I am a bit of a science geek when it comes to learning about the benefits of expressive writing. So many writing studies have been done about the biological and physical benefits of a consistent expressive writing practice. The evidence I share with you is from Dr. Pennebaker’s book titled Opening Up by Writing it Down.
What benefits have you noticed when you take part in journaling or another form of expressive arts?
. . . an HSP artist and Expressive Writing Teacher. I’d like to re-introduce myself. Alongside blog posts, bios, and portfolio items, we have stories that shape us and motivate us to do our thang.Â
By way of Ms. Baz, my third grade teacher, I share a piece of the real me in this video. The real me is the child who feels safe in the classroom, my place of liberation and expression.
Starting The Writing Shed comes from this place of joy and warmth that Ms. Baz embodied.
Thank you for listening and engaging. Thank you for using your precious time so that we can connect anew.
I’d love to hear your ideas and impressions in the Comments feature below.
During our before-you-pay sessions, my potential coach said things that stuck to my bones: You don’t have to do anything.
She was already pre-empting my groans regarding tasks I thought I had to do.
When I told her I initially thought I wanted a doula to help me birth my small business, then retracted because this assumed there would be pain, she asked: Have you heard of orgasmic birth experiences?
When I asked her, “How am I going to get clients?”, she quietly asserted: You’re looking for a thought partner.
This coach flicked mantras off her shoulders—a Beyonce of business coaches: Along the path of your growing business, you will feel ease, positivity, and freedom.
I’ve had one foot in higher ed and one foot out for so long, I’m starting to feel icky, and this potential coach might help me dance like Beyonce?
I dream about writing a memoir:Â
  My Journey from Adjunct to Entrepreneur
  Zen and the Art of Leaving Higher Ed
  Fuck U (AKA All College Labor Practices in North America)
  The Spiritual Academic
  Jersey Girl Loving New Mexico
I dream of women who write memoirs about leaving their day jobs and going to Europe.
I dream of painting mini-objects found in magazines (the Radio Flyer wagon!) onto blank postcards in watercolor.
Do I really need a coach for an Etsy business?
I know I need help with my entrepreneurial personality. Do I have one of those?
Do I want to find out?
I think so.
The $6000 for 6 months of coaching is a big investment.Â
Matchmaker or business coach?
When she said things like market research and business strategy, I was intrigued, but also blank.Â
I imagine she can help me figure these things out.
She whittled down small business success to three objectives: To make my business pure and the message clear and to get it in front of enough people so they can say yes.
I can’t see the business clearly right now.Â
She said, move out of alignment, not fear. What if there were a beautiful buffet of options waiting for you to choose what you wanted? Where does the work feel delightful? You don’t need to know right now.Â
I want to find that marriage between what my client finds value in and clients who excite me.
Have faith and belief, she said, which picks at my recovering disorganized attachment style.
I want faith.
Do I believe in myself?
I believe in my feelings of empowerment and excitement after two sessions with her, and I believe in bringing people close to me who can support my developing business.Â
That is all I know right now.
The rest will be dreamed in the dance of my imagination.Â
When I think of the stressed out teacher, I think of one who works hard, but is rarely affirmed as a good human being or revered as a leader.Â
I think of the teacher who has a powerful personal story, but doesn’t have a safe space to compose it.
I see the teacher who feels overwhelmed by a whole bunch of emotions (her own multiplicities), and she is not encouraged to go deep with them.Â
I see the teacher who dreams of a calm place without chaos, judgments, and the demand to produce outcomes.Â
I dream of a world where teachers, caretakers, and artists have access to flower pots that can contain them. Where they can let go of pent up stuff.Â
I dream of a space where they can feel connected, calm, and creative about their own inner worlds. “Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher,” writes Parker J. Palmer in The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life.Â
I am that lonely teacher.
I was that scared teacher, afraid to show my authentic self because I thought no one had time to listen.
“If we want to grow as teachers — we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives — risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract” (Palmer).Â
Where can this happen? Who will take care of the teacher?Â
Places like The Sofia Center in Albuquerque are caring for the whole teacher and her inner world. They respect the teacher’s voice, call them into greater relational awareness with other teachers, and curate sessions that refresh and rejuvenate the exhausted.Â
After almost twenty years of teaching I too feel called to create a gentle and calm space for teachers to explore their complex and beautiful inner worlds.Â
Here at The Writing Shed, you are invited to feel the nurturing power of group energy, to experience creative bursts (just because), and to be transformed by what matters to your personal exploration. No grades. No evaluations. No unrealistic expectations. No shutting the door to block out the noise. Just a healing atmosphere and unconditional regard for who you are.
Because creative expression is hard work. Because the imagination works slowly. Because who has time to be still and listen to what resonates? Because it makes you vulnerable. Because you have to forget about yourself. Because there are no guarantees. Because failing is the point. Because it is risky. We might look stupid. People might connect our ideas with our self-worth. Because you might be wrong. You might be laughed at or shamed. You might look stupid in front of peers. You will have to admit you don’t know. Because you will have to practice new skills. Because it’s hard work. Because, as John Daido Loori tells us in The Zen of Creativity, you won’t be an original for a very long time.
Why should we practice our creativity anyway?
Because it’s hard work. Because slowing down lets us observe our lives. Because, listening, we can invite inspiration, which makes life bright. Because vulnerability builds intimacy. What a joyful cry! Because you have to forget about yourself. Just see what is in front of you. Because impermanence is the way of life. Because failing just means you showed up. Because being wrong is humbling. Because discussing shame interrupts patterns that dehumanize you.Â
Admitting you don’t know will feel like you have been reunited with friend from elementary school. She doesn’t judge you or belittle you. She too has marched in a band uniform down Main Street playing a half-learned tune.Â
Practicing new skills will make you an expert.Â
Because hard work is the way of life. Because creating something original isn’t the point. Creativity that embodies your own unique reality is the point.
As a girl, I thought artists were single moms with boys who walked to their dance studios. Or artists practiced mysteriously in a back room with the best sunlight, but not one I got to visit. I thought retired men had workshops with wood and nails and power tools. I think I took a few “art classes” in Mrs. Buffa’s front room a few times, but it was too expensive, and I stopped going. In elementary school, I thought about the stock rooms full of stationary, glue, and grading pens with a blue tip and red tip, and I am like a bee to stamen. But I also remembered sneaking peaks and taking detours so I could just be in its aura of love. I don’t remember being invited or busting in to make my presence known.Â
Creativity has always been this thing I thought I could possess. If I got published, then I would show the world that I was a real creative. If I could write the perfect poem or win a broadsheet poetry contest—where a prize is given for one poem out of hundreds—then I would prove to myself I was a fine artist. I could put a framed something on the wall. I could collect stuff for my bookshelf. I could circle back with a mentor and say, See?
Creativity was something to be competitive with. I secretly loathed the fact that writer friends were published in big name journals or would win well known contests or were interviewed to talk about their process. More than this though, I was secretly jealous of some sort of artist dust I thought was sprinkled over their minds and bodies that made them gifted, that made them able to write a sentence with such cadence, one thought an entire percussion session was performing in the living room. The artist dust also made them write regional color with drawls or such melodic darkness or eery images of lemons.
I love what Seth Godin says about the artist and non-artist—the only difference being that the former actually makes something of his creativity and the other does nothing with it.Â
Ken Robinson, author of Out of our Minds: Learning to Be Creative discusses general and personal creativities and how our Industrial Age educational model stifles both.
Brene Brown’s research on shame reveals that 80% of participants had a such a profound experience of shame in an early learning environment that it fundamentally changed how they thought of themselves as learners. Half of these experiences were called creativity scars—where someone shamed them for not being a good writer, dancer, musician, or painter!
John Aido Loori, Zen master, writes that the process of making art gets to the core of reality or the core of one’s being. Be the photograph. Be the poem. Be the teapot.Â
But what do I want to say about creativity? That many of us have artist wounds. That these wounds can be healed if we shine the light on them, talk about how they made us feel, and consider how they altered our dreams and hopes.
I want to say that I am a feeling woman. That writing is a meditative art. That this scribbling across the page is so I can discover something about myself. The phrase Writing for therapy seems so prescriptive and sterile. Writing as an experiential act, that sounds fluffier, but perhaps more true to who I am.Â
I am a woman of feeling. I am creative, smart, and thoughtful. How have I come to heal my artist wound? I will spare you the 12 tips to living a more creative life. I subconsciously sought out people who felt like mothers to me. I go on artist dates to nurture the things that inspire me—a pen shop, an Irish pub, a search for the perfect postcard, a dalliance in the vintage shop to find a fuschia dress for my divorce party. I make things in private and sometimes I give them away. I take spiritual pilgrimages. I start research projects. Many times I like to practice and be disciplined. Or I don’t write. I come back to it. I’ve got to tend to what’s showing up in my nervous system. I plant some marigolds. I sweep the floor. I tuck my son in three times in one night. I write a poem about artist dust.
I think it’s important to express emotions in our art making.Â
And it’s more important to express them in our lives. Is there a difference?Â
Or is the greatest art-making the construction and reconstruction of our selves moment to moment that becomes a decade then a season then a lifetime?
Confession has a bad reputation. It is pulled from suspects in the interview room. It is linked to crowded boxes at the back of the sanctuary. It is mocked when heard from writers who describe the body.Â
I am told Sharon Olds’ confessions are pornographic–she wrote about the pope’s penis after all. I am told we live in an age of too much celebrity confession (braggadocio or commonplace varietals).Â
I say confess already.
But confession is no banana split.
My relatives mistake my questions as a request for them to confess. I have asked family members what I thought were benign questions about my ancestors, such as: What was your favorite memory of your grandmother? To which the granddaughter responded: Nothing in particular. She was kind. Okay, not many details, I think to myself. Let me ask another question: What was your father’s relationship like with his mother? She quickly stiffened and likened my questions to an interrogation. Where is this going?, she asks me. Her body triggers a response as if she were confessing, which she then immediately tries to squelch.
Confession is the wince when forking a sopapilla, releasing the scalding steam before it is ready to be eaten.
I recently asked my mother to send me a picture of herself at the age in which she gave birth to me—1979. Not only was I curious about how young my mother would look in the photo, but I was curious to see what photo my mother would select. Would she choose a photo that put her in a good light, figuratively and literally? Would she select a photo to influence how I view her now? I didn’t tell my mother this, but an energy healer had recommended I place a photo of myself as a happy child on my desk, alongside a photo of my mother when I was first born. All of these gestures are supposed to help me—in a subtle and slow way—continue to forgive my mother.
I received the photos in the mail a few days later. She had sent the photo I requested of myself—the one of me wearing yellow OshKosh B’gosh overalls in our New Jersey kitchen. She sent a photo of herself sitting at Grandma’s laced dining room table. She is looking dreamily out into the distance, with two shell clips in her hair, and her favorite ombre sweater in purple and blues. She looks like a saint—St. Therese of Avila-esque. Something is off.
I certainly don’t remember my mother like this. And perhaps this is the point of the whole exercise. See your mother as she wants to be seen, not as you remember her. She wants to be your friend. She didn’t mean to hurt you.Â
Looking at this photo of her, I can almost believe this.
When I ask my mother, Who is this woman in the photo you sent me? She says, Oh, I don’t know, all casual and non-committal. When I ask the same question another way, she snatches the air from between both of us, and says, What is this an interview?
Confession to one is small-talk to another.
Obviously, people in our lives don’t want to disclose or reveal their true feelings because of shame or embarrassment or void connected to their memories. Yet, the benefits of confession are strong. Or, said inversely, the strength required to keep something a secret (the effort involved in inhibition) has negative effects on our bodies. Researchers James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth in Opening Up By Writing it Down (2016) conclude that “After confessions, significant drops in blood pressure and heart rate as well as improvements in immune function occur. In the weeks and months afterward, people’s physical and psychological health is improved” (41).
The changes happening on the bodily level from confession are indications that something is happening in our brain. Are we integrating our memories into our current reality in order to form a more coherent narrative? Or is our body/brain keeping memories at bay, thus limiting our ability to understand who we are and how we got here?
Pennebaker and Smyth share the study from a UCLA researcher, Matthew Lieberman, and his team. Lieberman’s study concludes that “putting our deeply emotional experiences into language and words facilitates our brain’s capacity to help us manage our emotional states” (39). They observed people who were really scared of spiders. Yet, when they were able to express these fears in the presence of a real spider, they were able to move closer to the spider (as compared to those who only looked). “Putting those fears into language appeared to confer some protective benefit” (39).
What is going to happen if I make these confessions about my mother?
And I am already badgering myself for confessing. Do you know how much flack you are going to get for this? You know you can’t share this right? Why would you want to hurt your mother like this? You’re just ungrateful. I’ve known your mother.Â
I have already deleted the confessions in the process of writing this blog. Words like cruel, ghost, and You still make me cry.
Of course, confession in a journal is different from confession in front of a person you know. Sharing your confessions does not always end well, depending on who you share them with. It can end relationships. It can also make relationships stronger.
Confession is the tong you use to pick up a hotdog from the boiling water. It’s the perfect tool, yet not the only one. You can also use a fork, your fingers, or a pocket-knife.Â
Even as a girl, I knew journaling was for me. It was something the adults in my life knew was powerful. Â
My oldest sister owned a red diary with a clasp and key. My mother read the pages of this daughter’s diary, the one with gold painted edges. This let me know that a growing woman’s thoughts could be a threat to other women in the house.
I was in junior high when I sub-consciously internalized the triple threat of journaling–a danger to a family’s status quo for female roles; a sharp tool of liberation for a woman who could keep it hidden; a comfort for a young woman seeking to understand her sexuality.
One of my favorite high school teachers, Mrs. Goodman, assigned reading responses on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Invisible Man, and Brave New World. We wrote them in lined composition books that she would take home with her on the weekends. I got to imagine female protagonists who wrote their own stories, learn compassion for the vulnerability that Black men in America face daily, and escape into a world where parents couldn’t hurt you because mothers and fathers were taboo.
Journaling meant I could visualize the world beyond my childhood town and position my place within it.
Seeing the stack of composition notebooks in my teacher’s hands as she walked through the parking lot meant that I would be seen.
Since these two powerful journal experiences, I have used my journal to heal:
It includes a first poem about my port-wine stain birthmark, which led me out of a spiral of self-loathing in my thirties.
It captures a moment of domestic violence in my marriage.Â
My journal holds micro-poems of my first year as a forty-year old mother.Â
It holds my dreams for calling in a new partner to journey with.Â
My journal includes a letter written to my inner child at the Sunset Cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.Â
All this time, I never thought, Oh, I am journaling. Or I am keeping a journal. I just wrote in blank notebooks, kept track of my I Ching readings, scribbled down lots of questions on nature walks about my purpose in life, and was always always looking for clear answers about why I was feeling alone or upset or burdened or overexcited. Now I know that I was journaling.
My journal is still my 24/7 standby therapist. She lets me rant and rip and let it roll off my chest. My journal doesn’t try to fix me or judge me or rush me. She challenges me to push through the pain and practice even greater liberation once I do. She sops up the tears and never tells me That isn’t true. Don’t listen to your thoughts. She is the great witness to my story and a true friend.
I’ve started The Writing Shed because I want to help you express what is on your heart. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always wanted to express myself, but didn’t know how or didn’t have the space to experiment. I felt awkward sharing my heart. I felt uncomfortable crying. I could feel the blue balloon in my throat and had to remind myself to breathe. I wanted to tell my grade school teachers I was lonely, but the word lonely was not spoken at home. Speaking from this experienced pain, I can now say that expressive writing about my life has helped me find liberation from this sore throat.
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I have come to understand that expression, for me, is everything it means to be whole and healed. It means I have come home to myself, and I can talk to her. I can form a wave with my body, from one end of my fingertips to the other end; I can say a prayer for myself; I can ask a stranger if she’ll let me cut the rose blooms off her bushes; it means I can say “no” when I know it’s not part of my future self; it means I can be in the habit of writing a journal; it means I can draw squiggles with watercolor.
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I can utter, move, forgive, speak, and share with authenticity. That’s what expression means to me. And yet, it’s not always easy. More