The Joys of Mindful Writing

Why writing and mindfulness go so well together

For a long time, my mindfulness practice was separate from my writing. My writing was very focused on the goals I had for it whereas mindfulness and being present were saved for other times. When I wrote a story, even while I was putting the initial words on the page at first draft, usually from a writing prompt so I hadn’t even discovered yet what it was really about, my mind was already elsewhere thinking about where I could send it. Which competitions had upcoming deadlines, which journals were open for submissions, who would want this story?

But the longer I practiced mindfulness, the more I found myself subconsciously applying it to everything I do. It transformed how I felt about my stories. It changed how I approached writing them, how I felt while I was writing them, and what I hoped might happen with them once the story was written. But first, I had to untangle the ways writing had got so bound up with these goals that they had become the most important element of it.

Mindfulness came into my life at a time when I was struggling with my mental health. In the space of a year, I had three bereavements of people close to me, all of which were sudden and unexpected; my first novel came out with a publishing house that treated me very badly; and memories of childhood abuse that my mind had hidden from me for many years came back to me. I was also trying to navigate my way through a very difficult and demanding relationship with my mother, who is a narcissist. The concept of mindfulness in Western cultures is very closely linked to stress reduction and I was feeling very stressed so much so I had two accidents in the space of six weeks as my mind wasn't focused on what I was doing. So I turned to mindfulness to try and gain some control over my racing thoughts and anxiety.

But mindfulness before it came to the West was born of spirituality in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions and it wasn't long before I became more interested in this side of it. This led me on a journey of discovery, both spiritual and scientific, that has been life changing – more of which I will share in other posts – and is still ongoing now.

As I slowly took control of my anxiety and stress, had therapy, and became more mindful on a day-to-day basis, which took place over years as I had a whole lifetime of stuff to untangle, I began to understand that the reasons my writing had got so bound up with goals was because I had to prove my worth. Love in my family, which was dysfunctional on so many levels, was not unconditional and that had been programmed into me. I had to achieve big things with my writing otherwise I wasn't good enough as a person as well as a writer. Coming to that realisation and letting go of it, is how I discovered the joys of mindfully writing.

For me, mindfully writing is about the whole practice - it’s changed what I want to write about, how I want to write, and has given me so much pleasure in spending more time with my stories to really dig deep into the meaning, to make the language sing, to understand what my characters are trying to tell me. Then a friend sent me a quote from the poet, Mary Oliver, which put into words all I had been feeling and experiencing about my writing practice. I wrote about that here.

Mindfulness is about being present in the moment and now when I turn up to write, I am fully there in what I am creating and I give no thought to what might happen to the story after. I now have many stories sitting on my laptop that I haven’t sent anywhere. Some of them have been there for a couple of years and that would never have happened before. It is so freeing to write like this and being fully there on the page with my stories and characters is a mindfulness practice in itself.

One of the craft books that was integral to this transformation is Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldman and this is a book I return to time and time again. In the chapter ‘Writing as Practice’ she says how one of our aims in developing a writing practice is to learn to trust our bodies and minds, to be patient and non-aggressive.

Art lives in the Big World. One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It’s the process of writing and life that matters. Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.

For me, learning to mindfully write has been a big step towards becoming sane. As has learning to mindfully live, and love, and speak. I hope the things I share with you here, can help you on that journey too.

With love,