For the Love of Writing

Story by Marlys Cervantes/Contributing Writer

In a world that becomes chaotic and makes us oftentimes feel like we are meeting ourselves coming and going, it is sometimes difficult to find the beauty around us. Maybe we should remember the words of Maya Angelou: “This is a wonderful day. I have never seen this one before.”

The thought comes from an icon of literature, a woman who persevered much and found solace, comfort and a reason for living through her writing. Through that very writing, she inspired a nation.

In a month that includes both World Teen Mental Wellness Day (March 2) and World Poetry Day (March 21), let’s take a moment to look at the need to take care of ourselves and the value of writing to do that beyond the beauty and inspiration of the words.

The first challenge of every single day is simply maintaining a focus on the positive rather than being dragged down into the negative. Rick Hanson, Ph.D., psychologist and Senior Fellow at U.C. Berkeley, explains the problem in his book Hardwiring Happens, when he tells us our brains are “Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive.” Our instincts are to hang onto the negative over the positive even if there is far less of it. Only we can start to train ourselves and our brains to react differently, and it takes work.

Focusing on the positive instead of the negative is, of course, a beginning. It sounds simple, but it is researched truth. Leading neuroscientist Richard Davidson met His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in the early 1990s and discussed the power of meditation. In 1992 the Dalai Lama offered Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the opportunity to scan the brains of Tibetan monks. This 2001 study and others since have shown significant differences in brains focusing on the positive. Their inner peace comes from practiced meditation, something we could all learn from.

However, since we cannot all spend hours daily in meditation, what are other pathways for finding some peace in the craziness of our world? Write, you can write. Many psychologists and psychiatrists use writing in their practices for good reason. Philadelphia-based Anjana Deshpande, MBA/LCSW, teaches us about the issue of chaos and trauma as free-floating memory that has not yet processed in the hippocampus. I was lucky enough to be at a hands-on conference where Deshpande taught us about using writing to help people work through the chaos disrupting their lives, she talked about working with war veterans and success stories they had working through their own past trauma. She explained that writing is the most efficient way to organize and process our memories and thoughts. Deshpande is a therapist at a clinic, an instructor at a writing therapy institute and an officer of an international poetry therapy organization. She lives what she believes.

Social psychologist and linguist at University of Texas-Austin, James W. Pennebaker, has also researched writing as a mode for healing and found the same: “The emotional findings then suggest that to gain the most benefit from writing about life’s traumas, acknowledge the negative but celebrate the positive.” Pennebaker’s various research efforts discovered that not only do we need the positive focus, but that there is a tremendous role of language in this process. Language and writing therapy can be used to look at multiple perspectives and develop a focus that leads to a positive and potentially constructive outcome.

So, write. Write when you need to figure out what you need to do next in your life; write when you are not sure about who you are anymore; write when you feel lost in the midst of the changes happening around you or in your life; write. The method of writing doesn’t matter as much as the activity.

An easy way to begin, and a solid way to continue, is a journal. I love teaching journal writing. There are so many types of journals, so you can have fun with them. However, they can also just allow you to get what is on your mind out on paper. Put it all down. Even if it looks scattered and confusing coming from your mind to the paper, that’s a first level of organization – the thoughts are on a page. You can move forward from there to begin organizing those thoughts, making progress with your path.

Or, if you enjoy writing poetry, write any type of poetry. The type doesn’t matter. What matters is that you write. Rhyme if you like, but don’t stress about if you don’t. The point is to write. I write through many feelings in many different ways. The type of writing often depends on what I am feeling or experiencing. Many times my first writing about subjects has all of the details in it. I need to know very specifically how I feel. Then I can organize those feelings into a more structured journal, which ends up, oftentimes, to eventually be an inspirational story. Later, I process feelings from the same experiences through poetry – I don’t need the details but just the feelings. That’s the way I process grief. Many of my poems don’t say what or who they are actually speaking about but rather just put the feeling forth, especially if the event is in the past very far. Sometimes I just still need to feel.

I hope you will take the time to write, in whatever way works for you. We are all just figuring out ourselves on our journeys in this life, and we are certainly ever changing beings. As Bob Dylan once said, “All I can ever do is be me, whoever that is.”