Dear Friends,

What part of your narrative is a spiritual story? Today I forego my usual introduction highlights to ask this question of you, to share a story, and to suggest an end of the year writing experience.

A friend of mine works feverishly after Thanksgiving to create his end-of-the-year poem. This is his custom. Forty poems. Throughout the year, he has collected images, snatches of song lyrics, conversations, and absurdities posing as news stories no one would believe actually happened. Always included are some death masks of the famous, and sometimes of family, or both.

Each year the poem finds its way and dedicates itself to one person living or dead. My friend’s poem ties a big red ribbon around the year and presents itself like a new car under wraps in the garage waiting for a sixteen year old to open it. We know it’s really the old year polished in the mirror of metaphor, but we wink at the poet as he winks at us. Another year older, another wiser? Time always tells. Past, present, and future are present in this dramatic monologue, a language ritual that redeems the year at its close and renews a spirit worn ragged by the world. My friend's poem done, he has written out the old year like splitting wet oak and stacking it on his back porch, ready for the winter's fire and whatever the new year brings.

Focusing on writing as spiritual practice, our December issue suggests many ways to renew the spirit through writing. I hope you will try many of them. And join me and my poet friend in an end-of-the year writing experience, whether in poetry or prose. Create a writing ritual of your own that redeems the past year and renews your spirit. Write out the old year and write in the new!

Write and be well!

Best wishes,
John

Writing From the Flow by Megan Cutter

Several years ago, I attended a haiku writing retreat with poet Clark Strand at Great Tree Zen Temple just outside of Ashville, NC. During our practice, we ventured outside and wrote haiku, dipping into the flow that came; for me, it began in spurts and fits but soon, I found my natural rhythm. I came away no longer thinking of haiku as just a writing form that I remembered from grade school. It grew into a writing practice that I carry with me, allowing the images to flow out without holding onto them.

Like many, I find it so easy to be distracted by the internal and external experiences in my life, positive or negative. There’s the list of things to do, take care of, worries, anticipated joys, or the everyday mundane tasks that simply must be taken care of. Just even finding a time to write where the phone won’t ring or my name won’t be called can be difficult. Yet, writing from the flow allows me to tap into the creative spirit, the source, and the space where everything becomes sacred.

Each one of us will discover this space for ourselves; that one place where we write in connection with the flow, where the words rattle off our fingers without resistance. For me, this place is often outside steeped in nature but sometimes I can also find it in my office, the door closed at 4am, writing only by candlelight.

Before living in North Carolina, I resided in Tuscaloosa, AL, and recently returned there for an art exhibit honoring my mother. While there, I also distributed wellness and writing packages to those so close to us affected by the tornadoes, hoping to offer to them the same sacred space that can so often lead to healing. On my return trip, I walked the exhibit hall alone where my photography hung next to my mother’s artwork, and experienced an even deeper connection to the creative spirit I had long forgotten. Returning to this internal connection allows all of the distractions to stay on the periphery, and the words remain in focus.

Whether it’s a zen meditation hall, a church chapel or a quiet room at home, writing in connection with the sacred allows our words to transcend ourselves. We may be full time writers, writing through particular experience, putting together our memoirs or dipping into poetry or haiku, yet seeing our work as sacred texts brings us back into connection with the flow, and in return, the flow of words cascade out to others who may need to remember.

To learn more about Megan Cutter and her husband, Barton, and the workshops they lead and to subscribe to their newsletter, please visit their website.

Poetry as Spiritual Practice, A Book Review by John Evans

Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions by Robert McDowell (Free Press, 2008)

I was immediately compelled to read this book from cover to cover simply because of its title, and I admit I wanted to like the book before I had turned page one. Fortunately I was not disappointed. I could dwell on just the theoretical aspects of poetry as spiritual practice alone except that would neglect the virtues of McDowell’s explanations and examples. Thankfully, McDowell’s purpose is not to dwell in theory. A primer to be sure, McDowell is instructive, from his explanation of the building blocks of poetic expression such as simile and metaphor to his examples of spiritual poetic practice in his last section. Straightforward, unencumbered but lyrical instruction mark every section and chapter of McDowell’s handy guide. Useful and insightful, readers will appreciate many light-hearted opportunities to discover poetry’s power as well as its more profound messages. “Elegies, poems written in praise of the dead, are especially powerful in spiritual practice because they commemorate these cathartic opportunities by stirring up, then calming, our deepest pool of grief.” McDowell helps us understand poetry as the completed circle in the human spiritual experience.

Journaling and Spirituality by Ruth Folit

Spirituality is about big questions: Who am I? Why do I exist? Is there a Divine Force/God/Source? And if so, what are its defining characteristics and how do I connect with it?

These questions are vast and tough to grasp. Kind of feels like trying to hold a cupful of water with bare hands: It just slips away, seeping through the tiny crevices between fingers.

An excellent container that helps the illusive nature of spirituality from running trickling away is a journal.

Journaling gives you the room you need for deeply contemplating and exploring individual spiritual beliefs. Journaling gives you the focus and the space to take this vast, mysterious subject and pin it down and make it solid, fleshed out, and real.

Religious backgrounds, readings, discussion, and everyday experience build our own concepts of what spiritual principles we believe in and want to practice. Our own spiritual beliefs evolve and shift with the hair-pin turns and the steep ups-and-downs of life. There’s no better way to both track your inner spiritual journey and also intentionally create and nurture it than to write about it. Paper and pen or keyboard and computer screen are the fruitful grounds to grapple with what your brand of spirituality is and what it means in your life. First expressed in writing to sort out and untangle, and then lived in life choices, you can honor what’s most meaningful to you.

The more congruent you are— the more your inner world and your outer world match—the more easily your life will flow, your health and energy will radiate, and your full potential can be realized.

Ruth Folit is the designer of LifeJournal, journal software. She’s been looking for the right person to guide journal writers in the non-linear process of exploring the sacred dimension of life and is thrilled to have found author and seeker Mark Matousek who recently created the Spirituality Add-On to LifeJournal. Learn more about Mark in an interview about spirituality and journaling.

Interview with Mark Nepo

SR: Mark, This month's newsletter focuses on writing as a spiritual practice. I know this is something you have experienced in your own life. Would you please share a story with us about how you have used writing as a practice?

MN:Twenty-two years ago, in my mid-thirties, I was working hard at becoming a good poet, when I was thrust into my journey with cancer. The torque of that experience pulled me from all my goals and routines and aspirations. I was left in the raw, uncertain simplicity of being alive and trying, by any means possible, to stay alive. I had few native gifts to help me through. The one closest to my heart was the aliveness of expression that lived below my want to be a poet. And so I began to journal daily about my uppermost fears, feelings, pains, and dreams, about the prospects of living and dying. I didn’t think of it as “writing” or as “material.” More, I was climbing the rope of honest expression, day by day, into tomorrow. It became a muscular and tender, honest space in which I began to access my own inner healing. This was my first in-depth experience of writing as a spiritual practice.

SR: You’ve written about "The Expressive Journey of Healing." Can you speak about this?

MN: There are two very strong and subtle ways we are conditioned in modern times. Both are difficult to shake. One is the manufacturing mindset by which we turn everything into a product: our time, our love, our dreams, our worry, our fear, our art. The other is the way we are taught to place ourselves with authority at the center of all existence. In essence we are taught to play God, to be mini-creators who control everything we come in contact with. This affects the writer as well. I have learned over time, after being battered and smoothed by experience after experience, that creativity, whatever form it takes, is less about our creating something out of nothing and more about being in relationship and conversation with life and the unknown. The more we use writing and expression as a way to listen to and stay in relationship with life—not bending material to our intent, but bending to give voice to life and its natural rhythms—the more sacred life and we become. After my cancer journey, I began to learn that what is not ex-pressed is de-pressed. And so, I’ve become more interested in the expressive journey of healing than creative writing.

SR: You’ve also written about "Becoming the Poem." Can you speak about this?

MN: Since all young people are taught to be ambitious, I began as all young artists do—working toward some imagined greatness that might reveal itself in time if I could stay devoted enough to my craft. But along the way, I was humbled to be more uplifted by what was true rather than what was great, by what was heartfelt rather than what was intricate. It kept me close to my own experience, which at center began to reveal the common center of all experience and all time. From there, I risked more by entering the poems more than writing them, not sure where they might go, and found myself touched and changed by such honest engagement. Well, that’s not very different than being changed by loving another, is it? Now in the second half of my life, I am devoted to being in that holy space where the conversation of aliveness exists. It’s not about the words but the poetry of life that is revealed and enlivened by our honest engagement. And so in my sixties I long to be the poem.

SR: Would you tell us more about your book The Book of Awakening?

MN: I began The Book of Awakening fourteen years ago on the other side of cancer as a way to give back, to create a useful, concise form that might offer small doses of what matter for people busy living, struggling, loving, dying. My hope was to provide a form of inner food. I had been amazed at how the daybook had been a pliable and thoroughly used form in many lay communities: cancer rooms, recovery rooms, support groups. I thought if I could fill this form, I might create something of use. It took two intense years to gather all the entries and to imagine the meditations. And the book began its way in the world. I believe that the heart of awakening is the quietly courageous act of feeling what is ours to feel and facing what is ours to face. The way that fish must keep moving through water to stay alive, human souls on earth must keep feeling and facing the days in order to stay alive—that is, to keep experiencing aliveness. Writing—expressing—is one of the best ways to do this. It doesn’t matter how “good” the expression is but that it keeps us in relationship to the larger Universe we are a part of. The unseeable connections we trip on are the poems.

Mark Nepo has taught in the fields of poetry and spirituality for more than thirty-five years. His new book of stories, As Far As the Heart Can See (HCI Books, audio book, Simon & Schuster) has just been published in Sept 2011. His other books include the New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening, which was also selected as one of “Oprah’s Ultimate Favorite Things” in 2010. As a cancer survivor, Mark devotes his writing and teaching to the journey of inner transformation and the life of relationship. To learn more, please visit www.MarkNepo.com and www.threeintentions.com.

Resource Review: Journaling by the Moonlight

Journaling by Moonlight is a journaling workbook with an accompanying deck of journaling cards that weaves together the ideas of spirituality and writing by nurturing the self through writing. Below is just one example from this remarkable resource.

The Last Quarter
Taking Baby Steps

Establishing Your Safe Zone

Imaging yourself in a field of wildflowers
right before dawn. The moon is still
in the sky and the sun is beginning
to peek over the horizon.
You sit quietly in the field with images
of your vision board and you release them
into nature, one by one, like butterflies
flying high up into the sky. Each image
flutters about capturing the energy
of the moon, the sun, and the wildflowers.
Then they fly back down to you, bringing
the magical energy and wisdom of nature.
They flutter around you wrapping you in a
circle of love and authenticity.
You close your eyes and receive nature’s
gifts brought to you by the butterflies.
How does this feel?
Does it feel safe enough to stand up and
take a first step toward your bigger vision?
Take time to write about this experience.

To learn more about Journaling by the Moonlight: A Mother’s Path to Self-Discovery, visit the Moonlight Moms Circle website.

Reflection from Kathy Vayder

"Lord, Can you hear me?" "Can you feel my pain?" The beginning sentences of a letter written to God. Spiritual writing enables a person of faith to dig deeper and gives voice to the fears. Especially for the broken hearted who are grieving a significant loss in their life. The higher power calls them to write honestly and sincerely from the heart, about their anger, or guilt, their questioning faith, the lack of understanding by others, the daily facade of trying to be normal again. Strength to move forward is gained by writing about the overwhelming desire to move through the grief with unconditional love from a higher power. A key component of spiritual writings is the opportunity to share with others who are in similar circumstances. Spiritual wellness is enhanced by a safe place to write, in a shared community and knowing you are not alone.

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Kathy Vayder is the author of Writing for Wellness in Christian Settings, a spiritual companion guide to Julie Davey's Writing for Wellness, a Prescription for Healing.

Self-Published Bookshelf: A Communion of Sorts

A Communion of Sorts: An Anthology of Writing from the Healing Writing Program at Loran Smith Center for Cancer Support edited by Sara Baker and Sandra Scott is an anthology of word and images, of poetry and prose, that creates a kaleidoscope of experience focused on the single diagnosis of cancer. From the perspective of the person diagnosed with the disease as well as those who stand in caretaking attendance, both professional and personal, the voices are ultimately unified. Gathered from participants in the Healing Writing Workshops, the reader acts as a witness to the experiences of those who, as Baker explains in the introduction, “refuse to be defined by their disease” (7).

As Baker says, “The power of their work comes from the authenticity of their voices, from their insistence on being present to their own lives amidst the ‘full catastrophe’ of illness and treatment” (8). The pieces are organized in a logical chronology—from the initial “chaos” of diagnosis through reflections on the past to loss and even joy. The book can be read from cover to cover as if it were a single journey told in a chorus of voices or a reader can explore different parts of the whole. Some of the contributors, such as the two editors, are presented on the page more than once allowing the reader to follow different stages of the writer’s experience. Drawings, paintings, and Matisse influenced decoupage illustrations by Susan Gill make this glossy book one that many will want to explore time and time again.

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For more about Sara T Baker’s Woven Dialog Writing Workshops and a link to her blog where you will find ordering information, visit her website.

Writing to Heal Workshop

A Transformative Day-Long Workshop with James W. Pennebaker, PhD, and John Evans, EdD

Join internationally recognized research psychologist James W. Pennebaker, PhD, and John Evans, EdD, Founder and Executive Director of Wellness and Writing Connections, for a powerful workshop that will lead you on a path of life-long health and wellness.

The pioneer of Expressive Emotions Therapy (ETT), James W. Pennebaker comes to Duke Integrative Medicine to share his landmark research on the powerful effect our words can have on our health and healing. The author of several books on the subject, Pennebaker has demonstrated that when we allow ourselves to express our experiences in written words, we open up the opportunity for disease prevention and deep and lasting healing. He will describe his paradigm-shifting research, and offer insight into the simple - but profound - mechanisms at work when we express our inner monologues and personal narratives in written form. With thirty years of experience in this field, John Evans builds upon Pennebaker's research and brings his work to life in an engaging series of guided writing experiences including expressive, transactional, and poetic writing. Participants need not have any proficiency with or affinity for writing to benefit from Evans' hands-on-guidance.

Whether you or someone you love is coping with a chronic illness, a major health event, stressful life circumstances, or ongoing psychological distress, Pennebaker and Evans will provide you with the information and tools you need to experience how you can benefit from Writing to Heal.

Writing to Heal
Saturday, March 10, 2012
10am - 5pm
Registration is now open.
$225 | $195 if enrolled by February 10, 2012
Lunch served to participants.
Call to register: (919) 660-6826 (local) or 1-866-313-0959 (toll free)

For more information about the workshop and presenters, visit the website.