Writing and Healing Prompts

The writing and healing prompts gathered here have been developed and gathered over the past 10 years or so, and are now numbered—beginning with the earliest prompts posted in 2006.

In addition, I’ve started in 2016 posting twice daily writing prompts at Twitter. These prompts are different than the numbered ones below, and you can read more about them and see the prompts here.

Please feel free to share any of the writing prompts as you wish—

1. Designing a Healing Retreat

2. Freewriting

3. The Body as a Healing Place

4. The Easiest Writing and Healing Exercise Ever

5. A Shopping Spree

6. Discovering Needs and Desires

7. Has Writing Ever Changed Your Life?

8. Buy a Box

9. The Mystery of Language

10. Conjuring New Images and Metaphors for Healing

11. A Scavenger Hunt

12. Falling Apart

13. Lifelines

14. Considering a Package

15. Listing What Remains

16. A Walk on a Strange Street

17. Steps for Making a Written Collage

18. The Things We Carry

19. The Good Part in Other People’s Stories

20. Finding a Benefit in Adversity

21. Meanwhile

22. Once Upon a Time

23. What If the Moon’s a Balloon?

24. Deciding Who to Bring on the Train

25. A Memo at Your Breakfast Plate

26. Figuring Out the Shape of the Story

27. What Am I Here For? (part one) // What Am I Here For? (part two)

28. Consulting with the Wizard of Oz

29. A Title for Your Quest

30. Choosing Chapter Titles

31. Locating a Turning Point

32. Keeping a Process Journal: A Long-Term Solution to Writer’s Block

33. Imagining Refuge

34. The Next Step

35. My Favorite Piece of Writing Advice from Natalie Goldberg

36. A Letter for Breaking Through Resistance

37. A Conversation with a Companion

38. I’ve Always Meant to Tell You: A Different Kind of Mother’s Day Greeting

39. Changing the Plot

40. A Clean Copy

41. Reading to Discover What You Most Want to Write

42. Imagining the Future

43. Rest Hour

44. What Audience Do You Imagine When You’re Writing?

45. Drawing a Map

46. Opening the Door

47. Choose a Word

48. Locating a Potential for Change

49. What Really Counts in This Life?

50. Listening in the Silence

51. Ira Progoff’s Stepping Stones

52. Stepping Stones in 3 dimensions

53. Words as Snowshoes

54. Become a Lake

55. Gratitude as Antidote

56. What if Appearances Are Deceptive?

57. Instructions by Neil Gaiman: The Writing Prompts

58. Writing about Rain

What to do with the salt of suffering?

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 15, 2014 in Blog, Healing Grief, Healing Places, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

Sometimes when I’m at a loss for words it helps to come across other’s words, and just this morning I came across a treasure trove of poems at, of all places, a website of the Frye Museum, an art museum in Seattle, where they hold a weekly mindfulness meditation session on Wednesdays, and have published some poems and pieces they’ve used at these sessions. Here is one piece that seems particularly illuminating this morning. It’s not a poem, but it’s like a poem—a healing story as short as any poem. It’s not attributed to anyone. At another source I found it attributed to a Hindu master. Here’s the story: An aging master grew tired of his apprentice’s complaints. One morning, he sent him to get some salt. When the apprentice returned, the master told him to mix a handful of salt in a glass of water and then drink it. “How does it taste?” the master asked. “Bitter,” said the apprentice. The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take the same handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake and once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt in the water, the old man said, “Now drink from the lake.” As the water dripped down the young man’s chin, the master asked, “How does it taste?” “Fresh,” remarked the apprentice. “Do you taste the salt?” asked the master. “No,” said the young man. At this the master sat beside this serious young man, and explained softly, “The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things. Stop being a glass. Become a lake.” How can writing be used to enlarge one’s sense of things? Is it possible that the more we write–and the more we try to encompass in our writing–the larger we become? How can writing be used to become a lake? The photo is of Lake Mapourika in New Zealand and is by Richard...

Report from a Far Place by William Stafford

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 28, 2014 in Blog, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

I’ve never thought about words as snowshoes. I’ve never even walked in snowshoes—or seen them up close—I’ve only ever seen them in pictures—but I do love the connection William Stafford makes here in his poem, “Report from a Far Place.” When I was a kid and we lived in Michigan we used to walk to school often in snow. When the snow was very deep I would walk behind my brothers–they would break the snow first and I would step into their footprints. That memory is very vivid. Following became a way to navigate the snow. We could call words anything, I suppose–anything that might become meaningful–but here he’s calling them snowshoes: Making these word things to step on across the world, I could call them snowshoes. They creak, sag, bend, but hold, over the great deep cold, and they turn up at the toes. In war or city or camp they could save your life; you can muse them by the fire. Be careful, though: they burn, or don’t burn, in their own strange way, when you say them. Words as a way to navigate the “great deep cold.” What great deep cold needs to be navigated? This week? This year? This lifetime? What words could make particularly good snow shoes? The poem, “Report from a Far Place,” is from Someday Maybe, 1973 The photo is by Kim...

Writing and Healing Prompt: Ira Progoff’s Stepping Stones in Three Dimensions

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 13, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

Another useful way to work with stepping stones, building from last week’s prompt, is to take a set of stones and add another layer: What did I want at each stone? What was my motivation? And why did I want that? And why did that matter? And what was beneath that? It’s like taking a two-dimensional map and adding another dimension—the dimension of depth. The dimension of why. You can begin to deepen the map in this way. You can notice threads that emerge—patterns. You can see how your motivations may have changed over time. The previous piece on stepping stones is here. The photo, Stepping Stones, River Rothay, is by Chris Heaton and can be found...

Steppingstones as a Way to Examine Your Life

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 6, 2014 in Blog, Map, Writing and Healing Prompts

Ira Progoff, a student of Carl Jung, who developed an elaborate process of journaling for self-discovery, one that involved binders and dividers and multiple colors, used the term stepping stones to describe a way of looking back and examining one’s life. I’ve always found his term evocative. I see the stones on a path with spaces between them, the stones stretching back as well as forward. Our lives are a river of moments. The stones are those key moments—often ones we remember vividly—often ones where something of significance turned, or shifted. In his book, At a Journal Workshop, Progoff writes: They may come as memories or visual images or inner sensations of various kinds. Especially they may state themselves in the form of similes or metaphors in addition to expressing the literal facts of past experience. Let your attitude be receptive enough that the continuity of your life as a whole can present itself to you both in symbolic forms and in literal factual statements. He compares the creation of stepping stones to a running broad jump. “We go back,” he says, “into our past in order to be able to leap forward into our future.” He recommends “placing” eight or ten steppingstones. No more than twelve. Simply naming the stepping stones is a beginning—and later, if one chooses, one can come back to a single stone and explore it in more depth. The book, At a Journal Workshop, can be found here. More about Progoff’s workshop process can be found here. Photo by Chris Heaton at Geograph: a footpath over the River Rothay in Cumbria, Great Britain...

Writing and Meditation Prompt: On “In Silence” by Thomas Merton

Posted by Diane Morrow on June 22, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts, Writing and Meditation

Be still. Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent, they try to speak your name. Listen to the living walls. Who are you? Who are you? Whose silence are you? from “In Silence” by Thomas Merton One way of thinking about meditation, it occurs to me, is to think of it as listening to thoughts in the silence—either one’s own thoughts or the thoughts of someone else, or some combination of the two. And one way of thinking about writing and meditation would be to combine this kind of thinking in the silence with writing about it afterwards. The meditation and the writing complementing each other. This is something I’ve been trying out lately, and playing with, in my quest to explore and practice meditation. I seem to have settled on three steps. These steps could be thought of as meditation for those (like me) who find meditation a challenge. Or these could be thought of as writing and meditation for the beginner. Relaxing and settling in The meditation itself Writing about it The steps, of course, could be adapted as needed. Here are the three steps as they might apply to meditating and writing on this excerpt from Thomas Merton’s poem. The process as outlined here would take about twenty minutes. Probably best if one can find twenty minutes of quiet, uninterrupted time to try this out, but this too could be adapted. First, settle in and begin to relax. Take 5 minutes or so. If you’re already a meditator, you can sit in the posture you use for meditation. (If you’re already a meditator, you probably don’t need these instructions!) Or you can sit in a chair. Whether sitting on the floor or a chair, best if possible if your spine can be straight—and then your muscles relaxed or beginning to relax. I’m including here brief instructions for relaxing and settling in, instructions I’ve adapted from instructions I learned when I was doing imagery training (a kind of hypnosis training), fairly basic instructions that I often used with patients when I had my mind-body medicine practice. Sometimes, when working alone, it can be helpful to record a script like this and listen to it while you relax, but you can also simply read it and go back and forth between reading it and settling in. Begin with a cleansing breath—a deep inhalation, a pause—and then a long breath out. Do this twice. And then begin, very gradually, to bring your attention to your body. Beginning with your feet. The soles of your feet. Your toes. Noticing that, and then, if you like, inviting your feet to relax. And noticing what that feels like . . . Now your calves. Noticing what you feel there. Your thighs. Your hips. Inviting the muscles to relax. All the time noticing, paying attention. As you do so, you might begin to feel a flow of relaxation moving from your feet up into your legs, your hips, your belly, your chest. If you do, just notice it. Notice what happens as you bring your attention gradually up the body, imagining the relaxation flowing into your neck and shoulders, and down into your arms, and past your elbows. Then down into your hands—the tips of...

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