On a chilly Sunday afternoon last month, a sisterhood of women, along with friends and family, gathered at the New Hope Chapel at Acadian Village in Lafayette for the presentation of a book three years in the making. Thirsting for More: Writings from Sacred Center is a compilation of the poetry and prose written by 18 women who were brought together at a centering prayer group known as Sacred Center. The collection serves to reassure readers that we are not alone in what we’re experiencing and there is a light at the end of a dark journey.

Set in the countryside of Maurice, Sacred Center is a community where women gather for centering prayer, meditation, and support, guided by spiritual leader and Center founder Lyn Holley Doucet, a licensed professional counselor and well-published author. 

Over the past 12 years, some 150 women have come through Sacred Center, meeting every Thursday morning in a tiny cottage known affectionately as Honeysuckle Cottage. Representing different cultures, religions and ethnicities, they are mothers, grandmothers, caregivers, nurses, teachers, artists and writers – like Dana Manly, who provided the book’s cover art, and poet Wendi Romero, who also served as the book’s editor. 

This is the second book written by the women of Sacred Center. Their first, Reflections of the Heart, published in 2018,shares their healing, hopes, dreams and love. 

Romero, a contributor to both Sacred Center books, realized the power of poetry after sustaining a closed-head injury in 2009. In the nearly two years of recovering from post-concussion syndrome, the former CT/MRI technologist struggled with communicating in sentences. And then her poetry teachings from college came back to her. “I started writing one phrase at a time and that’s what poetry is. I did a lot of writing as part of my recovery,” she shares.

Like others at the Sacred Center, Romero says writing helps her to process things that she doesn’t understand or that are challenging for her. Her personal experiences are seeped into lines like: “From your shadow, turn and face the light, see what it brings—wholeness once more returning, coming in full, circling toward new life in the Spring.”

Her injury and the challenges it presented are one of the many themes in her books representing a profound stage in her life. The idea of sharing her experiences in a deeper way led to her first book Pilgrimage to Self, and she has since published two other poetry books. 

“After my head injury, I was writing from what I was feeling, not what I was thinking; it was coming from a deeper place than my brain,” she reveals.

In the pilgrimage to finding herself, Romero says, “I have discovered that it is possible to recover from something that I thought I’d never recover from and to find life as vibrant after the injury as it was before. Writing poetry has been my healing journey, and I had no idea it would touch people the way it has.”

While her works have been used as a tool by therapists and spiritual directors in group and one-on-one therapy sessions, Romero says, “The greatest recognition has been from the group at Sacred Center telling me that my words spoke to them and offered them hope.”

In speaking of her hopes for Thirsting for More, she says, “To share our personal stories of hope, faith and new life is to offer our lived experiences as a pathway of healing, light and transformation for others…and for the world.”

Thirsting for More: Writings from Sacred Center can be purchased online at Amazon, Xlibris and Barnes and Noble.