What happens when you sit down to write
Why we love it, why we leave it, why we—ahem—write it off, and why it matters
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Last year (what?!) I made a short video unpacking what happens when we sit down to write: Why we love it, why we leave it, why we—ahem—write it off, and why it matters.
Sometimes we put something out there — in writing, simply sharing an idea with a friend, drawing an image, exploring a theme, pursuing something that keeps pulling at our sleeve — and it takes time for the learning to catch up. In a culture that lauds ambition and a future-focused perspective, looking back is powerful.
Look at what you were learning before you realized it. Look at what you keep circling back to. Look at the recurring lessons, patterns, motifs. This gold is yours to keep close.
This week, I finished re-reading Parker Palmer’s book Let Your Life Speak (to be honest, it offers lots of stunning nuggets but doesn’t wrap up as a whole…I am thoroughly obsessed with vocations so if anyone has recommendations around books on this topic, please let me know). Still, this resonates:
...we need to listen to what our lives are saying and take notes on it, lest we forget our truth or deny that we ever heard it.
And he shares this quote from psychologist/playwright Florida Scott Maxwell in her book The Measure of My Day:
You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done… you are fierce with reality.
Listen, take notes, claim the events. Really, look at how far you’ve come.
I’m over here revisiting some things as part of a larger practice of slowing down to catch up with what I know…
So: what happens when we sit down to write?
Since starting the writing gatherings, I have had the privilege of talking with loads of people (from a mix of ages, cultures, and levels of experience and confidence) in depth about their relationship to writing. This is important: overwhelmingly, the people that join the writing gatherings don’t consider themselves to be ‘writers’.
You don’t need to know what you are doing to write something that changes you.
You certainly don’t need to believe in yourself. The part of yourself that is expressed when you bring pen to paper wants to teach and transform you. Let yourself be transformed! It might be confronting, this is true, but writing has a way of making transformation gentle and kind with a grace that ‘life lessons’ don’t always carry.
From all of these conversations, I can say with certainty that most people find themselves in a back-and-forth with writing: they love it, they avoid it.
They feel centered when they do it, and it’s often one of the first things that gets deprioritized.
This was an extremely comforting learning! You are human and grappling, it’s part of it.
You know when people talk about ‘finding their passions’, it is often a story of trying something once — going on the run, taking the yoga class, picking up the knitting needles, trying out the new language — and the rest is history. From then on, they do it all the time. Sometimes, it becomes their career and they also manage to create great prosperity with this passion.
It’s never been like that for me. I avoid the things that make me feel alive with fierce tenacity.
And yet, we always find our way back to each other. This is why I write about a term that I came up with a while ago: forever practices. It’s ok if your forever practices come to you easily, it’s also ok if they are a source of outrageous resistance.
This is why one of the main intentions behind the Community Discovery Writing Gatherings is to make the path of returning to writing as smooth and shame-free as possible. The path of return can be filled with so much delight—it’s a place of re-discovery and self-permission and fiery stubbornness. Like I shared the other week, you get to ditch all of the rules that don’t work for you. This remembering is a gift.
But when it comes down to it, why write? Why return to it? Why face the back-and-forth of remembering and forgetting, practicing and abandoning?
No matter what form writing takes, it helps us to stay awake. Ideally, we wouldn’t endure suffering in this life, but it’s part of the pact of existence. I think that there is a sincere desire to be here, even and especially when suffering is present. Writing helps us to know that our suffering can be held — by gentle processing, by breathing through, by the power of community, by movement, by small, strategic choices, by remembering what is most essential and enduring.
Writing meets the uncertainty and impermanence of existence like a kind hug. It meets the fullness of your experience of being alive at this time in the world and creates some sense around it. Writing offers an energetic shake-up…
First, there’s the pleasurable emotions and states of being that expand your energy and sense of possibility: joy, lightness, heartfulness, compassion, silliness…
The most common state of being that I hear from the Community Discovery Writing Gatherings is connection.
Writing also creates space and opportunity for difficult emotions to make their way through. There’s the grief that you’ve been trying to outpace and layered levels of anger that you barely have the words for. Sometimes writing feels like emptying out a junk drawer that you didn’t know you had.
The emotions and states of being that you want to feel are likely why you love writing, return to it, and why it feels so good when you pick it back up.
And the possibility of facing the difficult emotions are likely the source of hesitation, resistance, and denial of the part of your that craves getting it out on the page.
We can get stuck in this dance of feeling drawn to it and repelled by it because the experience of writing is always a risk. It creates an opening for us to meet the dualism of reality because writing itself is an experience of duality.
But—and this is the silver lining—for when challenging emotions arise, the practice of writing has an inherent structure to it. This structure acts as a container. Writing might be confronting, but it doesn’t leave us hanging!
Here is the structure that is inherent to the writing process…
Slowing
Grounding
Intimacy
Inquiry
Opening
When you sit down to write, there is firstly a slowing down. The quickness of your thoughts need to meet the pace of your hand through slowing down. Your mind slows to capture the details, remembering for example a patch of weeds that were just so in the summer sun. This slowing can kick up anxiety — is it safe to feel this slowness? Can I really let down my guard and rest??
The experience of grounding supports your body in befriending slowness with a sense of safety. This grounding occurs through touching into the senses, either looking back on something or touching into the senses with what is here right now. We feel the paper and then pen. We notice the weight of our hand on the table and our feet meeting the floor. We often practice orienting in the writing gatherings: slowly scanning the room and letting our gaze fall on something calming. Together we ground into presence.
This builds intimacy with our experience, hence the often shared feeling of connection that blossoms in the writing process. We get intimate with reality through inquiry and we inquire into the nature of experience through a willingness to be intimate. You can already sense the qualities of an open-heart and an open-mind as we practice new postures of wonder.
The entire process is characterized by opening. The marks on the page mark an inner opening. We cannot write and close down. Sometimes this is the barrier to getting to the practice: when you are shrunken and contracted, a part of yourself knows that the writing process will open you up, and until the familiarity of safety is established, this can feel threatening.
Writing is consenting to expansion. It builds the muscles that let us each know that, yes, it is safe to expand into full expression and awakeness. It is safe to be here and share your voice and belong to this world.
I’m curious to hear from you, either by replying to this post by email or dropping a comment below:
🏵️ What insights have you gathered up through your experiences in writing? 🏵️ How do you maintain a writing practice? What gets in the way?
Writing is a way of meeting your magnificence and loving all parts of yourself (even the difficult parts) and offers a foundational way of interacting with, understanding, and co-creating your experience of life.
This is why we gather.
XO
Maggy
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