The Mindful Storyteller in You: New Program Fall 2023

 

The Mindful Storyteller in You   Presented by Alexandria Peary  What stories connect you to the Granite State? In this workshop led by New Hampshire State Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary, we'll focus on jumpstarting your most important place-based stories. You'll practice mindful writing techniques that offer a fresh way to start a story you may have contemplated telling for a while, and in the process, could discover unexpected stories that have been waiting to be told. Developing an openness to the present moment, you'll free yourself from thinking there are stories you "should" write. Learn how to practice "moment tracking" to develop a path your story may take. The session will close with strategies to continue the creative momentum at home and give you more tools to finish your story. We'll also talk about how to remain receptive to changes in the draft, keeping an open mind about its final form through genres like flash nonfiction, the personal essay, and prose poetry. Choose your date and location: Wednesday, September 20 at 5:00 pm Wayfarer Roasters Downtown Café, 626 Main Street, Laconia RSVP Friday, October 6 at 2:30 pm AVA Gallery, 11 Bank Street, Lebanon RSVP Saturday, October 21 at 10:30 am Historical Society of Cheshire County, 246 Main Street, Keene RSVP

As part of our multi-year initiative, Becoming New Hampshire, these workshops will culminate in a heartfelt and lively on-stage conversation between New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult and New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary in Jodi Picoult and the Writing Life: More Than a Good Story at the New Hampshire Humanities Annual Celebration on Wednesday, November 8 at 5 pm at The Palace Theatre. DETAILS

Webinar on Mindful Writing (January and February 2021)

 

If you're looking for a way to mindfully manage pandemic stress or learn more about mindful writing to benefit your writing practice, you're invited to an upcoming mindful writing webinar!

This January & February, the National Council of Teachers of English is hosting a sequel of my Mindful Writing Series. The sessions are designed for anyone (no need to be a teacher) dealing with pandemic stress or curiosity about mindful writing/mindfulness. See site for non-member registration fee and for videos of the September webinar: NCTE Mindful Writing Series

In each session, participants will be invited to do a guided meditation and then a restorative activity that combines writing with mindfulness, including already-perfect meditation, working with preconceptions and story lines, caricature of our internalized critics, and mantra for self-compassion. We will revisit and practice a few of the mindfulness activities from the September series. Some sessions will include guest speakers and experts on mindfulness with an opportunity for Q&A; guest speakers will be announced as they are confirmed.

By writing in the moment, we can relax into the present and take care of ourselves.

20 Mindful Writing Breaths for Calm During COVID-19

I'm finding mindful writing to be an incredible practice each morning during the COVID pandemic. I'm grateful for the oasis of focus and calm it is providing me and would like to share one of my grounding techniques.

20 Breaths

Preparing to Write:

Find a quiet location and draw your mind to the point at which air enters and exits your nose. (Don’t listen to music.) Put aside your other thoughts: redirect your attention to your breathing for at least a minute before starting to write this exercise.

Next, breathing in, think “here.” Breathing out, think “now.” Repeat for a minute. If you find your mind wandering, it’s no big deal. Just gently guide your thoughts back to breathing.

Writing: 
Describe what a single breath feels like physically. Watching the inhalation, notice the breathing-in as a brand-new event—as though it has never happened to you before. Watching the exhalation, notice the breathing-out as a brand-new event—as though it has never happened to you before.

Stop for a moment. Number this breath: Breath 1.

Write 3-4 phrases or 1-2 sentences about Breath 1.

For instance, you could try answering a few of these questions: Where did you feel the breath in your body? With what did the breath make contact? What moved or changed in your body because of the single breath? How long did the breath seem to last? What was the temperature of the breath? 

To head in a more poetic direction, if the breath possessed a shape, what shape would it have? If the breath was an object, what kind of object might it be? If the breath came in a color, what color or colors? If the breath was a single word or phrase, what would that be?

Repeat until you’ve described twenty breaths.

The purpose of this exercise is to use writing to retrain the mind to pay attention to the present. For the times we're all living in right now, watching our breathing through writing can ground us and lead to a calm outlook. Ultimately, this will help you pay attention to the present while you write, which will carry all sorts of benefits in terms of your outlook about writing and the ideas you reach.

* Image from Shondaland.com

TEDx Talk, "How Mindfulness Can Change the Way You Think About Writing"

If you're in the Massachusetts area, I'd like to invite you to my TEDx talk, "How Mindfulness Can Transform the Way You Think About Writing." It's happening on Sunday, September 22, at Salem State University as part of TEDxSalemStateUniversity (the theme is mindfulness). Tickets go on sale June 17. Here's where to find information about the event: 

https://www.salemstate.edu/tedxsalemstateuniversity 

Writing, No Writing: Guest Blog Post at North American Review

Here's my second guest blog post, "Writing, No Writing: Cultivating the Emptiness of the Page," at the North American Review: 

https://northamericanreview.org/open-space/writing-no-writing-cultivating-emptiness-page

The blog post opens:

"Normally, not-writing is rejected experience. Most writers value the popcorn sound of typing or other signs of productivity—a paragraph written, a journal page filled, a poem drafted, a noble goal of 3,000 words/day. The entire reason for prompts is to springboard writers out of the preverbal and into the verbal, for instance. We only begin to feel secure once language makes an appearance on the screen and the word count climbs. Each new sentence or line seems to rescue us from a perceived plight of failure, transporting us farther away from this face-off with nothingness..."

Bowing to Writing Difficulty

One of my most important writing practices is bowing to difficulty.

As I end a session at the desk, after I've stored my notebooks and pens and closed the laptop, I bow deeply. I acknowledge the opaque black plastic of the closed laptop lid. 

It doesn't matter if the session was seemingly productive, resulting in new writing or a completed document. It doesn't matter if the session was seemingly non-productive, resulting in a phrase or two or perhaps no increase in word count whatsoever. I bow to difficulty; I bow to non-difficulty. It's all the same.

This practice is as important to me as anything I do to start the morning writing session. Or anything I do during the writing session. I would even venture to say that bowing to difficulty is as important as having the discipline to return to the desk. Why? 

The practice of bowing to writing is an exercise in acceptance and equanimity. I express my gratitude to the writing experience for what it is, without sorting it into categories of usefulness, non-usefulness, favorable, unfavorable. The experience is free of my evaluation, free of clinging, free of suffocating ego and ambition.

The practice of bowing allows me to continue to focus on the present moment of writing and work on avoiding future- or outcome fixation. Bowing to writing, no matter what, means the moment (and not the product) is the star of the hour.

Finally, the practice of bowing lets me establish the end note for the session. Bowing lets me take charge of "writing affect" (the emotions we have about the act of writing). Bowing allows me to steer my internal talk about writing toward gratitude, calm, and happiness and away from bitterness, frustration, and writing unhappiness. By purposefully shaping how a writing session ends for me emotionally, I am more inclined to return to the desk the next day.

The practice of bowing must be sincere: I honor whatever writing has happened in the moment.

Here's what I wrote about "Bowing to Difficulty" in my recent book, Prolific Moment (page 140):

"An easily initiated practice in accepting writing affect is "Bowing to Difficulty," in which writers close a writing session by bowing (physically or mentally) to their desk, laptop, notebook, or other writing materials for the challenges presented during a session. It's a variant of a remark I once heard a scientist make during a radio interview about his process of returning over hundreds of days to his lab to perform an experiment without success: 'Another day, another fail.' Eventually, he obtained interesting results (and was interviewed on National Public Radio), but success wasn't guaranteed--a lack of control that in itself constitutes a potent form of difficulty for many writers. To work without expectation of outcome or product and without expectation of ease is a trademark skill of a mindful writer who is comfortable enough with uncertainty and detached enough to perceive variability. A writing moment or hour passes: it contains the failure of seemingly insufficient quantity or quality. It's a matter of indifference, since the basis of success is the ability to perceive the writing moment and not whether the writing moment yielded appreciated material..."

* image from Taoism about com

Next Scheduled Presentation: Workshop on Mindful Writing at North Shore Young Writers Conference

I'll be presenting two 90-minute sessions on mindful writing for creative writing teachers and giving a reading of my nonfiction and poetry at the 2019 North Shore Young Writers Conference on February 1, in Beverly, MA. Looking forward to meeting these terrific young writers and their teachers!

Teacher Workshop

"The Mindful Moment for Creative Writers and Teachers"

Click here (and scroll down) for more details: https://www.waringschool.org/nsywc

Word Bells and Reminders to Be Mindful

One of the most important steps in a mindful writing practice is to find a way to "remember to remember." To remember to remember to notice the present moment. 

This reminder is the agenda of the word sati, an important term that predated even the term "mindfulness" in Buddhist texts. 

The ringing of a bell is one of the most common methods to return to the present. In mindfulness centers and retreats, practitioners are also trained in this remembering work by picking an ordinary object or activity to serve as a trigger to remember: crossing doorway thresholds, climbing stairs, or touching a door knob.

Writers also need a way to remember to remember in order to notice the present moment for the purposes of writing.

Ideally, this method should be practiced at the beginning of each writing session.

1. Formal seated meditation (even in the desk chair) is a tried and true method. Meditate for 3-5 minutes before turning on the computer or opening the notebook.

2. Something embodied, something you. This is different than the mindful breathing of meditation. Pick a physical sensation that always happens with writing. Examples: the sensation of sitting in the desk chair, the sensation of one's wrists resting on the laptop keyboard, the sensation of holding a pen. Whatever it is, draw your attention to it in the moment.

3. Focus on a writing object. Pick an item routinely on your desk. Start a writing session by observing this one object for 1-2 minutes while watching your breathing.

4. Set up a triggering action. Opening the laptop. Taking out your notebook. Pulling a pen from a holder. Opening a Word file. Whatever the action is, do it mindfully, while watching the breath.

The above are methods to remember the present when starting a writing session. 

We can also train ourselves to remember to remember when we're in the middle of a writing session. These methods are geared for more advanced mindful writing practitioners: people who can tolerate interruptions in their productive mindlessness. They're also helpful for all of us, no matter our experience with mindful writing, as occasional practice.

1. Set a timer for every 15-20 minutes. When the timer goes off, stop whatever you're writing and return to watching the breath for a minute. Then resume writing.

2. Pick a fairly frequent word, perhaps an article like "the" or a preposition like "to." Train yourself to return to the present moment each time you either write or read this "word bell." I recommend that this practice be used less frequently than the others. It's useful every now and then when you want to bolster your mindful awareness. Try it for 10 minutes every now and then.

Mom, Can You Help Me with My Essay: A Mindful Way For Parents To Help

In the glow of the kitchen table lamp, as though interrogated by officers of procrastination, your son or daughter sits slumped. The table is covered with the detritus of an evening of frustration—crumpled paper, a plate from a snack enjoyed hours ago, marked-up handouts and the grading rubric. 

Your child is stuck on repeat: “I don’t know what to say” and “I don’t know what the teacher wants.” From upstairs, the sounds of other household members brushing their teeth and preparing for bed, the happy murmur of siblings untormented by an essay. 

It would be so easy to helicopter in rescue sentences that start, “how about saying this here?,” but you refuse to write the piece for them. You just wish you knew how to make this process smoother.

Short of plagiarism, your child may be willing to do anything to exit this predicament, yet it’s precisely right now that your son or daughter needs to finish this homework.

The reason your child is suffering through this assignment is that they’ve been trained to miss out on the present moment in order to prepare for a future moment when their work is critiqued and graded. Mindlessness, as Harvard professor Ellen J. Langer has documented, hurts learning. It’s harmful to critical thinking and the ability to perceive alternatives to move beyond rigid views. 
I believe that mindlessness (future- or past-oriented thinking that overlooks what’s happening now, in real time) is specifically consequential to learning how to write. Writing becomes an entirely different experience if children focus on what’s happening in the moment.

The main pipeline for this mindlessness instruction is a bit of routine advice. Students are constantly told to “consider their audience,” which really means visualizing a person in the future. After absorbing this traditional advice, your child unconsciously invites the teacher (their biggest audience) into your home. Ms. D from sixth period or Mr. K from Language Arts are not sitting on their couches binge watching Netflix: they’re in your kitchen.

The student hasn’t had time to compose that polished draft—it’s strictly a hypothetical object in the future—so what this teacher-reader “sees” is your child at their most vulnerably imperfect time—in the rough draft stage.

To avoid disappointing this teacher-reader, children delete and correct in-progress writing. Often it’s preferable to not write anything because that’s seemingly the most foolproof way to avert negative feedback.

#1 Settle into the Moment

The most important step is to help your child settle into the moment and steer attention away from that writing future. It’s a sort of mental CPR you need to perform on your child. Pick and choose from the other measures explained in this article, but this part is fundamental.

The best way for your child to more aware is to reengage with the body by observing the breath for 1-2 minutes. Breathing in, here, breathing out, now. The physical benefits of mindful breathing are the slowing of the pulse and the petering out of adrenalin. 
As young writers redirect their mind to follow the breath, self-talk downshifts from that stressful racing of I can’t write I have no idea what to write I am in big trouble. 

Breathing is a free and readily available method to switch perceptions of the time of writing—no special equipment required. 

In my classroom, I’m partial to what I call “yoga for hands,” directing students to focus on the sensations of typing (wrist bones, musculature, pistons of the fingers). It’s impossible to obsess on a tricky audience and simultaneously stay aware of your hands.

#2: Take Charge of Reader Proximity

To evict future-based imaginary readers, switch writing materials. Notebooks and pens install the teacher in the back of kids’ heads. To gain breathing room, avoid writing materials associated with final products.

Instead of a Word document or clean notebook, gather Crayons, magic markers, Post-Its, a coloring book, food stained paper from the recycling bin, a grocery bag—materials not normally shown to teachers. This automatically marks the writing as “private”—buys your child distance from critics. For instance, I write poems in the early hours of the morning with a $1 composition notebook and a pink magic marker precisely because I will never ever show an editor that copy.

#3 Start Where You Are

Young writers often make the mistake of believing they must start from the literal beginning of a document (title, first sentence, introduction). They’ll stare at the screen forever. The student erroneously equates the timing of reading (in English, we read from the top left corner to bottom right corner, rinse and repeat) with the timing of writing (as we write, we move all around a document). 

Any final document is actually covered with the ant tracks of time—what looks like the opening sentence to us might have been the final touch before submission to a publisher.

Instead of waiting for perfection, help your child start anywhere. A mindful and more prolific approach to writing means accepting whatever the moment offers in terms of material. Ask your child where he already has something to say and start freewriting about that spot—it doesn’t matter if it’s in the dead center of the research project.

#4 Go for Quantity over Quality

Help your child mute her tendency toward correct writing in favor of lots of writing. Between the two of you, agree that she’ll complete a number of rapid freewrites of a reasonable word count, for instance 100 to 300 words. Quality doesn’t matter—fillers, repetition, poor grammar, incomplete sentences are all fine for now.

Withhold rewriting, edits, and proofreading for later, even if only for the last fifteen minutes. When your child is deeply stuck, the focus should be on creating a full, messy first draft. It's much easier to operate from a position of abundance than scarcity.

You can improve your child’s writing experience through mindfulness—as long as you keep two principles in mind. First, you should write with your child. Reach for scrap paper or the back of a bill and write alongside him. Write about anything—scribble pajamas and novel in bed pajamas a dozen times—as long as you’re seen writing. This sends an important message that while you won’t be writing their essay, you’re engaged in writing.

Second, abstain from any criticism whatsoever—not a single misspelling, comma-gone-wild, or out-of-place sentence. Your kid is struggling because she’s crouched in a mental huddle, anticipating corrections on content and grammar. For her to access the present moment, it’s important that she writes as freely as possible from anticipated correction.

 It might be tempting to tweak your child’s writing once it starts flowing—don’t. It’ll only do more harm than good. Take a breath—I bow to you—because if you’ve followed even a few of these steps, you’ve already done a world of short- and long-term good for your child writer.

The Movie Screen of the Mind

Rosa Menkman

Everything is mind-made.

--Ayya Khema

 
Each of us has an entire movie production going on inside our heads, the volume turned down so that no one hears the script. Think of the present moment as what’s being shown on that screen, including the screen.
 
When I was in my early thirties, I was suffering from an extended period of not being able to write--as well (not coincidentally) as from a period of personal sorrow.
 
One summer morning, I realized that I was the one making my own moods and feelings. Lying in tangled sheets, I saw my mind as a big empty movie screen, the sort you’d find at a drive-in theater, a white rectangle, upon which images and sounds were projected. The surprise, however, was that I was the projector. I suddenly understood that no one else was responsible for how I was feeling at any moment and that I was the speaker of the dialog in my own head. The people from my life who were in my thoughts were not actually in the room (just as the audience for most writing is also not in the room). I was the script writer and actor, making up the dialog and performing the parts of myself and of the other characters. 

For a split second, that movie screen of the mind stayed white and empty, and I had an experience of what Buddhist practitioners such as Pema Chodron call our innate joy. Behind everything—behind all the negative, excited, fluctuating thoughts and feelings of each moment of our lives, there is a screen of joy. 
 
Mindful writing means being aware of the movie as well as the screen it's being displayed on. It's as Bhante Gunaratana describes in Mindfulness in Plain English: “There is a difference between being aware of a thought and thinking a thought.That difference is very subtle. It is primarily a matter of feeling or texture. A thought you are simply aware of with bare attention feels light in texture; there is a sense of distance between that thought and the awareness viewing it.  It arises lightly like a bubble, and it passes away without necessarily giving rise to the next thought in that chain. Normal conscious thought is much heavier in texture. It is ponderous, commanding, and compulsive. It sucks you in and grabs control of consciousness. By its very nature it is obsessional, and it leads straight to the next thought in the chain, with apparently no gap between them.” 

Being a mindful person, however, is fundamentally different than being a mindful writer.

In practicing everyday mindfulness, a person tries to perceive the thoughts as they arise--negative, positive, or any gradation in between--and not follow them around the corner like a puppy dog, not be reactive. Sure, a mindful person has negative or provocative thoughts: they don't just react as often to that procession of ideas or images, and they consistently return to that large blank joyous screen.

A mindful writer also stays aware of arising thoughts--but with the intention of following one into an absorbed state of writing in which the conditions of the present moment are largely forgotten and words can appear on the page.

That is, a writer uses mindfulness as a gateway into what is largely an unmindful existence.

This experience of writing a lot, of being oblivious to the passage of time, of being inspired, is temporary, a phase we inevitable exit.

The mindful writer, though, upon exiting writing returns to mindfulness, to breathing, the constant joy of the present moment, a joy that involves change. (Part of that change is the change in one's writing ability: it has tapered off, mutated, fizzled, dead-ended--for the time being.)

The mindful writer celebrates the blank white screen along with the frequent oblivion of producing words. While other writers are afraid of those gaps--dreading the blank moment and using gimmicks to keep writing ability close--trying to avoid the present moment in order to prolong oblivion--the mindful writer welcomes the blank screen without reservation, without fear, without judgement. (A great discussion of accepting temporary inability to write is Donald Murray's "The Essential Delay.") The mindful writer is never afraid of those gaps, and if afraid, studies that fear itself as though it were an award-winning movie.

A Pen That Annoys

roy.luck

 

 It’s like writing with a rickety fire tower or construction scaffolding, the mechanical components of the pen shifting loosely inside.

 

Using an awkward pen like this one this morning, a fountain pen with a dazzling rim of rhinestones and a jet-black exterior—all polish and shine promising a swift writing experience but instead a toppling tower in my hand—the sensation is that various pieces are falling apart, that writing is falling apart, the tower is about to fall over, the pen cap jiggling, the components rattling, the ink well needing to be pushed to work, only to cause huge beads of ink which threaten to drop onto the notebook. 

This pen is some sort of fire tower, an observation tower. It helps me be aware. It gives me a view of the edge of mindfulness. It simulates that sensation of being on the very edge of writing—standing close to the state of flow but being held back by the details of the present moment, including its irritations—the sense of still being myself, still being aware of myself. It helps. Why? 

Because it also duplicates that moment of restlessness I often feel right before “getting an idea right” or “finding an idea.” It is as jagged and rusty as a sentence fragment, as unfinished as a phrase, cropped by the unconscious, passing through my mind—and so it is part of the construction of a whole. Anything that heightens my awareness of the act of writing, the physical side of writing, including a pen that doesn’t let me forget its presence, well, that helps.

How to Make Contact with Your Inner Dialog

 

 

To become a more mindful,
more productive writer, you need to get in touch with your intrapersonal communication—that inner “babble” in which you are constantly talking to yourself. (Don’t worry: we all talk to ourselves.)

That inner talk is where you can find ideas for writing as well as the energy to continue writing projects.

Of course, meditation helps us with this. Meditation is all about noticing how in our constant self-talk we are sorting our experience (into good, bad, and indifferent) in the misguided but all-too-human attempt to make life comfortable for us.

Some of my writing students, however, say they are unable to notice when their minds depart from the present moment. They say they can’t notice their monkey minds. They have no idea what mindfulness feels like.

To help those students, I devised the following exercise. I hope it might be of some use to you. The first 10 steps are the set-up for the exercise.

1.      Go to a quiet location.

2.      Put a piece of paper and a pen or pencil beside you.

3.      Sit gently upright, hands resting either palms-up or palms-down on your knees.

4.      Scan your body for its feelings: where are you tense?

5.      With eyes gently focused on a spot a few feet away, begin watching your breathing.

6.      Notice the sensation of the breath entering and leaving your nose.

7.      Notice the sensation of the rise and fall of your torso.

8.      Breathing in, think to yourself, “Here.”

9.      Breathing out, think to yourself, “Now.”

10.  Continue to put your attention on your breathing.

Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered from watching your breath, briefly turn to your piece of paper. Jot down one of the following:

ü  FUTURE (for a distracting thought about the future moment after this meditation session)

ü  PAST (for a distracting thought about a time before this meditation session)

ü  EVALUATION (for any thought that judges your present circumstance—for instance, whether you are pleased, irritated, or bored with the Now)

Do this notation fairly quickly. Don’t make a big deal of it. After you note “future,” “past” or “evaluation,” return to watching your breathing.

The next time you find that you’re no longer watching your breathing, return to the piece of paper and again record one of those three words.

After 5-10 minutes, if you’re like the rest of us, your sheet is probably one long list of distractions.

Did you notice, however, a difference in experience? Did the moments in which you were blindly daydreaming suddenly stand apart from another set—ones in which you were more aware?

If so, you may be well on your way to tasting mindfulness. Maybe more importantly, what you succeeded in doing is shaking hands with your own inner conversation.

Next time, watch that conversation and ask it a question about your writing. A good start might be, “What would I like to write down, right now, in this moment?” Or, “What do you have to say to me about  Idea X?”