Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life

Preface

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

—Joseph Campbell

Most writers will confess that they write because they have to write, not necessarily because they want to write. They write out of necessity because either it makes them feel better or they want to share their story with the world. I fall into both these categories: writing makes me feel good; when I don’t write, I feel as if something’s missing from my life, plus I also yearn to share my stories with others in the hope that they will resonate in a way that brings healing and a deeper way of knowing and understanding.

My beginnings as a writer began when I was ten years old, writing in my journal to help me cope and heal from the suicide of my grandmother, who had also been my caretaker and had lived with us in my childhood home. I was the only child of immigrant parents who worked all day tending their retail dry-goods store in Brooklyn, New York. On Labor Day in 1964, I was at home with my grandmother. In many immigrant families of the post-World War II era, children were reared by their extended families, particularly grandparents. My grandparents lived with us, and while my grandfather spent much of his time in New York City becoming culturally acclimated, my maternal grandmother, Regina, stayed home to take care of me.

It was a hot Indian summer day common to the season. We lived in a suburban community along with other immigrant families, and I had many playmates in the neighborhood. I was excited when a friend invited me to go swimming in her pool. With a child’s enthusiasm, I knocked on my grandmother’s door to ask for permission.

There was no answer. I tried several times, but still no answer. I called to her, but there was only silence. Trembling with fear, I phoned my parents at their store. I sat with my nose pressed to the front bay window until they drove up the driveway in Dad’s pink car that matched the house’s shingles—the color he had painted them the day I was born. My parents dashed out of the car and up to Grandma’s room. Before I knew what was going on, my beloved grandmother was being carried down our creaky wooden stairs on a stretcher and put into an ambulance. I never saw her again.

Like most children, I took the experience in stride and did not think too much about it. There was no doubt that I missed my grandmother, Regina, the only grandmother I ever knew. My father’s parents had perished in the Holocaust. I was lonely for my grandmother’s company and her love. After all, she had been the one who had taught me how to type short stories on the Remington typewriter perched on the vanity table in her room. Her loving attention was something my mother was unable to provide in a meaningful way. Now in addition my mother, who had also been an only child, was dealing with her own grief over losing her mother.

My mother knew I was grieving and wanted to help me through the trauma of having lost my grandmother. Reaching out to therapists was not done in those days; and even if it had been, we would not have had the money for it. Others might have seen therapists, but it was certainly not something anyone ever talked about. My grandmother had been a journal keeper. After some contemplation on how to help me cope with the loss of this important person in my life who had also been my caretaker, my mother went to the nearest stationery store and bought me a blank, red leather journal with a saying by Kahlil Gibran on the top of each page. I had many favorites, but in coping with the loss of my grandmother, this is the one that helped me: If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don’t, they never were.

One thing I learned from my grandmother was the importance of having love in my life. At the top of one page in my red-leather journal was Gibran’s saying, Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit. In this page I wrote about how much my grandmother’s love meant to me and how, after losing her, my life felt so empty.

For many months after my grandmother’s suicide, my mother continued to encourage me to write down my feelings about my grandmother. Having been an English major in college, my mother thought this was the best way for me to deal with my grief.

In those days, children were unwelcome at funerals, so I was shipped off with my journal to my aunt’s and uncle’s apartment in New York City. I guess everyone thought that the funeral experience would be too traumatic an experience for me. Certainly things would be different today, at a time when kids are exposed to a lot more than funerals. For days on end after my grandmother died, I sat at my small birch desk or in my walk-in closet under the hanging clothes, writing about my grandmother and how I missed her.

Little did I realize that my mother’s seemingly mild gesture of buying me a journal would set the stage for my lifelong passion for writing. As I grew into adulthood, each time I encountered difficult times—including my turbulent adolescence in the 1960s, my daughter’s drug addiction, and my battles with cancer—I wrote about what I was going through. Not only did I explain my lived experience, but I also wrote about how the experience made me feel.

It was more than four decades after my grandmother died, when I was forty-seven years old, that I received my first cancer diagnosis (about which I wrote in Healing with Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey). After healing from the physical and emotional trauma of that experience, and of course chronicling my journey in my journal, I decided to follow my dream of returning to graduate school. I pursued my MFA in writing, and when the time came to consider a subject for my thesis, the story of my grandmother’s life occurred to me.

Coincidentally, around that time my mother gave me my grandmother’s hand-typed journal telling of her early life as an orphan in Poland during and after World War I. When Mother handed me the journal, I felt as if I had been given the biggest gift a granddaughter could ever receive. I devoured every word and realized that my grandmother had shared my passion for journaling. My MFA thesis, which involved studying her life, turned into my first published memoir, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal.

In this memoir, I dealt with the two major turning points in my life: losing my grandmother—whose loss had been all the more traumatic because she had also been my caretaker—and then discovering her sacred journal. The journal was sacred because of its role in my understanding of my grandmother and why she might have committed suicide. It was also sacred because it was another chance for me to get close to her intimate and private thoughts. I realized that writing about my grandmother was healing, as it allowed me to honor her and keep her alive, and it was also a way to come to some resolution about her suicide.

I had always been a seeker, but the experience of reflecting upon my grandmother’s life and then finding her journal led me on a path of discovery and further transformation as I tried to understand why she had taken her life at the age of sixty-one—the age, in fact, that I am now as I write this book.

Studying my grandmother’s life leading up to her suicide helped me to understand, grow, and become empowered by her experience to take on the role of a woman warrior. I realized that she had been a survivor for most of her life. She had survived the trauma of being orphaned, she survived two world wars, she survived an emotionally abusive relationship, and she survived long enough to see me go to school. I learned from my grandmother that no matter what happened, I too wanted to be a survivor and a fighter. I wanted to become empowered by my experiences and also to help others become empowered by theirs. Thus, my grandmother had left me with a huge gift.

My MFA was not to be the end of my pursuit of education. It seemed as if whenever a life-changing event occurred in my life, I returned to school for another degree. My MFA was initiated as a result of my breast cancer diagnosis; and six years later, after being diagnosed with smoldering multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, I returned for my doctorate in psychology. About that time, I was approaching the age of sixty-one—again, my grandmother’s age when she took her life—and had begun reflecting on my own life and on how I felt there was so much more I wanted to accomplish. Having had two cancer diagnoses and dealt as well with numerous losses of loved ones, I fully realized the fragility of life. By returning to school, I hoped to merge my passion for understanding the psyche with my great passion for writing. Thus, the subject of my dissertation research was the healing and transformative powers of personal narrative, which became the impetus for writing this book.

Basically, my research examined how life-changing experiences have inspired some well-published authors to write the narratives of their lives. I interviewed writers such as Maxine Kong Kingston, Alexandra Styron, Kim Stafford, Monika Wesloweska, and Mark Matousek. During the course of my research and while compiling the results, I discovered the healing and transformative power of personal writing. Writing one’s story is a way to reclaim your voice, to share a family secret, or simply to share a story with others. In my study, I found that the act or experience of writing results in a heightened sense of awareness and an identity that becomes transformed, in addition to a deeper understanding of one’s place in the world. Most of those who participated in my study had been exposed either to early-life trauma and significant loss or to addiction, either their own or that of a loved one.

The actual decision to write a memoir depends on both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The intrinsic factors may be related to the individual’s emotions, and the extrinsic factors may pertain to what occurs in his or her world. Writing about certain experiences helps provide an understanding of one’s unique self, as well as of one’s relationship with others and the world at large.

My research incorporated the work of one of my favorite humanistic psychologists, Abraham Maslow, who, as you might recall from one of your psychology courses, coined the term the hierarchy of needs that identifies basic human needs such as security, love, and shelter. He illustrated this hierarchy in the form of a pyramid, at the top of which he spoke about the self-actualization of people who are motivated by higher means or higher truths. These self-actualized or highly motivated individuals are those who are extremely dedicated to some task that results in the higher good of others.

You might know someone who is self-actualized in this way; it might even be you. Such people feel an urgent or deep need to make a change in the world or to serve humanity. It might be something that possesses you. There are different terms to explain the idea of your calling in life. The Romans called it your genius, the Greeks called it your daimon, and the Christians call it your guardian angel. James Hillman used even more words to describe one’s sense of calling, such as, fate, character, image, soul, and destiny, depending upon context. If you know someone who has this kind of passion for doing something, you will recognize that they might feel an obligation and deep connection to their work and are driven by a great need to make some contribution to society at large. These people become one with their work and are inspired by both internal and external drives.

My research interest was based on the fourth and newest branch of psychology, transpersonal psychology, which is concerned with the study of optimum psychological health and well-being and with the idea of reaching your highest potential. Transpersonal means beyond the ego or beyond the personal. It has to do with the exploration of the unconscious as a way to tap into the higher self, personally and in terms of the collective. This new psychology grew out of the mid-twentieth century humanistic psychology movement and the study of alternative states of consciousness. It was originally founded and introduced by Abraham Maslow in the 1960s at Esalen Institute in California. Transpersonal psychology encompasses all other types of psychology, such as psychoanalytic, Jungian, and behavioristic, as well as humanistic. It also incorporates the spiritual aspects of the human experience. When studying this newest branch of psychology, I incorporated transpersonal experiences, which are experiences that extend beyond the ordinary and usual ways of knowing and doing.

Transpersonal psychology also accentuates various ways of healing, and writing is considered a transpersonal practice in that it encourages self-expression and self-discovery; it helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses and how you can achieve your potential and lead a happier life. By documenting the story of your life, you have the chance to relive, examine, and reconstruct your lived experiences in a way that can be empowering. By working through your life, you are able to draw a certain amount of energy from what you have been through, reconcile yourself with your experiences, and then move forward.

Other practices that are highlighted in transpersonal psychology are geared toward helping an individual reach their highest potential. Many of these practices will be discussed in greater detail later in this book and include setting intentions, mindfulness training, meditation, yoga, psychotherapy, creative visualization, and hypnosis, as well as journaling.

During my research, I learned that I was not alone in my pursuit to write to heal from pivotal or life-changing events in my life such as my grandmother’s suicide and a cancer diagnosis. Such experience sometimes serves as a stepping stone for a writing project.

I wrote and published my first memoir, not only to help me accept and understand losing my grandmother but also to help others who might have faced similar losses. My intention in creating this present book, Writing for Bliss, is to share my passion for writing and how it has helped me heal over the course of six decades. I hope it will help you transcend what immediately meets your eyes by digging deeper into your psyche and hearing the voice of your true, authentic self, while listening to the messages of your heart rather than suppressing them. I want to share the different ways of reflecting and self-discovery I have learned as a way to bring a sense of wholeness and, ultimately, a sense of bliss. My hope is that readers will become inspired to write during their joyous and difficult times, while also experimenting with different genres and ways of writing and being.

Introduction Writing for Change

The pen is mightier than the sword.

—Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

When considering any kind of change or incorporating a new practice into your life, whether it is writing for bliss, writing for therapy, or writing for transformation, I like to mention what Zen master Shunryu Suziki referred to in his book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1976), as maintaining the sensibility of the beginner’s mind. The idea is that the beginner’s mind tends to be open to many possibilities, unlike the expert’s mind, which only sees few. Remaining open-minded and available for new ideas is important, in the same way that we might witness in young children, who are like sponges for learning. Having a beginner’s mind is also about suspending your disbelief and going with the flow of your experience, as discussed in more depth in step 1 of this book, Preparing to Write.

Hopefully, when you have made the decision to engage in personal writing you’ve given yourself permission to take yourself on a voyage of self-discovery. This entails reviewing your life with a child’s curiosity, awe, and simplicity. In so doing, there is a good chance that significant revelations will begin emerging from your subconscious mind. Writing with the magic mindset of a child can be a fun and poignant way to write and to unleash deep, dark, and surprising secrets. Throughout this book I offer writing prompts as a springboard for your writing. Their intention is to whet your writing appetite. It is not necessary to do all the prompts, unless you feel particularly compelled to do so. You might find some resonate more with you than others. Perhaps some relate to a particular life situation at a particular time.

When my three children were young, we sometimes took family vacations to places I had already visited earlier in life. I was often fascinated about how those places seemed so newly unique and different when I returned to them with the children. They viewed those experiences with new and curious eyes, as opposed to my older jaded ones. They made observations and noticed things that I either took for granted or simply never acknowledged. For the first ten years of each of my children’s lives, I kept individual journals for them in which I accumulated all their questions and answers, vowing to share each one’s journal with them on their wedding day. This was a gift I would have loved to receive from my own mother.

After my grandmother died, and as the only daughter of two hard-working immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, I was often left to my own devices, in the sense that I was often left home alone to entertain myself. My mother did not allow me to watch television, advising me that it was bubble gum for my mind; however, she was a big believer in books and journals, thus setting my platform as a writer. Because I was alone much of the time, I was forced to pose many questions to my journal, but many of my questions remained unanswered. Therefore, when I had children of my own, I encouraged them to ask questions out loud, both at school and at home. I often reminded them that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Admittedly, as a result I sometimes felt less than smart, because there were times when I was unable to answer their brilliant questions without the help of my support system at the time—the World Book Encyclopedia.

One of the best questions posed by my son, Josh, was, Daddy, why doesn’t the ceiling fall? My husband, a scientist, was able to provide a decent answer, as I sat in amazement of my son’s question and of how sometimes the simplest of inquiries require the most complex answers. When posing the more personal questions about our lives, sometimes it can take years to come up with the answers.

One of my favorite poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, has this to say of the beginner’s mind:

Be patient to all that is unsolved in your heart and try to cherish the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not be focused on the answers, which sometimes cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. The point is, to live everything. Love the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer (Rilke, 2000, p. 10).

Patience is important to remember when you are engaged in writing about your emotions and experiences. It is also a good idea to view your experiences with both narrow and wide-angled lenses. Viewing your life with a wide-angle lens allows you to see the big picture of your life in a universal context and see the patterns. Viewing with a narrow angle lens allows you to view the specific details of your own life and your own particular patterns. Doing so will bring a renewed perspective to your experiences—a new viewpoint, a sense of inquisitiveness and curiosity—which will give your writing more poignancy and depth.

The art of writing for change is about setting out on a journey. Imagine yourself packing to visit a new land—one you’ve never visited before or one you have not visited in a long time. Be alert and mindful of the details of your landscape. Document them in your journal or on your computer. Don’t worry about the direction of your musings; for the moment, simply accumulate them. You can decide later whether your writing will be for you alone, for prosperity, or for public sharing.

Writing Prompt i:1 – Observing with Fresh Eyes

Go for a walk with your journal and pen and stop at a convenient place to write about an observation that captures you. Write about it using a beginner’s mind, as if you are visiting our planet and viewing it for the first time.

Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi spoke about the phenomenon of the Open Secret. The idea is that we all hold a secret—not necessarily a large secret, but a secret nevertheless. Whether our secret is a subtle one or a larger one, we know that we are not being entirely transparent. For example, when meeting you for the first time someone may ask the pat question, How are you? You might answer, Fine, but you know in your heart of hearts that things are really not fine. Perhaps a parent just died or your dog is in the hospital; perhaps you just lost your job, your spouse is cheating on you, or your garden hasn’t been tended in weeks. Perhaps