by Eric Maisel
Now we’re ready to look at the specific thoughts I suggest you “drop into” your long, deep breaths. I’ll use parentheses to indicate how these phrases (or incantations, as I call them) naturally divide. Notice that Incantation Three functions differently from the other eleven. It is a “name your work” incantation. You think something different each time you employ it, depending on the work you intend to accomplish. For instance, if your work is your current novel, your phrase might be (I am ready) (to write) or (I am tackling) (this chapter). I’m using (I am) (doing my work) as a place-marker to stand for the idea that you name specific work each time you use this incantation.
Here are the twelve incantations:
1. (I am completely) (stopping)
2. (I expect) (nothing)
3. (I am) (doing my work)
4. (I trust) (my resources)
5. (I feel) (supported)
6. (I embrace) (this moment)
7. (I am free) (of the past)
8. (I make) (my meaning)
9. (I am open) (to joy)
10. (I am equal) (to this challenge)
11. (I am) (taking action)
12. (I return) (with strength)
Try out these twelve incantations right now. Take the time to go through the list slowly, incorporating each phrase into its own long, deep breath. Begin with some preparatory centering breaths, breathe-and-think the first thought “(I am completely) (stopping),” and pause before moving on to the next incantation. Take your time and begin to experience the power of these twelve phrases.
Each of these phrases has its purpose and logic. I expect that you’ve already grasped what each incantation is intended to do. When you first enter your writing space, try out “I am completely stopping.” When you doubt that you are equal to writing your current screenplay, try out “I trust my resources.” When you get into a black mood about needing to send out another round of query e-mails to literary agents, try out “I am equal to this challenge.” When your mind inadvertently lands on that criticism you received at the hands of your third-grade teacher, try out “I am free of the past.” You will find that one or another of these twelve thoughts is exactly the right thought to cleanse and center you in any situation.
Traditional centering techniques require time—a half-hour listening to a relaxation tape, fifteen minutes going through postures, twenty minutes quieting mind chatter. More tellingly, they have no thought component. They help you relax, focus your mind, and calm your nerves, but they do not provide you with a repertoire of useful thoughts to meet the real challenges that you face. Lucinda, a writer from Milwaukee, complained: “I’ve tried many things but nothing seems to keep me focused. Sometimes I feel that being centered is something that just happens to a fortunate few while the rest of us are doomed to wander around in a daze.” This may have been your experience; now you have something to try.
Whether you use the phrases that I’ve provided, each of which has a certain rationale, or phrases of your own creation, I hope that you will make ten-second centering an integral part of your program to manage your moods and your mind. The marrying of a deep breath with a useful thought is simplicity itself. Get into the habit of breathing-and-thinking “I am equal to this challenge,” “I trust my resources,” or your favorite incantation as you get ready to write, when you feel distracted, or any time you want to deepen your experience of the moment.
LESSON 17
Learn to center quickly. You could spend hours each day getting ready to write—or ten seconds. Which seems more advantageous and economical?
To Do
1. Practice these twelve incantations.
2. Create some of your own.
3. Use them.
4. Turn them into an enduring habit.
CHAPTER 18
Upgrading Your Personality
You won’t live a happy, productive writing life if your writing room is tidy and you are a mess. Honoring your writing means, in addition to everything else that it means, upgrading your personality. You want to become someone who is less chaotic, more confident, less distractible, more motivated, less defensive, and so on. Of course you can enter your writing space as a burned-out case and still manage to get words on the page, but they are unlikely to be your best ones and they may be among your last ones.
Two of our greatest playwrights, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, very different in outlook, temperament, and orientation, shared a common history: excellent work early on, poorer work later on. This is a typical story, especially for American writers. Many writers manage to put words on the page, decade after decade, and yet aren’t really present at their handsome desk in their splendid workspace. The shadows in their personality, shadows that have grown darker over time, cast a pall over everything and their current writing is a mere shadow of their former writing.
It turns out that if we do not upgrade our personality, it tends to degrade. Our depressions start taking a bigger toll, our addictions begin to win, our imaginative powers start to wither, our output dwindles, our isolation increases, our despair deepens. Maybe we started out with certain cravings and a charming, zany, unhinged way of being; with each failed relationship and whiff of mortality, each round of excess and recurrent bad dream, we decline further.
Imagine that you are the following person. You are thirty-two years old, single, white, female. You have a degree in English and two half-miserable European trips, seven tumultuous love affairs, and a rocky draft of a novel to your credit. You are very busy—text messaging, checking e-mails, working a job, running by the reservoir, collecting information about how to store the good Bordeaux and why dating a married man might make sense—but, as busy as you are, you feel as if you’re sleepwalking. You say to yourself, “If I could just get that damned novel revised or maybe start a second one, maybe that would help.” What you don’t say is “I need a personality upgrade.”
You know that it’s rare for you to have a complete thought, a complete feeling, or a sense of completeness about anything nowadays. You have a lot of eggs left but not so many that each period isn’t meaningful. You wish that you could build a little Zen garden and sit there and be quiet and have that change everything, but you’ve tried that, or something like that, and it gave you the kind of headache that Tylenol couldn’t touch. Oh, you look whole enough and you can fool bus drivers and your therapist, who keeps cheering you on to nowhere. But you know that you need something and you say to yourself, “Maybe I’ll try a dating service.” What you don’t say is “I need a personality upgrade.”
You meant to write more than the first draft of one novel. You can taste the books you were meant to write, smell the sea air of this one, and feel the knife’s edge of that one. But you are very far away from writing them. You are thirty-two, single, white, female, and something happened, something that can’t be captured in a journal entry or corrected with laser surgery. Somewhere you lost something: your balance, your dream, your wherewithal. But it doesn’t occur to you to announce “I need a personality upgrade.”
That is exactly what you need. You do it in the following way, by selecting three or four qualities from the master list of qualities that life provides and by producing a simple sentence of the following sort: “I intend to live a calmer, more disciplined, more thoughtful life.” Or: “I intend to live a more passionate, more productive, more present life.” Or: “I intend to live a life that’s more generous and more ambitious.” Next, you turn your excellent sentence into concrete actions. You do something generous. You tackle something ambitious. You start a meditation practice to support your desire to grow calmer. You write every day, to honor your new goal of increased discipline.
This is simplicity itself: name what you want from yourself, then take action. “I want to sit still for a whole Sunday and really begin my next novel.” Beautiful: you sit still for a whole Sunday and begin your novel. “I want to stop feeling anxious and inferior, so I’m going to learn some deep-breathing techniques a
nd I’m going to release every ounce of my inferiority complex.” Beautiful: you breathe deeply, let inferiority evaporate from your skin, and write from a place of worthiness. “I want to stop being such a drama king and narcissist, so I’m going to go a full week without drama and without preening.” Beautiful: you wake up on Monday, begin your screenplay, and when, after fifteen minutes, you don’t know what to write next, you refuse to make a mini-drama out of your situation. Instead, you just keep going.
Of course it can’t be as simple as this. I am completely fibbing by claiming that you can upgrade your personality by crafting a useful sentence and taking some action. And yet . . . who knows? What can you lose by giving it a try?
LESSON 18
Figure out what you want from yourself, not what you want for yourself. Head in that direction.
To Do
1. Describe the upgraded personality you want.
2. Name the actions corresponding to that vision.
3. Take those actions.
4. Become that person.
Part V
Reflective Space
CHAPTER 19
Mindful Self-Reflection
Mindful self-reflection is the “space” we enter when we want to make productive changes, better understand what we want for our creative life, and guarantee that we are keeping an eye on our goals. It is different from mere unproductive worry and has, as its emotional component, a calmness that results from our practiced way of breathing through anxiety, quieting our mind and honoring our dreams.
Mindful self-reflection is a crucial ingredient in our recipe for living a creative life. Where does our next novel come from? Not from the cupboard or the closet. It comes from a way of being that invites its arrival. We are its container, its host, and its messenger. If we are doing the sorts of prophylactic things that ensure that it will not be birthed, we are the one practicing birth control on our own creativity.
Take Louise. A woman in her late forties, Louise had carved out a life for herself as a midwife to women writers. She led groups, workshops, and retreats for women, helped them open up and tell their stories, often for the first time, and for the last five years had even been able to earn a living from this work, albeit a meager one. Still, although she knew that she was performing a valuable service, a serious inner conflict remained.
She wasn’t doing any of her own writing, which made her feel incomplete. She couldn’t help but agree with her parents and her siblings, who, highly successful in their professions, wondered why Louise had accomplished so little, given her excellent education and her abundant talents. Wasn’t Louise supposed to lead as well as serve, create as well as midwife the creations of others, be in better financial shape, and make more of her life? She couldn’t quite say whether these were her own ideas, her family’s ideas, or ideas embedded in the culture, but she knew that she was carrying around a deep sense of failure.
She started her mindfulness practice with the question, “Am I really a writer?” This was a painful question to address because it seemed as if there could be no good answer. If it came to her that she wasn’t a writer, that would feel terrible; and if it came to her that she was a writer, that would confirm her intuition that she’d failed herself. She didn’t know what she could possibly gain by contemplating this question, and she began her practice a little mournfully, as many people who opt for self-awareness do.
For several consecutive nights she had vivid dreams, most of them involving forests at night. It was as if she’d been dropped into a fairy-tale world out of the Brothers Grimm, a world of lost children in woolen leggings, wood nymphs, and princes disguised as wolves and princesses disguised as swans. These scenes, however, had nothing to say to her. It was somehow not very different from spending the night at the opera or the ballet.
She tried a new question: “If I were to write, what would I write?” The same dreams returned. Only now the forest creatures kept changing their identities and their gender. Sometimes the wolves were princes and sometimes they morphed into princesses. The same happened with the swans, the squirrels, the deer, and the snakes. With each dream she saw this more clearly, until, in one dream, she observed all the forest creatures change before her eyes in rapid succession, a wolf transforming itself from prince to swan to princess to squirrel, morphing again and again.
When she woke up she discovered that she had learned something: she didn’t have to be just one sort of creature; she, too, could morph and change. She realized that she had two tasks to perform, affirming the appropriateness of her work as midwife while at the same time letting her own stories out. She’d always known this, but before she’d held the matter as an either/or proposition. For some reason it had seemed that she had to either serve or lead—she couldn’t do both. Now she wondered why on earth she’d ever thought that.
On second thought, she knew why: in the world in which she grew up, girls became nurses and boys became doctors. Girls got comfortable with bedpans and boys were sent out to be the visionaries. It suddenly struck her as strange that she had gotten this cultural message even though, in her own family, the girls had been given an equal shot at education and had been encouraged to excel. Still, there was some hum in the background, some undercurrent, some way in which the boys got more privileges or maybe just experienced the world in a more privileged way. That hum must have affected her. She had never been told, “Help others; don’t do your own work,” and yet somewhere, somehow she had gotten that message.
Now she saw that she needed just to be herself, freed from that piece of unconscious bondage. Instantly she knew what she wanted to write about: her experiences in India leading writing workshops for untouchable women. She had gone to India five times and had spent almost a year there altogether. For the longest time she’d known that she should tell the story of her experiences there, what her Indian students had taught her and what she had taught them, intermingled with the sights, smells, and colors of India. It would make for a fascinating and revealing book, if only she could write it.
Was she ready? Was it too late for her to begin her life as a writer? She answered the first question in the affirmative and the second in the negative and posed herself a new, beautiful question: “How should my Indian story begin?” Instead of waiting for an answer, she took herself right to the computer and, without any idea of what to expect and without knowing where to begin, she waited, surprisingly calmly, as her computer booted up.
In the time that it took for her computer to boot up, she heard herself think, “If I do not reflect on my life in this deep way, I get amazingly stuck, so stuck that I don’t do my own creative work. In order to write, I have to enter into a certain kind of self-relationship, not that of a cheerleader or a taskmaster but a private investigator, someone who has taken my case, someone who is willing to look at the evidence and hunt for clues. I’ve always said that life was a mystery. I don’t think that I understood that it required a real detective!”
You are the mystery; and you are the detective. Begin your practice of mindful self-reflection.
LESSON 19
We make many kinds of spaces for ourselves: noisy spaces, busy spaces, unsettled spaces, and sometimes calm self-reflective spaces. Make a calm self-reflective space for yourself by growing quiet. Then consider what your writing life needs—and how you’ll meet those needs.
To Do
1. Grow quiet.
2. Reflect.
3. Stay calm.
4. Take action.
CHAPTER 20
Making Space for Seville
Joyce was a successful magazine editor who, when she came to see me, had just celebrated her sixtieth birthday. Over the years her creativity had manifested itself in picking and editing articles for the magazine, choosing covers, and doing all of the other things that came with her job. That was a full-time job and more.
Joyce also kept to a strict exercise regimen, did early morning yoga, and served on the board of an organization that raised mon
ey for dancers with AIDS. She gave parties, traveled with her husband, planned vacations with her grown children, and mentored young editors at work, some of whom had gone on to successful careers at other magazines.
Yet all of this was not enough. For the longest time she had wanted to write a historical novel set in medieval Seville. The setting was crystal clear, and she had some characters and some plot in mind. But she had never started the novel, not even to jot down a few notes. It seemed that a wall stood between her and beginning her book. Each time she thought about the novel, she reminded herself that she was very busy and that each of the things she was doing was valuable in its own right. While that was undeniably true, she nevertheless felt as if she were failing herself.
For more than forty years she had wanted to do some writing and the fact that she had never given it a chance deeply disappointed her. We discussed reducing her commitments and even dropping a few of them and starting each day writing her novel, rather than in her usual way with yoga, exercise, and journaling. She agreed in a lukewarm way to my suggestions and also agreed to reflect on the question: “Where does my writing fit in?”
The thought that popped into her mind the next morning was, “All right, first thing.” She took that to mean that she should start each day writing her novel. But she couldn’t pull the feat off. She exercised instead. The morning after that she had pressing reasons to get to the office early. The third morning she simply dismissed the idea that she could start right in writing. Every morning she woke up thinking about writing her novel, but on no morning did she do any writing. By the end of the week she found herself in a foul mood.