Loving-Kindness Meditation for Writers

Mr. Littlehand

This meditation is an adaptation of metta or loving-kindness meditation. It's a variation of the loving-kindness meditation for non-writers described by Sharon Salzberg: a fundamentally imaginative practice leading to empathy and compassion for ourselves and others.

In my Overcoming Writing Blocks courses, this writerly loving-kindness meditation is one of my favorite activities, right beside showing students mindful eating and walking.

Writer's Loving-Kindness can be helpful in our interactions with audience. Recall from previous posts that we've discussed how all writing is at least initially private writing and how we've stressed the importance of recognizing our fundamental solitude while writing. The audience, to paraphrase Walter Ong, is fictional; what's real is the Present moment. (See earlier posts "The 3 Paradoxes of Mindful Writing" and "How-To Tip #1: Kicking Out the Reader-in-the-Head.")

What better way to take advantage of the vacancy of the writer's Present moment, what better way to make use of our imaginative inclination, than to use those capacities to develop a more reflective, more nuanced relationship to potentially tricky audiences or what Peter Elbow calls dangerous audiences? (Note, though, that Writer's Loving-Kindness meditation is also intended for more benign audience relationships.)

Here are the steps:

Sit in a meditation posture on the floor or in a chair. Begin watching your breathing. Breathing in, think to yourself, "Here." Breathing out, think to yourself, "Now." Do this for several minutes.

1. Think of someone who has been supportive of your writing either in the past or in your current work. On the In Breath, visualize something which would bring this supportive individual tremendous happiness. Try to think of something relating to this individual's writing, reading, or maybe even teaching life. On the Out Breath, visualize this individual receiving or this item (or experiencing this happy event, if it's an event like a literary prize). Continue for several minutes to think of this person in this fashion while watching your breathing.

2. Turn to yourself. What would make you happy in terms of your writing life? On the In Breath, visualize this item or event. On the Out Breath, visualize yourself receiving this item or experiencing this event. Continue for several minutes to think of yourself in this fashion while watching your breathing.

3. Turn to a neutral--someone who is not central to your writing life but plays a role. You might not even know this person's name. For instance, in the past, I've visualized an editor at one of the literary journals to which I submit my work. (I've never met him.) Follow the same steps as above for the In and Out Breath, focusing this time on this person.

4. Turn to a dangerous audience--someone from your past or current writing experience who has tripped up your writing, wittingly or unwittingly. Follow the steps for this person.

5. Turn to any writing group or class you are involved in. For instance, when I'm using this meditation in my Overcoming Writing Blocks class, we contemplate the whole class (students and teacher alike). You could also pick the members of a coffee shop writing group you belong to or the crowd who attends a neighborhood reading series, for instance. Follow the steps for this group.

6. Lastly, turn to the writers of your genre--all the people who compose the type of writing you do (poetry, short fiction, etc.). Follow the steps for this group. Wish them well.

From doing the Writer's Loving-Kindness Meditation, you might notice a softening of your outlook toward difficult judges of your work. You might also gain a sense of their perspective--the reason why they might have acted toward your work as they did. Most of all, this meditation provides a different sensation of audience. Instead of fighting with audiences in our head or even kicking them out in order to use our actual solitude, we can greet that audience and those fellow writers with calm and generosity.

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.

5-Day Retreat on Mindful Writing and Writing Blocks: July 22-26, 2013

SUMMER INSTITUTE, July 22-26, Salem State University

ENL 833: Overcoming Writing Blocks

Alexandria Peary, MFA, MFA, PhD

apeary@salemstate.edu

Spend a week in historic Salem, Massachusetts, meditate and write in a calm and supportive environment, and pick up some life-long writing strategies. This five-day course focuses on the writing process in order to understand and address writing blocks. Participants learn strategies and practice hands-on techniques to increase fluency and ease in academic, personal, or workplace writing. By exploring process theory--specifically, its concepts of freewriting, private writing, audience, feedback, and revision--problems such as anxiety, procrastination, and failure can be alleviated. We also explore various embodied rhetorical practices related to a sound writing process: chief among those is mindfulness practice. Buddhist mindfulness practice, with its heightened awareness on the self and its intrapersonal dialog, naturally complements process pedagogy. Participants will practice mindful eating, listening, talking, and walking as well as standard seated meditation. We discuss concepts such as equanimity, groundlessness, and impermanence in order to develop a mindful writing practice.


Go to http://www.salemstate.edu/academics/graduate-studies.php for information on how to sign up. Feel free to contact me at apeary@salemstate.edu if you have further questions. 

Writing Is a Mild Happiness

fotoedge

Not enough attention is paid in and out of the classroom to the emotional experiences (let alone physical—that's for another day, another post) of people as they write. Emotional states are the single most powerful incentive for people to consistently continue to write, especially when they're no longer students. Writing-related emotions are more powerful than deadlines or even ambition.

Teachers often talk about writing as a matter of struggle, of working hard and of encountering the difficult. Of course, writing has all of these qualities, but how gentle is one's slope up that difficulty? What's the angle on your mental treadmill?

No more potent an incentive to return consistently to the writing desk exists than when writing is a mild happiness. This emotion is key to building discipline as a writer.

MILD:

Avoiding extremes, binges, ups and downs, and manic relations to the ability to write. Don't celebrate anything about writing ability, and don't mourn anything either. In his marvelous but unfortunately under-discussed book, How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure, Robert Boice describes the importance of making motivation to write "more internal"; in fact, growing this internal motivation should be one of the goals of a writer

—as much a project as completing a book or even "writing everyday." Boice turns our attention to the emotional states we experience when writing and specifically asks us to seek a calm approach, a "mild happiness."

Crazy deadlines, all-nighters, adrenalin-pumping procrastination, and writing binges may bring a temporary burst of writing high, but the writer will shortly suffer a let-down: emotional, cognitive, and physical. It's like relying on too much Red Bull: feels good in the short-term but will only cause problems, tiredness, and dependency in the long-term. Some people struggle to avoid states of hypergraphia (being unable to stop writing)—as the neurologist Alice Flaherty so well documents in The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain.Other people induce this state in themselves--when it never had to be an option.

That common technique of waiting until last minute to start a project only seems beneficial. As Peter Elbow has pointed out, this method helps to kick a tricky audience out of your head because you simply can't afford to ponder them: it's "do or die" time. In a paradoxical way, waiting until last minute increases mindfulness because it allows the writer to focus on themselves while composing

—and not some distant audience. However, this method is unreliable (it won't always work and then you're stuck with an incomplete task or failure). Waiting until last minute also does damage by forever linking the act of writing with anxiety, sleep deprivation, and immobility: it makes writing become an unnatural and energy-expensive act, too separate from the normal give and take of everyday moments.

On the other hand, mild happiness resembles the state of equanimity which Sharon Salzberg has described as the ability to allow things to be as they are by putting large space around events and observations. Equanimity is about our stance on external events--how we relate and respond to them—whereas maitri refers more to how we relate to internal developments arising inside ourselves.

As applied to writing, equanimity means watching each moment during the writing experience and allowing it to be what it is. It means not overly valuing the ability to write. It means accepting a productive session as much as accepting a session in which you typed nothing. It means that when time's up on your writing session—you need to get to work or your kids are starting to leap out of their bunk beds—you just move on with ease. You know you've got other interesting things to do with your day. If you don't work with external constraints, set the limits on your writing session simply for the purpose of practicing that mild stance.

HAPPINESS:

Happiness in writing comes then as a result of that equanimity—because it means we are practicing acceptance, being gracious and generous toward ourselves (and we all know how harsh writers can be on themselves). It means that every writing moment can be a low-stakes moment: exploratory, safe, private, secluded. We are happy that we can be so kind to ourselves. With this perspective, there is absolutely no reason to feel uneasy about writing and no reason to dread it.

Basically, a writer needs motivation to continue and that involves accumulating positive associations with writing. This is far from a trivial matter: so much about writing seems linked with unpleasantness.

Early on in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I forced myself to spend hours each summer day meditating on the single image of a still-life. It was so painful that part of my brain literally started to twitch. The consequence? Did I get any writing done that summer? When September rolled around, I "discovered" several typed poems I had no memory of actually writing. Apparently, the experience was so painful that I'd blocked the actual writing entirely out of my consciousness. A few years later, I worshipped Martha Graham and pushed myself through strenuous acts of deprivation in order to finish poems. None of this was as sustaining to my writing life as the gentle and accepting approach of mindful writing.

So the question a writer needs to ask if he or she is struggling with writing is this: What would it take to bring pleasure into writing for me? No matter the answer... now matter how seemingly trivial and possibly even child-like, it's your answer. For instance: I could use crayons. I could write for only minutes right now and then go for a walk. I could copy the same passage over and over. I could freewrite about something that's troubling me rather than working on my article.

Pleasurable experience needs to be built into the curriculum whether in the classroom or in the self-teaching of your study (if you are no longer a student). Mild happiness is a learning outcome as valuable as "improve critical thinking skills" or "understand the social dimensions of written communication" or any of the bulleted statements found on syllabi. 

Knowing How to Give Water to Thirsty Writers: Guest Post by Al DeCiccio

A Provost’s Confessional Vignette:

Once a Writing Center Worker Always a Writing Center Worker

I am pleased to offer you this guest post about the power of collaboration between writers by Dr. Al DeCiccio, Provost at Southern Vermont College, a scholar in Writing Center pedagogy, past president of the Writing Centers Association and former co-editor of The Writing Center Journal.

For more than 30 years, I have held the belief that writing centers are places where risk-taking occurs, where mistakes can be made safely, where learning from errors is encouraged (indeed fostered), where getting it right the first time is less important than learning while doing over time
 

Most recently, at Southern Vermont College where I am Provost, we have implemented a new curriculum, using Neal Lerner’s Idea of a Writing Laboratory. Essentially, our curricular orientation is exactly as I have stated above about writing centers. I offer this fact as a way to orient readers to the following vignette. I hope everyone will find it affirming and illustrative of the fact that one can take the person out of the writing center, but one can never take the writing center out of the person.
 

In 1987, he was an important university man, the kind of man who could determine your future. Chair of the English Department and, more importantly for me, Director of the Graduate Program, Bill asked some questions, making proclamations as well.

“You don’t really believe that this‘positive intervention’ and ‘collaborative learning’ works for all of the students we see today, do you? Half the freshmen can never be taught to write. And then you want the students helping other students, as tutors. That’s the blind leading the blind, don’t you agree? And if you do, what is the point of collaborative learning and of writing centers?”

There had been long pauses in my life before. When Dr. Barry, the doctor who would save my eye, asked me to count backwards from 100 while he gave me ether. Or when I realized I was going to be attacked by the German Shepard after I reached out my hand to pet him. (I still have scars above my left eye, the one Dr. Barry saved, the one with no sight, the one close friends call goofy.) Or when I saw I was about to ride up the rear end of an Oldsmobile on the brand new bike my father bought me. (The look on my dad’s face when I walked the broken bike home was more disappointment than I could ever conceive of causing.)

This was another such pause.

I thought about how far away Tempe was from Lawrence and about how little this important university man knew of teaching writing and what it meant for those who learned to teach others how to do it well. Ten years later, Stephen King, of all people, gave the best advice about teaching writing: “Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up” (On Writing 270).

I thought of Frost, who was from Lawrence; I thought of John D’Agata, who is from Lawrence. Bill was far removed in space and in time from the kind of great writing these men produced.

I thought of Michael Struffolino. I thought of Tania Guimond. They were student-tutors, one a self-proclaimed Libertarian and the other had the warmest heart I’ve ever known even if she couldn’t spell a lick. They were terrific tutors; they knew how to give water to thirsty writers.

They worked and studied at Merrimack College, in the greatest writing center still (and I’ve signed the wall of Purdue’s Writing Lab and seen the Stanford Writing Center, close by Andrea Lunsford’s office filled with writing on collaborative learning and tiny red shoes). Michael and Tania knew Lawrence, too.

It was a hard, working-class place, but it was a city of families and neighborhoods; it wasn’t one fashioned after other cities. It didn’t sneer.

Finally, I answered Bill, realizing that I would make my line in the sand.“Well, unless someone is born with an intellectual disability,” I started out, “I think everybody can learn to write.”

“I think this dissertation looks really good. Did you write it on a computer?” The committee member speaking now tried to loosen the moment’s tightness by this left-handed compliment.

 

“Yes, I did, a Mac 520. But to answer Bill’s question, when writers work together, they gain a momentum that is truly inspiring. A power coming all over them with words. There is evidence, as I have suggested, which explains this power and how collaborative learning brings about knowledge and social growth for both the tutor and the tutee.”

 

 

“Well, it does look very nice--a sign of the times,” said the young professor on the committee, trying again to make things less tense.

 

“Thank you,” I said to the young professor. “Bill,” I continued to address him,“I would never (nor would you, if you knew them) call Tania or Michael or any of my tutors blind. That’s the whole point of collaborative learning and peer tutoring: when like-minded people work on a task that’s too hard for one of them to complete alone, together, they complete it efficiently and effectively. Heck, my whole dissertation was revised in Atlanta by people who know writing, who worked in a writing center--people who knew that, by helping me, I would get the dissertation done and to get back to my writing center tutors.”

“Now, thank you, Al,” my advisor said.“We’re going to deliberate a little and we’ll talk to you after that. Please wait in the conference room.”

When the committee members called me in again, they did approve my dissertation, grudgingly. They wanted major revisions. I suspect they would have preferred a rhetorical analysis of “Billy Budd,” because Bill was a Melville scholar and writing centers, peer tutors, the social construction of knowledge, and collaborative learning were still far out alternatives.

I completed the revisions. While I have never been thrilled with the dissertation, I was always pleased with my writing center work, particularly while at Merrimack and with the peer tutors I knew there. I’ve learned from many good people through the years (Kenneth Bruffee, Bonnie Sunstein, Harvey Kail, Judith Stanford, Mickey Harris, Peter Elbow, Lisa Ede, Michael Rossi, Kathy Cain, Lil Brannon, Don Murray, and more). Still, none of them taught me as much as the tutors did about collaboration and compassion and the power of those actions.

 

I return to those lessons all the time in my position now. I am proud to think about and use what I learned about writing centers, peer tutoring, collaborative learning, and the justification of belief. As I have done for the past 20 years, I use the experience of the Merrimack College Writing Center in every budget decision I make, in every hiring decision I make, in every curricular decision I make, and in every interaction I have with my colleagues.





Photo of Al DeCiccio

Though I am no longer at Merrimack, I can still see Frost’s bust on that campus and hear the last couplet of “The Tuft of Flowers”: “‘Men [and women] work together,’ I told him from the heart,/‘Whether they work together or apart.’”

 

Poetry and the Ant Tracks of Writing

torbakhopper
 

This post is my musing about the workshop, "Your Ability to Write a Poem is Always Present," I'll be giving next Friday for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. 

Is poetry different when it comes to mindful writing?
 

Any act of writing leads to a structure that can be quite different from ordinary spoken language. It's different because of that intricate use of time to create the text (those unseen ant tracks made by the author, the recursive nature of writing/revising/editing/writing/etc.) The time factor of literacy allows us to rework our language, adjust our phrases, make changes without a listener standing around, waiting for us. We have the leisure to tinker, to be by ourselves and our words.

To some extent, because of those ant tracks, all writing (no matter the genre) has captured the intrapersonal dynamic and the privacy inherent to writing. This happens even if only for a few seconds, as when composing an email that's immediately sent. As long as there's the capacity to delete & edit & add before another person encounters your words, the chance for internal dialog arises. This is part of the Present moment of writing.

The use of page space and line breaks--as well as the typical brevity of a poem in contrast to other types of writing--make poetry much more about those omissions, those silences, those big phrases of privacy. The intrapersonal dynamic is heightened with the genre of poetry.

We're also much more likely to think of a poem as a system of sounds (and thus occurring in time) than other genres. This helps accentuate the Present moment.

Mindfulness has the potential to alter the nature of our internal communication. By training in mindfulness practice, we become more aware of that internal dialog. So does the writing of poetry: it can alter our internal dialog by drawing our attention to it.

In fact, if you want to become a more mindful writing, no matter what genre you consider to be your mainstay, no matter if you are a novelist or even a blogger, trying out poetry can help develop your awareness.

 

Portrait of a Paragraph: One Strategy to Build Voice

jmussoto/Picasso

One thing that's struck me about voice-in-writing over the years is how little theory or practice has been developed around how to construct a voice.

Theorists debate whether voice is invoked, the extent to which voice is in response to a particular (real or imagined audience), and so forth. Categories of voice--such as real or dead--have been established. But must writers resort to chance to build a voice?

Pushing aside the issue of whether the voice we hear from the page of a dynamic author is actually microphone feedback from our own intrapersonal babble, I do think there are real ways to go about constructing voice. Voice has to be at least in part due to structural choices, and one of the main choices involves sentence length and sentence type.

Sentence length and sentence type (which is dictated by the punctuation used) constitute the skeleton of every text. Word-free, they nevertheless play a powerful role in the rhythm and voice of a passage.

A device I've shown students is called "Portrait of a Paragraph." It involves taking a passage from a text and drawing lines  __________________  for where language occurs and then placing punctuation exactly where it falls in those lines. 

Punctuation including commas, semicolons, colons, periods, dashes, exclamation marks, parenthesis, and question marks should be captured in the portrait. 

This should be done almost mindlessly with little attention to the meaning or words of the text. 

For example, here is a Portrait of a Paragraph of my previous passage, up above, the one starting "Sentence length":

Sentence length and sentence type (which is dictated by the punctuation used) constitute the skeleton of every text. Word-free, they nevertheless play a powerful role in the rhythm and voice of a passage.

__________________________  ( _____________________

_______) ________________________.   ________, __________

___________________________________________________ . 


If you draw a portrait of a longer passage, you can see the structural reasons which cause that voice or the lack of an interesting voice.

For instance, if you can circle many of the punctuation choices making a sort of vertical entry in a crossword puzzle--if, in other words, the punctuation roughly lines up--then you know you have identified one of the reasons for monotone.

If the sentences are extremely long but nevertheless grammatically accurate statements (with no commas and just end punctuation), you know that you are probably looking at an instruction manual or a bureaucratic document with little concern for the natural pauses of human breathing. (Why would such a document be concerned with our breathing? It doesn't want to appear to be spoken or made by a single author. Instead, it seeks to be anonymous and almost machine-made.)

So look for similarities and patterns in sentence lengths and punctuation choices. These frequently indicate a text with little voice.

On the other hand, variation in lengths and punctuation better resemble spoken speech. These occurrences indicate a text with voice.

If you want to practice developing voice through attention to structural concerns, pick a passage by an author, one full of voice. Do the Portrait. Then try to write something of your own that follows the same sentence length and punctuation choices.

You can also do a Portrait of a Paragraph on one of your own drafts and make changes based on what you notice about voice.