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INTRODUCTION: The Hand of Promise

A young mother came to me for hypnotherapy saying she wanted to develop a closer connection to her spiritual self. As I usually do, I began by asking her a few questions. To the question when in her life does she feel a presence of “something more,” she said it was when she was tending her child in the middle of the night. To the question what did it feel like, she said it was a time when the outside world took on less importance and the connection between her daughter and herself felt soft and glowing. With this feeling, everything counted, she told me, her heart was open to the sky, the books in the room, people sleeping across the ocean. All she needed was a gentle reminder from me to continue using love to have more of that spirit feeling.

This book is written to help you stay close to that feeling, to be sheltered by what’s true and real for you. In it, we’ll use writing to develop our spiritual practice, to access that sense that we are connected to something greater than ourselves. Some call it their muse, higher power, goddess, god, the spirit. Just use whatever word or name feels right to you.

Spirituality is many things, and we each must decide what it means to us. Perhaps you feel that religion is a set of acquired opinions and not the sacred truth, and have left religion behind to embrace a more loving presence. Maybe you practice within a religious tradition but are also developing a spirituality that feels closer to your daily life. There are no hard-and-fast rules here. Only this: Spirituality is a way of living that seeks to satisfy a longing that draws us to life.

To search for our own way can be a long, slow process, but what I’ve found repeatedly, over many years and with my many clients and students, is that writing can be your spiritual practice. It can help you become more open, develop faith to be comfortable with the unknown, and be better able to answer the question: Who am I and what am I doing here? Whatever you determine spirituality is for you, writing will help you find your way.

As a child, I used writing and creativity to save my young life from the problems in the family. I loved the bright colors of chalk murals, but even more I loved the chalk dust as it floated to the sill. I loved to paint and watch trees grow on the page under my brush. I’d write stories that felt more real than the life I lived and was sorry when they were finished. I was in love with the act of doing art. When the fort I was building was finished, I was eager to begin another.

As I got older, I realized that writing and painting gave me a sense of re-creating myself. To be creating something, to make something new, to be at the beginning of something, was to feel alive and generous and loving. I didn’t yet call it a god force, because I didn’t believe God was in my life. When I was five years old, our Sunday school teacher showed us a poster of Jesus surrounded by island children. Jesus was reaching out to them. We sang “Jesus Loves Us” and I remember the thought crashing through my mind that that’s why God and Jesus didn’t help me. They were on some island helping other little children.

And so I lived my life wanting the feeling of connection that writing and art gave me. I found I turned more and more to writing because all I needed was a pencil and paper and myself. I could write anywhere. My writing gave me a feeling of connection to my life source in an everyday, regular way. In times of despair I could write a poem, a story, or just put down what I was thinking and feeling. I learned I could ask myself questions and write the answer until I felt my heart opening to myself and others. Writing helped me connect to my soul. It is this feeling that makes me a larger person and makes happiness a part of my daily life.

In my work with clients, I often ask if they notice any connection that they may already have to a higher power. Many times a client will at first say there is nothing to build on, but then remember loving the smell of the lilies of the valley that grew in the neighbor’s yard where she grew up, and wondering how that scent was made. We then explore how the smell makes her feel and what that has to do with her spirit.

What I’ve found is that it is often easier, and more genuine, to build on something we already have in our memory and may have forgotten than to search out something altogether new. Of course, the process of developing our inner selves and our connections to our wise powers through writing will not be a linear one. We will remember the old connections that stirred in us as children. We will remember questions we once asked. We will start to accept our feelings and to let go of our fears. And then we will find ourselves doubting those connections and feel that we’re back at the beginning. We will follow our intuition to find balance and, after a good jog in the rain and a ten-hour night’s sleep, the feeling of connection will return.

The exercises in this book were designed to help you more regularly find this connection, to tap into your wise self. With practice, growth sneaks up on you much like a garden when it’s ready to bloom. After seeing only buds for the longest time, suddenly you are awash in blooms. How could it happen all at once? Why did it happen in just the left end of the garden this day? Was it the sun? It didn’t seem stronger there. Maybe it was the soil in that section. Whatever it is, after the clearing, the seeding, and the nurturing, a pattern of growth is displayed. And sometimes, too, in the midst of the garden, are sunflowers you didn’t plant. You have no idea how they got there, but they grow the fastest and tallest of all. You’re glad to have them for beauty and eating and the mystery of it all. That’s the way it is with writing about spirit.

The first time I taught Writing as Spiritual Practice as a workshop, a woman who was grieving the loss of her partner cried as she asked to read to the class what she had written. As she read, I had the feeling that doves were flying out of this grieving woman’s heart. I could hear their gentle flapping wings. She told us she felt so openhearted just then and so filled with such forgiveness for herself and love for us. I knew the doves were alive in her life now and that writing had released something that had held her in darkness. Now she could move on toward her own hopeful dawn.

As you write and explore yourself, you are a part of a long history of seekers. This longing for spirituality can be traced back to the limestone caves in France where Cro-Magnon people left their ritual markings and paintings. Writing gives us the power to pull back the blankets of night and see what the light will bring. You may change. You may deepen. You may find the souls in your body and feel more connected.

I developed the process we’ll use in this book out of my own feeling of overload. For years I had cast about for ways to develop my faith, and had ended up feeling overwhelmed by all the information I was getting from church, workshops, classes, and books. And so I sat down and thought about the qualities common to most spiritual and religious searches. What was it that allowed people to live with a greater feeling of soul and spirit? I identified nine key qualities: Awareness of Connection, Acceptance, Letting Go of Control, Trusting Our Knowledge, Sense of Self, Creativity, Integration, Peace of Mind, and Cycles of Life. I then intuited what each one would entail and began to sketch that out. That sketch has become the program I call Stirring the Waters.

Over the course of nine weeks, we’ll explore each of the nine qualities in turn. For each day of a given week, you will find a discussion of one aspect or component of that quality and then several writing exercises to help you explore it further. You’ll discover how that aspect of the quality appears in your life and how it can be transformed. On the seventh day of each week, you’ll have a “reward” day, where you are encouraged to take yourself out into the world to write.

The first week is devoted to Awareness of Connection. Here we’ll look at the concept that there is something more than the life we see in front of us. How we feel expansive as we sit in a redwood clearing or connected to a friend who is feeling vulnerable and tells us her fears. We’ll explore how wondering about our spiritual connection leads to hope and all the opportunity hope opens, and how faith develops from our belief that connection is possible. Awareness of connection can be the insight that we are related to all other souls.

We’ll use our writing to explore how our lives have shown courage and triumph. We’ll remember what it is we love: where we live, the particular mosses and wetlands or neon streets and winter with the good smell of fresh rain. We’ll notice how grace begins to enter our lives with a soft touch, hesitant at first, then more enduring, when we pay attention to connection.

In the second week, we begin to explore Acceptance—accepting ourselves and accepting others. We’ll use our writing time to look at loss, anger, difference, change, and to begin to truly open our hearts to ourselves and the world.

Letting Go of Control takes Acceptance a step further. In this third week, we’ll look at how, when we care less about what others expect of us and more about what is soulful for us, we begin to grow emotionally. Control is a big part of all this, of course. Letting Go of Control is saying I’m not in charge of everything. We will write about letting go of other people’s expectations for us and moving into a more authentic way of being. We’ll do exercises designed to help us notice how often we compare ourselves to others and how we can stop that process, and how to stop the flow of the negative and critical thoughts that stream through us. Through the process of letting go of control we become more a part of things and know that others will share our burdens. It’s surrendering to life and saying “Help me.”

When we reach the fourth week, Trusting Our Knowledge we should begin to feel a turning point in our lives. We will begin to explore the many ways in which we receive knowledge: through thinking, emotions, body sensations, and intuition. Of course, this doesn’t happen all at once, but you’ll begin to realize that through your writing you’ve been going inward for answers, and that you can recognize a body feeling, a voice, a place of truth for yourself. In this section we’ll look at how to nurture your intuition so that you can have ready access to that truth.

There are many ways to let the wise voices come through. A man I know leans against a tree at the edge of the pond at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, breathes for a minute, and lets the wise voices come. A painter friend in Chicago uses Lake Michigan as her muse, finding quiet there. You, too, may discover a place in the world that can help you hear your intuition, a special place that takes you to yourself. Or you may find that simply sitting quietly in your living room helps you remember a time when you just knew what to do. Through the exercises in this chapter you will find ways to build on this feeling, to explore ways to release the feeling of being overwhelmed so you can hear your wise voice.

Writing itself can help. It structures your thoughts and emotions and helps you make sense of body sensations and intuition. Once we are less overwhelmed, we can find our clarity and stand up for ourselves. I saw a bumper sticker today that said, “Even if your voice shakes, stand up for yourself.” The car was filled with young women laughing and talking, and I wanted to give them a power sign, a goddess, “Yes.”

What can be more important than developing a bottom line that asks “Is this best for my soul?” Week five, Sense of Self, is devoted to this. It is designed to help you reach within so you can reach out. You’ll explore through writing who you are beyond the image you project and how to deal with the changing identifications of self in your lifetime. You’ll do exercises on self-esteem and developing appropriate boundaries to enable you to better connect with others.

Week six is devoted to Creativity. We all are innately creative, but through our writing this week we’ll begin to explore how to better access our individual creativity. Creativity asks us to embrace ourselves. It is a voice in all of us that says we are one of a kind, and that even with the sun and daffodils of the world in full glorious bloom, there is room for more light and more yellow. What any one of us offers will be just a shade different from anyone else, but ail is needed and wanted.

Vincent Van Gogh wore lit candles in his cap to see better when he painted at night. He took singing lessons to help his yellows “sing” on the page. We will learn to express that hunger to be ourselves. We will explore how to find pleasure in uniqueness, too. In this section I suggest that we open ourselves to the world we have within us, to our daydreams and night dreams. Daydreams draw us into the imaginative realm; night dreams give us symbolic knowledge. We will begin to decode the messages our dreams give us.

In week seven, Integration, we get to write about qualities of our life’s longing: love, friendship, work, and creativity—issues of the physical body and how spirituality fits into integration. We will also look at how to make solitude a precious time.

The qualities of spiritual development are both cumulative and not. Sometimes, as we develop faith, we love our home more. We love the view out back and this sense of place allows us to develop patience. Our patience, in turn, invites grace to come, and we find we sit long nights on our patio writing and dreaming.

As we near the end of this process we come to Peace of Mind. In week eight we’ll look at ways to remember that there is a divine reason for everything that happens. We are only given what we can handle. We will write about how we can foster and use forgiveness, humor, gratitude, and simplicity as part of our spiritual practice.

And finally we come to Cycles of Life. Chance is always with us, but so often we live in fear of what comes next. By letting go into the knowledge of cycles we can begin to act less out of fear and anxiety and more out of hope and courage. I remember a student I once had. She was in such despair about losing her job, but when she remembered the happy days of the years before, and saw that unhappiness will pass through to better times, she was able to move on. This chapter helps us connect with our spirit and trust that we can deal with what life brings. In writing about cycles, we will explore our attitudes to our past, our life’s wanderings, and the present. We’ll be led to consider our own aging process, death, and rebirth. Our writing will help us see the ways we are protected by our soul knowledge and our energetic spirit.

Throughout this book I’ll be teaching different writing methods: streaming to explore your inner self and all that you might feel, gazing into the waters to relax and go deeper into your truth, and dialoguing for times of internal conflict or ambivalence. You’ll use clustering when you want to open yourself to new possibilities and listmake to help organize your thoughts. I include a Buddhist Peace Meditation, which helps us approach writing with an open mind, and the techniques of Dream Sourcing and Coming Together, which help you make sense of your dream materials and explore what the subconscious may be trying to tell you.

Now, just a few words about developing a writing practice. We’ll be using writing as spiritual practice just as some might meditate, do martial arts, or yoga—not to create works of art but to create an aware and happy self, to develop character, self-discipline, and integrity. From my experience working as a counselor and teacher, I’ve found that this sort of self-exploratory writing is best done if you schedule your writing time into your day.

Put aside fifteen minutes a day to start. This will be long enough for you to leave the logical world behind and allow surprises to script themselves under your hand. This time needs to be sacred. It’s for your well-being and will affect everyone you come into contact with. Some of us want a room of our own to write and insist on it. Others find that a corner without a window is less distracting. The important thing is to make a quiet time and ask not to be disturbed. In time you will be able to access your wise voices easily, and that dreams and everyday happenings in life will give you answers.

When you feel ready, expand your writing time to twenty minutes, then twenty-five, and then thirty. You’ll soon find a length that seems long enough to delve into the soul, a length that the spirit responds to.

On each day of this nine-week process, you’ll find a few exercises to help you explore yourself in writing. If you only have fifteen minutes, choose one. If you have thirty minutes, do two. It’s up to you how many you’ll do. You might make a light pencil mark in your book to note any exercise to which you want to return.

Perhaps you feel that you can only write when you feel inspired. I often feel this way, too. If that’s the case, then your job here is to find whatever it is that inspires you and to do it regularly, whether it’s listening to the opera, walking in the rain, or reading some favorite poetry. Do whatever helps you get to the place of curiosity. This book also includes quotations and exercises designed to inspire you.

I suggest you keep a folder of ideas or images from your own life sources that are inspirational for you: walks, a church visit, an art catalog, news clippings. I have a postcard collection of images to which I am drawn. Magazines are a great source of images in ads and articles that can be clipped and used as grist for the mill.

I have a friend who comes over several times a year with her ideas and images and we share and write together. It brings us closer and gives us a better sense of community as we write during the year.

Of course, any idea a visual artist explores is thought for your journal. Claire Wolf Krantz, an artist in Chicago, explores memory and where memory goes through painting. Sculptor Bonnie Marzlak explores the sense of home. In her installation pieces, Rhoda London of San Francisco explores sayings we heard as children, such as “Who do you think you are?” and “Too big for your britches?” Katherine Westerhout uses photography to explore the mysterious world of spirit and light. All of these are wonderful themes to explore through writing.

I moved recently to a place with a pool and a large lawn. Being here, I remind myself that much of my life is filled with energy and grace. I have so many feelings and conflicts and yet I walk lightly on the earth glad to be alive. Each year gets better because I’ve been able to use my years to find some quiet in myself. Years and writing have brought me to this place of happiness. In my life, writing is as important as food. It is nourishment, sustenance. It can be that for you, too.

I remember the first time I fed my son cereal and how his eyes grew round as he held the solid food in his mouth and looked at me for a clue as to what to do. I swallowed and swallowed again, this time making noise in the hopes that he would follow my lead. With his eyes now closed, he took a leap of faith. Take a leap of faith with me now.

Because writing can bring us to deep and sometimes painful truths, I suggest you have support as you write, especially if you’re writing about traumatic events. It’s also good to have support just to keep you writing regularly. Ask a friend to join you, or start a small writing group.

Bear in mind, of course, that mine is just one way of approaching the spirit. Yours may be different. Let this structure help you get started. From here on, the sky’s the limit.

Remember, we are each everything at the same time: the healing and the healed, the doubter and the believer, the person of grace and the person who stumbles through the storm.

My hope is that you will find more singing in your heart just by starting this process. May every bird remind you of your ability to soar, of your gentleness. May the image in your own mirror be your friend.