| Writing as a Spiritual Practice:
Your Do-it-yourself Writing Workshop Last of a 3-part series: Sustaining Your Practice by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg I started writing when I was 14. My parents were getting divorced, and I needed words as a lifeline. During the last 30 years, I've continued writing -- through heartbreaks and losses, celebrations and breakthroughs, serious illness and emotional black holes, and over hill and dale. Whatever I've given to writing is nothing compared to what writing has given me: illumination and connection, a tunnel toward the light and comforts in the dark, understanding and entertainment, my own history and a clearer glimpse of the future, and most of all, a way to be right here, in the intimate light of the page, right now. Last month, I wrote about writing a spiritual practice, and the month before on getting started in a writing practice, including exercises for igniting words on paper (please see www.edgenews.com for those article). This month, I'm back to write about sustaining a writing practice as a regular part of your life. Finding Your Own Way Go to any bookstore toward the writing books, and you'll see long shelves full of books on writing as a process. Some are full of helpful exercises and approaches, or moving stories of the author's practice that help you connect with your own desire to create. Some are also chalk full of stringent rules for doing this, which to me is the equivalent of giving someone rules for how to have a spiritual experience, right now, between the hours of 9 and 10 a.m. Life doesn't follow the rules, and neither should you unless the rules mirror your own needs. Finding your practice is all about finding what works for you, what fits into your life, what enables you to access more of yourself. Julie Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, is an absolutely superb guide on recovering lost creativity and creative energy. Yet, she strongly espouses that followers should write a set number of pages each morning before doing anything else (like getting out of bed, brushing their teeth, etc.). I know many people for whom this process was a godsend, and helped them enormously , not just with finding their practice but with finding their way of painful and chaotic passages in their lives. I also know a good many people for whom this practice deepened their depression or accentuated their anxiety. What's a visionary exercise for some is a blinding light for others. Some important studies, particularly by the very skilled and visionary James Pennebaker, on the connections between writing and health and healing, show that sometimes writing just to release emotions can do more harm than good, making the writer feel trapped exactly where they felt stuck to begin with. And for some situations, more directed writing exercises (like writing from another point of view, or writing in the form of letter) can help a person not just express pain, but find the tools to transform that pain into the next understanding of his or her life. This is all to say that one size does not fit all in ANY artistic or emotional or spiritual practice. We all must, as the cliché goes, make our path by walking it. So please beware of any guides, authors or workshop leaders who tell you there is only one way. Instead, listen to yourself. By embracing ourselves as beloved learners along the path, we can help ourselves feel safe and open enough to discover what it is we're seeking and how to find it, or at least look for it in a more meaningful way. Translating this to a writing practice means finding the logistics that work best for you. For some, it works great to sit up in bed, grab the journal and write a little each morning. For others, like me and fellow parents out there, waking up and getting into the morning is a difficult time of the day where shoes must be found, lunches remembered, backpacks pulled out from where they fell under the futon couch, and forms signed (OK, so if I was more organized...but I'm not!). Writing, even waking up before everyone else wakes to write, isn't an option I would merrily embrace. So instead, I've designated a whole day each week as "write and wander day" for the six hours my three kids are in school. For others of you, writing late at night before bed would work. Or you could meet a friend every Saturday morning for three hours to sit in a café together and write. The point is to find something that works in balance with your life, not against it -- and to find a practice that helps you get freer, and doesn't weigh you down with guilt over not fitting into someone else's idea of a practice. You already know when and how this could work for you. And you have a lot of ideas on how to protect that space (some you might have even found in my first article in this series or in other sources you've read). When you sit down in the neighborhood café with your headphones blaring old rock 'n' roll and your hands on your keyboard, or when you curl up in your window seat with your beautiful journal, or when you pull out your memo pad in the office, you already know (maybe without knowing it) what you wish to create, what you need to write. There are many exercises and prompts to help you, such as ones in these articles and a good many writing guides out there, but many good exercises will simply help you unlock the door you're ready to open. A good writing prompt will allow you to meet your words wherever you are -- whether you need to write about the problems with the laundry or the problems of the world. Sustaining your practice Years ago, I read a very important poem by Marge Piercy on writing that ended with the lines, "You have to love it more than wanting to be loved." I have found this true again and again: Creating something is a labor of love, a play of delight. If you write to seek approval or love from others, you'll largely be unsatisfied and often caught in the cycle of desiring what you can't fully have. If you write to feed your soul, every session will be some kind of feast. So how to sustain this? You do it. You find the time, you protect the time (remember: headphones, leaving the house, writing in your car, whatever it takes), and you keep reminding yourself this isn't a competitive sport but a spiritual practice. You expect that there will be times you'll have little to say, that the well will seem dry. And there will be times of immense harvest. There will be surprises, and some stretches of boredom too, and there will be revelations and wonders. Think of it as mini-road trip you take each writing session to someplace you have never traveled or to familiar grounds you're seeing with new eyes. As for what to do with your writing, that's a whole other deal. But it's probable that the more you write, the less you'll feel the need to show your writing to anyone because you'll find your own response and understanding becomes central to your process. Yet there is also enormous value in writing and reading in community: When you speak your words aloud to people listening, the words get bigger. One thing that can help you sustain your practice is to set up a group of a few others who also write as a practice -- a group that can meet together occasionally, write for a few hours, sharing the fruits of the process along the way. One particular approach for a group is to use what Natalie Goldberg called "marathon writing." To do this, you set up a big hunk of time (preferably at least two hours), and you give everyone a bunch of slips of paper or little cards. Everyone writes a word, which could be a potential topic, on each slip or card. Then you toss them into a hat, and pull one out, read it aloud, and write like crazy for 10-15 minutes. The more concrete the words, the easier the writing often is. You'd be amazed at how much you can write about sneakers as opposed to writing about democracy. After each exercise, people can read what they've written aloud, and then everyone can do another round. And another. A variation of this, and one I've done often with groups, is that instead of writing, everyone leaves their journals open (unless they wish that writing exercise to be confidential), and then the group rotates around, reading one another's journals with no talking aloud absolutely! It's usually a thrill to simply read someone else's journal (maybe because it's taboo), and by not speaking, all of our energy to respond to one another has no place else to go by into our next writing exercise. In any case, there are wonderful books and guides out there with lots of exercises you can do alone or with groups, and here are some more to play with if they speak to you: -- Take a moment in your life when you experienced an injustice, and rewrite it, adding a character (or angel or animal or magic object) that serves as an advocate to you and helps counter the injustice. See how you feel afterwards. -- Describe the perfect day, the perfect house, the perfect love of your life, the perfect walk in the woods. -- Write like a movie camera. Pretend your writing is a movie camera first doing a wide angle shot of a place you spend or spent a lot of time (a workplace, a school, a home). Then zero in on the entrance, follow down the halls, go to a room, and focus in on you there. See what script unfolds. -- Put on loud and fast music, and dance alone for a few minutes. Then sit down and write as fast as you can without thinking about it. Put on the music again, and dance some more. Then write some more too. Variation: do a yoga pose, breathe into it for a while, and then write something. Then do another yoga pose, interlacing your yoga session with writing. -- Aromotherapy meets the page! Take a few scents you truly love (sometimes essential oils are great for this). Spell one, and write what images you evokes in you. Or try to describe this scent to someone who has never smelled it by using examples of other senses (this lavender smells like blue paint on a white wall looks). -- Go on a long walk. Then sit down and write what the trail you just walked would say if it had a voice. -- Write a love letter to yourself or someone else. Or write a letter to god, or to whatever/whoever you believe in. Write many of these letters. And write yourself responses too. Suggested readings for this month include Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind, the poetry of Marge Piercy and Li-Young Lee and Sharon Olds, Rodney Yee's and Nina Zolotow's Yoga: The Poetry of the Body. Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., has 30 years experience behind the pen as a poet and writer. She's a certified poetry therapist, and she directs the Transformative Language Arts program at Goddard College (www.goddard.edu). Her books include Lot's Wife (poetry), and the award-winning Write Where You Are: How to Use Writing to Make Sense of Your Life. She also facilitates writing workshops for people of many backgrounds, including upcoming workshops for people recovering from and living with cancer and chronic illness at Menorah Medical Center, and half-day retreats on writing as a spiritual practice, and much more. Please see her website at www.writewhereyouare.org for details, or contact her at carynken@mindspring.com or (785) 843-0253. Copyright © 2004 Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg |
||
|
May 2004 |
|
