November 19, 2015: Writing As a Sacred Path

     We had an opening in the schedule this week. I was reading a book that I thought contained some good quotes or readings for our group. And, indeed, such was the case. A good discussion followed.

     The book is entitled Writing As a Sacred Path: A Practical Guide to Writing with Passion and Prupose by Jill Jepson  Celestial Arts, 2008 Paperback.

     Jill Jepson is a college professor, linguist, anthropologist, traveler, journaler, and above all writer. She had some difficulties with her personal life and career and seemed in a constant search for some sort of spiritual answer. Then she finally put her two loves together: writing and spirituality. She had traveled all over the world and spoke with people from all spiritual paths trying to find a way. She now uses those universal experiences from a multitude of different paths to provide ways to write, exercises, tools and quite profound readings that do indeed turn writing into a spiritual path. I have some quotes from her book here that we discussed at this weeks Spirit Mind Body Group.

     From Chapter 2 The Sacred Gift:  Storytellers are the custodians of human history, the recorders of the human experience, the voice of the human soul....Stories...take the vast, transcendent, and ineffable and make it small and concrete enough to talk about....As Anais Nin put it, 'we tell stories, "not to say what we all can say, but [to say] what we are unable to say'
     "Stories remind us that we are not separate, isolated individuals afloat in the cosmos, but part of the universal stream of life....Writers are the ones charged with the work of giving stories form and passing them on to others.
     "Stories, including the ones we write ourselves, offer us advice, suggest alternatives, give us insights, show us possible results of our actions, and make us think about situations and conditions in new ways."
     Throughout the book, the author gives us "sacred tools" which are often exercises to learn to write better and then to make our own writing a 'tool' in our own sacred path. She uses such exercises as turning your story you are writing into a board game, or creating a mandala for your story, writing from the words of others, physically writing with the non dominant hand, writing to heal yourself, sitting with silence, focused observations during writing, and many, many more exercises.

     "Among indigenous peoples the world over, stories serve to reinforce ethical behavior, maintain social mores, and impart values. Many cultures hold storytelling in high esteem because they know that stories can effect personal and social change. In the West, we tend to think of stories as mere entertainment, forgetting that they also serve to guide, enlighten, and transform us.
     
     "Among the Dine people -- known to many as the Navajo-- to be told a story is a great honor. In ancient Celtic cultures, story telling was considered a service to the community. But contemporary writers seldom think of their work as a gift or service. Much has been written about how people heal themselves through writing -- but almost nothing has been said about the ways writing can help heal another person, a community, or the Earth.
     "Envisioning your story as your personal gift is an acknowledgement of the significance and beauty of the work you are doing. It reminds you that you are not simply entertaining yourself or trying to find money or fame, but that your work has meaning and substance. It is vital that we keep this awareness alive. One way we can do this is to consciously alter our way of thinking of our stories so that we become aware that they are our gifts to the world."

     The author divides the sacred paths of writing into 4 groups, not as stages to pass through, but just as 4 major ways that writing can be a spiritual path. These 4 ways are 1) The Mystic Journey  2) The Monastic Path 3) The Way of Shaman, and 4) The Warrior Road.

     In the Mystic Journey chapter, the author discusses Mihalyi Czikscentmihalyi's theory of "flow" and how to culture your writing so that the practice creates flow. She also has some other exercises that help guide you into making your writing practice balanced, creating the correct amount of difficulty within your own abilities to avoid frustration. These are the characteristics that define Czikscentmihalyi's flow.

     In the Monastic Path, often silence and solitude play a large role during your writing practices. Also the community as in a monastic community may play a large role in offering support and inspiration for creating your best writing.

     "...Correspondences between the monastic world and the writing life run deep beneath the differences. Like monks, writers have a yearning for truth and a relentless desire to find meaning in the world. We {writers} are willing to fore go many of the pleasures of the world for our art, an we frequently work without expecting pay or recognition. We, too, know the importance of contemplation, and at our best, show a monk like discipline and devotion. "

     The Way of the Shaman: "Since the time of the first glimmerings of human consciousness, virtually every society on Earth has had members who travel between the mundane world and the spirit realm. These extraordinary people -- known today under the catchall term shaman -- cross barriers between life and death, concrete reality and shadowy myth. They enter states of consciousness inaccessible to others. Their goals are to gain healing knowledge and aid from the spirits on behalf of others who have come to them with physical or emotional ailments -- sometimes for an entire community. They act as psychologists, priests, seers, and performance artists. 

     " Shamanism has been nearly obliterated in industrialized cultures but the need for shamans has not disappeared. In fact, in a world where rationalism rules, we desperately need people to serve as our emissaries to the mythological realm. In the West, this task falls largely to writers....Like shamans, writers have a special connection with the world. They view reality through the lenses of imagination, intuition, dream, and myth -- the very act of writing is the conjuring of a waking dream -- and they are in touch with forces that can elude others."

     "To cultivate the shamanic aspects of the writer's craft is to explore strange new terrain. It can tap into your creative energies and enable you to access deeply buried aspects of memory and imagination. It can sharpen your awareness of your role as a "soul specialist," and it may take your writing into areas you never knew existed." Particularly the Way of the Shaman tends to honor and protect nature and often it is that nature and its vast beauties, mysteries, and wisdom that can inspire and indeed ground and help create a deep spiritual base that informs a transformation.

     The 4th path is called The Warrior Road. "Some people find it difficult to think of warriors, with their connection to conquest and bloodshed, as a model for writers. But the warrior has been a powerful archetype throughout history." In the past Japanese samurai, the chivalry of the Knights of the Round Table, the code of ancient Sparta have represented some of the highest codes of humanity. "Today business leaders read Wu Zi's Art of War, sci-fi fans emulate the traditions of the Jedi knights, and martial arts classes are brimming with students striving to lean not just how to break bricks with their hands, but the self-control, focus, and daring of the fighter. The best aspects of the warrior -- discipline, courage, and the willingness to fight for truth-- are among the most admirable of virtues, and those qualities also lie at the core of the writing life.

     "One mark of a warrior is the knowledge that what she does can make a profound difference in the world. Because of that power, warriors are trained never to act recklessly or in malice. The writer, too, must live with that awareness. Like the warrior you possess the power to alter the course of people's lives -- for anything you write, no matter how trivial it seems, might change some reader's beliefs or impel her to act. That power make you honor bound to write with the utmost integrity. If you are a writer, you are engaged in a battle for truth, justice, and peace, whether you want to be or not. This is an awesome responsibility, but learning from the warrior, studying his practices, and following his code can help us rise to the challenge."

      The author offers one exercise that I thought might benefit the readers of the blog:
"Devotion to Truth: If someone asked you right now to list the basic truths you live by, could you answer? Most of us can come up with some sort of response, but it is seldom well thought out or clearly articulated. It takes some work to uncover what we truly believe in, but once we do, those truths can serve as beacons for our daily lives and for our writing."

     The exercise is called Finding  Truth in Daily Life.
      1) Carry a small notebook for a week and in it write down whenever you find yourself feeling annoyed or angry, and write down what it was that made you feel that way. It might be when a politician with whom you disagree put forward a new plan that was particularly wrong in your view, or it might be when the store clerk was gruff. Just jot down a brief description and how it made you feel.
     2) After a week, look at your notes with mindfulness and look for repetitive patterns. Look for your truths in these items. You may need to read through them or even list them on a clean page to see the themes. Even your annoyance with something as trivial as the pizza delivery man's brusqueness might reflect your beliefs about kindness and courtesy.
     3) Identify your truths. You will likely be able to identify several basic truths. Look for patterns. Maybe anger when you saw a news piece about cruelty to animals, anger at seeing a dog locked in a car, and sadness when a friend had to euthanize her pet all made you angry or sad. Maybe you had not known that compassion for animals, our fellow travelers on this earth, was one of your fundamental truths of your life. Sometimes an item only appears once on your list but your note about your feelings indicates that it is a very very intense issue for your and may be one of your fundamental truths of your life. Another way to clarify your truths is to write what you think could be done about these issues. That might make a pattern come forth. Another way to look at this is to instead of writing the negative annoyances for the weak, write the good things that you witnessed. A pattern might appear also here that tells you which might be one of your fundamental truths of your life. After this exercise you should be able to answer the initial question in a better way. And of course, you will then know yourself in a much deeper way. And it may tell you how you may go about bringing about change in the world through your writing or in many other ways.   

    There was some discussion about books that really affected various members. Also we talked about how a book can seem wonderful and then years later our viewpoint has changed and the same book no longer moves us.  Several members of the group had some recommendations for reading on this theme -- the benefits of writing.  Also these are works that really strike the reader. Author Anne Lamott; Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at tinker Creek; On Being a Man by Sam Keen. Eric's sister in law wrote a book entitled Writing from the Senses. David Kobeck said, "Telling a story is like growing a garden. We have a deep need to share what we feel."  Certain authors seem to have a wonderful ability to "paint with words." We can be very moved by such authors. There was a brief discussion of Six Words. Ernest Hemingway started the competition to write a complete story in 6 words. His example was "For sale, baby shoes, never worn."