Tag: Natalie Goldberg

Writing 101 Day Three

Practice makes perfect.

Again, here is the WordPress theme for the day:

Day Three: Commit to a Writing Practice

Today’s Prompt: Write about the three most important songs in your life — what do they mean to you?

Nailing Brahms’ Hungarian Dance Number 5 on your alto sax. Making perfect pulled pork tacos. Drawing what you see. Or, writing a novel. Each requires that you make practice a habit.

Today, try free writing. To begin, empty your mind onto the page. Don’t censor yourself; don’t think. Just let go. Let the emotions or memories connected to your three songs carry you.

Today’s twist: You’ll commit to a writing practice. The frequency and the amount of time you choose to spend today — and moving forward — are up to you, but we recommend a minimum of fifteen uninterrupted minutes per day.

The basic unit of writing practice is the timed exercise. – Natalie Goldberg

Author Natalie Goldberg says to “burn through to first thoughts, to that place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor.” Here are some of her rules of free writing practice from Writing Down the Bones, which we recommend you keep in mind:

  • Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you’ve just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)
  • Don’t cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it.)
  • Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don’t even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.)
  • Lose control.
  • Don’t think. Don’t get logical.
  • Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)

Jorge Luis Borges said: “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.” So, what are you waiting for? Get writing. Fifteen minutes. Go. And then, do it again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after.

Now having written a daily post for well over five years, I’m comfortable with the concept of committing to a writing practice.

Thus I’m going to republish something that gets to the heart of more worldly matters – keeping a smile on your face in these ‘interesting’ times. It comes from a blog that I recently started following: One Regular Guy Writing about Food, Exercise and Living Longer.

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How You Can Benefit from a Positive View on Your Life – WSJ

Regular readers know that I have embraced the theory of positive psychology. I have written a number of posts on the benefits of a positive point of view. You can find an index of them at the end of this post.

Meanwhile, I was thrilled to see Elizabeth Bernstein’s piece in the Personal Journal of Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal entitled “It’s Healthy to Put a Good Spin on Your Life.“

think +ve

In a study of a large number of adults in their mid to late 50’s researchers found that “when people displayed higher levels of agency, communion and redemption and lower levels of contamination, their mental health improved. They consider good mental health to be low levels of depression and high levels of life satisfaction and psychological and social well-being.”

They explained the four keys to good mental health as follows:

• Agency—Did the subjects feel able to influence and respond to events in life, or did they feel battered around by the whims of external forces?
• Communion—Are the people connected to others or disconnected?
• Redemption—Did the subjects take a negative experience and find some positive outcome?
• Contamination—Did they tell narratives of good things turning bad?

I would like to point you to a post I wrote in May of 2011 called Super Tools for Handling Stress.

In it I quoted Maggie Crowley, Psy.D., a Health Psychologist at the center for Integrative Medicine and Wellness at Northwestern Memorial Physicians Group.

Dr. Crowley listed the following as maladaptive coping strategies:

*Demand our circumstances be different
*Devalue ourselves and others
*Demean/blame ourselves and others
*When the above fail to work, do we choose another strategy?
*Or, do we double our ill-conceived efforts and feed our downward spiral.

She said that we needed something to shift our mental gears out of the stressful/fearful response that triggers that damaging cascade of negative emotion. She suggested the following activities that set off the parasympathetic approach:

*Practicing appreciation
*Making choices that are positive
*Using constructive language
*Employing our strengths and personal power.

I think that there is a great similarity between the four keys to good mental health mentioned in the Journal and the points made by Dr. Crowley in dealing with stressors.

Regarding positive psychology, I have found it answered a lot of questions for me. If you are interested you can explore it in the following posts:

What is Positive Psychology?
How to Harness Positive Psychology for You – Harvard
Breaking down 8 Barriers to Positive Thinking – Infographic
11 Ways to Become a Better, More Positive You
How to Become a Positive Thinker
7 Exercises That Train Your Brain to Stay Positive
Positive, Happy People Suffer Less Pain

Tony.

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This is such incredibly powerful and useful advice with lots of further reading to boot!

For we are bombarded with negative news from all quarters and having a healthy relationship with oneself and, thence, with the world around us is, in the end, what life is all about.

Writing 101

A bit of a change for the next twenty days or so.

As I’m sure you know Learning from Dogs is written under WordPress. Right from the start, I took the decision to offer a daily post and am so glad I did. (This post is number 2,435!)

However, many bloggers do not subscribe to a daily publication of a post and WordPress, in an effort to encourage more bloggers to so do, have launched Writing 101.  Here’s what they sent out to those bloggers that signed up to Writing 101, as indeed did I.

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Day One: Unlock the Mind

You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen — it becomes distorted, and it’s been diminished. The writing you end up with is an approximation, if you’re lucky, of whatever it was you really wanted to say.

– Author Khaled Hosseini, “How to Write,” the Atlantic

On The Daily Post, we try to instill a daily blogging habit in each of our readers. We’ve gotten to know many of you — your avatars, your blogs — and are reminded each day that our community is full of many different stories and voices.

Some of you want to take your craft of writing to the next level — you might be a seasoned daily prompter ready for something more, or want to experiment with different aspects of storytelling, from considering your setting and point of view, to developing your characters and dialogue.

So welcome to Writing 101: Building a Blogging Habit. In these twenty days, we’ll dive into the elements of storytelling, help you cut through writer’s block and — as Natalie Goldberg teaches — access the pure thoughts and ideas of your wild mind.

To get started, let’s loosen up. Let’s unlock the mind. Today, take twenty minutes to free write. And don’t think about what you’ll write. Just write.

Keep typing (or scribbling, if you prefer to handwrite for this exercise) until your twenty minutes are up. It doesn’t matter if what you write is incomplete, or nonsense, or not worthy of the “Publish” button.

And for your first twist? Publish this stream-of-consciousness post on your blog.

Need a helping hand? Head to The Commons. Happy writing!

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So apart from Sundays I shall be posting in accordance with the daily theme for the next twenty days.  On Sundays I shall revert to my usual Picture Parade.

So that’s enough of a preamble (or delaying tactic!) to today’s theme – here we go.

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Just twenty minutes of free writing.

 (Time: 15:10 PDT)

Writing without thinking!

On the face of it that is an absurd notion … and yet? And yet, there is something fascinating in being totally free to let the words spill out without regard to the potential reader – I guess how one might approach writing a daily diary or journal.

Or try exploring the concept of consciousness!

It strikes me that it’s a little like those odd times when one is sitting in a passenger seat on a commercial airliner flight and one starts to ponder about what makes you and all your fellow passengers remain aloft! There is a difference however in that physics does understand the nature of lift that occurs when air flows across the upper and lower surfaces of a wing.

But consciousness!

I’m pretty sure in my guess that while the human brain is well-understood the precise process, for want of a better term, that explains consciousness is not perfectly understood. If I am wrong on that count then so be it. I hope I am not, for there is something incredibly wonderful, even ephemeral, about a conscious human wondering what it is that makes him or her that conscious human wondering just what it is that causes him or her to be that conscious person! (I sense the closeness of a circular argument appearing out of the mists of my own consciousness!)

The way the brain works in terms of thoughts and inner thoughts and even deeper subconscious thoughts is wonderful. Anyone who has had cause to use the services of a counsellor or therapist to delve into the inner workings of the mind could not fail to be in awe of the power of our brains, the way our brains are so deeply ‘wired-up’ during our formative childhood years, and the way that they conduct our behaviours during our years of adult life.

Which leads me nicely to a closing thought (my wrist-watch is telling me that my twenty minutes are up in six minutes time).

Here it is.

Writing is such a wonderful gift. Put no better than in the words of Khaled Hosseini as quoted in that opening of the Writing 101 item above. It strikes me that it is impossible to write on a regular basis without revealing a great deal about one’s own thoughts, inner thoughts and deeper subconscious thoughts.

That is why blogging is such an incredible way of making connections. Connections across countries, cultures, genders and creeds. In my years of writing this blog I feel an incredible family of friends out there.  Those that follow my humble scribblings and, in turn, those that attract my own following.

It would be wonderful to think that this new world of digital writing and the consequential sharing of the thoughts and ideas that drive our writing may one day make this world a very much better place.

And with those words, I stop.

(Time: 15:30 PDT)