Guided Writing Session Directory
Below, you will find recordings for each Guided Writing Session dating back to August 2021 when the sessions began.
Take a moment to review the Usage and Guidelines Folder below for information on how to post work and use the directory.
Use the Independent Entries Folder for submissions not specific to a monthly program or Guided Writing Session.
More About Guided Writing Sessions
Guided Writing Session: November 17
Thanks to all that joined the session.
Writing Prompt 1: What gives you hope in your life today? How do you define hope? Be Specific.
Writing Prompt 2: Do you believe that you are "enough" as you are? If not, what seems to be missing? If so, how did you get there?
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Hi Mark! Will there be a meeting on Tuesday, November 24, 2020?
Yes Arden. There will be a session next Tuesday.
See you there!
Prompt 2: Enoughness
Am I in a state of enoughness? It’s still a tad frightening, to proclaim I am. Like the idea of tempting fate. The possibility exists that I’m not enough, and the floor will drop out from under me.
This has happened before. Many of those times occurred when I was caught up in contentedness. I saw my happiness as being ever-after, once-attained. Ever-afters can be problematic if you slip into rigidity. Into thinking the world will always be this way.
Never-afters can be problematic too. I can scare myself out of living, with my fears of fright. An unintended consequence is that they become an excuse for not trying things.
Between ever and never is my place of possibility, where enoughness is. A stable place of movement. Enoughness requires remaining slightly ajar.
I want to keep a assessing eye on things, but not squint my sight into skepticism, or cloud my vision’s acuity with over-dreaming. That’s safe enough.
For me, this requires a sense of grounding, done with agility. A state of middle that can move up and down and side to side, as in circularity. A looseness in my posture. A bending in my limbs. A rootedness in my belly as it falls and rises.
Such a relaxed way of existing in my body. Non- terrorized.
A both-sides kind of vision that opens me to possibility. A state of hearted-mind.
Pausing from my aria of fear and remembering myself back into a state of hope requires containing. A holding of both me inside the world, and of the world inside of me.
I’ve tried handling fear by leaping into it , hoping momentum would carry me. Sometimes it does, but mostly I go crashing, when my speed gets out of sync for me. Maybe my mistimings are a sign I have unexamined oughts and shoulds.
At times, my fear keeps me sitting frozen, ruled by my amygdala. I need a form of middleness to step out of its spell. Neither one thing or another, but both. The ability to shift, midstream.
Getting to enoughness requires me to accept the “What is” of my situation. I can become my own labyrinth of self-analysis, caught up in endless critiquing.
When I’m flexible in my expectations, I see that life contains both ups and downs. I remember my mother, making that point to me.
It happened when I was being a sixteen-year-old, bemoaning my teen angst. We were sitting in the built-in kitchen nook that looked out on the backyard. She’d paused from working on her oil-painting for a cigarette and coffee. She was making smoke circles in the air, as I decried the unfairness of most everything.
With the world in such awful shape, I asked how god could be. Recently I’d read in Time or Life Magazine that god is dead. A thought that seemed sophisticated, adult.
She sighed as she stubbed out her cigarette in ashtray, tapping its remains to the rhythm of her words, as she explained the downs were there so we’d appreciate the ups, only she said “hills” and “valleys”, more in keeping with the landscape she was painting.
At the time, I groaned and protested this logic. But now I’d concede. When I cling to my ups past their point of “now”, past the point when it is true, up can turn to down. And vice versa. There are lessons in my losses. Down turns into up again. Things become more relative.
For example, when my physical appearance was altered by my cancer surgery, I had to mourn my loss of breast and balance. I found there was much about my body’s previous form I didn’t appreciate until its loss. Within my loss were my unacknowledged blessings.
One of them was noticing how interesting life can be when I shift my experience of time. View events as not only chronological, but also liminal, like the Greek notion of time. Both Kronos and Kairos.
Kairos is not just a crisis, but also opportunity and favour. The opportunity for grace. It can bless me with the ability to I tolerate a little risk within my need for safety.
Enoughness comes when I can be flexible with my perceptions of what is, including time.
Hi Devon,
Thanks for this! I like the way you define enoughness as the middle point between never and forever, both of which are illusions, and how you identify your sticking point (the place you suffer). " When I cling to my ups past their point of “now”, past the point when it is true, up can turn to down. And vice versa. There are lessons in my losses. Down turns into up again. Things become more relative." Absolutely.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving! See you very soon.
Mark : )