We can practice writing mindfully to make order from chaos, to make meaning from our lives, and to heal. For centuries, people have been writing in their journals, writing memoirs, or writing the stories of their lives as a way to validate their everyday experiences and sometimes as a way to connect with other people who have shared experiences.
There is a wealth of literature to support that writing is healing. Most notably, James Pennebaker, Denise Sloan, and Joshua Smyth have examined the impact of written disclosure. Denise Sloan and Brian Marx found in their 2004 study that examined female college students who reported history of traumatic events that the students showed significant reductions in psychological and physical symptoms following written disclosure of the events as compared to a control group. Of significance is their 2005 study that showed that participants who wrote about the same traumatic experience, gaining repeated written exposure, reported significant reductions in psychological and physical symptoms at follow-up than other participants.
Research conducted in 1998 by Petrie, Booth, and Pennebaker showed increased immune function in groups that wrote about emotional issues as compared to groups that suppressed emotion. Louise DeSalvo, in her book Writing As A Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms our Lives begins her book by saying, quite simply, “Writing has helped me heal. Writing has changed my life. Writing has saved my life. How often have I uttered these words, and meant them, or written them into my journal since I started writing? A hundred? A thousand?”
Drawing on the research of James Pennebaker, DeSalvo emphasizes that the only kind of writing about trauma that has been clinically associated with improved health is writing about the details of the traumatic events and then writing about how we felt then and how we feel now about them. She offers that writing healing narratives builds resilience.
DeSalvo suggests that the transformative qualities to aim for when writing a healing narrative include a healing narrative renders our experience concretely, authentically, explicitly, and with a richness of detail…; a healing narrative is a balanced narrative. It uses negative words to describe emotions and feelings in moderation; but it uses positive words too…; a healing narrative reveals the insights we’ve achieved from our painful experiences…; a healing narrative tells a complete, coherent, complex story.
Most of us have experienced difficult times during our lives—a midlife crisis, grief, loss, depression, anxiety, eating or weight issues, transition, trauma, illness, war, etc. Writing Mindfully for Transformation ONLINE workshop is about learning to bear witness to our own suffering through creating written stories about our experiences.
Putting language to the pain, shaping the events into a story, and finding meaning in our suffering help us to make order from the chaos and transform the suffering. We will learn mindfulness skills to cope with difficult emotions as we explore creative ways of working with memory and imaginatively shaping the material into narrative. The course is designed for beginning and experienced writers who are interested in writing for self-discovery, healing and/or publication.
In this course you will learn tools for transforming suffering through writing, techniques for self-care while writing about difficult experiences, processes for discovering your authentic writing voice, mindfulness skills for coping with difficult emotions, strategies for dealing with writer’s block, fear and self-doubt, and ways to make meaning from suffering.
The next Writing Mindfully for Transformation online workshop begins May 12, 2011. Learn more about mindful writing here.