Life, Stripped Down

Feb 11

All is ecstasy, within…

I returned from several weeks of vacation travel over the holiday season and found my world in strange and heavy disarray. I landed in the Portland airport on Christmas night alone and drove home under slow-falling rain and black-iced roads. My dearest friend was very ill. COVID numbers even in our previously “special” state were rising astronomically. My beloved country was splintering along a massive fault line that could swallow us whole. My partner and my children were thousands of miles away.

And so, I opened my computer and began to meet with people. That’s what I do. I’ve been a psychotherapist for more decades than not. I love this work for its infinite variety and its unfathomable deeps, and most of all for its promise. I love the people with whom I am privileged to spend this intimate time, and I marvel at the resiliency and miraculous hope they, and we, are able to carve from what are often ancient mountains of trauma or despair. We work hard, all of us. We haul ourselves and one another out of dark chasms. We offer sound practices and good advice in difficult times. We prompt, coach, and finagle, all in service of the question, How can I help?

Working hard helps with many eventualities. I make lists like some people make prayers (and these days I make prayers too). How good it feels to cross something off, DONE! How good it feels to work toward progress, toward a future moment of success! These are exclamation point practices which soothe our nervous systems. Something’s wrong? I can fix it!

But we know this, right? This model is not only over-used in our strange culture, it’s breaking apart at its worn and weary seams. And we’re breaking too. That’s what I thought as I met with person after person who spoke of their weariness. People whose spark had dimmed or disappeared completely. People who didn’t want to get out of bed. The question, Why bother? echoed between us.

And I had nothing to offer that would obviously help. You see, we’re in this together: We have collectively been stripped of so many of our emotional comforts we hadn’t even known we needed. Our nerves are frayed, raw with unknowing. We are tired, so tired. We go through the motions. And therapists whose training mostly teaches us methods of labeling and treating psychopathology are, in the face of the actual truth of our existence, no more equipped than any other frail and beautiful human. Might it help to tell my client that she seemed depressed? I did. She knew that already.

I thought, We need to do something different.

Here’s what actually happened. I said, “you know, these are the kinds of things that we’ve been trained to call Depression.” I said, ”What if these spaces of despair were also simply spaces?” What if we could be with ourselves in Space as much or even more than we are in Action or Self-Improvement, Productivity or Worthwhileness?

Maybe that was a way of saying that I didn’t have anything better to offer. Maybe it was the very best thing to offer. I didn’t know.

We tried it on. We both breathed more deeply. She felt waves of relief. I did too.

So much of what I do as a therapist involves encouraging people in the direction of self-acceptance, which mostly flies in the face of our cultural winds. But asking a depressed person to accept her feelings? This invitation felt like Even More So, a bit like literally stepping off a cliff.

And finding wings.

To the extent that we’re afraid of space – stillness, spaciousness, silence – we’re afraid of our own inner lives. And to the extent that we’re afraid of our inner lives, we live at odds with ourselves. This is of course hardly a path to harmony. And harmony – we all know this, right? – is foundational to well-being.

When I started to write this piece, I thought I’d introduce and share with you my chapter on Play from our Wide Open Writing book. I thought as winter and Omicron and OhMyGod fell upon us, as uncertainty became a relentless normality, we could use breaks from the hard work of simply getting through our days. Play is great practice, and it doesn’t get enough attention from grownups. I think I’ll write about that next time. But as I write now, solstice and holidays and January 6 just barely in the rearview mirror, my 71st birthday still alongside, something keeps drawing me even deeper, toward even LESS activity, toward more Presence. Toward the respite of Space.

What if Space is, as one dear friend describes it, a velvet darkness that welcomes, that receives and does not demand? What if spaciousness is not what we should most fear but what holds our greatest beauty?

Jack Kerouac said, “All is ecstasy within.” Sarah Blondin, a meditation teacher I follow, suggests that we pause, breathe, and let in the beauty that is always present at the edges of our experience. She suggests, as does he, that a golden eternity floats within, around, and between our habitual cellular experiences of ourselves. Here’s a picture of what I think that might look like. Can you feel it?

But what if our felt experience is more akin to despair? What if, like so many of us now, we’re just not feeling the ecstasy? I wonder if even the experience of darkness might soften, might grow tender or even peaceful if we chose to stay with it, to accept it rather than fight it. Actually, I know it can, I know it does. I know that behind our fraught daily lives, behind the fears we spend time and energy fending off, there exists within us what theologian Richard Rohr calls an ‘ultimate tenderness’ in which refuge can be found. And all we have to do, as if that’s an easy ask, is greet ourselves with acceptance.

"…Don't we all, with fierce hunger, crave a cave of solitude, a space of deep listening -- full of quiet darkness and stars, until finally we hear a syllable of God, echoing in the cave of our hearts?" Macrina Wiederkehr

You might wonder what this could have to do with writing? In my new book, the one you’ve heard about if you’re a WOW follower, (Wide Open Writing: Embrace Your Creative Genius) a book you can order on the WOW website or on Amazon, I speak to the place of silence in our writing retreats and, by extension, in our lives. Please read on for those words. And even in these strange and wearisome times, may you hear that syllable of your own sacred nature echoing in the cave of your heart. And if you do, may you let that syllable ring out for all the world to hear. The world needs your silence, and it needs your voice.

On Silence

When we offered our first writing retreat in Tuscany, it occurred to us that we could spend early mornings in a kind of sacred silence. Even the three retreat leaders didn’t meet this idea with universal acclaim. Maybe extroverts were more likely to bristle at the thought of enforced quiet. Maybe people who'd come to love the practices of yoga and meditation were more likely to long for spacious space, for timeless time, those potential by-products of silence. For ten years, I had staffed weekend workshops during which we held silence for the entire weekend with the exception of the group exercises. I liked it. I loved the discovery that in silence, people could genuinely stay with ourselves. I loved not having to spend energy asking one another awkward questions: So. Where are you from? when what we most needed to do was stay present to the flow or flood of internal stories that had brought us all to the workshop in the first place.

WOW tried it. Some of our favorite images of that first workshop are of individual women sitting alone in the slanted morning light: Drinking coffee on a stone wall at the edge of truffle forests. Writing in a journal at the dining table under the pergola, green-eyed cat at her side, the sun sliding down her back. Sitting cross-legged on the yoga patio, eyes closed, dropping in. And we love at least as much the memories of greeting one another from that silence with our smiles, our eyes, with gestures exaggerated by the attempts not to speak, with quiet chuckles.

"Talk is a way to warm up for the big game – the hours you write alone with your pen and notebook.” Natalie Goldberg

To the surprise of many of us, we loved this practice. Rather than being more awkward and more isolating than meeting one another with words, we found that we felt delightfully connected in the silence. Dulcie walks by Pam and lays a hand on her shoulder. Pam’s head leans to rest on Dulcie’s hand. Touch becomes another kind of connection, more profound than words. We meet, as we have and as we will throughout the retreat, in a place of spacious silence, a space from which when it’s time, the words will arise. As Louis Armstrong said, with all our stories, with all our gestures, we’re really saying I love you.

Paradox abounds in a writer’s life. While we fully honor the importance of ritual, much of creativity also manifests in the willingness, the need even, to break out of ruts. As humans, we naturally create structures that become traditions, and then habits, and then, sometimes, mindlessness. Rituals go awry when they become mindless. Sometimes we need to break habits, if only to engage new curiosity about life without those habits.

Silence instead of chatter. Gather yourself before you spend yourself. Listen to the morning.

Julia Cameron is a firm believer in the power of silence. “For an artist,” she says, “withdrawal is essential. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically.” Retreat in order to re-connect.

The morning silence became a touchstone of our WOW retreats, just as the retreats themselves became touchstones for writers who needed room and permission to seek fertile quiet within while being held in creative community.

Suppose you can’t travel to Italy or Mexico or Maine to join us for the full retreat experience. Suppose we couldn’t hold retreats for a time as the world recovered from the shock and devastation of a global pandemic. In that case, we could at least seek a spacious quiet where we were.

Try it. Spend a day (an hour, a morning) in intentional silence. Go for a walk, longer than 30 minutes. Listen to the outside world. Listen to your inside world. Notice from your silence what happens when you encounter other humans. Notice the crowded freeway of your mind. Notice the restlessness, the desire to turn on the news or listen to music. Listen to nature, the quiet, the stillness, instead. How much of what you’ve heard could you capture on paper? Notice any peace that may arise.

Surround your writing with silence. Don’t talk before you write. And don’t speak until you’ve closed the door on the writing practice for the day. Let the people in your home environment know you need to create what a writer friend calls “a reverie of your own design.” When you come to your writing space, take four deep breaths before you do anything else. If you don’t have room in your life for these moments, create them. You are a creator, remember?

Texts and emails are talking.

Write for 25 minutes from the silence, on the feel of this time for you, letting your thoughts spread wide enough to contemplate the place of silence in your life. Notice aloud the quality of your relationship to silence. Pose questions about any of your characters and how they might relate to a time of silence in their lives.

Wide Open Writing

“We believe that getting away and connecting to nature and ourselves is central to the creative process. In this place of respite, we find our deeper truths. We purposely choose evocative settings where your adventurous spirit can come out to play with curiosity and wonder. Whether it’s desert or mountains, tropics or tundra, there’s always something sparkly to be discovered.”