Stirring the Waters. Janell Moon
us she felt so openhearted just then and so filled with such forgiveness for herself and love for us. I knew the doves were alive in her life now and that writing had released something that had held her in darkness. Now she could move on toward her own hopeful dawn.
As you write and explore yourself, you are a part of a long history of seekers. This longing for spirituality can be traced back to the limestone caves in France where Cro-Magnon people left their ritual markings and paintings. Writing gives us the power to pull back the blankets of night and see what the light will bring. You may change. You may deepen. You may find the souls in your body and feel more connected.
I developed the process we’ll use in this book out of my own feeling of overload. For years I had cast about for ways to develop my faith, and had ended up feeling overwhelmed by all the information I was getting from church, workshops, classes, and books. And so I sat down and thought about the qualities common to most spiritual and religious searches. What was it that allowed people to live with a greater feeling of soul and spirit? I identified nine key qualities: Awareness of Connection, Acceptance, Letting Go of Control, Trusting Our Knowledge, Sense of Self, Creativity, Integration, Peace of Mind, and Cycles of Life. I then intuited what each one would entail and began to sketch that out. That sketch has become the program I call Stirring the Waters.
Over the course of nine weeks, we’ll explore each of the nine qualities in turn. For each day of a given week, you will find a discussion of one aspect or component of that quality and then several writing exercises to help you explore it further. You’ll discover how that aspect of the quality appears in your life and how it can be transformed. On the seventh day of each week, you’ll have a “reward” day, where you are encouraged to take yourself out into the world to write.
The first week is devoted to Awareness of Connection. Here we’ll look at the concept that there is something more than the life we see in front of us. How we feel expansive as we sit in a redwood clearing or connected to a friend who is feeling vulnerable and tells us her fears. We’ll explore how wondering about our spiritual connection leads to hope and all the opportunity hope opens, and how faith develops from our belief that connection is possible. Awareness of connection can be the insight that we are related to all other souls.
We’ll use our writing to explore how our lives have shown courage and triumph. We’ll remember what it is we love: where we live, the particular mosses and wetlands or neon streets and winter with the good smell of fresh rain. We’ll notice how grace begins to enter our lives with a soft touch, hesitant at first, then more enduring, when we pay attention to connection.
In the second week, we begin to explore Acceptance—accepting ourselves and accepting others. We’ll use our writing time to look at loss, anger, difference, change, and to begin to truly open our hearts to ourselves and the world.
Letting Go of Control takes Acceptance a step further. In this third week, we’ll look at how, when we care less about what others expect of us and more about what is soulful for us, we begin to grow emotionally. Control is a big part of all this, of course. Letting Go of Control is saying I’m not in charge of everything. We will write about letting go of other people’s expectations for us and moving into a more authentic way of being. We’ll do exercises designed to help us notice how often we compare ourselves to others and how we can stop that process, and how to stop the flow of the negative and critical thoughts that stream through us. Through the process of letting go of control we become more a part of things and know that others will share our burdens. It’s surrendering to life and saying “Help me.”
When we reach the fourth week, Trusting Our Knowledge we should begin to feel a turning point in our lives. We will begin to explore the many ways in which we receive knowledge: through thinking, emotions, body sensations, and intuition. Of course, this doesn’t happen all at once, but you’ll begin to realize that through your writing you’ve been going inward for answers, and that you can recognize a body feeling, a voice, a place of truth for yourself. In this section we’ll look at how to nurture your intuition so that you can have ready access to that truth.
There are many ways to let the wise voices come through. A man I know leans against a tree at the edge of the pond at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, breathes for a minute, and lets the wise voices come. A painter friend in Chicago uses Lake Michigan as her muse, finding quiet there. You, too, may discover a place in the world that can help you hear your intuition, a special place that takes you to yourself. Or you may find that simply sitting quietly in your living room helps you remember a time when you just knew what to do. Through the exercises in this chapter you will find ways to build on this feeling, to explore ways to release the feeling of being overwhelmed so you can hear your wise voice.
Writing itself can help. It structures your thoughts and emotions and helps you make sense of body sensations and intuition. Once we are less overwhelmed, we can find our clarity and stand up for ourselves. I saw a bumper sticker today that said, “Even if your voice shakes, stand up for yourself.” The car was filled with young women laughing and talking, and I wanted to give them a power sign, a goddess, “Yes.”
What can be more important than developing a bottom line that asks “Is this best for my soul?” Week five, Sense of Self, is devoted to this. It is designed to help you reach within so you can reach out. You’ll explore through writing who you are beyond the image you project and how to deal with the changing identifications of self in your lifetime. You’ll do exercises on self-esteem and developing appropriate boundaries to enable you to better connect with others.
Week six is devoted to Creativity. We all are innately creative, but through our writing this week we’ll begin to explore how to better access our individual creativity. Creativity asks us to embrace ourselves. It is a voice in all of us that says we are one of a kind, and that even with the sun and daffodils of the world in full glorious bloom, there is room for more light and more yellow. What any one of us offers will be just a shade different from anyone else, but ail is needed and wanted.
Vincent Van Gogh wore lit candles in his cap to see better when he painted at night. He took singing lessons to help his yellows “sing” on the page. We will learn to express that hunger to be ourselves. We will explore how to find pleasure in uniqueness, too. In this section I suggest that we open ourselves to the world we have within us, to our daydreams and night dreams. Daydreams draw us into the imaginative realm; night dreams give us symbolic knowledge. We will begin to decode the messages our dreams give us.
In week seven, Integration, we get to write about qualities of our life’s longing: love, friendship, work, and creativity—issues of the physical body and how spirituality fits into integration. We will also look at how to make solitude a precious time.
The qualities of spiritual development are both cumulative and not. Sometimes, as we develop faith, we love our home more. We love the view out back and this sense of place allows us to develop patience. Our patience, in turn, invites grace to come, and we find we sit long nights on our patio writing and dreaming.
As we near the end of this process we come to Peace of Mind. In week eight we’ll look at ways to remember that there is a divine reason for everything that happens. We are only given what we can handle. We will write about how we can foster and use forgiveness, humor, gratitude, and simplicity as part of our spiritual practice.
And finally we come to Cycles of Life. Chance is always with us, but so often we live in fear of what comes next. By letting go into the knowledge of cycles we can begin to act less out of fear and anxiety and more out of hope and courage. I remember a student I once had. She was in such despair about losing her job, but when she remembered the happy days of the years before, and saw that unhappiness will pass through to better times, she was able to move on. This chapter helps us connect with our spirit and trust that we can deal with what life brings. In writing about cycles, we will explore our attitudes to our past, our life’s wanderings, and the present. We’ll be led to consider our own aging process, death, and rebirth. Our writing will help us see the ways we are protected by our soul knowledge and our energetic spirit.
Throughout this book I’ll be teaching different writing methods: streaming to explore your inner self and all that you might feel, gazing into the waters to relax and go deeper