Discovering Mindful Writers: Justyna Cyrankiewicz
Wisdom and reflections from Justyna's writing journey
Welcome to the August “Discovering Mindful Writers Q&A”. Each month, a guest writer answers the same seven questions about their writing life.
I am delighted to welcome this month. Justyna writes Stacking Stones, where she explores and offers guideposts to help us find, and follow, our own unique pathways.
I hope you enjoy her answers to my questions. Her response to one of them has inspired me to change the wording of one of the questions after this month. Hope will become aspire, and you’ll find out why below. What do you think about this differentiation?
I also found her decision to take a year off reading narrative works, listening to music, and watching films, fascinating. As an avid reader of, writer of, and teacher of fiction writing, who loves to dance in the kitchen with my husband, I can’t imagine doing something like that myself. What about you?
The series has proven very popular and I have guests booked in up until April 2025 now so I am not taking on anyone else at the moment. I will let everyone know in the new year when I’m opening up again for future interviews.
With love,
What does mindful writing mean to you?
I am always very careful about the kind of energy I bring into my writing. Mary Oliver once said that she thinks some authors have mixed the act of writing with therapy, which is unfortunate, and I agree. However, I am aware that this can be a controversial statement. My intention isn’t to condemn anybody’s actions or label certain choices as wrong or good. However, I’ve seen the adverse effects such a process can have.
My journey of homecoming to my innermost self has largely involved dismantling the narratives and emotional loads accumulated from literature, films, and music over the years. When I realised the extent to which artists use the creative process to cope with their emotions and how these raw, unprocessed feelings are projected onto us—readers, viewers, listeners—I decided to take a year-long break from these external narratives. I stopped listening to music, reading narrative works, and watching films entirely. My objective was to discover how my own natural emotions would feel when not augmented by these narratives.
What I found was that the life cycle of even the most intense emotional states is quite short-lived when allowed to exist simply as they are: fluid emotional happenings devoid of solid, mentally constructed components. To this day, I generally avoid music with lyrics, refrain from reading novels, and am very selective about the films I watch, which is a rare activity anyway.
So this is something I am mindful of when I write, and a question I ask myself often: what kind of emotions do I introduce to the reader, and which should I leave aside? It’s not just about the words I use but the overall state and condition of my entire being when it leans over a sheet of paper or the keyboard. Can I open up and be assured that what comes out of me and rests in between the lines has been digested, well-processed, and distilled into its purest form according to my current capabilities and knowledge? I must be very honest when I make such assessments. I cannot deceive myself because I know my readers will see through it. They’re all too wise for me to afford anything short of this effort :)
That isn’t to say I strive for perfectionism. There are days when my mind and heart are tired, and the process of writing turns into strenuous labour. Still, I must make sure I only offer to the reader what I already brought to the light of my awareness and which I sat with long and intimately enough to be able to say: this is a gift, not a burden.
Again, I don’t say engaging with those external narratives and allowing them to influence our internal ones is wrong. It’s just something that didn’t work for me personally, and so I am careful to ensure that when I sit down to write, I’ve already done my work in terms of dealing with my own emotions, which I’m responsible for.
I am aware it limits me in certain ways as a writer, and my writing mentor used to tell me I should give it more of my raw. I pondered it for some time, but in the end, I decided to keep choosing to offer the rawness of love, compassionate understanding, and the gentleness of becoming (or rather, un-doing) so that we can all continue arriving together closer and closer to that which is hidden deep inside: the real rawness. It’s just how I try to walk my path. To quote Mary Oliver once more:
“I don't usually mess around with what makes me unhappy when I'm writing. I want to write poems that will comfort, maybe amuse, enliven other people. I don't mean that the world is all great and wonderful. But I'm careful to—I try to keep the emphasis on the good and the hopeful.”
This sums up my approach pretty well.
And then, mindfulness in writing also means that I try to be mindful of what I don’t know yet. As much as it can sound counterintuitive (how can you be mindful of that which is still unknown?), I always try to leave some empty space in my mind and my writing. I try not to say it all because I simply cannot. I don’t try to portray myself as someone I am not, and I am careful not to suggest I know more than I actually do. Even though I can recognise that I have been gifted with relatively more life-augmenting and heart-shaking events in my short life than others of a similar age, which have offered me plentiful lessons, there is still so much left to learn—and that excites me.
Being mindful of how much I don’t know yet helps me remain humble and grounded, especially when my writing gains some recognition. A few readers emailed me since I began Stacking Stones, suggesting they grew to perceive me as their teacher. I am always incredibly humbled by such words, but also, they make me feel quite troubled. I don’t see myself as a teacher by any means. While I know I have something to offer, which I do through my writing, I also spend a great amount of time learning from others—both in person and through reading books and articles here on Substack. I learn a lot from my readers as well, and I'm endlessly astonished by their wisdom and the variety of their interests and life experiences.
How does a mindful writing practice fit into your wider mindfulness journey?
To give a well-rounded answer to this question, I must begin by saying that I am still quite unaccustomed to the word “mindfulness”. To my mind, it appears foreign and quite fancy. I think I first encountered it five or six years ago, and it was already dressed up in the general notion of “achieving something” or “becoming something which you’re not”. Until then, it was just something you do, without necessarily naming it.
Of course, the terrain of mindfulness can be expanded with a committed practice, and this is what my daily meditation sittings and studies aim at, but to me, it often means a return to my childhood ways of being and operating in the world—or rather, bringing them back to where I am now, and using them in a more skilful, but still simple and open-hearted way.
Growing up, my Babcia (Polish for Grandma) taught me to hug birches, placing my bare feet at their roots, and inviting their healing energy into my body. I have been doing that for as long as I can remember.
I spent my childhood traversing Polish forests and fields, jumping over the wild, quick creeks cutting through the fresh greenery and plush of early spring grass. When I wasn’t at school, I was observing frogs, tadpoles, fishes, birds, grasshoppers, and—if they chose to lift the curtain of their mystery—foxes and roe deer emerging from the forest into the wideness of the meadow and my eyes. I would curiously track the trotting of a wild paw across the wet forest floor, and I would submerge my hands in the cold forest streams all the way to the bottom, always yearning to be closer to nature, to feel its damp touch directly on my skin.
In 2022, I took my last antidepressant pill and pressed “connect” for the last time, dialling my therapist over Zoom. After six years of depression, I had reclaimed my life. Up until that point, it had offered me lessons on grief, isolation and loneliness, panic attacks, sexual abuse, an eating disorder, and never-ending overthinking. Lessons which I now look back on with gratitude. Yet, I had almost lost my life to them.
Having spiralled down into the bottomless well of mental suffering that we constantly stand on the edge of, I dedicated my efforts to finding and learning ways of uplifting and steadying myself even amidst the greatest of turmoils.
My everyday practice is oriented towards this very goal: to soften and hold, to challenge and comfort, to build and to dismantle, to question and listen for an answer. And then to offer the outcome through writing—from my heart to those of my readers.
When I write, I strive to reignite my child's voice, infused with the scent of a mossy forest floor, the murmur of thin streams cutting through the fields and accompanying the roads to wherever they must lead. I recover my bygone freedom to play with words and sentences as my allies instead of subjecting myself to them without any courage or fantasy. I bring back those old musings and use them to dress up my present perspectives.
This is the closest I can get to answering your question. Mindfulness and its combination with writing, in my process, is just that: putting my hands deep in the stream to touch its muddy belly and then transferring the scent of the mud and the freshness of the water onto the page. It is an act of un-doing, dissolving, setting free. It is the courage of the heart to learn to walk away from the fearful ways of the mind and to recognise its own wisdom and power.
I find it unfortunate that we, as humans, are so stubborn about coming up with names for everything. It can be very limiting since, of course, a term is never that which is. It can only try to point us in that direction. My struggle with it stems perhaps from the same approach I described earlier. I find the act of living more fascinating and engaging when it’s allowed to “live itself” rather than when it’s forced to fit into terms and concepts that always will be too narrow for the grand happening of life. The less I squish it in the tight container of a narrative, the more fruitful and sweet it is.
One could say, then, that my mindfulness journey is that of leaving the words at the doorstep of my mind and stepping out, trusting and naked, into the forest of immediate living, with my feet muddy and ready for adventure. That is, of course, at odds with the act of writing. Luckily, for now, I managed to find a good balance. I still return to my desk, wipe my feet clean, brush my hair back, and let my mind retrieve the words it had let loose with the wind among the trees. When I write, I try to operate in the same way I do in my everyday life: always choosing what to keep and what to set free. That’s the journey I undergo on the page and which I invite the reader to set out on with me.
What do you write? Essays, poetry, fiction, plays?
I write essays in public and poetry in secret.
Although, I tend to think of my essays more as letters—from me to the reader. The writing I publish at Stacking Stones often contains an account of my most intimate emotional, mental, and spiritual experiences. I don’t think I’d be able to afford such a level of openness if it wasn’t for the context of correspondence between two familiar minds. I think of my readers as friends, and that’s what enables me to write so openly. After all, it’s just a chat with a friend—what’s there to hide? That’s why it means so much to me when someone takes the time to comment, send me a message, or write an email! It’s a sign that a conversation I had initiated has been picked up, and it’s a great joy to share it in such a way. I learn a lot from my readers and always await their responses with excitement!
As for poetry, I’m still too shy to share it, and I want to spend some more time exploring it in the intimate space between me, my hand, and a piece of paper before I offer it to the world. I am slowly making up my mind, though, to participate in one of the local poetry open mics. I feel like this day is coming closer and closer!
What drives you to write?
I’m afraid I don’t know. I’m not sure whether I can separate it from who and what I am. It’s just essential. I’ve tried to identify it, but again, I decided to let it live itself. It is something I have been doing for as long as I can remember. It feels as natural to me as breathing—the only difference being that in order to breathe, we luckily don’t need to learn anything—we do it as soon as we leave our mum’s womb. Writing, however, demands us to learn at least the complexities of an alphabet.
This fact caused me a great deal of frustration when I was still in pre-school age. My parents told me they had to forbid me from writing because I wanted to do it before I learned how to write, that is, before I was introduced to the secrets of a written alphabet. So I came up with my own, written from right to left, and I would spend most of my free time trying to write. They were afraid it could cause me to struggle later at school, so they’d hide pens and paper to keep me away from writing until I learned to do it properly at school. Still, I’d hide in the bathroom or wardrobes and write on whatever paper I could find.
Soon enough, I learned the guarded art of an alphabet and could legally enter the wondrous world of writing. As I continued to write, I began enjoying the ways in which language lends itself to us as a playground, and we can stretch and mould it, bending its boundaries and defining new limits. This freedom of movement within the language is something I had lost when I began writing in English, which is not my mother tongue. It took me quite a while until I could do that again; I lacked words (I still often do) to express the breadth and depth of what I wanted to share. Luckily, now, it feels increasingly natural and playful to me again. Those who have known my writing in Polish tell me that now they can see more of “me” in my essays, which is to say, more of what passes through me is skillfully laid out on the page so that it can be offered to others. This regained possibility of playtime in writing is what pulls me back to it, no doubt.
When it comes to the deepest, original motivation, however, I cannot tell you, unfortunately, what drives me to write. I never questioned it too deeply, and I don’t think I can, or want to. I write because when I don’t, I feel like I am lacking something significant. Maybe that’s just what I was made for in this life.
What stops you from writing?
When I sense I might lack sufficient emotional capacity to process my inner contents, which I intend to lay out on the page, I don’t write. I take a break, and, as Wendell Berry wrote, “For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” That is to say, I go out and lay down in the grass, I walk to the beach and jump from rock to rock, I splash the ocean water at my dog, raise my face to the sun, or I go look at the trees to be reminded how to be stable and resistant but still growing and beautiful. One of those things always helps.
And then, usually, my head has been aired out, and I’ve been reassured of my own potentiality well enough that when I return to writing the same or the following day, I am in a better position to curate my insides when distilling them into the outer form of an essay.
Before I decided to launch Stacking Stones, I was hesitant to return to regular and public writing because, again, I was wary of the workings of the narratives. In my mind, life occurs with great fluidity, and I do my best not to disturb it. Ever since I took a break from external stories, as I mentioned in my answer to your first question, I committed to dismantling many others that were forming an intricate and overcomplicated structure of my inner world. I’ve committed to simplicity, and frankly, there’s not much room for narratives in a simple mind. That’s why, in the description of my publication, I say, “I write about simple things for complicated minds”. It’s all I do, really.
I noticed that whenever I try to describe something, myself especially, it can take time to let it loose again. This is also why I took quite some time to answer these questions, and I’d do it bit by bit every day so that I could ensure nothing remained stagnant afterwards.
So, one more thing that occasionally stops me from writing is the decision of whether I want to put an event into a narrative or would rather let it be wild and free for a little longer so that it can shape me in unspoken ways until it’s ripened enough to offer the seeds of words. There are some topics that I was asked to write about or wanted to include in my writing, which I decided to let run freely instead. Writing solidifies; it encourages a logical flow to the otherwise net-like structure of thoughts and inner happenings. It can be a good thing (that’s why journaling is often advised), or it can be troublesome as it tends to build into us elements which don’t belong and would better be let loose.
What do you hope to achieve with your writing?
I told myself not to assume or hope too much about what I could do with my writing. Hope is a troublesome state of mind, and I learned not to engage in it too much. I prefer to orient my approach towards action—however small or big it may be.
Since moving to Portugal almost two months ago, I have been attending evening group meditation sessions at the local Buddhist Monastery. During one visit, I stopped by a bookshelf with publications available for practitioners. As I looked through the books, one of the monks noticed and asked me to show him what I had picked. “That’s good, but here are five more you might like,” he said with a smile while collecting additional volumes and handing them to me. Among them was one written by him. In it, there were words about hope I had been re-reading since:
“You can aspire without attachment. Hope is tied up with attachment. Aspiring contains contentment and carries the sense: ‘I can give into this.’ And a basis of release is the sufficiency that comes with that sense of: ‘I can give.’ Hope, on the other hand, makes and leaves a hole.”
— Ajahn Vajiro “Allowing Intuition, Revelation, and Insight”
When I write, I focus on that gentle sense of “I can give into this”, and I do what I can. Sometimes it turns out well, and sometimes it doesn’t; I thoroughly enjoy the process, so that’s okay. I try my best to evoke warm emotions in the reader and to inspire them to look deeper within. What comes out of it, however, is no longer up to me anyway—as I mentioned, the work I do before I sit down to write is for it to turn into a gift. And once a gift moves out of our hands, it begins to live the life of the recipient. If I’ve done my job well, it will help them to lead a life well-lived.
Finally, of course, like many others, I aim for my writing to get me to the point where it’s the main thing I do. I simply want to focus on it more, dedicate more time and energy to it, and, thanks to that, offer more to my growing community of readers. This is a very practical goal which I try to “give into”. I do need to eat, and I do need a roof over my head; I need a connection to the internet, and I need books in order to write—for that, I need money. It would be wonderful not to think about those aspects of life when it comes to writing and to engage in the craft of it for its own sake, but I am not in that position, and I think it is okay to admit that.
How do you write? Are you a planner or do you just start writing from an idea and let it lead you?
I generally view my everyday life as preparation to write. I know that if I indulge in compulsive behaviours, if I skip one or two of my formal meditation sittings, if I don’t get good rest and good playtime, and if I act in unskillful ways, it will all be reflected in my writing at the end of the week. So, in that sense, you could probably say I’m a planner—I plan my days around what brings the best out of me, and I try to hold myself with gentleness and kindness as I follow this discipline.
When Thursday comes, which is typically when I begin to write my weekly Stacking Stones essay, I try to put extra effort and attention into how I enter this space of an intimate conversation with myself and the world, which then is opened up and offered to the broader community of my readers.
The day before, I go to bed earlier so that I can have a slow morning, preparing me for the task. I typically sit for my one-hour meditation, go out to visit nature, eat my breakfast with care, and try not to get exposed to external narratives as much as possible—that means I don’t check my phone, I try not to have any conversations even with those I share a home with, and especially not with myself. I suppose that would mean I enter a mindful state, although, as I explained in the beginning, it is something I do because it serves me and others well; perhaps that’s what it’d be called in the end.
When I sit down to write, I either already have a topic in mind, or I look through a list of themes I had gathered before and pick one that calls me on that day. If it’s a good day, I simply begin writing, or otherwise, I lay out a structure in bullet points on the days when I struggle to fetch the words out of my mind. In either case, I set out on a journey and allow myself to be lost and found over and over until the letters I place on the pages lead me back home, step by step. I try not to get carried away by any expectations or impatience that might arise in the process, which comes to me more easily the more I write.
If everything goes as planned, I will have a promising draft by Thursday evening, which I edit on Friday morning. My essays go out every Friday afternoon (in the European time zone), and I do my best to stick to that schedule. Although, of course, there are times when I have to tend to urgent matters, and just like we take a day off at work, I have to do the same here occasionally. :)
Thanks so much for your time and sharing your insights and inspirations, Justyna.
Next month’s guest is who writes A Thin Space, where she shares personal essays that explore attentive and intentional living in a way that brings readers closer to discovery, joy, and healing. Her writing is beautiful and Emily is one of the first people I made a deep connection with here on Substack. I am really looking forward to this one!
Read previous interviews in the series here.
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Thank you! 💙
Enjoyable interview. Thanks both for sharing.
Inspiring and powerful 🙏🏻thank you Amanda and Justyna for your wonderful light ✨