Poetry Writing Exercises
Thank You
I want to send you a little exercise that I learned. . . for clearing the aura, cleaning the Qi or just plain old getting the garbage out of your system. It goes:
I want to tell you about a bit of serendipity.
One morning at a Christmas party one of my friends who tends toward depression, got off on her worry about how people are all in a rage these days. Once she gets started, she can't seem to stop. So I told her of an exercise I learned in Dr. Maurer’s workshop. He said that when you get stuck in traffic and are feeling frustrated it helps if you do this simple exercise: You make eye contact with yourself in the rear view mirror and say to the mirror, "I want..." (fill in the blank with whatever, world peace a new pair of socks, someone else to be chauffeuring me around.) Then you say for the image, "Thank you." You repeat the "I want and thank you" process twenty times. This exercise works equally well when you wake up cross and snarl at your image in the bathroom mirror, "Who are you looking at, you disgusting slimebag?" You apologize to yourself and go into Dr. Maurer’s "I want and thank you" routine. Something in this technique serves to help you redesign your deeper set of emotional programs and get things working toward a better direction. This exercise can be done with a partner, if you happen to have one who is willing to play. In that case, one person says the I wants and the other says, simply, "Thank you." (as in "for telling me that.") After the first person has finished saying the I wants for twenty times, you switch sides. (Bill and I can only think of ten things at a whack that we might want.) Just stating what it is you would want without any expectations that someone will do it for you works wonderfully for just simply releasing your tensions...it is a physical release, knowing you have permission to think about what it is you want. I think this is because we spend too much time dwelling on things that are not as wonderful as we would like in the world at large and feeling our helplessness to fix them. We spend too much time on things we have no control over, and pay too little attention to the here and now. We don't actually live in the world out there. Just this part where we are, that's where we live. This part we can appreciate and improve.
When I got my depressed friend to go through the exercise...she only could do five I wants...the atmosphere in the room lightened...and she let us all move on to brighter things.
Another friend then told us about her insomnia routine. When she finds herself awake at night she makes it a practice to say thank you for all the things that she finds joy in...friends, California Poppies, whatever.
Well, when I got home from the party there was a letter from a long time friend who lives far away - you know one of those old and dear friends that you think about a lot, but only write letters to at Christmas time - the kind that you don’t see for a decade and then start in the middle of the sentence you left off on when you last saw them - well, she writes in teeny tiny scrip...so she managed to get this wonderful message in her card. She said, "As you know from Fran (My friend Fran in LA.) I had back surgery. I am up and back to my library volunteer activities. Better than ever. I think of you often. Little pictures of us together come to keep me company. Feeding the ducks with your kids in Hillcrest Park. That beach at Point Pelee. The haunted antique shop…." And on and on. It was like thank you for those golden moments we shared, that one, that one and that one...
They all worked together to make a wonderful feeling for me.
So I think I will thank you for reading this.
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