The book

A transformative guide and radical invitation to come home to your body—finding safety, joy, and connection, exactly as you are.

Movement, breathing exercises, and writing practices for a fully embodied life—simple somatic resources for complex bodies.

Write Yourself Home offers accessible somatic writing practices to help you connect more deeply to your body and embrace your own unique story beyond the boundaries of health, wellness, and ability.

This book guides you on a somatic journey to root into your body’s presence; listen to your body’s wisdom; reclaim pleasure; and integrate joyful, creative practice into your daily life. Each chapter blends evocative teachings, insights from author Johanna Franzel’s lived experience with chronic illness, and practical, gentle prompts that are designed to meet you—and nourish you—where you are.

Order

  • "Write Yourself Home is an enthralling, luminous, deeply moving account of a descent into illness and a path back to the body and to allegiance to that body, through language. In her deeply innovative and beautifully curated exercises, Johanna Franzel shows us a way to open up again to life and to hope and joy and full embodiment. Find a cozy chair, because you won’t be able to put this book down.”

    —Susan Conley, author of Landslide

  • "For anyone whose body has rewritten their life without permission, Write Yourself Home offers a different way forward. Grounded in somatic awareness and radical permission, this book offers accessible practices for those navigating illness, trauma, grief, or burnout—without pushing, fixing, or bypassing. Designed to be done from bed, from rest, from wherever you are, Franzel helps readers reclaim their own language, agency, and sense of wholeness—without denying pain or demanding recovery. This is not writing to improve yourself, but writing to come home to yourself. Highly recommend."

    – Sarah Ramey, musician & author of The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

  • "An essential guide for every body. Write Yourself Home invites you to fully inhabit the life that's yours, and it does so with creativity, warmth, and clear steps. I highly recommend this book to every single person out there who happens to have a body!”

    —Stephen Cope, author of The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

  • "The first step to telling the truth - in your life, on the page - is letting yourself hear the truth. Johanna’s practice of embodied writing offers a way to access the truth that lives in the body, beneath other ways of knowing. You won’t find a wiser, more compassionate teacher."

    —Megan Devine, author of It’s OK that You’re Not Ok: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture that Doesn’t Understand

  • “In Write Yourself Home, Johanna Franzel reframes the basic act of writing. This is a writing process that pays a different kind of attention and provokes new form and meaning from the knowledge you carry around with you everywhere. What is truly revelatory is watching Franzel demonstrate, through her own experience, how to use writing to follow the instructions of the body. Then she shows you how! This book is deeply generous, practical and accessible. You will walk away knowing just what to do.”

    – Chana Joffe-Walt, radio journalist and producer at This American Life

Write Yourself Home is a transformative guide for creating your own vision of wholeness, one that doesn’t ignore the challenges and struggles you hold in your body, or suggest individual solutions to collective problems. This is a profound new approach to root into your body’s truth and creative genius.

You’ll learn to:

  • Nurture a sense of belonging in the body you have, right now, as it is

  • Break free from imposed definitions of health and wholeness

  • Cultivate creativity and presence

  • Build daily practices to nourish your embodied wisdom

About the author

Resources for readers

Guided meditation for settling
Johanna Franzel
Embodied writing for the autumnal equinox
Words & music Johanna Franzel