We are flawed and magic

So.

I haven’t been doing that well, lately. I’ve been triggered with loss and sorrow and rage. September does this to me a lot, and at the beginning of this September, I was in New Hampshire and Vermont, the very places where I began the break from my stepfather and his extreme control and abuse, back in 1993.

Somehow, this year, while I was driving back and forth on i-89 from Lebanon, past Hanover, to Plainfield, while the sun rose through the thick early-fall fog sweltering over the crevices in the Green Mountains to make it up for the day’s Power of Words offerings, and then back down south (through the nearly indelible dark) to my friend’s apartment for good if abbrevited conversation and sleep, I managed to drive myself right back into the past – right back into that 21 year old convinced both of the world she’d been trained into and convinced that there was nothing left to her future but utter soul-destruction if she didn’t manage to get away from the man who’d decided to turn her family into his harem; when the man she loved had given her an ultimatum (him or me, her boyfriend said, because that was what it looked like), she chose her boyfriend and was (don’t ask me how – it’s still a kind of miracle to me) able to pick up the telephone and speak into her utter terror: you can’t do this to me anymore.

It began a process of extraction. I realized, during those few days earlier this month back in that countryside, back on those roads (filled still with the echoes of all my sobbing, traced still with the fear that he would send someone to destroy me, thick still with the impossible desire that had begun to bubble in me for a new way of living, for women, for change), that I’m still extracting myself from those old horrors.

1993 is 16 years ago. Sixteen years. Sixteen years. Why am I still in this struggle? Why isn’t it done yet?

This was the sort of question I was tormenting myself with over the last month
(alongside the old sorrow, of course, trying to reach back to that 21-year old and let myself finally forgive her, forgive me, for all that she had to do to get to where she could make the break that her mother couldn’t make, her father hadn’t made, no one had stepped in to make for her. I didn’t have to crawl through a river of shit literally, but I sure did have to drag the people I loved more than myself through it)…

What good does it do to ask why you’re not over it yet? What does that question even mean? It’s not actually get-overable, this history. It’s of me now. Right?

When I’m thick in the sludge of shame and possibly-irreparable damage, depression laced with terror, sorrow that my sister and I still struggle so hard to share space, to be in the same room and really look at each other, what difference does it make why I’m not ‘over it’ yet?

And all the while, I’m trying to be functional. Functional. Show up at my day job. Truly ‘show up’ (heart and all) at the workshops, be available to hold space for us as a group of survivors writing, be open (then) to not being perfect at it. I try to show up for my husband…

And otherwise, I slip out through the thread of things. I leave conversations. I don’t return friend phone calls or emails. I leave Facebook alone, as I don’t want to be reminded of all that I’m missing, all that I’m not accomplishing, all that I’m not I’m not I’m not…

My friend asked me, when I was finally able to reach out, as the deep trance started to break and I felt my heart start to reopen again to the now: “Who can talk to you when you’re in that place?”

What? What a fantastic question, I thought, and told her. Most of the time I’m asked, Who can you talk to when you need support – but she reframed it. And I saw that there were people in my life who could meet me in the mire of shame and self-hate, who could speak kindly and gently into the midst of those old voices. And I felt a little less alone.

I’m not fixed yet. It almost feels like a confession I need to make. Now that I’m feeling better, stronger around all those fragments I still hold of me, I remember that most of us aren’t – that for so many of us, there’s no such thing. There’s learning to maneuver anew, with these scars. There’s laughing anyway. There’s learning new arms for self-care, like with the bunches of rosemary carted to every workspace, just to clear the air.

These are the voices of the depression, the old training, when I’m in the thick of it: I question who I think I am, offering writing workshops for sexual trauma survivors – and then, I think it’s unprofessional to reveal how I’m really doing. I think I can’t possibly tell my friends – they’ll think I’m pathetic, they’ll talk about me to other people, they’ll ask if I found a therapist yet.

Please note: No friend has ever responded to my sorrow this way – it’s the learning of that decade without a close friend, a pre-teen girl taken into the lair of a sociopath and trained away from the sort of socialization we’re supposed to get as teenagers, about how to have intimate relationships with people who aren’t sex partners. I only learned to relate to people through sex. It was the only option I had for intimacy outside of abuse, and I took it.

Here from this place back where my peripheral vision is wider (here, where I can see out into the music and mystery of a hawk floating over Market street, above the Flood Building, signaling to me that we’re still here, we’re still full of possibility), I know that it’s ok not to be ‘fixed.’ I know that we’re all struggling in different ways to stay engaged with this thing called humanity -- I know it’s ok to be human. Imperfect.

I want to touch that 21-year old I was, hold her hand in the impossibility of her solitude, remind her it’s ok that she’s human: that she needed an ultimatum from a lover to open the door to that previously-unimaginable action, to pick up a phone, shivering, and say, No. Enough. That it's ok that she couldn’t just choose herself: she had to choose (for) a lover. Of course, at that time, she’d (I'd) been trained into such a devaluing of self that that was the only option—and she took it. We took it. I took it. And I survived.

We do what we have to do. We are flawed and magic. And we survived. And I am sorry and I am grateful.

" At nearly 40, you are finally learning about friendship"

(One of our prompts at the Art for Recovery writing group last week was this: “you wake one morning and you are expecting…” (from "The Crows," Evelyn Fitzpatrick)

You wake one morning and you are expecting to believe again, to fall into the foreshadowing that the dreams brought into you, or you into. You remember the doves, the way they carried you, and the pelican’s dipping heads, feeding under your feet, and how you walked over the water til you got to the other side of the lake, and to nearly dry land, where you sat back and cried because you were exhausted, desiring, and hadn’t noticed your ability to talk on water while you were doing it, you just needed to get somewhere, and now that you’re there, you know with out trying that the capacity has left your feet.

You poke one toe at the water and it sinks beneath the surface. Minnows startle away like dreams, like longings, like small children—you remember, after waking, the streaks of water down your cheeks and, too, how the surface of the lake undulated with a presence beneath your soles, like no surface you’d ever before encountered    but it felt so normal all the wile you were crossing the lake       what had you needed to get to? Why couldn’t you pay attention?

You think you remember – the way dreams come back unbidden, like childmemory – something having to do with a good friend and a loss, a declaration or a poem you had to deliver       but mostly you just wanted to get to her. She was mourning, and you knew about mourning, how so often it goes and rides through you, us, without words – and how you wanted o sit next to her, and she was, you knew, on the far side of the lake from where you’d begun, and the lake was long, unbearably so, and you’d known, in the dream, it would take too long to go around, something would break in her during the time you were being a good and dutiful; boy or girl citizen and walking barefoot the long way ‘round       and so you rolled up your cuffs just slightly because you didn’t want to be entirely unpresentable when you got to her and you strode out onto the surface of those tidal silty waters. You could have swum, you suppose, but it hadn’t exactly occurred to your dream self to do so       when you get to the other side (not of the lake, but of the dream, after you wake) the day is coolwarm and the dream air around you, back in there, was salty-kelpy, smelled like worms and cormorant feathers and exhaust fumes. When you wake up, you wondered why no one else seemed surprised that you were walking on the water – and that no one joined you. In the dream, you were alone on the other side, you sat down on a rock wall built by laborers fifty years ago to keep the lake’s banks from eroding, and you leaned back onto your hands and you wept with a kind of thick longing. You woke up, still catching the sobs in your sleep-riddled throat, and you brought your waked hands up to your face to feel if it was wet there. It wasn’t, but that didn’t quite convince you you hadn’t been crying –

You knew this dream was something to do with faith and the enormity of friendship, the clotting that friendlove will let you do, how a deep trust in someone who knows you, knows even the things you think you hide, the person with whom you have failed most indelibly and still they hold their arms open to you, the deep trust of settling into letting that love be a part of your life and wanting to return it, makes miracles flow from the tips of your fingers, solidifies even the most liquid thing, makes liquid, too, the rocks and boulders with which you’ve cluttered your heart. All you had meant to do in the dream was get to your friend where you knew she sat alone next to a live oak tree on a greening hillside near the lake and keened for what she had lost, sit your body next to hers and let her keep on howling – just not alone. You wanted to be the hand she could grab onto if she needed one, you wanted to be some ears she could pour story into if she was ready, you wanted only for your body to be there, next to her body, both your fractured human lives embedded into the earth and inextricably into one another’s hearts.

At nearly 40, you are finally learning about friendship, about a kind of love that has not sex at its core but something more substantial, less malleable, something you don’t have words for, something you can’t bribe into or out of place, something you can’t control – and that realization, that without your manipulating it or wheedling it or flirting it, someone loves you in all of your flawed entirety, even still, at your waking time here in your post-good-dream bed, brings you back up to tears, opens you to gratitude, bleeds you toward hope.

What would I tell them?

(This was the prompt...)

“What would you tell young friends who are afraid?” what I want to say is that the night sweats happen and then they are gone, the same nightmare appears for years and then its terrifying physics and grammar begin to transform around the dreaming you: suddenly you can pseak, you can move, you can run, you can say, now, No when before the word could only push from your lips into a screaming wait that woke you and your lover at midnight.

You see from those dreamtime changes that you are healing, your seams are coming together and it’s a slow, it’s an interminable process it will seem like it’s never ending and it ought to. Feel every minute of it, let the loss and terror burn through and be done with you. Someday it will be done with you, because you stayed with It, because you were not thrown by the fire and rage that you yourself contain.

This is a terrible thing that I’m recommending, I know.

Write it all down, all of it, even the stuff you know can’t be testified to in a court of law but that sits still on your tongue to be spoken: better to spit out the lies they fed you onto the page rather than swallow them. Now and again you can flip back through your record, see, read, how you have changed in two weeks, two months, 10 years. Build a bridge to your whole unsullied soul, still locked safe inside you, with those words. Write out all your complications and conflicts, the ways you are always in conflict, the jealousies and inconsistencies and fears. Don’t show it to anybody. These are the places we have.

Be more afraid of finding out what loss looks like from the inside out, be more afraid of losing the ability to write before you have recorded all that you are. This is you creating your own rabbit trail. Hansel and Gretel aren’t throwing down any bread crumbs or stones for us. We write our own Wonder Woman, Batman, Savior – we write ourselves ahead when we say right now what’s true. It’s the only lily-pad-hopping way forward I know. Settle into this skin of confusion with your pen in hand. Stitch away time out of your day just for writing. Let the words be the only think you hold.

And then feed yourself well. Visit the doctor or NP now and again. Call the good friends, the ones who leave you alone when you’re writing, the ones who don’t try to fix it when you cry, and see if they want to go to the beach with you. Put down the pen and pack up a lunch, get on the 5-Fulton without a book and watch through the bus’ grimy windows as the grey concrete of the city give way to the contagious riot of green in the park . Get out at the last stop and walk yourself into a thick salty sea breeze. Feed the tides your bare feet, take your friend’s dry warm hand, hold the seagull’s cries into your newfound ears.

Upcoming workshops with Jen & Writing Ourselves Whole -- August 2009!

Read on for more information about the upcoming Declaring Our Erotic and Write Whole workshops with Jen & Writing Ourselves Whole!
heart power!

Declaring Our Erotic-Reclaiming Our Sexuality
Eight Tuesday evenings, beginning 8/11/09
Open to queer women survivors of sexual trauma!

Have you been thinking about exploring some new edges in your writing? Are there longings you'd like to find language for?

Now's the time: Changing our language can change the way we understand ourselves and our desires! Once again, I'm opening this workshop explicitly to queer women survivors of sexual trauma who want to continue the process of reclaiming their sexuality.

In this erotic writing group, we write in response to exercises that engage or invoke various aspects of our erotic, sexual and sensual selves, in a safe and confidential group of peers. Get more comfortable writing about sexual desires, receive strong and focused feedback about your new writing, explore the varied and complex aspects of sexuality and identity, all while trying your hand at some explicit erotic writing!

In these 8 weeks, you'll create an exciting body of fresh and (often) surprising new writing, and my very well find that your experience of your erotic voice/erotic power has been transformed.


Write Whole: Survivors Write
Eight Monday evenings, beginning 8/10/09.
Open to all women survivors of sexual trauma!

Transform your relationship with your writing -- and with yourself. For survivors in particular, writing freely in supportive and attentive community opens us up to the possibility of being fully heard in all of our expression, creative and otherwise!

In this workshop, write in response to exercises chosen to elicit deep-heart writing, and deal with such subjects as: body image, family/community, sexuality, dreams, love, faith, and more. We create new art and new beauty out of the difficult and complicated realities of our lives.

You'll be encouraged to trust the flow of your writing voice, and receive immediate feedback about the power of your words!

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All workshops held in an accessible, downtown San Francisco office, near Powell Street and Market - close to Bart & Muni.

Spaces are limited and pre-registration is required.

Fee for each 8 week workshop is $250.

To register, email: jennifer@writingourselveswhole.org.

About your facilitator: Jen Cross is a widely published freelance writer. She's a queer incest survivor who used writing as a transformative and integral part of her own healing process. She's a certified AWA Facilitator and is currently leading workshops at UCSF for folks living with cancer.

More info: www.writingourselveswhole.org.

Note: These workshops are open to individuals who identify on the woman/female spectrum and who also self-define as survivors of sexual trauma. Categorizations of gender can be highly problematic and I believe that both "women" and "survivor" are self-defined! Please don't hesitate to contact me if you're wondering whether you should attend or not.

National Assoc of Memoir Writers FREE teleconference tomorrow!

Visit the NAMW conference site to sign up for tomorrow's telesummit and to get more information. It looks to be packed with amazing information and connections!

-Jen

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2009 Second NAMW Virtual Conference

We’re inviting you to sign-up for A FREE teleconference sponsored by the National Association of Memoir Writers to be held on April 23rd starting at 10 AM PDT. You will receive the conference call information after you register.

Schedule of calls are as follows (please note that the times are in PDT):

10:00 AM Kay Adams Writing Through Troubled Times
11:15 AM Dr. James Pennebaker Putting Emotional Experiences into Words
12:30 PM Lucia Cappachione Re-Membering Your Self: Creative Journaling for Memoirists
1:45 PM Christina Baldwin The Spiral of Experience—How Story Changes Over Time
3:00 PM Marina Nemat Writing and PTSD

Linda Joy Myers, Ph.D., President of The National Association of Memoir Writers (NAMW) is host and director of the 2009 Virtual Conference.

Guest Speakers for this year’s conference:

Kathleen “Kay” Adams, LPC, RPT
10 AM PDT | 11 AM MDT | 12 PM CDT | 1 PM EDT

Writing Through Troubled Times:

Journal Your Way from Chaos to Calm

Anxiety is the new pandemic. Our workplaces, families, campuses and communities teem with overload and uncertainty. We’re exhausted by the demands on our personal resources. Money shrinks, conflict swells, and stress shatters our confidence and clarity.

Dr. James Pennebaker
11:15 AM PDT | 12:15 PM MDT | 1:15 PM CDT | 2:15 PM EDT

Putting Emotional Experiences into Words
In this virtual conference Dr. Pennebaker, world-famous psychologist who conducts research on how writing heals, will teach us how expressive writing—writing true experiences with emotional content– creates positive change and promotes the healing of trauma.

Dr. Lucia Capacchione Ph.D., A.T.R.
12:30 PM PDT | 1:30 PM MDT | 2:30 PM CDT | 3:30 PM EDT

Re-Membering Your Self: Creative Journaling for Memoirists

In this teleconference Dr. Lucia Capacchione will discuss the relevance of art, collage, and non-dominant hand writing and drawing in the context of a journal for memoirists. Tapping into rich stores of memories using right-brain techniques, which she originated,

Christina Baldwin
1:45 PM PDT | 2:45 PM MDT | 3:45 PM CDT | 4:45 PM EDT

THE SPIRAL OF EXPERIENCE–How Story Changes Over Time

The power of story allows us to interpret experience in ways that potentially transform facts and events into meaningful insights. It is from the stories we make out of experience that we create the lives we lead and the people we are.

Marina Nemat,
3 PM PDT | 4 PM MDT | 5 PM CDT | 6 PM EDT

Writing and PTSD

Marina Nemat is the author of Prisoner of Tehran where she chronicles her harrowing experience as a prisoner in the famous Evin prison in Tehran. Marina was only 16 years old when she was arrested. She was tortured and came within minutes of being executed.



We are excited this year to present the top writers, researchers, and mentors in the field of therapeutic writing, all of whom were gave us a huge amount of inspiration and information at the 2008 Journal Conference in Denver. Kay Adams, one of our guests for this important telesummit, was the director of this important and first ever conference that brought together for the first time the important people in the memoir, journaling, and therapeutic writing world.

Some of you may want to know the definition of therapeutic writing. Dr. James Pennebaker, one of our guests and the premier researcher in the field of writing to heal, has done many dozens of studies with hundreds of people that demonstrate all the ways that writing helps to heal—the body, the mind, and the spirit. The work of Kay Adams work and Christina Baldwin for the past three decades has been in the area of writing from soul, listening to the inner spirit, and using writing as a way to more deeply know the self. When we are connected with our deepest inner self, we are able to be authentic, to tell our truths, and free ourselves from some of the constraints and pain of the past.

Writing is a way to listen to ourselves, to give voice to what we deeply know about ourselves, our society, our planet. All the presenters at this very special telesummit will help to give us guidance, inspire us, and evoke the desire to use writing as a regular technique in our lives to create wholeness and even happiness.

Please join us for this wonderful and inspiring telesummit. You can also join us by phone for FREE. Sign up here, and you will receive more details about the telesummit, including new presenters and details about the conference, as time draws near.

Note: If you have signed up for last year’s NAMW Telesummit, then you’re automatically added to the list and you need not sign-up for this teleconference.

Podcast Answers, Day 10 - What's giving you hope?

Back in November, I committed to posting longer, more well-thought-out answers to the questions that Britt Bravo posed to me during our Arts and Healing Network podcast conversation. Here’s my answer for day 10!

10. What gives you hope right now?

This has been a hard question for me to answer. I've been slipping between feeling very hopeful and deeply hopeless and heartsick - there are beautiful moments and possibilities and still horrors inflicted in every moment and how can we talk about hope except that without even the mention, the word, I think we lose everything.

Every week, the sort of writing *and* the sort of communal engagement and solidarity manifested at the writing workshops gives me hope that we can create the space we need for deep change and amazingly honest openness in our worlds/lives --

And then there are other places of hope for me:
1. Resistance to empire and other hierarchies of power.
2. Lemon squeezed into water.
3. Hot coffee in the morning.
4. The way some folks are willing to make eye contact with strangers while walking through downtown San Francisco on a weekday morning.
5. The cracking open and brilliance of emotion and voice that happens in the writing workshops; the deep open-hearted kindness of folks' responses to one another; the joy we receive in recognizing the artists in each other, and having recognized the artists in ourselves.
6. (The very possibility of) Laughing with my lover after some difficult weeks.
7. My sister. just her.
8. The way friends can reach out across years and miles and difference and still create a net for me to fall into, even when I think I don't deserve it.
9. The fact that our local farmer's markets are still going strong.
10. All the folks who are writing and reading. Everyone telling their stories everywhere. I mean it.

There's more, and less, but this is my count for now.

What's giving you hope right now? I mean, in this minute?

Podcast Answers - Day 8: Thoughts for others who want to do this work

Back in November, I committed to posting longer, more well-thought-out answers to the questions that Britt Bravo posed to me during our Arts and Healing Network podcast conversation. I took a bit of a break at the end of Dec, but I'm back on track. Here’s my answer for day 8!

8. What advice do you have for a writer who wants to use writing for their own healing, or to facilitate healing in others?


This is such a big question – I actually feel I need to break it down into two: Thoughts for folks who want to use writing around their own healing/transformation, and thoughts for those who wish to use writing to facilitate healing with others.


Part 1: Thoughts for folks who want to use writing around their own healing/transformation -

Want to write yourself whole? Pick up the pen and start now. Just let the words come. Don’t pick the pen up off the page, don’t censor, don’t make sense. Don’t stop to worry about whether your grammar works there or if you ought to use a comma or a semi-colon or if it’s time for a new paragraph. Give yourself these 5 minutes, maybe 15. Give yourself a lunch half-hour. Give yourself a morning hour, an evening hour. Shut off the phone and turn away from the computer. Follow the flow, the pull of your writing. Set down in ink or pencil whatever words come up, non sequiturs and nonsense and to-do-list reminders alike, stories and complaints, wishes and dreams and frustrations and remembrances. Let it all come and comingle on your page. Let it flow through the boundaries and the bridges that we build within and around ourselves, the containments and separations, the work stuff and play stuff, the now stuff and then stuff. This writing is just for you. It doesn’t have to be shared or read aloud or posted anywhere, unless *you* want to do so.



Start it now. Do it again tomorrow. Keep up this pattern as many consecutive days as possible, over several years. Continue for a lifetime.

I’m just repeating what I’ve been told, what’s worked for me, what I’ve read. This is the kind of urging that Natalie Goldberg makes in Writing Down the Bones, that Anne Lamott sets before us in Bird by Bird, that Pat Schneider lets us consider in Writing Alone and With Others. Trusting yourself enough to write freely and broadly and openly and deeply -- it creates change.



This kind of freewriting has introduced me to my thought patterns, allowed me to trace out language for experiences that I thought were unnamable, given me meditation and play time. And over time, I’ve learned again to trust whatever my writing wants me to put on the page, to generate material first and then edit later, and to only share my writing when I’m ready, and with folks whose opinions I trust and appreciate. Pat Schneider has an awful lot of good stuff to say about transformative writing when working alone in her book (Writing Alone and With Others).


Part 2: Thoughts for those who wish to use writing to facilitate healing with others -

The experience of this erotic writing group ended up being harder, and more amazing, work than I expected it to be. I don’t know exactly how I could have believed that facilitating a group like this would be easy, or straightforward, or wouldn’t bring up intensely hard emotions for women participating (definitely including me)–but I did, and it didn’t take long for me to understand the error in such beliefs. Yet the women were incredibly supportive of me in this endeavor. They offered me great feedback on my writing, allowed me to fuck up and keep going. They told me they needed what I was doing in this group and I wanted to, and did, tell them that I needed them, as well. We opened and we fed each other words and images, and in doing so, we fed ourselves. I was continually astonished at what happened when these women set pen to paper. We got somewhere together, yet each woman arrived via her own path, with the rest of us as witnesses who walked along with her. All I did, it seemed, was create a space, come up with exercises–it was the women participating who came in and made magic. Every week felt like an absolute miracle, this opportunity to sit in witness with these courageous women. (from my process journal, Fall 2002)

On the one hand, I think anyone ought to be able to do this work. I think to myself, Look, I haven’t had any special training and I did it. I don’t have an MSW or experience as a therapist. But here’s what I do have: personal experience of surviving sexual abuse; training and experience as a volunteer listener for youth and battered women and men; certification as an Amherst Artists and Writers writing workshop facilitator; training as a crisis/peer support group facilitator. All of these skills came in handy during the writing groups I’ve facilitated.

Can you do it without any of this training? It’s hard for me to say, because I have it and the folks I know doing the work have it. Desire is important, as is intuition—both of these are essential, even—but so is experience. It’s important to have the skills necessary such that a group of folks handling volatile material together can engage safely and ethically in the work they need to do. By safely, I mean without psychologically imploding in the group, and assisting others in their struggles not to implode. It’s my experience that the Amherst Writers and Artists workshop method provides a strong and ethical container for the work of transformative writing in community. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other methods – this is the one that has resonated most strongly for me, both as a participant-writer and as a facilitator-participant.



I have just recently, and finally, been reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and picked up The Vein of Gold to continue the work after I complete the initial 12-weeks of the Artist’s Way. Toward the back of The Vein of Gold, Cameron has a chapter dedicated to those who’d create and participate in creative Artist’s Way circles, and her focus on a non-hierarchical structure and the importance of shared risk (that if there’s a facilitator for the group, the facilitator must “do the work” along with everyone else) absolutely resonated with me as essential reminders for anyone who wishes to facilitate a non-clinical transformative/healing writing space.

Before I was a writing group facilitator, I had training as a peer and crisis counselor–from queer youth service organizations and a domestic violence agency. This means that I had experience with listening to and empathizing with people. I had experience with the fact that, often, the most helpful thing you can do for another person is to listen to them, attentively and devotedly.

This lesson was reinforced via Pat Schneider’s Amherst Writers and Artists workshop facilitator trainings: listen and hear, and model listening for others. It’s a hard lesson to really, deeply internalize.

Difficult things come up in a writing group, whether the group is focusing on erotic writing or sexual trauma or if there’s no particular focus at all. Despite the attention to all work as fiction, the experience of emotion is real: the terror, frustration, lust, anguish, pain, desire, desperation is real. As a facilitator, you’re not going to fix it. You’re not going to offer folks therapy and you’re not there to make it all better for them. That work will be work done by the writers themselves over time, with the help of those whom they choose, and when they choose.



In a transformative writing group, one thing (among others) folks seem to want, as survivors and particularly as writers, is a hearing. That’s what these groups can offer. The original AWA training, for example, helps you acquire a sense of how not to be blown away by heavy, hard, overwhelming emotions; how to ride through hard high intense roller coaster rides of emotion without getting thrown off or shutting down. Most times, you don’t need to do anything but listen, deeply hear and experience the words as they are offered to the group, and to give your personal individual feedback about the writing itself, while modeling for others how to do the same.

The ability to attend to your boundaries is also essential. And even so, even with this training myself, I want to bring each person who has participated in a group of mine into my life and care for them and make everything OK. It’s an empathetic challenge, and there’s nothing wrong with the draw, so long as I don’t act on it: I have to save my energy for the work I can do, the work of bringing together and facilitating these writing groups. It’s hard when all you can do is 1) offer a space, 2) keep the space safe, contained (as much as possible), and 3) listen well and respond personally, heartfelt and ethically–but it’s what I can do, and because it helps, it’s what I must do.




Learn how to take care of yourself. How do you get support and help after group? Do you write and get stuff down and out of you? Do you call a friend or another writing group facilitator? Do you call your mom or sister or uncle? Do you do nothing? Do something, ok? I’m still working on this one, myself, and it’s been six years since I started with this work! Go to the gym, go for a walk or a drive, sing hard, run, go dancing, do something. Let loose the energy that builds up during each group meeting.

If folks don’t have the chance to go through the original Amherst Writers and Artists training, then I absolutely encourage you to participate in an AWA-model writing group in your area, or other writing group. It’s helpful to be exposed to different facilitation styles, if only to learn what not to do, how you don’t want to facilitate (as well as to do the opposite!).

What do you think? What's worked for you, if you've done transformative or healing writing on your own? What's worked for you as someone participating in and/or facilitating a transformative/healing writing space?

Unexpected offline-ness

I apologize for the unannounced break in my posting schedule! So, I'd planned to keep on keepin' on with my bi-weekly posts all through the last couple weeks. It turns out, though, that I needed to take some time away from the computer. Most weekdays, I spend at least 8 hours on the computer, and something that I've offered myself during this end-of-Gregorian-year vacation has been some time not linked up: baking and painting, instead; movie-watching and stargazing instead; reading and beach-walking instead. It's been deeply, deeply good; necessary, even -- bringing up fully into my consciousness how much of a break I really need.

Besides thinking about a 2009 schedule, what's been heavily weighing on my mind are these horrors:
- Israel is massacring Palestinian civilians with the apparent approval of the US and the UN, using such similar justificatory language to Bush's -- the world is watching; can we stop this brutality?
- a woman was brutally gang-raped in Richmond a few weeks ago -- there have been four arrests made: a 31 year-old man, a 21 year-old man, a 16 year-old boy and a 15 year-old boy. A 21 year-old, a 16 year-old and a 15 year-old. I want to write more about what I see as so many terrible barbed-wire layers around this case, and yet, how can I seriously start to take apart for individual consideration the very recent threads of this survivor's experience? Just because some suspects have been caught by the criminal justice system doesn't mean that justice has been or will be served -- real communal change, I mean an actual ending of rape as a tool of social control and violence and terrorization, continues with our conversations, our vigils, our communities holding the perpetrators accountable, our ongoing work. We cannot trust the State to do it for us.

I *am* going to finish the Arts and Healing Network podcast question responses! These are the questions we still have to think about:

8. What advice do you have for a writer who wants to use writing for their own healing, or to facilitate healing in others?
9. What inspires you the most about your workshops?
10. What gives you hope right now?
11. What are you working on right now with your own writing, or writing workshops?
12. Is there anything else you didn’t get to talk about that you would like to share with listeners?

I'll be back on my regular posting schedule next week. Much love and peace to all of us, ALL of us, goddess knows we all need it, this new year.

Podcast Answers - Day 4: Has writing been healing for me?

Last Monday I committed to posting longer, more well-thought-out answers to the questions that Britt Bravo posed to me during our Arts and Healing Network podcast conversation a couple weeks ago. Welcome to day four!

4. Has [art/writing] been healing for you personally? If so, how?

Writing saved my life. Isn’t that true for so many of us? If I hadn’t had that outlet back when I was 20 and 21 and trying to figure out what had really happened to me, trying to come to a new sense of myself in relationship to words like ‘woman,’ ‘sexuality,’ ‘incest,’ ‘gay,’ and more, I wouldn’t have had any outlet at all, and I think I would have slipped fully into the word ‘crazy.’

I was someone who’d been trained out of the ability to be a friend, had been instructed to trust no one, did not open my deepest thoughts to even my significant others. The person who knew me best in the world, during my adolescence and very young adulthood was the man who’d been sexually abusing me, and even him I didn’t tell everything, despite his very thorough attempt to convince me that he could read my mind, so I might as well tell him what I was thinking since he knew anyway and thus could tell if I wasn’t – it was a measure of my trustworthyness, right?

(On a side note, I recently found this semi-satirical video about mind control "made easy" via bOING bOING and it felt weirdly familiar, even through my wincing laughter.)

The only safe place, I figured out, was the page. I came to realize that he couldn’t get in there (nor, really, could he get into my mind), and so everything came out, messy, jumbled, exploratory, raging, sorrowful, desiring, lusting…


Writing helps me to figure out what I know, what I think. I follow the philosophical lineage of Natalie Goldberg, freewriting daily, following any surprising or ridiculous though, getting it down onto the paper, moving on, not stopping to analyze or decipher, just writing, just writing, just writing. It’s exercise and meditation, it’s possibility and dreaming, it’s sometimes just working my way through the mire.

Writing also has brought me back into a sense of possibility around my sexuality. I initially started writing sex stories “for” my stepfather, but continued it for myself.



This is something I wrote in an (as yet unpublished) essay called “Blame it on Macho Sluts,” about how sex writing has been transformative for me:

When writing, however, I find it easier to get around the boundaries of my sexuality, because I am not directly confronting my own issues. Instead, I sit behind my character’s eyes and come in through the back door to the safety and power of my sexual self. I find solidarity with others, and their troubling desires, their struggles to break through the confines of particular identities. I am able find a home for their desire. In so doing, I may open a door for a reader who had no name for her desire, but felt it or thought it nonetheless. Hell, I might find a home for that desire within myself! When I first read “Jesse” in Macho Sluts I felt [Califia] had presented a mirror to me in the form of my damp and squirming thighs as I read (and reread). In the privacy of my little dorm room, a voice inside my head was saying, “Look at yourself. There’s something here you ought to pay attention to.” No one was around to laugh at me, to scorn or ridicule me, so I could consider this new aspect of my desire that had revealed itself to me. I had language to use, later, when discussing my reaction to the story (and others) with the aforementioned friend, as well. This is what smut writing can do: Help us, as readers and writers, to know ourselves better.

Often, writing smut in and of itself is sexual, is sex, for me. When I am writing well, porn writing brings me into the heart of my own [sex], brings me into my power and fear and lust and desire, and simultaneously into the core of ones I have loved enough to know intimately. This writing is a means through which I continue to heal myself: when my body feels broken and unredeemable, when I am afraid that I will never again be wildly and joyfully sexual, I remind myself that I am wildly and joyfully sexual when I write. I take steps to bring the scenes I imagine (some of them, at least) into the reality of my bedroom.

Yes, writing has been healing for me, and continues to be healing for me! Writing in community, as a last point, is consistently transformative, particularly when I’m writing in an AWA method workshop space: not only am I free to write openly, to follow my writing wherever it seems to want to go, but after I write, I know I’m going to get to read the brand new, heart-just-set-to-beating, piece of writing aloud, and I’m going to have folks tell me what stays with them of what they heard.

This is a powerful experience, every week, of a deep hearing: I tell my story (whatever bit of story got written, fiction or non-fiction, regardless!), I am witnessed (uninterrupted) in that telling, and then folks say what they heard and liked – often I am surprised by what someone liked, “Really? That? Huh…” And then I get to participate in the same sort of hearing for other writers/artists. In my own life, I find that there are so few opportunities to really completely focus on someone else, with no interruptions or distractions, or to be so attended to. For those of us who are survivors—or, truly, for anyone who has felt unheard in their lives, this experience can be terrifying at first, at second, at third (or, you know, at least it was for me!), and, simultaneously, a powerful gift: Oh. I am worth listening to. There’s good stuff in what I have to say, think, create.

This experience can change everything. And has. So, yes, writing (and writing community) is healing for me, still and always.

What about for you?

This Sat: Self-healing meditation retreat

Rev. Trinity Ordona is leading a self-healing meditation retreat this weekend, which sounds amazing!
-Jen
----------

Have you tried meditation, but you cannot sit still without . . . memories or problems taking over your mind? Having trouble “letting go” of the past?

Pain, Disappointment, Anger, Anxiety
HEALING THE HURT WILL
OPEN YOUR HEART

A Day-Long Training
In Buddhism and
Self-Healing
Energy Meditation

with
Rev. Trinity A. Ordona, Ph.D.


SATURDAY, SEPT. 8, 10 AM – 3 PM
Convenient SF Location


9 – 10 AM: Class - Basic Instructions in Grounding, Centering
and Releasing Blocked Emotions from Past Problems

“Once I learned to ground, center and connect my self to universal healing energies, I could easily meditate
and effectively release blocked emotions from my past experiences of abuse.”

10 AM – 3 PM: Silent Retreat: Dharma Talk and Basic Instruction and Practice in Sitting, Lying, Walking and Eating Meditation

Rev. Trinity A. Ordona, Ph.D., an incest, rape and cult survivor, works primarily with survivors of violence and trauma. She has been practicing Buddhism in the Vipassana tradition at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and is a current member of the Path of Engagement,
a multi-year program designed to help participants connect the process of individual transformation with service to others.


For further information:tordonahealing@yahoo.com, (415) 626-6441


Cost: This class is free. However, I ask that you consider making a donation to allow me to continue to offer classes like this to anyone who seeks them. This is known as the practice of dana (generosity), which is how wisdom teachings have been provided in Asia for centuries. It allows exposure to valuable lessons independent of class and economic status.

Registration: Call or send an email to Dr. Ordona at tordonahealing@yahoo.com, noting that you are registering for “Self-Healing Energy Meditation Daylong” and providing your name, phone number and postal address. On the day of the retreat, please arrive 15 min. early to complete registration paperwork and settle in before the Instruction or Retreat begins.

Miscellaneous: Out of respect for people with environmental illnesses, please do not wear fragrance or scented products.