Creative Writing in Service to Wholeness
“In their origins, the words ‘poetry’ and ‘healing’ have a lot in common; ‘poetry’ comes from the Greek and means to compose, to pull things together, to shape, to create, to make; less well known is the etymology of ‘healing’ which derives from the ancient Germanic khailaz, through Ango-Saxon hoelan, which also means to make whole. With today’s reappraisals of the influence of psychic states on physical illness, we are again getting used to the notion of healing as the making whole of the body and mind together, rather than a state of war on some invading disease or rebellious organ or limb.” - Collaborative Writing and Mental Health, Graham Hartill.
Prayer has a lot of connotations and is traditionally practiced in the context of religion. But, prayer can be reframed for non-religious people as a deeply human practice of listening to one’s own story. It can be a valuable instrument to clarify intention and connect with heart of one’s true desire. The practice of taking the formless and crafting it into a form not only would serve as an exercise of evocation, but also marries the imagination and exploration of the self to create a touchstone that can be returned to over and over. This is a process of attending and nurturing one’s deeper wish.
We hear a lot of stories in our line of work. We hear the meaning our patients make from their experiences and we get to observe how the body participates in that story. Humans love stories and storytelling and a retelling of a story in a different way can be a powerful intervention as we are both the witness and Creator. Creating a story is an imaginative act, and the canvas on which that story is written is never blank. We write our stories within the lines of limitations, both imagined and real. In fact there’s something very powerful about listening to ourselves, about witnessing the contact we have made and failed to make in communicating our experience.
I feel inspired to use creative writing to end a session which would hopefully result in the cooperative formation of a prayer or poetry. Through writing it, we could re-articulate something of a patient’s story that they wish to connect with deeper, a reminder of who someone knows themselves to be, a hopeful image, or message of love to return to in troubling moments. It could be a totem to inspire positive thinking or a template for naming desire.
Padraig O’ Tuama is theologian, poet, and conflict mediator who uses poetry in the form of prayer to allow greater expression of the self and troubles one faces living in violent world.
He write this:
“Prayer, like poetry, like breath, like our own names, has a fundamental rhythm in our bodies. It changes, it adapts, it varies from the canon. It sings, it swears, it is syncopated by the rhythm underneath the rhythm, the love underneath the love, the rhyme underneath the rhyme, the name underneath the name, the welcome underneath the welcome, the prayer beneath the prayer. So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray.”
More inspiration from Padraig:
“These are the kind of things we need for the tired spaces of our world. This is the way we need to move forward in a world that is so interested in being comforted by the damp blanket of bad stories. We need stories of belonging that move us towards each other, not from each other; ways of being human that open up the possibilities of being alive together; ways of navigating our differences that deepen our curiosity, that deepen our friendship, that deepen our capacity to disagree, that deepen the argument of being alive. This is what we need. This is what will save us. This is the work of peace. This is the work of imagination.”
Sources:
Study: Creativity and mental health: A profile of writers and musicians
Study: Finding the Words to Say It: The Healing Power of Poetry
Robert Carroll
Other Fun Resources
(1) How a create writing practice can lead to improved mental heath
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