Writing Wisdom
Writing as Meditation
I completed my seven pearls of writing wisdom in my last newsletter and invite any new subscribers to head to my archive if you are interested in reading them. It was based on a chi running programme I did years ago.
This month I want to look at writing not in terms of your current work in progress but as a therapeutic tool, one that will ultimately be of great value not only to your writing process but to your overall wellbeing. The truth is our heads are messy things, full of random thoughts and ideas that often intrude when we least want them too. When you try to focus on writing your short story or novel, the internal chatter goes up a notch, reminding us of chores that need to be done and planting seeds of doubt as your hands are poised over the keyboard. That loud inner critic scoffs at the idea that you can write, so you falter, and your creative urges are stifled.
Now just imagine that whatever you write is for your eyes alone. That your friends, family, and the waiting critics will never set eyes on your words. That you can write whatever you like knowing it will remain private. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine how that feels. That your innermost thoughts, feelings, and embarrassing ideas leak onto the page risk-free.
Nobody has your life. Your childhood, your family, your griefs and your joys. Whatever you write is shaped by your past experiences, good and bad. Your words are a prism that reflect you, how you view the world and your place in it. It may be that your past is so filled with shame, guilt or trauma that even taking a glimpse into it feels too much. And that is all right. This exercise is something for you alone and it might well lead to a place where you need professional help. Just start with tiny, doable steps.
Gifting time to yourself to tap into your creativity can be the most healing and giving thing you can do for yourself. It will help you to access the richest, most unique resource you have for your creative projects.
Get yourself a journal or exercise book. One that is beautiful and that makes you want to write (or draw if words are too hard). Add in pens in different colours, maybe some crayons or pencils or highlighters. Be playful and just let go. Remember, this is for your eyes only.
Start with this simple exercise. Try sitting very still. Feet flat on the floor, back straight. Take three slow breaths, counting to three when you inhale, pausing for three then counting three for your exhale. Focus on your immediate environment and set your timer for ten minutes and just write. If you can’t write what you see, hear, feel, taste and smell, draw instead.
There are so many safe memories you can retrieve for this exercise. Try the following ideas.
Words someone said to you that still resonate. The teacher who praised your artwork, the lover who told you your eyes were beautiful, a friend who thanked you for your kindness. Your first pet. A place you visited that filled you with joy. Your favourite song.
Once you feel comfortable, you may find yourself drawn to darker places. What are the difficult memories that leak into your current life. Honour your fear, guilt or shame. Don’t judge your words. Just let your pen write. It may just be one word or sentence repeated over and over. It may help to write the headings, what do I regret or feel ashamed of?
Do whatever you have to do to reach into those locked away spaces. Sit in a library or under a tree, get up early to create some time for yourself. If you are at home, light a candle or make yourself a cuppa. Allow yourself to free fall into words, and don’t make any judgements, just let whatever thoughts are in your mind slide onto the page. They don’t have to make sense. There is no right or wrong. No judgement.
I have sometimes suggested to a patient that they do this exercise when they are unable to express themselves verbally. I reassure them what they write is not for my eyes but to help them make sense of events. A difficult diagnosis, dealing with chronic pain, a divorce, trauma or loss. If you have a history of mental health issues, you may consider joining Red Room Poetry a safe space to share your words. They provide support should you find yourself triggered.
When you are stuck, unable to write and procrastinate endlessly, try free writing. Use a timer or just commit to writing one page. Use one the prompts I have suggested above or just write whatever is in your head. Use a notebook and write by hand. Gift yourself as little as ten minutes and free fall into whatever words are in your head. Don’t edit or judge what you write. Remember this exercise is strictly private. If you do this writing meditation regularly, you will be surprised how uncensored words give your imagination free rein to explore your complex internal landscape. When you are not worried about placing in a competition, being published or getting feedback, there is no pressure, just the joy of providing your imagination with space by allowing it the freedom of a blank page.
And don’t forget to keep your notebook somewhere away from prying eyes. It is your private, safe playground, a place to explore the fascinating labyrinth of your inner life.
GP Wisdom
I have delayed writing about one of the hardest (for me at least) non-medical paths towards greater wellbeing. We all know that planned time spent in quiet meditation delivers tremendous benefits and yet it can be very challenging to just stop and be.
Those of you old enough, will remember the anxiety and nervous anticipation of Y2K, a new year met with angst that the world as we knew it would end. Fears of planes falling out of the sky and collapse of society aside, there was something special about slipping into a new millennium. Curious what life looked like one thousand years earlier, I read a book by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger called, The Year 1000, outlining what life was like in England in that year. What really stood out to me was how quiet it was. No planes overhead, no cars, no phones, no loud cities with their relentless noise.
This month, I will reflect on my own challenges in finding silence and hope that it inspires you to seek your own practice of the present moment, or mindfulness.
I invite you to pause and view this brief film about happiness by Steve Cutts. If you are anything like me, you may have tried to soothe all this busyness, noise, and the ceaseless demands of life by adding more things to your schedule. Yoga classes, meditation, books about time management and work/life balance– anything to counteract the incessant stimulation that fills our days (and at times, nights). And yet, even when we make deliberate choices to relax and focus on self-care, it can feel like squeezing yet another thing into lives already stretched beyond capacity.
I have made numerous attempts over the years to meditate, aware of the extensively studied benefits to wellbeing. Years ago, when my three children were very young, a leaflet was dropped into our letterbox offering free Christian meditation one evening a week at a local Anglican Church. An hour of quiet sounded like bliss, so hubby and I hired a babysitter and went along. It was a small group, and the session began with a brief reading from the Christian monastic tradition followed by a half hour meditation. It was extraordinary how the minute the gong signalled the beginning of our session, my mind began its ceaseless chattering, my thoughts free ranging from worrying about whether we had enough milk for breakfast, or if I’d paid a bill, to planning the logistics of a beach holiday. I worked hard to still it down, to repeat the mantra I’d chosen and not pay attention to these persistent thoughts bouncing away in my head, but it was very difficult, and half an hour seemed like a very long time.
I mentioned in my last newsletter that I am not brand specific when it comes to churches, and my search for inner quiet took me to the Quakers. I initially attended their weekly meeting in Canberra some years before I married and then went back for several years with my husband and children when we moved to Brisbane. Unlike other church services where you sit and stand and listen to readings and a sermon, the meeting is a one-hour long meditation where anyone may feel moved to speak. The setting is beautiful – a large area of bushland in the Brisbane suburb of Kelvin Grove with light and the rustling of leaves filtering into the round room of meditating souls. There is no hierarchy, no priest, no order of service. It appealed to my sense of what faith is. And one hour of enforced meditation felt like just what I needed.
I will fess up now that I don’t have a regular meditation practice. Hubby even made a meditation stool for me and I did use it for a while, but now it sits in the corner gathering dust. I found it impossible to clear my mind of banal thoughts and despite sustained efforts to do so, never achieved that blissful state of quiet headedness other advocates speak about with reverence.
Did you know that most of us have around thirty-five to fifty thoughts passing through our brain every minute? That amounts to 50,000 -70,000 thoughts per day. This is very useful when a patient is listing their concerns, and I am working through a diagnostic sieve conducting an examination and planning a management plan in fifteen minutes. I also embrace this bounty of thoughts when writing and enjoy sifting through ideas as they skid along my brain cells. It is disruptive when I am kneeling at my meditation stool hoping to eliminate unwelcome intrusions like my endless to-do list.
While commonplace now, the concept of mindfulness was a revelation to me. It has its origins in Buddhism and is drawn from the word, sati, meaning presence of mind and is related to the word, sarati, meaning to remember. It has come to mean a bare awareness of your inner and outer world in the present moment. Unfortunately, in the Western world, where we focus on profit and productivity, driven by neo-liberalism and individualism, everything is valued in terms of how it can meet our own needs. Ironically, the separation of mindfulness from its origins has resulted in mindfulness shifting from no self to self-focus.
While I still dream of attaining inner silence, the reality is that life when working, writing and juggling a family is full and busy. What I have learnt to do is draw on the practice of mindfulness to carve out small spaces where I push pause and appreciate the small details. I take longer over meals, savouring every mouthful and stay at the table after everyone has moved on. I linger on the back deck with my book enjoying the smells and sounds of the yard. When I write a sentence and it is better than I imagined, I bask in the sheer pleasure of the moment. My runs are now headspace where I appreciate the world using my five senses. The shift of dawn from dark to lavender then pink, the taste of humidity on my tongue, the feeling of rain or sun on my skin. I return refreshed and ready to reach into my day.
At work, I have reduced my hours and left some gaps where I can catch up, take a breath, and keep abreast of paperwork. I take a proper lunch break (mostly) and read my book in my room, needing to recharge after talking to patients all morning. These incremental changes mean I am getting home earlier. It makes it possible to do regular medical reading and keep up to date. I have more time to listen to each patient and can provide more wholistic care. The pressure to do more hovers, but I have learnt to resist.
I am nudging towards creating larger blocks of quiet. I am a work in progress. You may not have the luxury of reducing your work hours like I did, but there may be other simple ways you can reclaim sovereignty over your time.
I will leave you with a free mindfulness programme that may assist you in your own search for inner peace and tranquillity. Press pause and enjoy a moment’s silence before diving in.
Book Review
I am focussing on a non-fiction read this month as it speaks to the theme of inner quiet and mindfulness. A few years ago I bought, Turning Down the Noise – The Quiet Power of Silence in a Busy World, by journalist Christine Jackman. I even lined up at Avid Reader just before Christmas a few years ago to get it signed, hopeful that the new year would bring with it new insights about how to attain inner silence without adopting a monastic life.
The book is so easy to read, I devoured it in a few days, marking all the pages that really spoke to me with sticky labels that have become frayed and faded with use. Christine uses her own experiences to take us on a journey towards greater silence. She gave up her high-flying, executive life in Sydney, her phones (yes that is plural) and embarked on a quest to find a quieter, calmer way to live in our complicated, noisy, modern world.
Christine’s expertise as a journalist is evident in her comprehensive research including fascinating details about how noise impacts our health and wellbeing. Her work is brimming with wisdom that is easy to apply immediately to your own life, however busy it is. It begins with understanding that ‘… most of us are better at articulating what we don’t want than what we do, which is how we come to spend an awful lot of time avoiding things we don’t like while remaining incapable of recognising the things we actually need.’
I learned that I need more gaps, more silence. I am still working on meeting those needs in a consistent way.
One of the gems this book gifted me is learning about Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist (I had no idea what that even was) who has dedicated his life to preserving places where natural silence exists for greater than fifteen minutes. He says, ‘silence isn’t the absence of sound. It is the presence of everything.’
I invite you to listen to his wisdom by tuning in to the podcast, On Being.
And do add Christine’s book to your shelf. Even if you don’t read every page, she has a very useful guide at the back that I have been tempted to tear out and carry around with me. She suggests simple ways to incorporate silence into life using Slivers, Slices and Slabs of time demonstrating that mindful practices can be readily incorporated into the busiest lives.
In Slivers one of her suggestions is to Hold Space. When someone is speaking to you, hold space for their words. Treat that space like a blank page …into which they are adding their thoughts or emotions. Pay attention with the ‘ear of your heart,’ not just waiting for a pause to insert your own words.
I invite you to get yourself a copy and turn to the back first. Curl up and carve her words into your heart. They will nudge you towards a quieter, softer and happier place.
One of My Poems
Each month, I include one of my stories for you. This month I have opted to share one of my poems instead. I have confessed that I find meditation challenging and do not regularly make use of the beautiful meditation stool crafted for me by my husband. However, I do run regularly and use this space in my day to allow my mind to clear out the detritus that seems to clog up my neural pathways. From time to time, this inspires me to write some verse.
I was delighted to learn about a practice called walking meditation a practice encouraged by the late Thich Nhat Hanh to deepen our connection with the earth. There is something about the rhythmic movement of my feet moving beneath me that enables my mind to still, giving my five senses the freedom to absorb the world around me. I invite you to open the link above and to read Thich Nhat Hanh’s words and to find your own slice of peace and silence as your feet tread lightly on the earth and your breath connects you to your home, grounding you and bringing you fully to the present moment.
A Pause for Peace
The incremental
Slipping away of time
Between the blur of days
The imperceptible accumulation
of weeks
And months
And years
And yet…
Each paint-blush of dawn
Unfurls tendrils of light
A soft nudge
To pause.
A necessary
Letting go
to glide on invisible currents
Like a soaring bird
While connected to the ground,
And tethered to its bounty
Its still, early quiet
Between the sky and city silhouette
There is comfort in the early light
A moment of being beyond
endless commitments
and expectation
A recalibration
A meditation
A pause
Before
Time beckons me
back into its slipstream.
