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Writing and Healing Prompt: Choose a Word

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 23, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

This follows from last week’s writing prompt and also from coming across a post recently by Sharon Bray. She’s an author and teacher who posts weekly writing prompts at her site, Writing Through Cancer; she wrote a lovely post in January about choosing a word for the entire year. You can consciously choose a word (or two) that you want to explore and consider and define. Here are some possible words: contentment, delight, patience, kindness, healing, recovery, grief, sorrow, peace, reprieve, time, impermanence, death, love, compassion, success, regret, guilt, meditation, happiness. But it could be any word. Periodically, I’ll ask students to choose a word for our writing catalyst for the day. The other day one student chose omnipotent. Another chose vitriolic. Another chose divulge. _____________________________________________________...

Writing and Healing Prompt: Count Key Words

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 16, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

After writing last week some early thoughts about happiness, I decided to go back and see if I tend to use the word happiness much—and discovered I don’t! On this site—before last week (when I used it twenty or so times)—I’ve not used the word once, and in the entire draft of my book I’ve only used it seven times. I was interested to see then what words I do use and found, for instance, compassion was much more common: 50 times. Suffering: 42 times. Peace: 37. James Pennebaker has a program that counts words and looks for patterns—and has yielded interesting results. But one can also count particular words in a Word document by simply using the find feature. It occurs to me that the pattern of words we use can be a clue to what preoccupies us. So . . . the prompt: count key words. And you can decide what those key words might be. You can begin by looking through a few pages of your own writing and looking for patterns—what words stand out? Or you can begin by generating a list of possible candidate words and then do searches of them in your own writing. Or you can start with these four words: happiness, peace, suffering, and compassion. You can also use Wordle to get a snapshot of key words in a piece of text or a blog. I entered my own blog and got this word picture: (The word happiness jumped in frequency after last week’s post.) ____________________________________________________ Also: at analyzewords.com you can analyze Twitter feeds using James Pennebaker’s program: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). The site includes a link explaining the analytic program and leads to links for additional resources on his analysis. His program focuses on the use of pronouns, articles, prepositions, and other small words. He’s become interested, through his research, in these smaller, connecting words rather than key...

Happiness: Some Early Thoughts: A Collage

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 9, 2014 in Blog, Happiness, Writing and Meditation

I’m just beginning to explore meditation, but I keep running into this word: happiness. And I’m beginning to realize I have a bit of resistance to it—the word itself seems kind of, well . . . frivolous when you start to think about all the suffering in the world. When I was in my twenties (and thirties and into my forties) and my mother was suffering with severe depression the word often seemed especially frivolous. As I remember it, when I was practicing mind-body medicine, my patients rarely talked about happiness—rarely used that word. They talked about wanting to be free from pain, or fatigue, or depressing thoughts, or, sometimes, perhaps, to have peace of mind, but I don’t remember the word happiness much. As if, perhaps, there were a number line and they were trying to get out of the negative numbers and back to zero—back to some kind of baseline—and it seemed just too much to ask—even greedy—to be aiming above zero? I found this a while back, written by Gordon Parker, a psychiatrist at Black Dog Institute, and it resonated: “As a clinical psychiatrist, I have yet to have a patient present seeking ‘happiness.’ Depressed patients have a more fundamental objective—relief from the ‘psychological pain.’” My students use the word happiness much more often. In junior English because it’s a year that focuses on American Literature, we end up talking quite a bit about the American Dream—and this inevitably leads us into conversations about success—and happiness. If I were to choose one word that comes up most frequently when my students talk about happiness it would be family. They often link the words family and happiness. Many talk about happiness in terms of wanting to fall in love and have a good marriage and a good family and be able to support them—this often no matter what difficult circumstances they’ve grown up in—and sometimes especially when they’ve grown up under difficult circumstances. Sometimes my students seem very innocent. Sometimes not. Here’s a quote from one of my juniors that ended up on a poster about the American Dream: “As young children, we believe we will have the perfect lives as adults, but as we grow and mature, reality hits and we often have to settle for less.” This from a student whose father was recently diagnosed with a serious chronic illness. What is happiness in the face of reality? And how can that discussion be approached without sounding glib? I go looking for quotes from the Dalai Lama on happiness and I can’t seem to find what I’m looking for—something that can speak to these questions—and to the fragment about my student—and then I find this, from The Art of Happiness, which seems to be the right next piece: No matter what activity or practice we are pursuing, there isn’t anything that isn’t made easier through constant familiarity and training. Through training, we can change; we can transform ourselves. Within Buddhist practice there are various methods of trying to sustain a calm mind when some disturbing event happens. Through repeated practice of these methods we can get to the point where some disturbance may occur but the negative effects on our mind remain on the surface, like the waves that may ripple on the surface...

The Art of Meditation by Matthieu Ricard, Part 1

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 2, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

One has to start somewhere as a beginner, and I’ve decided to start here. I ordered Matthieu Ricard’s book, Why Meditate?, but while waiting for its arrival I found this video by him: The Art of Meditation. I realized if I’m going to try and explore connections between writing and meditating, I need to learn quite a bit more about meditation. The 29 minute video is geared toward a beginner audience, like me–someone who might be considering meditation but wants to understand more about it before diving in. Why Matthieu Ricard? His new book, Why Meditate?, showed up on a search, and everything I’ve learned about him since has given me confidence in him as a teacher. He strikes me as one of those experts who’s able to translate and explain his ideas to a beginner–but without condescension. He’s a former biologist, French, who became a Buddhist monk at the age of 30, and has, in recent years, worked with the Mind and Life Institute, a collaboration between scientists and Buddhist scholars. TED, where he’s given a talk on the habits of happiness, describes his attitude toward happiness in this way: “Achieving happiness, he has come to believe, requires the same kind of effort and mind training that any other serious pursuit involves.” I’m attracted to this notion of a mental state requiring training. I’ve always known that writing required training, and, more and more, I’ve come to think the same about healing. These are processes that require effort—they don’t just happen. Robert Chalmer, writing in The Independent in 2007, describes Ricard this way: Matthieu Ricard, French translator and right-hand man for the Dalai Lama, has been the subject of intensive clinical tests at the University of Wisconsin, as a result of which he is frequently described as the happiest man in the world. It’s a somewhat flattering title, he says, given the tiny percentage of the global population who have had their brain patterns monitored by the same state-of-the-art technology, which involves attaching 256 sensors to the skull, and three hours’ continuous MRI scanning. The fact remains that, out of hundreds of volunteers whose scores ranged from +0.3 (what you might call the Morrissey zone) to -0.3 (beatific) the Frenchman scored -0.45. He shows me the chart of volunteers’ results, on his laptop. To find Ricard, you have to keep scrolling left, away from the main curve, until you eventually find him – a remote dot at the beginning of the x-axis. I don’t know much about these happiness scans—or what his scan might have looked like, say, when he was twenty-five, before he became a monk—but certainly this is intriguing. Chalmers also writes this, one of the reasons I rather like and have a tendency to trust the article: In the foreword to Happiness, the psychologist Dr Daniel Goleman describes how a three-hour wait at an airport “sped by in minutes, due to the sheer pleasure of Matthieu’s orbit” – a phrase which had made me faintly nauseous when I first read it. Now, it seems to make perfect sense. Ricard exudes a sense of tranquillity, kindness and – surprisingly enough – humour. Skeptical journalist won over by tranquility, kindness, and humor. I like that Matthieu Ricard opens the video with a very basic question. This...

Writing and Meditation: Writing Down the Bones: First Questions

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 23, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Meditation

When I think about writing and meditation, the very first moment that comes to mind—the moment when I first thought of these two concepts as linked—is a moment in my late twenties, coming across Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones, and finding this: In 1974 I began to do sitting meditation. From 1978 to 1984 I studied Zen formally with Dainin Katagiri Roshi (Roshi is a title for a Zen master) at the Minnesota Zen Center in Minneapolis. Whenever I went to see him and asked him a question about Buddhism, I had trouble understanding the answer until he said, ‘You know, like in writing when you . . .’ When he referred to writing, I understood. About three years ago, he said to me, ‘Why do you come to sit meditation? Why don’t you make writing your practice? If you go deep enough in writing, it will take you everyplace?’ This, for me, was like coming across fresh water—or a compass, a map, the right food at the right time. Yes, maybe that’s how it can be. A part of me had begun to suspect this—a faint voice telling me that writing could take me where I needed to go. But reading that passage—that sense of permission—it strengthened that voice in me, nurtured it, encouraged it. Now it’s been more than twenty-five years. I can say with full confidence that my life is far richer and better because I have written through so much of it. But lately I’ve been thinking that I want to be even more intentional in the ways that I use writing as a practice. To look at it more closely. Is writing, potentially, a form of meditation itself? (That’s what Katagiri Roshi seemed to be suggesting above.) Can writing be a bridge to meditation? Or a scaffold? A kind of way station? For those, like me, who find meditation hard? Or, perhaps, can the two work together well–say, a person going back and forth from one to the other? How might writing and meditation be fruitfully connected? And how might all the information that has begun to accumulate about meditation, including meditation and neuroscience, inform that connection? These are questions I’m starting with. ______________________________________________________________________________ See also Writing Down the Bones Photo is mine. A way station?...

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