It’s 5.30am and I’m sitting at my desk at the top of the staircase, tucked under the eaves of the house. Beneath me, the rooms are in darkness. I am writing. Or at least, I am trying to write.
I’ve been working on the same page for the last few days, working and reworking the same few paragraphs. I can’t get them right.
I stop, flick through my notebook, sit back in my chair, look up at the skylight above my head. Wisps of cloud drift, pearlescent pink, suffused with sunrise.
I watch as the pink deepens to orange. I watch as I feel my body begin to loosen, the tightness in my jaw soften, my hands relax. A tingling warmth begins in the base of my spine and, as I breathe, it moves upwards into my chest, my head.
Now my fingers are moving over the keyboard again, but this time the words come easily. I have stopped trying. I have stopped searching. Now the words are liquid, moving out of me and onto the screen through the tips of my fingers.
The next time I glance up, the sky above my head is a perfect rectangle of glassy blue. I have written five pages.
For me, writing has always been a way of paying attention, allowing my overcrowded mind to slow, my body to expand. When I remember to stop trying and instead bring my full, relaxed attention to my writing, time stands still. It’s just me and my notebook or the laptop screen, tasting the words on my tongue, hearing them inside my head, feeling my breath move through my body.
I used to understand this aspect of my writing as a kind of self-hypnosis. Years ago, I wrote a book called Hypnotic Journaling. I compared writing in my journal to a trance-like state of embodied calm. These days, I would probably describe it as a mindfulness practice.
In recent years, the word mindfulness has become part of our everyday conversations. It has found its way into boardrooms and corporate policies. It has become a short-hand for wellness.
But what is mindfulness and can we say that writing is a way to practice it?
What is mindfulness?
If I were to attempt to describe what I mean by mindfulness, I would say that it is a way of being, in which we focus our awareness on the present moment whilst noticing, acknowledging and accepting our feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations without judgement.
Though popularised in the industrialised West by Jon Kabat-Zinn's work in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), mindfulness has deep roots in many different cultural practices throughout the world. It is also intertwined with practices of compassion such as psychologist Paul Gilbert’s work in compassion-focused therapy (CFT) , Kristin Neff and Chris Germer’s Mindfulness Self-Compassion and Tara Brach’s RAIN: A Radical practice of Self-Compassion.
But can writing be used as a mindfulness practice and, if so, how?
Bringing qualities of mindfulness and self-compassion to our writing
Perhaps many activities - any activities? - can be a means of practicing mindfulness. Some might say that this is the entire point: that mindfulness is the process of bringing a mindful quality of attention, compassion and self-compassion to our daily doing, thinking and being.
Mindfulness practice has, for me, always been about picking up a pen or pencil and writing by hand - in my notebook or on a piece of paper.
As beloved writing teacher Natalie Goldberg (a practising Zen Buddhist) famously advised in her wonderful book Writing Down the Bones, it’s about ‘keeping your hand moving.’
Noticing the rhythm of my hand across the page, paying attention to my breathing and the feel of my pen on the paper helps my mind to quiet and the freewriting to flow. On some days, this is calming and centring. On other days, it is sensuous, enlivening, ecstatic. There’s a feeling of connection with something beyond my hand and the page.
If you're not able to easily hold a pen, you can bring a mindful and self-compassionate quality of attention to letting your hands move over the keyboard; or you might focus on feeling your body fully supported by a chair, the ground, your arm rests, or pay sensitive attention to the air moving over your skin as you speak into voice-to-type software.
What intrigues me about this process is that I don't need to feel calm and quiet in order to begin. There is something about the process of writing that helps me to slow down and let go into a more expansive, proprioceptive, fluid way of being.
Writing as paying attention
Jon Kabat-Zinn writes that ‘the core invitation of mindfulness is for you to befriend yourself.’
For me, this has meant cultivating the presence of a compassionate reader of myself and my writing on the page.
I’m constantly in the process of challenging that mean critic that lives inside me and turning instead towards a supportive inner reader, mentor or teacher. By strengthening my sense of this compassionate and accepting presence, a reader who receives my work with kindness, I’m not letting myself off the hook. It’s simply that, over time, I’ve found this gentle, playful writing companion far more motivating and helpful to my growth as a writer — and a person — than the bullies and monsters I used to hang out with.
Writing as compassionate community
‘Self love cannot flourish in isolation.’
- bell hooks. All About Love: New Visions
Writing, when we have the courage to offer and receive it in kind, supportive spaces, is particularly good, I think, at creating a sense of connectedness. As we read, receive and offer compassionate feedback on the writing of others, we become more compassionate and supportive readers of our selves.
If you're looking for a supportive space to explore writing in this way, we'd love to welcome you to WRITE! Club, our writing community. Find out more here.
I don't have any easy answers to my original questions about writing and mindfulness. Mindfulness itself seems both elusively simple and highly complex. The mechanisms by which it is helpful to us are increasingly the focus of research. But I do believe that writing can help us to slow down, pay attention, experience more presence in the moment and connect with one another.
One final and important point: When we make time to let our overworked minds and bodies quieten, we sometimes find that thoughts and emotions that we’ve been suppressing come bubbling up to the surface. This can sometimes feel frightening or overwhelming and so it’s important to know that you’re not alone in this process. If this happens to you, please seek support from someone – a trusted person or a professional. Do also take a look at my post here which includes suggestions for keeping yourself safe when writing about difficult things.
