Pat MacEnulty's Open Salon Blog

Sunday Sermon: Writing as Spiritual Practice

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 11:03:51 -0400

My definition of transformative writing is writing that seeks to connect, understand, and illuminate. Although transformative writing is therapeutic, it’s not just that. Transformative writing strives for a level of artistry that, to borrow from Faulkner, uplifts our souls. Transformative writing may inform, it may entertain, and it may heal, but it also does something more. It connects to and transmits something of our human/divine nature.

Writer Moira Notargiacomo said it beautifully in a recent workshop:

Writing is what speaks to my soul, what cries out from my soul. Writing gives me sustenance, a raison d’etre. When I am sad or lonely, I write it down and the feelings pour out of me and onto the page. When I am joyful, I write. I write about what inspires me. Writing is a pathway to the divine and from the divine. Writing is the blessing that was given to me. I find out who I am by what I write. I find out what I care about by writing. I transform my soul. Rather the words and images transform my soul. I expand and grow from writing. I communicate my thoughts and feelings to others. Writing allows me to communicate with the silence, with that which cannot be seen or even be known. Writing is as necessary as life, as breath, as love. With writing I have everything.

I realized when I first led a writing workshop in a women’s prison that we were doing something different from ordinary workshops. This work was not about getting published in The New Yorker. It was not about fame or fortune. Rather It was about unlocking something within ourselves that had been locked up. It was about freeing these women (and myself) from our internal prisons.

And so I began approaching workshops differently. I realized that helping people become better writers was actually a side effect, not so much the purpose. But of course I never said this out loud. By introducing participants to the principles that would make their work more artistic, these workshops also became laboratories in spiritual transformation. For years I couldn’t exactly articulate what was happening, but I knew it was profound.

Recently I found a book that had been sent to me by a publicist several years ago. At the time I had no interest in the book and it sat untouched on my book shelf. Then the right moment came and I plucked the book off the shelf. The title is Alchemy of Light, and the author is a Sufi teacher named Llewelllyn Vaughn-Lee. He writes, “Through our human consciousness, new forms, images, and ideas can come into being; through us the intelligence of the world can be more creative.”

Aha! I thought when I read that. This is what it is going on when we write from our deepest selves. We are, as Vaughn-Lee points out, connecting to a light deep inside us, and this light is God. To get to that light though we must first travel through darkness. In transformative writing, we confront the shadow. We embrace it, dance with it, and sometimes make love to it.

Another book I have picked up recently is Fear No Evil by Eva Pierrakos and Donovan Thesenga. This book contains lectures that Eva channeled in the 1970s. I remember reading some of those lecture around 1985 and being launched on a spiritual journey that continues to this day.

The lectures are filled with great wisdom. In one lecture, the guide says, “To face life’s reality means to be able to face yourself as you are with all your imperfections.” Life tends to numb us. We are constantly distracted by our work, our entertainments, and our addictions. But writing, especially transformative writing, requires that we un-numb ourselves, that we focus, that we face our imperfections because that’s where the gold is. If we want to create an interesting, compelling, three-dimensional character, we look to our own imperfections. If we want to write an honest memoir, we unveil the dark parts of our hearts. If we want to wake up the world, we sift through the collective unconscious to find the fears and prejudices that keep it entranced.

Vaughn-Lee says in his book that we must transform ourselves and then the light of the divine will be able to enter the world. We cannot change the external structures. They are too entrenched. But we can go deep within ourselves and connect to that light within us. He connects this to writing and art when he says, “Through the mediating power of symbols, we can reawaken to the mystery of life as a continual relationship with the divine, a constant communion.”

Symbols, shadows, light. Creation. Becoming a better writer is a by-product.

This post is cross-posted at my transformative writing blog.

The Fire This Time

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 06:02:00 -0500

I hear the tone of her voice before anything else. “Mom! Wake up!”

“What?” I burst out of the cocoon of sleep.

“The bathroom is on fire!”

It’s early morning. Still dark. I had just fallen back to sleep. It had been a rough night -- nausea, my nasal passages clogged, my throat a ragged gravel road. But in seconds my amygdala stirs me into action.

“Call 911!” I yell. Where’s the cat, I wonder. I throw on the closest bathrobe, step into my slippers, grab my computer and decide to take the power cord, too. I snatch my cell phone from its charger and dial 911 as I exit my room with my computer under my arm. Get out, I’m telling myself, Get out! I hear my daughter yelling at our friend Lorri who is sleeping in the room down the hall to get out.

“It’s bad, Mom. It’s bad,” my daughter says in a panicked voice.

As we tumble down the stairs I’m calling 911 but my nose is so clogged up from the cold I’ve had for a week that the dispatcher can barely understand me. My daughter is also calling. We’re screaming out our address. I want to give directions but I know it isn’t necessary.

In seconds we’re standing outside. It’s black and cold. Lorri has the cat, so I don’t have to go back in like some bad TV movie hero to save her. I put my computer on the ground and realize my car is in the garage. It’s one thing to lose the house but my car? I go back in the house, grab my keys and get the car out of the garage and park it on the street.

Then we stand there for a minute: my daughter, wrapped in the quilt her now dead godfather gave her; Lorri holding the cat; and me with my computer. It is only later that I realize what we have done. We have saved livelihood, memory, and love.

Sirens. I try to use my mental powers to guide them toward us. The sirens get louder as they enter the neighborhood. My fear lessens. Suddenly we are aswirl in lights.

“It’s upstairs through the bedroom at the top of the stairs,” we tell them as these anonymous men and women go tromping into the house.

It’s cold and so we go sit in the car.

“You lit a candle for your bath last night, didn’t you?” I say in a dry voice.

“I didn’t mean to do it! It was broken. It didn’t even light so I just dropped the match down into it. I never even saw it light.”

I know exactly the candle she was talking about. An old big green candle that wasn’t even in a glass jar, one left over from her father. Why hadn’t I taught her that candles need to be in something? I had missed that lesson. We think they’re adults but there are still so many things they don’t know, don’t think through.

We watch as lights go on and off in the rooms upstairs. After a while a few firefighters come back out, but no one tells us anything.

Finally, I get out of the car to go around the house and see if the fire has burned through the walls, but from the outside everything looks fine. The firefighters come trooping out. A big burly man steps out, and I ask him for information.

“The captain can tell you,” he says and turns to a woman about my size in full fire regalia who has just come out onto my front porch.

“It’s out,” she explains. “We had to cut a hole in the wall to make sure it hadn’t spread. You were lucky. It didn’t.”

I’m not thinking about luck right now. I’m thinking about the brand new tile in that bathroom. I’m wondering if all that work has to be replaced. I’m not thinking about the toxic smoke from the fiberglass bathtub that could have killed my daughter.

The firetrucks pull away, and we go back inside. Upstairs smells awful, and there is a huge cindery hole in the bathtub. Part of the wall is missing, but my tile is okay. I have no idea what to do now, not even sure if the insurance will cover a candle fire. The firefighters are gone. I am supposed to give a writing workshop in a couple of hours. Well, I know what I am going to write about.

I’ve been pretty calm throughout this ordeal but a muscle just below my right shoulder blade decides it isn’t happy and suddenly I’m yelping in pain if I move in the wrong direction.

The three of us gather in the living room and try to eat some breakfast. The sun has come up. I’m wondering if I can drive with my messed up back, not to mention, the nose, the stomach, the lack of sleep. I don’t care. I am going to do my workshop.

My daughter says, “Aren’t you glad I came over to help you yesterday?”

“Yes, honey,” I tell her. “I don’t know what I would have done without your help”

We had spent the day before moving furniture that I wanted to get rid of and packing up boxes of books. I’ve been hoping to sell the house soon -- not burn it down.

I dress gingerly. My daughter gathers her things to go back to the college town a couple of hours away where she lives.

“I’m going to leave now,” she says. “My work here is done.”

I laugh so hard that I cry. It’s a long time before I admit to myself what might have happened, what could have happened. For now life goes on.

Writing, Exploring

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:01:43 -0500

This is a reposting from my Transformative Writing Blog: http://bit.ly/yk9Zlm

My friend Becky recently said to me, “The thing about writing is that all the things you don’t know about yourself come out.” This is one of the reasons I think of writing as spiritual exploration. We are like spelunkers going into caves with our flashlights piercing the depths as we gaze in astonishment. We discover our fears, our secret joys, our hidden longings, our obsessions, and a host of forgotten moments. This sense of the unexpected is also why I enjoy our transformative writing workshops so much: because even though I have done all the exercises I am going to be presenting, I have no idea what will come out when I do them. Every time it is something different.

This weekend my daughter accidentally set our house on fire. She’d left a candle burning by the bathtub. By six a.m. the fiberglass bathtub was in flames and we were standing outside in the cold, waiting for the fire department to arrive. So I knew what I was going to write about when I went to my TW workshop that day. I had to write about the fire. But I didn’t know I was going to write about my house and how I had fallen in love with it the first time I saw it. I didn’t know I was going to write a love letter to my house.

I have lived in this house for nearly thirteen years, longer than I have ever lived in one place. Now I am getting ready to put it on the market. In the piece I wrote during the workshop I focused on the memory of the pack of neighborhood girls tromping through on a snowy day with a fire in the fireplace as I poured hot chocolate and marshmallows into ceramic cups. In all my preparations for moving on to the next phase of my life, I had not stopped to think about everything living in this house had meant for me: the sense of family, the sense of normality, the love.

So that was the gift my explorations brought me that day, or one of them. Through the explorations of the other writers I experienced the strangeness of a panic attack, the joy of discovering you’re pregnant, the fear and rage you feel when you’re attacked in a dark parking lot by four men for your sexuality, the satisfaction of taking your life back and deciding to live for yourself. And underneath those feelings was a pervasive sense of strength. We were conquerors recounting our battles.

Here are some prompts to help you in your explorations this week:

1. What is home to you? Where do you feel a sense of home? What are the physical manifestations of home? Conversely, are you still looking for home?

2. What is the very first place you can remember? What details stand out to you? What is an incident that happened there? Draw a map or a blueprint of the place. What happened there that still somehow affects you today?

3. Have you ever felt fear or panic? What did it feel like inside the body, in your bones, your organs, your muscles?

4. What about joy or contentment? Describe a time you felt either. Use as many metaphors as you can.

C-sections: Not Always Necessary, Not Always Safe

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:01:41 -0500

Ina May Gaskin, author of Birth Matters, is dismayed by the high rate of cesarean births in this country, and in her new book, she takes the medical community to task for putting women’s lives in dangers by these often unnecessary operations. About one in three women in the U.S. have c-sections instead of giving birth vaginally, but the World Health Organization says that “The best outcomes for mothers and babies appear to occur with cesarean section rates of 5% to 10%” (Childbirth Connection). Gaskin asserts that maternal mortality in the U.S. is rising along with the number of c-sections.

In 1990 I was one of the many women in South Florida who had a c-section to deliver my baby. I was happy to have a healthy baby, but I also felt that my baby and I had been cheated out of the full birth experience. Simply put: my birth experience sucked. I want better for my daughter.

After reading Birth Matters, I drove to Tennessee to interview Ina May for the Sun Magazine. Ina May lives in an intentional community called The Farm that she and husband Stephen Gaskin established in the 1970s. The Farm is home to a birth center where women -- even women who have a baby that is breach -- choose to have a completely natural childbirth. The philosophy at The Farm is that love, compassion, and humor are the best drugs you can give a woman in labor.

Ina May told me that many obstetricians have no idea that a breach baby can be born vaginally but that it is actually common in the Amish community, where the doctor who taught her and the other midwives on The Farm learned it.

“But,” I told her, “my baby wasn’t breach. Why did I have to have a c-section?”

This was her answer: “Many women like yourself ended up with C-sections because of perceived or real stress on the baby from their medically inhibited labors. In the seventies the use of electronic fetal monitors became routine in most hospitals. Electronic monitoring usually doesn’t work well unless the woman is flat on her back. Women used to be up walking around the maternity ward, which makes most labors move along faster.

“Once you have the woman lying flat on her back, she’s in a lot more pain. If she moves to get more comfortable, then the monitor indicates the baby is in trouble, and the nurses get upset with the mother for moving. This painful back-lying position can also be dangerous because of the weight of the uterus on the major blood vessels, which can interfere with the circulation of blood between the mother and the baby. Sometimes a baby can go into distress because the mother is in that position instead of on her side. Because lying flat causes more pain, women quickly opted to get epidurals as soon as possible. One of the side effects of the epidural is that it slows labor. If given early, it can double the length of labor.” (Full interview in The Sun Magazine, January 2012)

I thought I was well informed when I went into the hospital to give birth. Like a lot of other would-be mothers I had laughed and said, “Yeah, give me drugs!” even though I dutifully went to my Lamaze classes. I had no idea how the medicalization of childbirth had transformed what should have been the most natural thing in the world into a nightmare.

What struck me most about my conversation with Ina May was her emphasis on treating a laboring mother with loving kindness. When I was pregnant, I was on my own. I had no husband at my side. I went into the hospital a week early thinking my water had broken but I was wrong. They sent me back home. When I came back the next week and my water really had broken, the nurse sneered at me and said, “Are you sure this isn’t just another false alarm?” Later the anesthesiologist spoke to me in a voice dripping with disdain about my lack of pain tolerance. My doctor was on vacation so a doctor I didn’t even know came in to deliver the baby. A girlfriend came with me but she’d never had a baby, and she was as clueless about the whole process as I was. So we were bullied by the hospital staff, and although my cervix was fully dilated, the baby stayed firmly put. There was no encouragement to try to have the baby naturally; instead they strapped my arms in a crucifix position and cut me open.

I can’t help but wonder what the outcome would have been if I’d been in a warm, comfortable environment surrounded by encouraging women who would let me eat food and drink water and who would laugh with me and hold my hand during the hard parts. One woman I met at The Farm told me she’d had an orgasm while giving birth. An orgasm!? Other women have spoken about the spiritual transcendence they’ve experienced during childbirth. They acknowledge that there is pain but nature gives us ways to cope with it.

Ina May Gaskin’s book should be on the nightstand of every woman who is or ever will be pregnant. It should also be required reading for obstetricians. One of the most famous lines from the movie Gone with the Wind is Butterfly McQueen’s statement: “I don’t know nothin’ bout birthin’ no babies.” Maybe it’s time we learned.

The Yoga of Transformative Writing

Sun, 8 Jan 2012 16:01:42 -0500

The following post is from my transformative writing blog (http://transformativewriting.blogspot.com/):

I can easily remember the date of my first yoga class here in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was Sept. 11, 2001. I had taken a few classes here and there in the 1990’s back in Florida, and I’d been wanting to start taking it on a more regular basis, but there were no classes nearby until a YMCA opened up near my house. Of course I’ll never forget that day. I was so happy that I’d found a class near me, and I immediately liked the teacher. And yet the day that I started my journey with yoga, our collective journey as a nation “at war with terrorism” also began. The juxtaposition of my individual peace-filled morning practice with a nation’s unexplainable horror made everything seem surreal and uncertain. But two days later I went back to yoga. It sustained me through many a difficult time.

The other night, I watched a documentary on Netflix called Ashtanga, NY about a yoga class taking place in New York City at the time of the 9/11 attack. It was interesting to see how the yoga practice helped the participants absorb the terrible news and cope with the tragic sense of loss. Yoga helped them internalize and process external events.

Yoga means union. I have studied both the spiritual side of yoga through Isha yoga and the physical aspects of it through my local YMCA. The physical practice of yoga has grown enormously in popularity. According to an article in the New York Times, “the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011.” The article was actually about the negative effects of yoga. No doubt people can injure themselves doing yoga, just as you can injure yourself any time you get up off the couch.

But there’s a reason for its popularity. When you are doing yoga you are fully present. I rarely think about anything else when I am doing yoga. My family worries disappear, the latest drama with my students is of no importance, and I’m not wondering what I’m going to eat next! I’m completely there on the mat. I’m in my body, fully aware of the steadiness of my breath, that tautening of my muscles, and even the expression on my face.

So how does this relate to transformative writing you may be wondering? It relates because the greatest gift we can give to our writing is to be fully present, to be in the moment, absorbing each detail, recording the sounds we hear, and noticing our thoughts and bodily reactions.

I think there are other connections as well. Yoga is a practice, and as it grounds us in the now, it becomes a spiritual practice. The now moment is where we meet the Divine. Transformative writing is also a practice. We do it regularly. Sometimes we have rituals associated with our writing practice: a hot cup of tea, a special place where we like to sit, or some other routine. When we engage in transformative writing, we are accessing the Creator within. It is our creativity that makes us divine. When we are in the creative flow we enter a blissful state. We are more alive.

When you are in your yoga class practicing with other yoginis, you are in communion with others. Transformative writing is also about communion. It is the connections we make with others that make the writing truly transformative. Yoga and transformative writing bring us together and sustain us through tough times.

I am certainly not saying that you have to take yoga in order to write well. I could just as easily say you should become an alcoholic to write well! (We have plenty of examples to back up that statement.) No, I’m simply making a connection between two activities that are meaningful to me.

The thing I love about both yoga and about writing is that I will never be perfect at either one. I will always be a student, always learning, always trying to get a little better. The mat and the page will always challenge me. They remind me not just of my divinity but of my fallible humanity as well.

WIY: Here are a few prompts to play with this week:

What do you do that is physical? What are the rewards and challenges? Describe it. Get into the body.

What is writing like for you? By that I mean, what other thing can you compare it to?

What is your spiritual practice? How does it feed your writing? And how does your writing feed your spirituality?

Create a character who has an obsession. Show that character doing what he or she loves to do, needs to do.

Finally, put a character or a community in a situation of crisis or tragedy. How does the character/community cope with it? Show us what enables them to move forward.