The Writing Warrior

by Laraine Herring

  CHAPTER 20

  Soft Eyes

  Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

  —E. M. Forster

  Please take a minute to move into a space you find appealing. It can be inside or outside. Take your journal and a pen with you. When you arrive, find a comfortable seat, either on a chair or on the floor. If you’re in a chair, rest both your feet flat on the floor. Breathe deeply into your belly three times. Exhale fully each time.

  Now soften your body, your shell. Soften your gaze and then close your eyes. Soften your shoulders, your spine, your hips. Soften your breath so it sinks to your belly. Relax your tongue, your jaw, your throat. Relax your ears, your skull, your wrists, your fingers. Soften your mind. Allow your thoughts to pass through without clamping onto them. Release your eye sockets, your eyelids. Relax your teeth, your bones, your belly.

  Your sweet, sweet belly.

  Place your hands on your belly and feel it expand as you inhale, then feel it release on your exhale. Settle a little deeper into your hip bones. Keep breathing, your breath sinking, sinking into your belly. Your belly is fleshy and soft under your palms. Keep your hands on your belly. A lot of emotion is stored in the belly. You may want to run away from your belly energy. Stay. Stay with it, your awareness moving deeper inward, into your body and into your heart.

  What do you notice? Is this a familiar place? Foreign? Frightening? Do you notice yourself fidgeting? Sit for a while, just observing, hands on your belly, breath moving deeper and deeper, slower and slower, fuller and fuller. Allow your exhale to be as long as your inhale. Soften, soften, soften.

  Stay here as long as you like before continuing with this chapter. When you decide to move forward, notice the nature of your thoughts and breathing as you proceed. Just notice; don’t judge.

  Now slowly open your eyes and allow your gaze to travel around your space. Don’t linger too long on any one thing or area. Imagine your gaze is softly stroking your environment. Rather than using your eyes as arrows to pinpoint a particular object or person, allow the edges of your vision to become slightly fuzzy. I find this is easiest to do when I consciously relax my jaw and tongue. You might want to allow the tip of your tongue to rest on the back of your tooth ridge. This is a grounding place. Keep your breath moving fully throughout your body.

  When you’re ready, take out your journal and begin writing down your thoughts. Practice just being in the flow with them. Don’t try to make them say anything of deep importance. You might want to record other impressions, not just of what you see but of what you might smell. Do you notice any changes within your own mouth? A shift in the quality of the saliva? (I’m not making this up!) Are you more aware of any particular sensation in your body? No judgment. Just observation.

  When you feel complete here, move on intuitively to something else. It doesn’t matter what you pay attention to next, so long as it’s something specific. Perhaps you want to follow a feeling that arose to see where it lands or where its source may be. Perhaps you want to move deeper into a sensation within your body, or explore an object in your field of vision more fully. Follow your thoughts. Once again allow them to pass through without judgment or attachment. This time, if you (when you) find yourself traveling away from the initial prompt, redirect yourself back to your original intention. Begin again. If you (when you) find yourself traveling away once again, redirect. Begin again. Redirect yourself at least three times before you allow yourself to move onto another subject. Continue in this pattern as long as feels right for you today. When you feel complete, record your thoughts. Then set your journal down, return your hands to your belly, and close with three deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling equally.

  OK. What did we just do? Quite a lot actually. First, we placed ourselves in an environment in which we feel comfortable. Then, we concentrated our attention inward. We grounded ourselves by keeping our feet flat on the floor and by consciously directing our breath deep into the belly. Our hands on our bellies kept us connected to our source. By concentrating on softening, releasing, relaxing, letting go—whatever phrase you like—we are creating space. Where there’s rigidity, there’s tension. Where there’s softness, there’s release.

  For many of us, the act of writing involves a lot of physical tension. Writing shouldn’t be such a big deal, should it? You’re just sitting in a chair scribbling away, right? Next time you’re in your regular writing space, pay attention to the way you’re sitting, the way your fingers are poised over the keypad or wrapped around the pen. Notice your shoulders; creeping up toward your ears perhaps? Are you trying to hold up your arms with your shoulders or are you allowing the table to hold your weight? Is your jaw locked? Breath shallow? Brow furrowed? Shoulders hunched forward over the desk putting strain on your upper back? I’d bet all of you have noticed several, if not all, of these physical characteristics at some time while writing. You may even be exhibiting some of them now while you’re reading. It seems as though we humans love to hold tension in our bodies. We have to retrain ourselves to move with freedom rather than contraction. To take the path of least effort rather than most effort when performing a simple physical activity. To use our breath like a bellows to keep our body expanding rather than contracting. To surrender rather than resist. When we consciously practice softening before we write, we’ve already taken a big step toward creating space and openness before we even pick up a pen. You can accomplish this softening in just a few breaths, or if you have the time on a particular morning, you can allow yourself fifteen minutes or more to pay attention to softening your body and mind.

  Softening your body and mind is akin to stirring the raw ingredients in a cake mix. You can’t make a cake until the batter is smooth. You want to have that same delicious buttery smoothness in your own body and breath. Earlier, when you opened your eyes and let your gaze caress the world around you, you were practicing “soft eyes.” You weren’t trying to see anything (attachment). You weren’t trying not to see anything (aversion). This left space for you to see what you see. It gave you the space to practice absolute vulnerability without flinching.

  Let’s give a more practical example. If you go on a hike and try to see a hawk, your whole hiking experience will be measured against that intention. Did I see a hawk or didn’t I? Maybe you do see a hawk, but you weren’t able to get close enough to really see the hawk. You just saw it soaring across the sky. Does that count? Where does that fit in the story you constructed about your hike? By trying to see the hawk, you (consciously or unconsciously) filtered out things along the way that were not hawk. Maybe your gaze was focused only upward toward the sky or trees so you didn’t see the small red flower pushing itself up through the roots of a ponderosa pine. Maybe you were focused on the trail map so you wouldn’t get lost on your trek to find a hawk. When we’re this focused, the likelihood of our seeing a hawk is miniscule, based solely on the chance that the hawk actually flies within the narrow window we’ve created for “hawk seeing.”

  This also applies to writing. When you’re too narrowly focused on the intention of a book or a scene or a character, you close off possibilities that don’t fit within the framework you’ve established.

  This applies to self-knowledge as well. If you’ve boxed yourself in with labels and judgments, all the elements in the universe must conspire together perfectly for a sliver of authentic awareness to slip in.

  The first part of the writing exercise in this chapter asked you to just observe your thoughts and write them down. This reinforced the softness, the flow, and the value of every aspect of your experience. Then I asked you to trust your intuition and choose a focal point to begin another piece of writing. This trained you to follow your own intuition and not seek outside direction for all your writing choices. However, instead of allowing you to wander off topic, I asked you to reign yourself back to the element you wanted to focus on. I asked you to do this a minimum of three times.

  The two tasks weren’t in opposition to each othe
r, believe it or not. Writing is both flow and discipline. Art and craft. Intuition and perspiration. Writers have to create a lot of raw material to find the focus. A lot. Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel says, “There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them.” It’s necessary to cultivate soft eyes to see those eight hundred pages. It’s necessary to train your mind to discipline itself to stay on course so you can distill a clear, cohesive book of several hundred pages. Bringing your mind and your pen back to your original intention regularly helps cultivate that discipline. It also keeps you from moving away too quickly from something that might have a great deal of emotional energy for you. It’s primal to move away from something painful. When we reach something in our writing that has an emotional charge, the sane thing to do is back away. The writer, however, can’t look away. The writer stays, looks, absorbs, and reports. The writer’s eyes stay clear and focused. That clarity and focus is grounded in softness, which is different from a focus that an outside source dictates to you. It’s different from the kind that requires a rigid adherence to dogma. This focus comes authentically and organically from your direct experience. In yoga we talk about the importance of having strength with flexibility. Flexibility alone turns you into Gumby. Strength alone makes you a bulldozer.

  In the beginning of this chapter, I referred to your body as your shell. Consider hermit crabs. They have a squishy and tender abdomen (just like us!), and they carry their shells on their backs as a home and as a barrier against the elements and predators. You’ve no doubt thought of your own body as a shell or container for your essence in some way or other. There’s another layer of our human shell, though, and that’s the energetic barrier we put up between others and ourselves. It’s often much easier to soften our physical shell than our emotional and spiritual shells. I’m sure you’ve been in a situation where you’ve entered a room and noticed someone who absolutely positively not now not ever no how no way was going to let anyone into her personal sphere. She had a “keep out” wall in front of her wider than the span of the room. We can energetically feel that in others, and we respond by keeping our distance.

  Hermit crabs use secondhand shells for their homes. They scavenge until they find a discarded shell, and then they move in. Think of the hermit crab’s scavenged shell as similar to our own energetic shells. How much of your energetic shell—your barrier between your vulnerable, soft, squishy self and the rest of the world—is made up of ideas and belief systems that you’ve picked up secondhand? How much of it is not even yours, but scavenged from your parents, your ex-lovers, your tragic-poignant middle school experiences? How much of the rigidity, thickness, and depth of this energetic shell actually has anything at all to do with you? We tend to add bricks to our energetic wall when we get hurt. Hurt is real. Hurt sucks. Hurt also causes us to contract. The next time you bang your knee or accidentally cut your finger, try to relax into the pain rather than pull away from it. It’s still going to hurt, but not as much. Promise. I’ve tried it. Hermit crabs know when their scavenged shells are no longer suitable. They leave the old shell in the sand and find a new home. Humans are a bit more stubborn. Rather than let things go as they arise, we’re more likely to store them and then cover them with mortar to make sure they never move. Kind of maladaptive, don’t you think?

  In order to dive into our energetic walls so we can dismantle the bricks that aren’t ours or no longer serve us, we have to cultivate a way of seeing these things that isn’t going to magnify our resistance. This requires compassion, which is the final thing that soft eyes teach us. We learn first to turn compassion inward, so later we can authentically bring compassion into the world. We start by viewing ourselves with all our wrinkles and belly rolls and aching knees and mistakes without judgment. We leave space to look around honestly without fear and contraction. We then show ourselves that we can come to the table with clarity and compassion, not with the snarky schoolmarm or overbearing parent voice. Our authentic self takes notice, even if you don’t notice yet. You’re learning to cultivate intimacy with yourself. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to extend that compassion into the world and into your writing.

  CHAPTER 21

  Self-Study

  Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

  —Richard Wright

  We have spent a good portion of this book engaged in self-study, even if you haven’t realized it. For example, our shaking practice helps us pay more attention to our inner and outer bodies. The Writing Warrior practice pulls us back to our breath and to the page when we want to stray. We’re learning to sit and face our inner selves without judgment. The more we uncover our authentic writing, the more we’re uncovering ourselves.

  Why is self-study important? Can’t I write a best-selling book without doing any of this inner work? Can’t I do good things in the world? Of course you can. But why would you spend less time trying to understand yourself than you’ve spent earning your degree or working on the craft of writing? After all, you came in with you and you’re going out with you, nothing else. Wouldn’t it be pretty cool if you knew who that being was that you’re traveling with?

  In my experience, writers are natural questioners. This might have gotten us in trouble in junior high, but it’s a great quality for someone wanting to explore the larger themes of the universe, or for someone who wants to solve the mystery of the clock tower, or understand more about black holes. Every book poses a question. Sometimes the writer is aware of this question in the beginning. Other times the question reveals itself as the writer writes. Part of the tension that keeps a reader wrapped up in a good book is a result of the reader wanting to know what happens next. The what, how, why, when, or where questions that propel a reader forward in a novel are the questions you use when exploring your own depths.

  Last semester, a student said to me, “Laraine, I’m just not as deep as you think I am.”

  “Poppycock,” I said.

  We’re all vast and limitless. What limits us is our patterns and our perceptions of what we think we can be. We likely have had some personal experience to support our claims, and that experience, rather than being a memory, becomes a taskmaster. Our responses today are often based on our experiences of yesterday. A guard to our inner depths has been trained to tell us there’s nothing in there worth seeking, nothing in there worth exploring, and, most importantly, nothing in there worth loving. Over many years, we have learned to believe the guard is there even when he’s taking a lunch break. We simply stop taking the trip.

  It’s frighteningly easy for our habits to become our facts, just like it’s easy for our opinions of people, groups, and cultures to seem factual. But the warrior is ever vigilant. When your imaginary guard tells you to turn back, you stand your ground. “Why? Why should I turn back? You’re not the boss of me!” And so you’re able to take another step inward. Think of how many habits can become rigid assertions about ourselves over the course of our lives. A statement such as “I’m just not as deep as you think I am” becomes an unchallenged assumption. Unchallenged assumptions are the fuel that keeps the warrior from slaying dragons. For every unchallenged assumption in your mind, there are attached behaviors that may be harming yourself or others.

  Psychoanalyst Carl Jung spent much of his life’s work studying the unconscious self. It was his belief that the unconscious part of ourselves was what was really in charge of things, and that the more we could bring out of our unconscious to our conscious mind, the more harmonious our decisions and actions would be. We move into the unconscious first by the path of ruthless questioning. It’s much easier to stay asleep. It’s much easier to turn away when we’re challenged with “poppycock” from an instructor.

  It takes a great deal of energy to deny direct experience. Write that dow
n. It takes a great deal of energy to deny direct experience. Why, then, do we not acknowledge the experience that’s in front of us? We will have to experience it eventually because it is part of our path. When this student went back and looked at his writing and pushed further, he found he was able to uncover something, or at least bring forth something that he had buried for quite some time. He needed a push. We all need a push. Once something has arisen in our psyches, it’s time to pay attention to it.

  We’ve all got things buried. We have an abundance of experiences to uncover. I find that to be invigorating and exciting. What else can I look at? What else is keeping me from living my life as fully as I would like to? What else? What else? As you make more space within your body (please continue to do the shaking practice), you’ll find images, memories, stories beginning to emerge, floating for a time and then passing away. Pay attention to these images. They are bread crumbs for you on your journey. Don’t judge what comes up. Ideas such as, “Gosh, I can’t believe I’m thinking about him again!” or “That’s really too petty to be a problem” are examples of judging. It doesn’t matter what comes up. If it comes up, it’s yours. Own it.

  What else? Walk right through the door to your inner depths to learn more. Once the guard there knows he can’t push you away so easily, he’ll back down. Now pay attention. This guard will get more clever the more work you do, and he’ll find ways to trick you into turning away again. Be ever vigilant. Question everything. Don’t be complacent. When something that arises feels right, embrace it. If a time comes when that belief or concept no longer feels authentic to you, let it go. It’s easy to embrace what feels right, often not so easy to let it go later. Remember this Taoist wisdom: When the guest comes, make hot tea. When the guest leaves, throw it out. In other words, welcome what arises in the moment. Don’t attach. Don’t avert. When what arises passes, don’t hold on.