In the previous blog post, I discussed the mindfulness practices that Mary Fowler, international soccer star, uses to grow her resilience, support her mental health and develop calm and happiness. What I did not include in these discussions is the poetry that Mary writes and incorporates in the chapters of her memoir, Bloom: Creating a life I love.
Poetry can be a rich source of mindfulness, both when reading poems or writing them. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of Exploring Poetry of Presence 11: Prompts to Deepen Your Writing Practice, explains how writing poetry can be a mindfulness practice. Her book provides not only a guide to reading Poetry of Presence 11- More Mindfulness Poems, but also a stimulus to our own poetry writing. To achieve guidance for reading the focal book, Rosemerry draws on every poem in the book and uses them and other poems to stimulate our own writing of poetry.
Rosemerry co-hosts the podcast Emerging Form that discusses how to develop the creative process and provides examples. Her poetry is published widely and her anthologies include Hush (a winner of the Halcyon Prize), Naked for Tea, and All the Honey. She has written a poem daily since 2006 and these can be accessed by subscribing to her mailing list and/or by reading her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Rosemerry also produces an audio daily, The Poetic Path, which she describes as “an immersive daily experience of poetry and reflection”.
Writing poems as a mindfulness practice
Writing poems develops our capacity to be in the present moment, to be open to the richness of our daily experience and to engage more consciously with others and the world at large. Writing cultivates curiosity and acceptance of what is. It enables us “to show up in the moment”, if we arrive daily with a pen in our hand or a digital device for capturing our thoughts, observations and reflections in-the-moment.
Writing poems changes the way we engage with others, ourselves and our daily environment. It makes us more aware of, and open to, both our external and internal worlds and helps us to achieve an integration between them. When we are seeking to write poetry, we are on the lookout for inspiration and are more conscious of what is going on in our life, in our body and in our mind – it makes us so much more grounded in the reality of our everyday life.
Rosemerry maintains that we should not seek to write “good” poetry according to external standards or those of other people. She argues that this only taps into our negative self-thoughts and cultivates a mindset of criticism and can lead us to get stuck or frustrated. For her, this self-criticism is the opposite of being mindful – it is not accepting what is and how our writing reflects the vicissitudes of our daily life and our natural responses to how we experience our reality. She encourages us to write from our own truth – what is true for us in this moment of writing.
The outcomes of writing poems as a mindfulness practice
Rosemerry draws on her own poem-writing experience to provide a “caveat” for the readers of her book. She counsels us to be aware that not only will our writing change but a lot of other things in our life will change too in unpredictable ways. She explains that using writing as a mindfulness practice has made her more open to life, softened her perspective on many things and enabled her to be “more willing to be vulnerable”.
She found that through her poetry writing she became more honest and trusting. A key outcome of this mindfulness practice was her ability to meet “great loss”, in particular, when her son took his own life. Rosemerry contends that the mindfulness practice of writing poetry really matters when we are faced with “trauma, loss, fear and woundedness”. In her anthology of poems titled The Unfolding, written after the deaths of her son and father, she shares her aching heart while savouring beauty and wonder. Her poems in this collection convey contrasting states such as playful and sombre. They express a life lived fully, consciously and openly.
Despite her grief over her son’s death, Rosemerry experienced an ever-increasing capacity and desire to be open to the richness of life. In the process, she was able to love and connect even amidst “the tough stuff”. She attributes the mindfulness practice of writing poetry to her ability to avoid “shutting down” in the face of extraordinary pain. Having established a “practice of presence”, she was able to show up each day. Her daily stimulus for writing was a set of questions such as, (1) “What is here?” and (2) “What is true right now?”. We could add for our own writing practice the question, “How do I want to show up today?”.
Rosemerry contends that gaining these mindfulness outcomes does not depend on our talent, wisdom or skill level – all that is required is to “show up with a blank piece of paper and a pen”. She maintains that using other people’s poems as a guide can help us to write as well as drawing on the writing prompts she provides in her book or other books such as Exploring Poetry of Presence: A Companion Guide by Gloria Heffernan.
Writing prompts for poems
Throughout her book, Rosemerry provides a series of writing prompts to enable us to write our own poems if we need an external stimulus. Sometimes poems just come to us, catalyzed by significant events in our lives. The writing prompts she offers are an invitation to write our own poems and are an excellent stimulus for self-expression. An example of the prompts she provides includes the following prompt:
Paying attention – the challenge to be in the present moment, noticing the world around us and within us. We can view the world (and our writing) through our senses – sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. Consciously noticing our outer world can lead to cognisance of our inner world – our thoughts, our feelings, our sense of wonder and awe. Rosemerry claims that writing poems mindfully can “build a bridge between these two worlds” – our outer and inner reality.
According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, meditation teacher and practitioner, paying attention is central to mindfulness and enables openness, curiosity and self-awareness (particularly of our negative self-talk). Rosemerry suggests that an easy way to start to pay attention and write is to create a list, e.g. of “what could be”, “what I sense in the moment” or “what I find interesting about the world”. She maintains that by “naming things outside the body” we are led to a “revelation inside the body”.
Reflection
I have found that writing a reflective poem has helped me to manage my frustration and pain associated with chronic illnesses. Writing poetry enables me to take a different perspective, explore the consequences of my own actions and often acts as a “bridge to action” when I am faced with inertia.
Writing poems has been particularly helpful for me to stay grounded during a recent family crisis where violence and injury, destruction and dissolution, were very real. Mindfulness heightened by poetry writing enabled me to reflect on what was occurring, explore alternatives and be conscious of my whole-body stress.
As we grow in mindfulness by poetry writing, we can tap into the power of being present, enhance our creativity and build our resilience in the face of “the tough stuff”. We can also develop self-care strategies that enable us to withstand the ever-occurring forces of overwhelm.
_______________________________________
Image by Janusz Walczak 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.
