alive, and clear, and joyful and uplifted.
I remember thinking wow, if people could see my body of energy now they would see how much I have really changed.
What a massive gift that was! Just two years earlier I had been so down and out, so exhausted and in pain, so bummed by the struggle of living in that challenging body and then I was finally free. To be clear, I was recovered after just a year of doing that style of meditation and healing work with the Clairvision School of meditation, but after the 18 months living in the retreat full-time, I was better than new. I felt amazing.
It is hard to capture the aliveness of experiencing the aliveness of that transformation. Except perhaps with one word, joy. The kind of joy that is an inner exuberance that bubbles up from the core seemingly without any external cause.
Anyway, as I was smiling broadly inside of myself, and driving through that dry hot landscape, I could not help but wonder about all those people out there who are also sick and desperately trying to find their own pathway to freedom from cfs. But unlike me, perhaps there are people who could not find their liberation. And I thought wow, those people deserve to know that there is another way. That YOU CAN GET BETTER, YOU CAN FIND YOUR OWN PATHWAY TO RECOVERY.
Maybe that is you? Or someone you know?
But I was moving to another rural spiritual retreat center just 3 hours inland of Sydney, life was busy and I let the idea drop away.
And yet it returned a few months later, the inspiration to communicate to the world about the possibility of recovery from CFS through understanding subtle bodies and energy when I did a few weeks of solo meditation.
The idea for this book felt inspired by the possibility of true freedom. It was alive, white, high, clear and bright. Almost like a brilliant snowflake or star in the blue blue sky above.
Does anyone else have packed ideas for whole projects come in the form of an image or a musical sound, like a symbol for the whole idea?
I almost always know those are the best ideas when that happens to me.
This time that one clear picture was a whole package of how to bring this information to those potential friends out there who are looking for a way out of the drudgery of being exhausted and sick. Again, I decided to drop it for a little while because I was meditating.
Many ideas come and go in meditation, so it is usually better wait a few weeks after the retreat. If it is still good then I would take further steps to see if this was really an idea worth pursuing, or whether it was just a big distraction, taking me away from my own path of transformation?
Epic Journey
Everyone that I spoke to was very much in favor of me going ahead with this project. My spiritual teacher, trusted friends, mentors and advisers were all in agreement. This was a good idea.
Honestly I wrote a rough first draft several times in the following few years, as well as running workshops, giving talks and doing private sessions for people with CFS and burnout.
But none of those initial drafts was any good. Ouch, difficult but true. Only a writer knows the pain of writing a bad first draft. If that is you, keep going. Keep writing. You will get better with the right feedback, and consistent effort, I promise.
Still, I wonder if the me back then would have committed to this project it if I had know what an epic journey it would be?
If you are doing the math, then you can see it was 20 years before the book came into fruition. Twenty very eventful years where I learned so so much. Not least because I have lived on three different continents, five different cities, and set up my business and life pretty much from scratch each time.
Working an IST Practitioner I saw a lot, a lot, of clients (at least 8,000 sessions) all around the world, as well as giving many public talks on CFS and burnout, presentations about this work corporations, and workshops too.
Of course I also grew massively though talking with and working as an IST Practitioner for many many people from all over the world. I helped those people as clients and in the audiences of talks and workshops with many issues including CFS and burnout.
But what all of those people had in common was that they wanted more, and they wanted freedom to be themselves fully in their lives. They wanted connection to themselves at a deep level, which sometime included breaking out of the shackles of fatigue and illness.
Little did I realize but this book about recovery was to be a life-long project.
I learned so so so much, about life, about people, about the world. But most of all about myself.
So Much More to Give
In all of that time, I was also using the Clairvision style of meditation for myself and developing my own skills in energy management.
Working as a practitioner in New York city alone is a huge training ground for learning how to manage your energy, particularly if you have a history of CFS and burnout. Sometimes I felt like just standing on a street corner in Manhattan for long enough you could get CFS or burnout. And of course many of the clients that came to me there were suffering these issues as well as numerous other things.
After moving to Berkeley, California, and managing an urban meditation center for four years, I was too busy to write. However, the minute that I moved into my own place, again that same impulse to write this book returned.
It had exactly the same flavor of clarity, enthusiasm, warmth, joy and uplifting that it had almost 20 years earlier. This time though, I had so much more to give to it. And I had a team of people around me that were able to support the project as much as I was able to receive from them.
So here we are. On the cusp of publication. So exciting. Please do write to me at info@samanthakeen.com to apply for the ARC Team if you want to be involved in the launch. Yay!
