The Writing Shed
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The Magical Dialogue Tool
Join me next Thursday on April 20th from 12:00 to 1:00 for a journaling workshop on Zoom. We will learn the very magical dialogue tool.
After I reflected on the dialogue I had with my heart, I realized a few things: my heart seems to fiercely defend my true self. I love her for this! At the end of the conversation with my heart, I also realized internally I was open to conversations. In other words, I didn’t need to have a hard and fast resolution right then, which has been a hard fought win for me. I don’t like loose ends!
My reflection write also noted that by dialoguing with my heart, I was able to easily distinguish between multiple parts of me, the ego part, the Superwoman syndrome part, the little girl part just wanting to be seen and heard and affirmed, and that immutable part of me that is so tied to my nervous system health and transformation.
Like most journaling sessions, just doing a reflection write on the learned tool can be the most rewarding part!
Register for the journaling workshop at www.jessica maggiebrophy.com/registration
First Place Contest Winner!
Celebrating a small win today. This personal web site (home of The Writing Shed) won first prize in the New Mexico Press Women Communications Contest 2022!
I celebrated with a mango yuzu chantilly cream cupcake. 🎉
The New Mexico Press Women (NMPW) was “organized in 1950, as an affiliate of the National Federation of Press Women. It is an organization of professional journalists and communicators that promotes the highest ethical standards while looking to the future in professional development, networking and protecting First Amendment rights” (“About”).
What Are Your Birthmarks?
Women! What are your birthmarks? What are you trying to hide from the world that God made perfect and beautiful? Where do all of these emotions go when you don’t have the language to talk to your birthmarks? Emotions like confusion or sadness or anger or hate?
They get buried in our bodies and they harm our immune systems and we live in states of freeze or depression, as was the case for most of my teenage and 20 something years. Gabor Mate in The Myth of Normal gives study upon study that shows the relationship between stuffing emotions (especially in women who aren’t supposed to express “bad” or interrupting emotions) and cancer or auto-immune diseases.
When I began using my journal as a sounding board and as a really cheap therapist, I realized I could say on the page what I couldn’t say out loud in the home. Poetry was my human voice and I became of interest to myself (idea adapted from Elizabeth Alexander’s poetry). I could take a compassionate gaze at a girl becoming woman who hated herself 💕
I pulled out old school photos and wrote self-portrait poems. I looked closely at my face in the photos, at my posture, where my hands were resting. I imagined what she must have been feeling, what she was holding back, what she was too choked up to speak about.
This helped me love her, even when she couldn’t love herself in those moments of fear and self-loathing.
This helped me see her, even when she hadn’t been seen or validated before.
These poems began my journey of learning how to mother myself as an adult.
What Are the Images of Your Life?
Join me this Saturday December 17th at 9:30 a.m. MT to also learn the guided art making tool (in a Zoom journaling session). This tool is all about being the heroine of your own life and not being satisfied with the stories of others. Rumi tells us “unfold your own myth, without complicated explanation, so everyone will understand the passage.” After a journey, “then comes a moment of feeling the wings you’ve grown, lifting.” The images of our lives have a lot of messages and symbols to teach us. It is going to be a fun journaling session with drawing and coloring. Bring your own art supplies!
Register for the journaling session at: www.jessicamaggiebrophy.com/registration
Lists of 100 Journaling Tool
Join me on Saturday, Nov. 19, at 9:30 a.m. (MT) for a free journaling session learning the “Lists of 100” tool. Register here and consider making a small gift so that everyone can have access to the benefits of journal writing.
See you in The Writing Shed!
Expressive Writing in College Classroom
Sometimes I just want to check in with my students and feel their heartbeats. I want to know if the writing process for them has been a healthy one or if they have some unresolved emotions.
I recently heard that when students are confronted with a lot of information, it can be a type of trauma. “In a twisted sort of way a lecture is like a trauma for the audience. People are passively confronted by a bewildering amount of information over which they have little control” (Pennebaker and Smyth Opening Up by Writing it Down).
I had never thought that lecturing was a type of trauma, but I think the bigger point here is that students need to be given opportunities to confront and control what is happening in their own learning experiences and not constantly be confronted by the lecturer’s ideas. Expressive writing is one of those confronting strategies to put the power back in the hands of students.
An unexpected outcome of the journaling session was the immense outpouring of support, compassion, and love that the students shared with one another in the chat box after someone was brave enough to read their journal entry. I couldn’t have prepared or constructed this result in a million years with just me lecturing to the students. When I let go, and let the students explore their own lives, they wanted to be present for one another and they felt a deeper bond as a result.
What other confronting strategies do you use to have students reflect on the connections between the subject matter and their own personal lives?
The Flow of Writing
In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he writes: “The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.”
Join me on Wednesday November 2nd at 6:15 p.m. Mountain Time to learn the stream of consciousness technique, where you will learn how to take great joy in focusing attention on your intuitive flow.
Please register for the session here. Your first session in The Writing Shed is always free!
Managing Stressful Thoughts at Night with Writing
Do you have stressful thoughts at night that keep you from sleeping? Over the past week, I have struggled to get the best sleep because I was thinking about the friend who ghosted me. It was a painful experience that I hashed out in my mind when I was supposed to be sleeping!
A lack of sleep can lead to all other types of health issues. One expressive writing study asked at risk for depression students to write about what was bothering them. Those who benefited most were those who brooded less in the future. That is, “writing helped them to change the ways they were thinking about their world: perhaps staving off periods anxiety or depression in the future” (Pennebaker and Smyth Opening Up by Writing it Down).
I love another journaling prompt that can help you manage your thoughts: 1–Ask yourself what are the unpleasant thoughts? 2– How do you feel about these unpleasant thoughts? Try this prompt the next time you are having trouble sleeping because your thoughts won’t leave you alone.
The point isn’t to get rid of the thoughts. It’s to acknowledge them and accept them so they have less control over us.