Guided Writing Sessions

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Guided Writing Session: January 12

Thanks to all that joined the session.

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Writing Prompt 1: What aspects of your life, and yourself, are you most eager to regenerate? How might this happen?

Writing Prompt 2: What is your ego attached to that your true Self doesn't need? Be specific.

To share a piece of writing, click 'Reply', post your work, and click 'Submit'.

From Prompt #1, and Seeker’s January 10th-  

Epiphany

I walked towards my car, caught up in a bubbling/gurgling sensation.  I was feeling like the sound of water laughing over rocks.  For two-and-a-half hours, I’d been participating  in white-water rafting of a sort, without capsizing.

I’d completed my medical tests, to check my cancer situation.  I had been present with myself for them.  Unbelievably, I’d already been given my results.   I felt survival exhilaration.  

Normally, it took four days before I got them.  Then my general practitioner would call, with her medical augury.  That first year, I was no good at waiting.  My will was still declaring it could rescue me.  Internally, I was mostly adrenaline and pacing.  Yet I’d started to loosen,  a little.  

I’d read  Gabor Mate’s  “When the Body Says No”. I was beginning to re-remember I was a body.  My interactions with my physical self were directive, and estranged.

Mate’s book is meaningful to me.  I happened upon it synchronistically.  It was there just when I needed it.  He presents a trauma-informed  theory of the emotional components of disease.  

I’d read the ACES study (adverse childhood experiences) so Maté’s words made sense to me.  They linked the physical and the emotional.  

Shortly after reading the book, I got word my annual mammogram showed cancer.  Even before Dr. W said “angiosarcoma” I heard the bad news in her voice. An unsure tremble.  But I had my own plan, from reading Mate. One I’d decided to pursue, no matter the test results.  Mate talked about relaxing into anger, an oxymoron if I’d ever heard one.  

I could not conceive of it, yet it called to me.  A union of opposites.   A new possibility of being.  One that implied both ease and boundary.  I wanted to get to both/and.  I was just unsure how.  I could recall times of feeling confident, among friends.  I experienced this as Fortuna’s smile — an external benefaction.  What if such a state might be invoked intentionally and internally?

Right-now is my fourth year of practicing noticing.  I still confuse thoughts with feelings, but I’m improving.  As I opened my car door and slid into the driver's seat, I was bemused, chuckling about life’s irony.  

This year, I’d come prepared for waiting, even welcoming it.   I’ve come to see the wait time as a period of grace.  A resting in the unknown, with its possibilities. A time to enjoy the shapelessness of my now.

Now was lulling in the waters of the divine mother.  A sense of being gently contained within a largeness I connected to. A station in the ritual of my knowing.  But that day, no waiting was required. It was the feast of the epiphany.  It lived up to its name.  

Each of my technicians went beyond her job description.  Each spoke to the radiologist about his readings.  Each revealed my results like a gift.  I could feel the celebration in their faces.   

My news was their good news, too.  We shared it’s blessing.  I would’ve hugged them if these weren’t Covid days.  Even though I’m not a natural-hugger.   Too much trauma history.  Yet my joy in life keeps increasing.  Perhaps I’m becoming an embracer after all. 

I did a self-hug that day. For a second year, I’m being spared further surgeries.  I have more energy to spend other ways. 

When I turned the key in the ignition, the news came on instantly.  I’d forgotten I’d been listening to a broadcast about Congress, and the debate about whose reality would reign supreme. 

I saw Trump as the loser.  He wouldn’t admit defeat.  I heard a few words about his speech to his followers.  Inciting words.  He would not go gently into the good night.  I started to panic.  This is the point where I’d typically dissociate.  I’d fight or flee or freeze into a time warp.  I’d estrange myself from my body, to distance from my feelings.  They felt over-sized. 

This was not that process.  I very much held an awareness of me. I noticed myself, noticing.  So I paused.  In that pause, I realized I wanted to write about the gladness I’d just been having.  I wanted to make sure I took it in.  The Sirens of suffering were starting to sing, and I didn’t want to slip into my victimization mentality.  I wanted to resist the pull towards hypervigilance that was calling.  

I often think if I keep listening to the news, I’ll learn something that protects me.  Instead I just turn numb through my obsessiveness.  I didn't want my gladness to fade away while I turned victim.  I turned off the radio.

My son had given me a beautiful notebook, for Christmas.  It’s made of beige leather so supple it feels like butter.  I pulled it from my purse, and began to write.  It was my intention to capture the now I’d just had.  It felt like sunshine.  I wanted to put it in my pocket and have it there, for rainy days.  

The art of spiritual writing lets me merge those elements Mate spoke about, the physical and the emotional.  I try to do this in the mindful way Mark teaches us.  Presence infuses everything with possibility.  Even chaos.  Even dying.  

So I began to write about my sense of water, relaxed and moving, undeterred by rocks.  There was something in the in-between of them.  The rock-solid of my will had become liquid.  

I’d just experienced what felt like cooperative surrendering.    My desire was to turn the contents of this day into a worded-understanding.  I relaxed into my wish instead of trying to direct it.  It remained true, but it opened to the what is instead of clinging to the wanted. 

My will alchemized, changing into the water of a stone and the stone within the substance of the water.  Then I remembered a parallel day.  November 22, 1969.  The day I had waited in the school chapel  for results from Tuberculosis x-rays,  and then been shocked by Kennedy’s assasination.  

But that’s another story.

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From prompt 2 :

 

I think about when I make ceramics. When I hold the clay in my hands, I am aware that it is just an element in search of a form. Whatever is in me that is searching to explore, or understand itself, finds its way in the process of creating that form. The work, the pot, that comes out of that fusion between the clay and my strength, my energy, is connected to my being in some way, but at the same time, I am not that pot. A story has been told and released to the world. In the process there is change.

That consciousness that detaches itself, understands that identity is not something static. Instead of being defined by a story that we refuse to let go of for fear of losing the security that a solid identity gives us, I feel like we begin to see ourselves not as the story itself, but as the recipients of a story and I can see my ego passing through it, playing its role, as a tool.

It is as if we live on many levels at the same time. We are the writer of the story, the one who tells it, the one who identifies with it, and from there on creates a narrative of life. Suddenly, one day, the writer comes across a crack that lets open a piece of the story that he was unaware of until then. His entire perception is then altered by it, like a hole on a wall that suddenly expands into another room.  We find a presence behind everything we create that knows that there is much more behind each story we tell,  that understands that the life in us goes beyond the words that try to define it.

Maite

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DevonB

Maite,

I really enjoyed you post and the metaphors you used to make your points.  I really liked the way you parsed out the many levels of life “the writer comes across a crack that lets open a piece of the story that he was unaware of” evokes association with that line from Cohen’s “Anthem”.   I also resonated with your lines about “ a presence behind everything we create...that understands “ life goes beyond words.  You say a lot,  succinctly.  Thanks for sharing this piece.  - Devon B

 

Hi Devon,

Thanks for your comment, I'm glad you enjoyed the piece!

Maite

Dear Maite,

Thanks so much for your note. Your comparison of ceramic-making and storytelling is insightful and accurate.  "We are the writer of the story, the one who tells it, the one who identifies with it, and from there on creates a narrative of life," you write. Just as a ceramicist holds the clay in her hands (the "element in search of a form"), the writer brings her stories forth from the raw material of consciousness; she waits for directions from within and uses language to give form and shape to her creation. Unlike the ceramicist, however, the maker of clay objects is in no danger of confusing herself with her creation (unlike the writer, who often mistakes her self-story for herself). The presence you allude to ("We find a presence behind everything we create that knows that there is much more behind each story we tell") is the actual Creator, of course. 

Great to have you with us in The Seekers Forum!  Hope to see you tomorrow for the writing session. 

Mark 

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Maite

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your comment.
True. It's easy to lose ourselves in our stories, especially when we don't really know when the story actually began.
Sometimes it seems like we imbue ourselves in it, unconsciously seeking to understand our story in a particular chapter.

Maite