How Writing Connects Us with Ourselves

a writing prompt for you + November Writing Hour

Welcome to Writing in Company. This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

On Monday of this week I got to share about writing with a lovely group of spiritual directors and spiritually-minded people. (Hello, new friends from SMI!) They listened generously to me, wrote without hesitation to suggested prompts, shared their writing bravely, and responded with care to one another.

Preparing for a writing workshop with a new group always gives me the chance to refine what I want to say and share. Sometimes I teach primarily by example, using variations on a tried and true series of prompts. Groups learn about writing by writing. Sometimes I am asked to include a presentation, sharing about writing as well as offering some actual writing practice. That’s more of what my Monday workshop needed.

Gathering my thoughts for this group meant reflecting on how writing can be a tool for healing and spiritual practice. I think about that in three ways—how writing connects us to ourselves, to others, and to God/Spirit. Here’s a little more about the first of those connections from my work for Monday. I’ll share the other two in future newsletters.

Here’s a slide I created, because slides mean you know what you’re talking about, right? (I’m not great at slides….)

The kind of writing I teach and use in workshops is sometimes called reflective, or expressive writing. It’s the sort of writing where we keep our pen moving, without stopping to reread or plan or revise. We let our thoughts flow onto the page without our inner editor popping in to interrupt.

Writing this way can give us access to inner resources that we might not otherwise recognize. It helps us connect the present moment with our lived experience and knowledge. It helps us tap into our own strength and resilience, by recalling events and memories that our inner wisdom knows we need to remember. Writing gives us the freedom and space to tell the truth about our life—in the past, right now, or in the future—without needing to tone it down for anyone else. We can let it take up as much space as it needs to on the page. We learn to value our own voice as a teacher.

Writing helps us dip down into our tender life, to discover what is underneath the surface; while also providing enough of a life preserver that we stay afloat. The container of the page and the gift of a good facilitator give us enough boundaries and guard rails to let our imagination, our memories, and our creativity loose to find truth.

Writing also gives us some narrative agency. When we write about the people, places, and events that live in our memories and imaginations, we have the opportunity to tell, retell, and eventually reframe our stories. I can’t remember who said it, but it’s true that “every time we look in the rearview mirror, the past looks different.” When we become a narrator of our stories, we claim our power to say what our past means, and so shape our future. We can remember, honor, wonder, bear witness, and make meaning out of events that might otherwise get told only one way. Our pens give us the ability to move our stories forward. In the grief stories I’ve written and received as a listener, I’ve seen this happen repeatedly. Over time, as we write and rewrite our stories of love and loss, our sorrow can turn into something else, even something more. For me, this was the resurrection story I learned to tell—how writing gave me a new life after loss.

Here’s an example from my first experience of a writing group, with my fellow bereaved mothers. We were invited to write about an object that belonged to our child. My Jack didn't have many objects in his four days of life, but he had a hat, and so I wrote about it that day, over twenty years ago. I described the hat—white, with a blue brim, knit by a kind volunteer. Keeping my pen moving, I wrote about how in his hat, Jack held court—like a wise old yogi to whom others flocked for wisdom, including me on his last day. I didn’t plan that image. I hadn’t thought of it beforehand. But when it came out of my pen, it was true. That image of Jack as a wise old yogi in his tiny little hat has stayed with me all these years. It helped him become for me not just someone who was taken from me. He is someone who has given something to me—wisdom. One writing prompt gave me that.

Writing can also connect us with our embodied selves. The physical act of writing, especially with a pen and paper, means our bodies become part of the creation of meaning. When we combine that with prompts that invite us to consider our bodies, or to write from our senses, we reconnect with ourselves on a visceral level. Some of the most powerful writing I’ve done has been about bodies—mine or someone else’s. I’ve written dialogues with the parts of my body that turned on me in pregnancy, and in cancer. I’ve written about where I carry grief and anger in my body. I’ve written about the hands of people I love, about nursing babies, about walking 100 miles in Spain, about yoga and breathing. All of that writing connects me with my embodied self, which is the only way I know to be me.

There is also science about how writing is physically good for us. Studies by social psychologists like James Pennebaker and others show that writing about difficult events can lead to better physical health, with lowered blood pressure, heightened t-cell production, and boosted immunity. There’s much more to say about this, and much more I’m trying to learn about it.

That’s some of how writing helps connect us with ourselves—our inner wisdom, our narrative agency, and our embodied selves. How do you find writing connects you with yourself?

“Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals to us what is alive in us. The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves: “I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write.”

—Henri Nouwen

a writing prompt

Write about an object that belongs to someone you have loved. Maybe that’s yourself. You might choose an object of clothing, or an object that would engage their/your physical body. Then let yourself write about it without stopping or editing. Let your writing dip beneath the surface of what you think you know to find your own wisdom. Let it reframe or retell a story if it wants to. Trust your words to say what matters.

Next Writing Hour is this Saturday

To recoup some writing time lost to Hurricane Helene, I scheduled two Writing Hours for paid subscribers in November. The second of these is this Saturday, November 23rd, from 4-5 pm Eastern. Mark your calendar now! If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

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Photo by Chandler Cruttenden on Unsplash