Clouds Photo: Photo: Doug Brown 37/flickr CC
Writing the Spirit
Jane Mutisya describes an imaginative writing experience
‘Writing the Spirit’ is the title of a series of creative writing workshops, led by Judy Clinton, in which she encourages people to write whatever they are experiencing in the present moment.
The aim is not to produce something that is ‘good writing’ but to use writing to enter more deeply into one’s inner world.
Last September a group of us from Reading, Maidenhead, Wallingford and Henley Meetings met at Wallingford to take part in one of these spontaneous writing workshops.
It doesn’t matter how disjointed or rough the writing is, because you are writing solely for your own benefit. Judy described how this kind of spontaneous writing can increase our insight and self-awareness, and deepen and enrich our spiritual lives, particularly when practised regularly. One of her aims in working with Meetings is to encourage people to carry the process on by forming their own writing groups. Over time such groups can become mini-communities in which people discover more of their true selves and feel accepted and nurtured by one another in a way that helps them to grow.
The workshop began with a warm-up exercise of non-stop ultra-fast writing, with the instruction to just keep writing whatever we were thinking of for six minutes. If nothing came, we had to just keep writing the same word over and over. This was to lose our inhibitions about putting pencil to paper, and also to get rid of any surface preoccupations.
The core of the morning session was twenty minutes of silent writing. The stimulus was spending time, in silence, looking very closely at what was around us (mostly in the sunny Meeting house garden) and feeling our response to it. Then we were simply to write the first thing that came into our head, then the next thing and the next, until we had written what we wanted. In the afternoon session the stimulus was hearing Advices & queries number one about the promptings of love and truth in our hearts.
After each spell of writing we read out as much, or as little, as we wanted of what we had written. The safe and accepting atmosphere made it possible for people to share even deeply personal writing. This sharing was a strong part of the whole experience. In the morning session the sharing was done in creative listening mode, with no comments being made, but in the afternoon, after each person had read part or all of their writing, there was time for others to respond. Both formats worked well.
Writing spontaneously, in that supportive atmosphere, came amazingly easily. The immediacy of the process seems to free up a pathway to deep inside. You can find yourself writing down what you didn’t even know was there and which feels important at a soul level. And having experienced this process in a group, it seems easy to continue with it at home afterwards. I use it whenever I feel blocked and want to find out what is really going on inside me.
Most of us have thoughts running through our heads most of the time that are very difficult to switch off, and that prevent us from living in the present moment. Many people find practices such as meditation, yoga and art helpful for this. Spontaneous writing is another wonderful tool for helping us to make the shift into a deeper and more centred state of being. As well as being really satisfying to do, it can help us to live with more awareness and self-knowledge.
