Using mindfulness as a guidance system.
As a writer and mindfulness teacher, I combine these skills almost completely. I do not always write about mindfulness, though it does lay philosophically at the heart of all my poetry and memoir writing. I use it to enable myself to write better and cope with the writing life. That can be very challenging and disheartening at times too. In my twenty-seven years of being a writer published traditionally and self-published, I have faced some thwacks. One of those was being told my memoir about growing up with a narcissistic mother was termed a ‘misery memoir’ in the industry and would only get published if I took out all the information about how healing true love is, and how to come back from such massive emotional breakdowns. It has to be either a self-help book, a memoir of misery or a love story, but it cant combine all three. I was defensive and knew that I wasn’t a victim, and hadn’t written a misery memoir, so I self-published and gained excellent reviews.
The Challenges of the Writing Life
For example, as in my case above, you have just written something to which you have given your all, something you hope will win applause, give credit where credit’s due, and enable you to fulfil your dream of being a successful writer. And all you get at best is indifference, and a few snarky comments perhaps, or criticisms that cut deep. Maybe you are offering it up to a group you belong to, or a writing course tutor, and again you are disappointed or feel misunderstood by the kind of feedback you are getting. It happens to us all.
It’s tough, especially the criticisms, and more so if that is from someone you know. Or even more, if it’s someone you don’t know because the fear of being misjudged jumps in on top. ‘Oh no, they don’t know me and they already think I am rubbish’, or variations along this theme.
Rejections
Most famous writers famously faced a lot of rejection. Graham Green famously received around thirty rejections before he placed his first book, which went on to be very well received and earned him enough to commit to full-time writing. Similarly H.G. Wells, and many more. George Orwell received only four rejections for Animal Farm before it made it into print. Heller named his book after the number of rejections he received, Catch 22, which has not only been a much-lauded anti-war book but also the catch 22 phrase we all use to note impossible conundrums and traps in life. John Le Carre was passed over from one publisher to another saying ‘ you’re welcome to LE Carre, he hasn’t got any future’. Stephen King, in his memoir ‘On Writing’ shared how he had a nail onto which he spiked all his rejection letters when he was just starting out. He probably doesn’t get that many rejection letters any more, just a guess! And so the list goes on. Anne Lamott tells us to just write and worry about the rest later on, giving full permission for the ‘shitty first draft’. Rejections are the spice of our lives. and there are some wonderfully funny in retrospect rejections comments made too. Worth a read if you’re interested.
In other words, we take criticisms and rejections personally, but it isn’t and shouldn’t be seen as such. Publishing is a business first and foremost, out to make a profit. It will market and sell what it thinks can make the biggest profit. So zeitgeists are important, bandwagons should be jumped on but can also be jumped on too late as the public reading taste has moved on. And that doesn’t exclude genre-bending original perspectives, but they may be harder to place because someone needs to see potential ahead of the game. The publishers who finally adopted these famous writers did very well out of them.
Mining for Gold
Our writing might come from our souls but it isn’t who we are. The risk is that we close down to avoid further hurt, and in doing so we cut ourselves off from a gold nugget. That rejection of mine mentioned above hurt, but it made me more determined to break those rules and do it on my terms.
The biggest risk of this defensive posture is that we lose the opportunity that is the nugget inside our pain. Yes, there is a gold nugget in there, but you might have to wade through the dross to get to it.
Mindfulness and Managing Challenges
In mindfulness, the teaching is to be with your feelings, acknowledge them, and allow them to settle. An emotion is transient enough if we allow it to move through us without holding onto or ruminating upon it. This is easier said than done, though with practice we can master this skill or become more adept at it at least. On a personal level, as long as my trauma has not been re-activated (triggered), I can move past these daily emotions quite smoothly, but if they touch something more sensitive, ouch, I am locked down once more into freeze mode, which can last a few days or so. Then I spend the next few days actively trying to unlock myself and get back to equilibrium. Even that I can use positively, as a time to allow my unconscious mind to consider such issues and find creative paths through them. I hate being triggered but I don’t let it go to waste. I use it as a practice ground for my reality grounding, for strengthening my mindfulness and even to use it as a time off, when I read instead. Nothing goes to waste but I avoid nothing either.
But, if we hold onto the emotion, it becomes far greater than its origins. We are adding to it all the history of all the previous times we felt rejected or diminished in some way. For some this may be traumatic, depending on their history, and for others not that much. This is where we each differ and should therefore have much more compassion for each other in the process. We are all a sum of our histories and the responses we made to them at the time. If we had been taught never to let go, then we will find it much harder.
Many people are actually unconsciously afraid of their own stronger emotions and will do anything to protect themselves from feeling those feelings. Men are especially bad at this, but we can all do it. We fear our own fear, which in turn means we never deal with it, and that holds us back massively from being successful in our own writing.
Revealing the gift
Turning criticism into gold is the answer. We must embrace their words, or else we reject their words and view them as rubbish, and tell ourselves that they don’t know what they are talking about. In other words, we get defensive. That is understandable but it is preventing you from getting to the best part of critical or negative feedback. Even the most crude, basic or ignorant comments can hold a nugget of truth that can be helpful. In some cases I have found it has also given me a whole new topic to write about.
As a writer cruising on the choppy oceans of a writer’s life, we must learn how to become our own self-righting lifeboat through the turbulence. That is what this choice of path can be, a non-stop stormy weather with bright patches.
I sometimes think my soul chose this writer’s path in later life just so I could write out my experiences and feelings, and learn how to take criticism from them. It is a cliché to say cathartic and that is not quite what I do feel. But challenging, yes, and that is a good thing for developing humility, integrity, inner strength, and exorcising some of those bad old demons which once haunted me.
Sometimes it is how the criticism is given, that can trigger old wounds of public humiliation and rejection. Perhaps ask them to give feedback to you personally and not publicly. I am in a writing group which allows us to choose what kind of feedback we want, ‘rip it to shreds’ versions or ‘offers and suggestions’. We can choose. I always say rip it please, I need to know, even if it is just one person’s perspective and may not be realistic. Think of all those rejections above.
Feedback is your friend, we all have to learn to embrace it wholeheartedly. If we step back a moment we can see it is not about us as a person, even with memoir, it is about learning to craft our writing skills, to hone and polish them, to fine-tune them. And then to accept that no we can never please all the people all the time. These are two invaluable life skills generally, and writing life skills specifically.
My desire to be a better writer overrides my desire for praise. Until I can feel sure I am at my absolute best as a skilled writer I do not stop working hard to improve myself.
There are the obvious tactics:
reading copiously.
writing in all sorts of ways so that you can test your strengths out and find your weaknesses.
learning what the rules are so you can break them expertly.
This is being encouraged more and more often nowadays, crossing genres, and braiding different styles to create quite original approaches to writing. We need to explore, to try different things out, to see what we are capable of. Reading copiously allows us to see how other people are trying to play with these alternative ways of writing. Keeping up with our mindfulness practice enables us to risk stepping out of our comfort zones and try new things, to explore and take risks. It gives us a solid platform upon which we can stand and face these challenges. It slowly erodes the power of the self, the Ego, the part of us that craves approval and considers itself to be of paramount importance. That is very empowering. By removing our sense of self-consciousness, it liberates us to tell our stories more deeply, to mine our experiences and creativity so that we find the gems hidden in us all.
Writing Mindfully
More often than not when I sit down to write, an idea has been gelling in my mind for a day or so, sometimes longer. Then I sit at my keyboard, or get my pencil and notebook out and let it go. I am not always conscious of what I am writing. It is as if I am reading them on the page for the first time myself too. It flows like stream of consciousness, as if it comes from some essence inside me that is not me at all. I am not in control of this process. I do not hover over every word, I just let it go. Maybe later on I will go back and choose what my mind considers to be a better word for the job but generally apart from some awkward sentence ordering I can sit with what is on the page.
This approach might not work for everyone, but it might be worth giving it a try.
Talking Zen
I remember reading Natalie Goldberg’s words:
The problem is we think we exist. We think our words are permanent and solid and stamp us forever. That’s not true. We write in the moment.
That fits in so well with my own experience. She is a Zen meditation practitioner, as am I.
When I am writing I am mindfully aware of what I am doing but the ‘I’ does not exist. It is my body doing the writing, some flow of consciousness expressing itself through my activity. I feel most at peace when I flow with the writing like this, in the same way I feel when I am gardening — at peace and in the flow of life. I write what I experience, memoir, thought essays on mindfulness and emotional literacy, on writing and living through the complexities of life. My words seem to help other people too, which is a huge blessing for me and probably my main feeling of achievement comes from this.
Using mindfulness in practical ways to support my writing life seems to make the best sense to me. Why would I want to separate them from each other. Over here I do my meditation and over there I do my writing. This does not compute. It is a flow between each moment of each day. That is living and writing in the flow, as simple as that. yet the achieving of that takes time to achieve. But it is worth it.