Memoir-Writing for Healing

Janelle Hardy, writer and somatic healer, recently produced and hosted the Healing Through Writing Festival with multiple facilitators who themselves are writers and healers.   Janelle is the creator of the course, The Art of Personal Mythmaking: Write Your Memoir While Healing Yourself, which is designed as a self-directed approach to healing while writing the first draft of a memoir. 

The 13-module course includes writing prompts, somatic visualisations and other techniques, and a process for outlining your storytelling.   In developing the course, Janelle drew on her training and consulting experience in bodywork and somatic approaches to trauma healing.  Her techniques and tools enable course participants to gain “clarity, focus and structure” as they write to heal.

Janelle also offers a 9-module, self-directed course, Write Your Life Stories, Heal Your Past, which is also designed to help us heal from our difficult experiences while working on a memoir.  This self-paced memoir-writing course incorporates somatic healing techniques as well as guidance for choosing forms of storytelling, assistance in outlining a memoir, ways to overcome writer’s block and tips about the writing and editing process.  The course is designed to help us deal with our difficult life experiences through writing without becoming overwhelmed.

Writing prompts and the road to healing

Throughout her Festival presentation, Janelle offered several writing prompts designed to elicit recall and identify elements of our life story.   The prompts covered both challenging and rewarding experiences, bodily sensations and personal insight.  I found the prompts particularly fruitful for “loosening the cobwebs”. 

By way of illustration, Janelle shared her own story of chronic fatigue and her acute shyness. She would often experience a “frozen state”  and become “stuck”, with her creativity blocked. After a relationship breakup, she had to deal with her role of a single parent and, at the same time, cope with her negative self-stories.  She sought healing through multiple modalities including somatic experiencing, dance, writing and research and experience of different cultures.

Janelle highlighted the fact that we store and release stories in our bodies.  This is in line with the research and writing of Bessel Van Der Kolk who published the book, The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma.  Janelle introduced a basic somatic exercise during her presentation that involved listening to sounds, touching, stretching and feeling bodily sensations.  She incorporates somatic practices in her courses because she firmly believes that we can reclaim ourselves through our “bodies, stories and desires”.   Janelle described dance as an “embodied language” and found that it helped to reduce her stiffness, tightness, stress and related feelings.

Janelle explained too that we understand the world through cultures.  To really appreciate this idea, she became an exchange student and undertook home stays in Japan, Russia and Canada.  Given the pervasive nature of cultural influences, a useful writing prompt could be, “What influence has your cultural upbringing had on your own life story and how you perceive yourself?” 

I recently gained an insight into the influence of cultural experiences on our self-stories and how we perceive ourselves by reading the novel Runaways, a memoir by Shelley Davidow and Shaimaa Khalil.  The joint memoir tells the story of their 20-year friendship across cultures after meeting at the University of Qatar where Shaimaa was one of Shelley’s students. 

Not only were they “strangers in a strange land”, but also they brought to their relationship and self-stories the influence of their different cultural upbringings – Shelley was an Ashkenazi Jew from South Africa (with its entrenched racial tensions) and Shaimaa was an Arab Muslim from Egypt (with its class tensions).  Their memoir shows the intertwining of different cultures on the stories they shared and how their story was influenced by their life in Qatar. 

Shelley and Shaimaa explain what shaped them, broke them and the ways they returned to “wholeness”.  At different times in their shared storytelling they communicated their individual experiences and reactions in the form of a reflective poem

Janelle offers a series of writing prompts which are available from her website by subscribing to her newsletter: 10 Memoir-Writing Prompts for Healing and Transformation.  Her blog, which contains interviews with creative writers, essays on writing and reviews of websites, is a potentially fertile ground for other prompts.

Creating a theme for a memoir

The process of writing to story prompts enables us to discern various themes, common threads, in our life story.  We can then choose a theme to shape our memoir – exploring which stories in our life serve the theme.  Janelle explained that the selected theme then becomes a “tool for discernment” – assisting us to decide what stories to include and what to exclude.   We can potentially use the discarded stories as the basis for another memoir. 

This process of choosing a theme reminds me of my process in writing my doctoral thesis – the data collected could have been the basis for several different theses but I had to decide what was my central “claim to knowledge” and what data I could include to warrant that claim.  This involved then deciding what elements supported the core thesis and should be included and what should be left out.  I created a folder to store the other ideas and concepts for perusing at a later date.  When I submitted my thesis, I revisited my folder and produced a number of articles including one on the art of thesis writing as a movement through the Seven Chakras, from the Base Chakra to the Crown Chakra – a reflection on my thesis writing journey.  The thesis also incorporated my reflections on my role as a change manager within the Taxation Office – a potential theme for a memoir.

Janelle noted that memoir writers often write more than one memoir as they have several themes running through their lives.  The Australian author Shelley Davidow, for example, wrote  4 memoirs – Runaways (2022), Shadow Sisters (2018), Fail Brilliantly (2017) and Whisperings in the Blood (2016).

Janelle explained that a memoir becomes a meaning-making force that enhances agency and autonomy.  She shared her story of heartbreak and challenge that left her feeling abandoned and hurt.  Through writing, social support and somatic healing she was able to reframe her story from that of victim to someone with skills, choice-points and the opportunity for further personal development through self-employment.  She rewrote her story by “piecing together somatic healing and memoir-writing as an act of service” that enables people to avoid the disempowerment of a victim mentality and experience agency through creating a new self-story in the form of a memoir.

In her podcast, Janelle talks to storytellers and memoir writers along with healers.  The transformative conversations cover not only memoir-writing but also healing, narrative therapy and embodiment.  Through the podcast, storytellers share how they have moved from victimhood to personal freedom and agency. 

Reflection

Janelle has used her blog as a source of “personal mythmaking” by reflecting on her own life experiences as she shared insights on topics related to writing and healing.  Her essay and audio on “How to Shift Resistance” is a good example. 

I have found that in writing this current blog, I have been able to share my personal reflections on the topics I was writing about.  In the process I have been sharing my life story.  In reviewing the 775 posts I have published to date, I have been able to identify several core themes that would serve as the focus of separate memoirs.  I have now chosen one focal theme and begun writing my first memoir using the Kindle Create program as my writing and formatting process.

As we grow in mindfulness through somatic practices, reflection, blogging and memoir-writing, we can increase our self-awareness and sense of agency and reframe our life stories.

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Image by Firmbee from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)      

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Managing Transitions with Mindfulness

In a previous post I explored the use of storytelling as a way to manage life transitions.  In this post I want to discuss a story of personal transition shared by Peggy Farah, mindfulness teacher and licensed physiotherapist.   Peggy was interviewed by Jon Waal on his Life Through Transitions podcast (Episode 48).  Her focus in the interview is tuning into your body using mindfulness as a way to manage life transitions.  She initially started her more than 20 years working with emotional and mental health by supporting children and youth who were dealing with grief, loss or critical illness – all extreme life transitions that are described by Bruce Feiler as “lifequakes”. 

Beneath Peggy’s competence as a therapist was a private struggle with “body image” – she was disgusted with her body (despite dieting) and had a “difficult relationship with food”.  It was as if she disowned her body and continuously retreated into her thoughts, becoming lost in cognitive processes – avoiding having to confront her challenging relationship with her body.  It was during her Masters study of Psychotherapy and Spirituality that she was able to use mindfulness to “reclaim her body”.

As part of her postgraduate studies, Peggy had explored the concept of “presence” and discovered the merits of Eastern religions, especially Buddhism.  She was also introduced to the numerous documented benefits of mindfulness which she describes as “deep noticing” in a way that is non-judgmental.  This opened up the possibility of overcoming her own negative self-evaluation and time spent in her “monkey brain” – in Buddhist philosophy, the concept of “monkey mind” relates to restlessness, disorder and lack of control.

Mindfulness to manage transitions

From her reading, Peggy came to understand that mindfulness could provide her with an “emotional breather”, could actually enable her to “press pause” in her debilitating negative thinking pattern.   She decided to re-focus her Masters thesis on herself undertaking a heuristic study (where she was both the researcher and subject of her research).  Her aim was to apply the principles of mindfulness and presence to her negative relationship with her own body and food so that she could gain “self-acceptance” – a fundamental outcome of mindfulness.

Interestingly, Peggy’s route to mindfulness was through her body – being present in the moment through her body (our body is always in the moment, in the “here and now” – it’s our minds that persist in exploring the past or the future).  She was able to become grounded by focusing on her feet on the floor, her body on the chair, and getting in touch with the physical sensations of her body (a process that involves a “body scan”).  She adopted “mindful eating” practices – the opposite to her previous behaviour.  She expanded her mindfulness practices to daily observation and journalling and engaging in “micro-practices”.   She became aware that the more you practise mindfulness, the more often “spontaneous mindfulness’ occurs in your daily life – you suddenly feel more present in everyday events, such as when observing a flower or leaf.

As she continued her mindfulness practise and her Master’s research on what was happening for her, she began to experience the documented benefits of mindfulness – increased joy and compassion, greater awareness (of self, others and nature), and “deepened relationships”.   She changed from being a “wound-up” Type A senior manager caught up in endless daily tasks to someone who became “anchored in the moment”.   She was able to spontaneously appreciate the shape and beauty of a leaf, to achieve real “presence” when doing yoga, and be really present to her family at the dinner table.   Previously, yoga became a catalyst for negative  self-comparison – comparing her body to that of others participating in practice on the mat.

Penny graduated with her Master’s degree in 2012 and it was not long after this achievement that she moved into her private psychotherapy practice, where, among other services she shares her own experience and learning to enable clients to heal their relationship with their body and food (thus overcoming “emotional and binge eating, chronic dieting, negative body image”).  Peggy also offers anyone a free 12-session, self-help course that she describes as the Deeper Cravings Path™ – a path to achieving a “true connection with your body and develop a peaceful relationship with food”.

Reflection

Peggy has achieved a number of significant life transitions including moving from a person who disowned her own body (despite externally recognised therapeutic competence) to “body reclamation” and self-acceptance; from an overworked and highly stressed senior manager to a calming influence in her private practice helping others achieve creative life transitions.  Peggy now sees her body as “an avenue to return to myself”.  She is living evidence of the transformative effect of mindfulness practice.

Peggy asserts that her achievements to date do not mean that she no longer encounters personal challenges or that she will be free from “lifequakes” in the future.  What it does mean is that she now has the ability to drop into her body when feeling stressed and to take an “emotional breather” and “press pause” in her negative thinking pattern.  Her interviewer, Jon De Waal, reminds us that “every thought we have carries an emotional charge”.  Thus mindfulness practice by suspending or reducing our thinking provides us with a refuge from life’s challenges.

In my current life transition from a competent and active tennis player to a person in rehabilitation for spinal degeneration, I can take inspiration from Peggy’s journey and storytelling.  As I grow in mindfulness, I can experience gratitude for the many positives in my life, persist in the process of rehabilitation and creatively develop a new identity and life story

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Image by smellypumpy from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Managing Life Transitions through Storytelling

Many writers and podcasters highlight the challenges involved in life transitions.  Some focus on specific transitions such as aging, menopause for women, or transitions precipitated by organisational change.  Their discussions frequently highlight the need to reframe specific transitions such as aging or job loss as periods of growth and creativity rather than decline – this means changing our mindset and our narrative about these transitional periods.  As William and Susan Bridges point out in their book, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, many people become stuck in the “endings” phase of transitions because they focus solely on what is being lost, rather than appreciating the potentiality of “new beginnings”.

Bruce Feiler, in his TED Talk©, The Secret to Mastering Life’s Transitions, contends that one of the core problems people have in managing life’s transitions is that they have a linear mindset, a perception that life is always “onwards and upwards” with a predictable forward-moving pattern – schooling, job, home purchase, marriage, and children, and career promotion.  We are thus ill-prepared for “setbacks” or deviations that occur through job loss, ill-health, loss of a partner, or physical disability.  Bruce, who was diagnosed with cancer when he was a new father of twin girls, suggests that when we are “side-tracked” or things go “offtrack”, we can feel as though we are “living life out of order” – living a life that is totally unexpected.  In his TED Talk© and his book, Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at any Age, Bruce maintains that life is a series of “disruptors” and some of these are “lifequakes” that involve massive change and demand managing the transition to a new state. 

The role of storytelling in managing life transitions

Bruce, along with many other writers, podcasters and public speakers, offers tips for managing life transitions that we encounter.  He maintains that a key to transition is to explore our “life story” – this is the narrative we create about our own life. The solution to mastering transitions is often in our own narrative – false assumptions, self-deceits, delusions or denials (e.g. “it can’t happen to me”!).  Bruce maintains that a life transition, especially a “lifequake”, is an invitation to “revisit, rewrite and retell our life story”.  He offers a catalyst for this process through his Life Story Online Interview which provides an interactive form for reflection on, and  recording of, our personal narrative.  Bruce’s insights on life transitions have been gained through his own life experiences as well as through over 1,000 interviews with people about their life story.

Jon DeWaal, in his TED Talk©, Two Factors that Make or Break Every Messy Life Transition, stresses the need, when exploring our life story and the associated narrative, to adopt two practices to ensure that the exploration leads to a constructive outcome.  Firstly, he contends that we need to be honest with ourselves – to own up to our own part in contributing to our side track or offtrack experience.  This requires deep reflection, total honesty, self-awareness and avoidance of the tendency to blame others rather than look at ourselves.  Associated with this is what he calls “community support” – not the gentle, warm kind that confirms our invalid self-assessment, but the kind that offers “supportive challenge” which makes us confront our weaknesses, unfounded assumptions or persistent mistakes/oversight.  Jon is a learning facilitator and life transition guide at Liminal Space – a team of transition experts who can help us grow and thrive through difficult transitions.  Jon is also the creator of the podcast, Life Through Transitions, drawing ideas and inspiration from interviewees who have been able to make life’s “formative transitions” into opportunities for personal transformation.

Dr. Annie Brewster, MD, and journalist Rachel Zimmerman, in their book, The Healing Power of Storytelling, focus on the personal narrative as a way to “navigate illness, trauma and loss”.  Annie shares her own life experiences and transitions and, together with her co-author, offers specific guidance in the process of using storytelling for healing.  She is also the founder of the Healing Story Collaborative which provides shared stories and resources through a collaborative blog – processes that are open to anyone to engage with personal storytelling for the purpose of healing.

Reflection

We are continuously controlled by the narrative in our head and this is particularly true in times of significant life transitions.  We can become embroiled in negative self-stories, get stuck in the endings phase or be blind to the creative options open to us in a life transition.  We need to break this destructive cycle especially when confronted with what Bruce describes as a “lifequake”.

Using reflective storytelling, meditation and other related practices enables us to grow in mindfulness and can help us to increase our self-awareness and insight, to have the courage to move beyond our “comfort zone” and to creatively explore options to manage difficult life transitions and move forward to a new personal identity and reality.

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Image by Cristhian Adame from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Trees as Sources of Meditation

Every tree is different – it has its own aura, energy field, colour, shape, life story and natural beauty.

Individual trees can be a great source of meditation – they embody many of the dilemmas of human existence.

It’s Jacaranda time in Brisbane when these trees cover the city with their purple blossoms.  It is also a time of dread for many children because it signals the approaching period of school exams.

I am reminded that some time ago I wrote a poem about Jacarandas when meditating on a particular tree.

The poem goes like this:

                  Radiant Beauty

Resplendent purple, a carpet of colour

Fully clothed in regal garment

Refreshing hue, eye-catching glow

Noticed from above and below

Radiant beauty, swiftly shed.

The Jacaranda tree was standing in the middle of a park covered in its distinctive purple blossoms – resplendent purple, fully clothed in regal garment.

Wherever you walk in Brisbane at this time of the year you will be walking below the refreshing hue and eye-catching glow of the Jacaranda. It’s an amazing sight when seen from below.  It is even more amazing when seen from above –noticed from above and below.  From the air, the whole city appears carpeted in purple.

One of the characteristics of this type of tree is that its purple blossoms last for such a short time – radiant beauty, swiftly shed.  It is a constant reminder that human beauty is ephemeral – so transitory, yet pursued endlessly by many people as if it defines a person’s worth.

As the Jacaranda trees shed their purple blossoms, they create a carpet of colour as illustrated in the image below:

If we grow in mindfulness through meditation and other mindful practices, we will be able to see beyond transitory, external beauty and see the real essence of a person.  We will learn to value each person’s uniqueness and their life story – just as we learn to value our own.

Image source:

Park Bench by Indy24 on Pixabay