Creating your own Transformational Writing Practice Coming soon! Writing Life is an instructional how-to write memoir tool to for the writer ready to tell the story of their lives. It is instructional, insightful, funny and innovative, offering exercises and antidotes that have been tested in Jennifer Lauck's Writing Life Workshops. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do. Nobody can counsel you and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. ~ Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Introduction: Are You Sure? May 2007, New Haven, CT: It was a surprisingly hot day, 90 degrees by noon. My seventh Writing Life workshop was being staged in a conference room of an old firehouse that was now home to The Post Traumatic Stress Center. There was something quite appropriate about a firehouse being used to purge the psychological fires hidden deep in the psyches of human beings who longed for the cool winds of inner peace. During the weekdays, this place was snapping with one on one therapy, group sessions, drama therapy and healing rituals. This weekend, it was just eight of us sitting in a circle. There were seven women and one man. My partner in teaching, Carrie Link and I, had two and a half days (18 hours total) to teach these six people everything we knew about memoir via actual writing, talking, dancing, singing, meditating and some interactive bodywork. Carrie describes what we do as a kind of channeling, shaman, deep sea diving expedition that goes into the interior of a persons soul and brings forward what most needs to be written about. We both agree, our workshops are intense and best suited for people who are eager and willing to work hard. I was in the middle of the room with a writer named Suzy Pafka. This was her fourth workshop in less than a year. Additionally, she had written a first draft of a memoir on her online blog called Identity Crisis. She was well on her way to crafting a remarkable and helpful story about her life, where among other things, she had endured and survived unspeakable sexual assault at the hands of her brother. (He became a fireman, by the way and got away with all of his crimes). Suzy and I were doing an exercise about intentions and writing. I was asking her if she really wanted to write a memoir. "Yes," she said. "Are you sure?" I asked again. "Do you think I shouldn't?" she said. Suzy was in a chair and I was at her feet, on my knees. She gripped the armrests tight. Her silver John Lennon glasses were down to the edge of her nose. Her serious and yet, trusting eyes, peered over the top of the frames. "This is not about my opinion," I said, keeping my voice even. "You must make the decision for yourself Suzy, because this is the hardest path you can possibly walk and if you fall down, you must be the one who made the decision to walk the path, and who picks yourself up, not me. I can help but I cannot do this work for you and you cannot do this work for me!" Her eyes searched my face and her lips quivered. I knew she was close to tears. "Okay," she said, but the conviction was gone. "I want to write a memoir." "Are you sure?" I asked again. Suzy was completely frozen, eyes searching my face in confusion. The walls of the room were dense, made of bricks and mortar. The ceiling was high with huge moon shaped globes for electric light. Floor to ceiling windows allowed sun light to fall over us. Those in the room, silent witnesses, were spell bound. They were waiting for her answer too. * * * I once sat in Suzy's spot, in front of own teacher who was an enlightened master from Tibet. Our only witness was a translator and he had asked a question, which on the surface seemed remarkably simple to answer. But after I answered this question, he asked: "are you sure?" I cannot write the specifics of his question, one on one meetings are considered sacred. To discuss specifics is to lose the blessings and the grace of the teaching. "Are you sure?" he said, in his broken English. His eyes bore into me and his intensity was devastating. His question filled me with doubt and panic. I thought I had been sure of the response but then again, if he was asking, maybe I was not so sure. I responded again, with less conviction and again, he asked, "are you sure?" I wanted to whack him over the head or fly out the room. In fact, I left that day without a firm answer. He waved me off (with what I thought was disgust, I was certainly disgusted with myself) and had me go think it over for a day and a night. His translator found me later and I was feeling pretty low. She explained that Rinpoche (the term given to enlightened teachers which translates to mean: Diamond) did not care what I think he thinks or even what I have learned in a book. He wants to know what I think, that is where the wisdom exists. This is how deeply he loved me and all his students, she explained. He did not teach in order that I worship him but rather taught his students to know and honor themselves deeply. He wanted to free the wisdom that exists in all of us. * * * Suzy was likely feeling all the same things I felt when I sat in front of Rinpoche. I could tell she hated me, felt humiliated and was also afraid. Around us, the other students were equal parts confused and worried. They worried for themselves (what would I do to them, if this is what I was doing to Suzy) and were confused about the fairness of my technique. I could see it on their faces: She answered the question already, leave the poor thing alone. And they told me this later, after our day of teaching was done. But I couldn't leave Suzy alone and she was not a "poor thing" to me. Suzy was a great warrior who had lost her way into the side corridor marked "victim." She had great things to do with her life and her energy. Part of the greatness of her path was that she had to leave off the identity of uncertainty and embrace the fullness of transformation. And, she had to have the strength of her own convictions. It is what my own teacher taught me. I returned the following day and gave my answer to Rinpoche with confidence. "Are you sure," he asked again. "YES!" I said, wise to his game. "I am sure!" "Okay then!" he said, laughing, and he gave me my next instruction. * * * "Are you sure, Suzy?" I asked, ever persistent. "Yes!" she hit her fist on the armrest of her chair and her voice was confident. "I am sure, damn it." "Okay then!" I said, and I gave Suzy her next instruction. * * * My experiences with my own teacher and with Suzy did not weave together in my mind for many months. I was perplexed by the way I questioned Suzy that day. I was also filled with doubt about my method, because, unlike the sacred masters from Tibet, we in the West are newly born teachers. We don't have thousands of years of history and proven methods. We are flying by the seats of our pants, even when we have doctorates and professional credentials. Some of the most qualified healers, academically, are the least effective! But when I considered the moment carefully, I was brought back to the memory of that day with Rinpoche and realized that I finally understood how love, and the teaching via love, comes in many forms. Sometimes it arrives in ways we initially don't consider loving. My love for Suzy, as one my most accomplished students, was my motivation. While my method was not the touchy feely style we all hope for, it was what she needed. It made Suzy think deeply about her choices and make firm decisions her soul could stand behind. I also needed to shift the projection within her saying I knew more than she did, for in fact, I knew nothing that didn't exist already within Suzy. I was a mirror, that's all. And, that is all any teacher is. None of us are without the basic ingredients for true illumination. Memoir, like the spiritual path to awakening, is not for the meek. It is a not place where one will be coddled. Nor is it a place one should enter, without proper warning. Imagine entering marriage and/or parenthood with no warnings, no advice and no examples. Both marriage and parenthood are life-changing experiences. And, that is the case when you take on memoir as a path. Memoir is not a place where one will achieve fame, glory, recognition or financial freedom. Yes, those accomplishments might happen but they are fleeting and reliant on unstable, external circumstances that shift more often than the tides. When the book is written, the changes within you far outweigh any external outcomes. * * * Memoir. Memoir. Oh, illuminating, insightful, infuriating, intoxicating, impossible memoir. You are my delight and the bane of my existence! There has not been a better love affair, of this I am sure. When will we part from one another? This answer, I do not have but until that sorrowful day, bring your sweet page over and let me lay the weight of my words over you. I have been writing my life on the page for thirteen years now and it has been, in every way, a spiritual path to the Beloved. The Sufi poet, Rumi, is best known for his ecstatic dance with the Beloved. His writings make him the most popular poet in the world. He wrote: The Beloved is all, the lover just a veil. The Beloved is living, the lover a dead thing. And after all my years at the page, where I have contemplated the experiences of my life, I have found what he writes to be true. The Beloved is alive, it is a pulse of love so profound that words can barely touch its divinity and yet, here we are at the page, trying to translate. Sometimes this writing has been such a hard climb up a relentless mountain path. It seemed my feet could barely take hold of the unstable ground. Other times, story telling has been as effortless as riding the wind on strong, feathered wings. I've written Blackbird, Still Waters, Show Me the Way and Home, and there are the articles, the inclusions in anthologies and the blog posts. Words, by the millions, have raced from my fingers and spilled over the page. I've deleted, revised, stalled, stormed away, turned off my computer with the defiance of someone who is finished, only to come back within hours to start again on a blank page. At the page, I've argued with myself and raged against God and man. I've cried a river of tears and tried to understand things that cannot be understood. I have wandered, lost, in a fog where I thought the enemy was out there only to discover that my foe was right here—write here—at the keyboard. Finally, I have come to a place of surrender, knowing that what needs to be said will flow from my fingers in the same way the right amount of sun will fall from the sky and feed the flower. I've come to trust myself, and to trust the words I write. I've discovered what I write comes from that steady pulse of love that is the universe. Somehow, almost impossible to describe, I've written myself back to the one place I've always been searching for—home. My intention for writing this book is to help ease the way along the arduous, frightening, complex, intense, transformative, joyful, unparalleled and illuminating path of memoir. I write it to provide you with comfort, advice and insights. I write it to offer helpful and accessible tools you can reach for any time along your own way. And, last, while this book is for both women and men, I direct a good deal of the writing towards the arising consciousness the feminine and thus, women. The healing of the feminine (within men and women) is essential and writing is one of the primary tools for self-awakening and healing. I write this book to urge and inspire as many people as possible to write their stories with courage, awareness, patience, generosity and tenderness for themselves and those they write about! ~ From Sisters, OR Summer of 2007