First I will explain how I decided to offer these exercises, next I will tell you how the exercises are to be done and then I will give you examples of how I used them to help work my way out of stressful circumstances.
On the 11th 12th and 13th of September, when I wasn't walking in circles, or watching the plane fly into the tower yet again, I cleaned house. For a day or so I kept cleaning the house. This is a habit that goes a long way back with me. Way back to when we were first married and Bill and I had moved half a continent away from home to live, I was suffering a bout of deep home sickness or else the sky was falling in on me. I called home seeking solace.
Mama's instructions were clear and to the point.
She said: "Start by the phone and start cleaning up the house."
My mother was a woman who had more than her share of survival challenges so she knew that you do the thing at hand, start where you are, clear the trash and bring order to your house, your life...your thoughts.
Ever since then, when I lose all sense of direction, I clean house. Things have been going pretty well for me lately, so, there was plenty of house cleaning to occupy me for several days...in between commiserating with friends.
About the fourth time I had a conversation with some one who said, "I just find myself not knowing what to think. Not knowing what to feel. Not knowing what to do," I remembered that there was something I did know how to do. There was something I could do to try to help.
The thing that I do when I have to rebuild my sense of reality is what I think of as survival journal writing. Over the years I have put together a group of journal writing exercises that serve as a set of tools I use to help me sort through the rubble in my mind when all my illusions of safety and purpose are blindsided by unexpected events. I am putting these exercises out for anyone to use who might find them helpful. They have always helped me.
Before I give you the first exercise I need to make an observation about journal writing, in general. The purpose of these exercises is to find a new and honest perspective. It takes time to create a whole new reality. There are six sets of exercises in this course. They work best if you work with each of these sets of exercises for about fifteen minutes each day-yes the very same exercise every day for a week.
If you find your writing covering the same old ground and find yourself feeling worse and worse, stop writing immediately. Stand up, walk around your chair, take a few deep breaths sit down and choose a new writing exercise and start writing from a different vantage point. In order to help you in case you need to do this, I am going to give you a set of back up exercises. That is, I will give you two sets of writing exercises to work with each week. I believe you may get more out of these exercises if you stick with the first exercise for the week each day. But, feel free to switch to another writing channel if that feels like what you need to do.
My first exercise is simply writing a letter to a trusted friend who knows how to listen carefully to what you say. The trick is to give yourself plenty of room to explore all your thoughts and not worry about your spelling or punctuation. The way to do this is to know from the start that you are going to keep this letter in your journal, or yellow tablet, or what ever you write in. You are not going to mail it. Even you may never read what you have written. The important thing is to write it out clearly.
No one else is ever going to see this writing but you-unless of course you are living with someone like my husband, Bill. Bill is a compulsive reader. I have seen him pick up notes that are dropped on our front sidewalk by the kids that go to the Junior High School, at the end of our street. When I first started journaling I was very careful to hide my journal...then I got sloppy and wound up leaving it out. And, yes, he did read it. Since nothing goes in my survival journal that I don't want to be part of my new reality, the only consequence was that he understood my reality much better than he ever did before.
Just in case you don't have a friend that you can talk to about just everything and feel confident that that friend will understand exactly what you are saying, I should tell you that the purpose of this exercise is to teach yourself to be your own listening friend.
I was thirty-six and was raising four daughters before I had the amazing experience of having someone carefully listen when I talked to them. I think that it is a sad thing that more than one person has said to me, "You are the only person I know that I can be half way honest with about the problems I am having with raising my children." I know that feeling all too well. Until I enrolled in the Columbia, Maryland branch of Antioch University it had never occurred to me that people could expect anyone to listen to them carefully enough to allow them to talk about, think about their real hopes and fears.
After spending several years as a part of a close knit supportive community in Maryland, I found myself very much adrift when my husband's company transferred him to San Jose, CA where I knew no one.
It is not easy moving a houseful of teenaged daughters across the country. My advisor at Antioch had a special talent for showing his excitement about the projects I undertook and his disappointment and anger at the obstacles that I encountered in my work. My fellow students were a close band. I had come to rely on their opinions and on my advisor's council. In my isolation in California, I found myself reliant on an exchange of letters as a lifeline.
Since that was a time before e mail and since circumstances change so rapidly when life is in turmoil, I found myself more and more using the letters to my advisor as a way to frame my thoughts and not mailing them, because I knew that by the time the letter got to him and back, circumstances would be altogether different.
I began to use this letter writing technique as a way to clarify the problems and work out ways to deal with them. At first I believed that I was taking both my side of the conversation and his side. I have come to realize that what I was doing was forging a friendship with my own heart.
I have come to believe that our emotional response to events is based on intuitive knowledge. Our hearts scan the situation and make some assumptions. These assumptions can be very wrong and to act on them can be dangerous. This is why we teach our children to go through a linear process of thinking.
We teach our children that they need to move beyond impulsive responses. We teach them that logic is the only reliable way to deal with problems. This causes that...and if they want that to happen fine. If not...they should try another course that experience tells them has, in past, led to a more agreeable conclusion.
Most of the time this is a good system. The head will have put its accumulated information together just fine and it will come up with a very reliable guide for action.
Sometimes, however, the decision doesn't "feel right." The heart keeps insistently signaling that its intuitive analysis shows that some serious mistake is about to be made. The heart is not necessarily correct. Unfortunately, we have been trained to ignore our heart's messages, our intellect has all the words. It makes all the choices. Our heart only has a sense of how things are. When these two perspectives are in conflict, the individual feels frustrated, angry, powerless.
Just as people who cannot be heard get real angry, so it is with hearts that cannot be heard. There is, I think, only one way to heal this rift. We need to teach the heart some words with which to frame its objections, and, we need to teach the mind how to listen
To make good judgments we have to have respect for both the intuitive and the logical sources of information. I believe that these exercise, followed faithfully will eventually provide the tools for developing a dialogue between the mind and the heart.
Being able to have a sound and respectful discussion between your head and your heart is the first step in being able to constantly upgrade your life decisions by factoring in all the new information you encounter...after you have carefully evaluated it, the new information, with reference to your life experience.
The real bonus to developing a respectful dialogue between the heart and the head is that the respectful listening to your own conflicting opinions not only gives you a way to make responsible decisions in your own best interest but it also gives you a model for learning to listen carefully to other people.
