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Category Archives: emotional safety

Mute

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by nancystoryflow in art, continuing, creating, creativity, emotional safety, frustration, heart, Process, safety, self, slowing down, stability, stress, Uncategorized, Working

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art, Attention, despair, muteness, Process, stability, stress, work

How do I carry on when I feel mute?

How do I create art and to whom do I offer it?

Does art even matter anymore?

The answers are:

How do I carry on when I feel mute? I don’t know. I just do.

How do I create art and to whom do I offer it? I don’t know. I just do.

Does art even matter anymore? Yes.

The truth is, even though it seems the world is escalating and spinning out of control, even though I feel closer to the brink of street fighting and/or ecological destruction than I ever have before in my lifetime, even though I know more about my own and other’s suffering than I knew before, these have always been the answers to these particular questions.

Yes, art matters.

You don’t know how you make art or whom to offer it to, but you just do it anyway.

You don’t know how you’ll carry on, but you just do.

Stay as grounded as possible. Notice nature. Make art. Find the things and people that will help you not despair, because despair is not an option. The world needs you and your voice, and this has always been true. And will always be true. And on this you can count. This is truth. Art is a steady and stable place to stand. Artists are often known for being flaky and unstable. The truth is, we are very stable. Because we have to be.

 

 

Holding Onto a Young Heart

26 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by nancystoryflow in confidence, emotional safety, heart, safety, self, youth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

carrying on, confidence, safety, self, youth

I am at an age where I look back on my younger self with great tenderness. I wonder what happened so early in my childhood that my confidence-slate was completely wiped cleaned. There are of course institutions and people to blame: parents, adults, church, school, advertising, TV, other children, teachers, etc. etc. etc. We’ve all suffered something.

What happened to my confidence was no one person’s fault. It was a system, a tsunami of cultural messaging that I couldn’t untangle from, that wrapped its tendrils around my feet with every step I took, that pulled me backwards, or down, or away from expressing my own heart. I knew my heart, but I could not speak it without experiencing ridicule, or arguments, or someone denying its truth. As a result, I became an extremely silent child, a child afraid of being wrong, a child afraid she was wrong. A child who felt stupid, and bored, and who retreated into herself more and more as time went on.

I loved the woods. In the woods no one asked me to point out Taiwan on a world map, and no one asked me to recite multiplication tables, and no one asked me to give my life to Jesus. In the woods I could trust something. I could trust the woods. I could trust myself.

I used to fantasize about living in a cave – a furnished cave with a bed, and rugs, and a cat, and books. But what would I eat? I wondered. Cereal would be good, I thought. I could sneak back home and steal boxes of cereal. But I’d need milk. How would I keep the milk from spoiling? In the end, it was the lack of refrigeration, not the lack of a good cave, that kept me stayed put.

I stayed with my family and I stayed in school and I became a teenager with the usual teenage concerns. One day a boy said to me, “You don’t talk much, do you?”

“I guess not,” I answered, taking in what I perceived as criticism.

“It kind of pisses me off,” the boy said.

So it was criticism.

I talk now. I’m 64 years old and I’m a novelist and I can carry on a conversation with a stranger and I have a public life. Some days I wake up a little panicked over this. I always wanted to be a writer. When I was a child I knew that books were written by writers, but I noticed that I didn’t know anything about the writers themselves. If I ever saw a picture of a writer it was on the book jacket. Becoming a writer seemed perfect for me. I could present a book, but not be seen. Well, things changed, and here I am, a writer with a public life. It’s not bad though. It’s helped me gain some confidence, but I sure didn’t start out with it.

So these days, I look back on that child, the child I was, the child with her confidence-slate wiped clean and I look at who I am now, and I see that tender skinny child with the long, gangly legs and the soft hair on my young arms, the arms that I never raised in school when a teacher asked a question, and with which I hugged myself down in the woods. I see that young girl trying to please everyone by not existing, and not speaking her heart, and I feel sympathy for her and I also feel a smidge of pride, because I know that while she did not speak her heart, she did hold onto it.

 

Information Overload

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by nancystoryflow in art, Attention, creating, emotional safety, natural world, Observation, Process, Reading, ritual, safety, slowing down, Writing Advice

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muse, natural world, Process, Reading, ritual, safety, self, stillness, stress

Every day each human being on earth processes or filters immeasurable amounts of information. Some of this information comes from the media: our televisions, newspapers, radios, internet, podcasts, etc. etc. etc. Some comes from books. And some comes from the natural world. What do you pay attention to? What do you ignore? And what do you count as information?

I count all media as a form of information. I think there is a difference between information and knowledge, and I think there is also a difference between knowledge and wisdom.

I include under the category of media all TV shows and advertising. In fact these might be the most insidious forms of information because we absorb them and as we absorb they inform us of how life is supposed to be lived. As a child I didn’t question these things. Life was white and middle-class. Mothers enjoyed housework. Fathers enjoyed coming home to find dinner on the table. Children went to their parents for advice. There was no problem that could not be solved in thirty minutes. We all worshiped the same god. I absorbed all this from TV and advertising, because it was all that I saw. The world of television seemed more real than my own world, but I found something different in the woods behind our house.

This was where I went to escape and to be alone and to read and build forts. As a child I didn’t understand how fortunate I was to have a safe natural area right in my backyard. I didn’t know that many people did not have such a refuge.

In the woods I absorbed different sorts of information. I absorbed smells and observed crayfish and bugs and frogs. I invented games and people and made up stories which I acted out. I met my writer self down in the woods. I met my intuition. I learned to listen to a quieter sort of information than what the media delivered. Or what I heard in school. In the woods things made more sense than in the world of television or people. I’m grateful that I had access to that safe space, grateful for the filter the natural world gave me to sort through the offerings of the human world. The human world was chaotic to me.

That information gained in the woods is still there. That intuition. That ability to find patterns. I’ve lived my life ignoring a great deal of the information that comes from the sources that scream at me the loudest. I believe it is the path of a writer to listen and to sort and to not be led like a sheep by the many voices. I believe it is the path of a writer to be careful regarding the intake. Taking care with intake is the first step to taking care of what we can offer. Offer your best. Best in, best out. It’s as simple as that.

Holding Space for Yourself

16 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by nancystoryflow in comparison, competition, creating, creativity, emotional safety, Process, prompt writing, ritual, safety, slowing down, Writer's journey

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comparison, Guidance, Process, ritual, safety, self, slowing down, stress

In teaching, one of the things I try to do is hold space. In my private prompts classes, we close our eyes and take some deep breaths and get quiet, letting the workweek fall away, the effort that went into getting the kids off the school, the traffic we drove through to reach our destination, all the little niggling energy that we carry with us to the next place. My studio, where I teach my private classes, has, over time, taken on a lot of creative energy from my work there, and the work of others. The space supports our creative endeavors, and the work of holding space is made easier by this concentrated energy. But the energy in my public classes is also concentrated, and held collectively.

The class I teach regularly, for free and open to the public is called Prompt Writing. I teach it in a book store, and here I have a different ritual for opening the space. I ask each person to say their name, and give one or two sentences about their writing practice, and in this way we settle into each other.

I then introduce myself and tell the class what we’re going to do, I give the prompt and we write. There are rules for responding to others’ writing when it’s read out loud, and they are rules I believe in, so I try to enforce them gently, but firmly, and consistently. I do not waver from these rules.

The rules are meant to create a safe space for writers. It’s important. This is what is meant by holding space. Holding space is holding safe space, and there are lots of different ways to do it, and lots of different ways to not do it, or to undo it.

Competition is anti-safe-space holding. Overly critical thinking and analyses also. Hierarchy. Self-promotion. Comparison. Trying to fix something for someone, be it their writing or their life. Sometimes asking digging, probing questions can make a person feel challenged and defended instead of heard.

Recently I have been thinking about how powerful this is, and how I might try the same techniques for myself. In other words, when I am feeling low and anxious, perhaps I could recognize that I need something that’s not being provided and try to provide it. I might try to hold space for myself.

I don’t think it would be any different than holding space for others. The first step would be to get quiet, and the second step would be to create a safe environment for myself. One without competition, without over-thinking, without hierarchy, without self-promotion, without comparison, without trying to fix it, without digging at myself. In fact, when I need to hold space for myself, it’s always because I have let these things in. It’s natural that they should creep in. We live in a world of low thoughts. The trick is to see it, and to say no to it, and to open the space for yourself again.

The Burning Times

17 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by nancystoryflow in Alchemy of writing, creating, emotional safety, Guidance, Process, self, slowing down, Story, stress

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

alchemy, Attention, emotional safety, Guidance, Process, self, slowing down, Story, stress, teachers

Years ago, when I first started teaching writing, a woman signed up for my class at the John C. Campbell Folk School in the N.C. mountains because her doctor told her that if she didn’t do something for herself soon, she’d die. She wasn’t looking for a writing class. She didn’t think of writing at all. She was just looking to do something for herself, doctor’s orders, and she ended up in my group. I will call her Gladys.

In this class we wrote from prompts, and read back to each other, and received each others’ writing by recalling what we liked. We weren’t trying to create anything specific – no novels or poems or essays, although we ended up with parts of all of those things. The purpose, though, was to get used to writing as a way of expressing ourselves, and to get comfortable telling stories.

As the week went on, the class became a community, and we became important to each other, and we all found out more about each other. We found out about Gladys’s alcoholic husband. Her demanding adult children. The dishes in the sink and the laundry on the floor. The smack across her face. The black eye she covered with makeup.

We didn’t try to fix these things for her. We didn’t offer advice or even comfort. We didn’t judge in any way. We just responded to the writing, as we did with each person’s work. Write, read, receive, let go, repeat. By doing this we held space for Gladys to speak her truth. That was all.

Gladys wrote the scenes of her life that week. The scenes spooled from her pen and stitched themselves into story. Her story. It may have been the first time she ever told her story, even to herself. Stories are about pattern, and as Gladys wrote she saw the pattern of her life without the distractions of daily drama her situation kept her in.

After that week Gladys went home and left her husband. She rented a small apartment and lived alone. She wrote me a few times about how peaceful her life was now. She thanked me. What had I done? Had I broken up a marriage? No, of course not. I’d only held space with a group of writers for a person to hear her own thoughts. In the burning times, the times when women were being prosecuted as witches and killed, this might have been considered the work of a witch.

Powerful women, smart women, women with property, women who healed others with herbs and deep knowledge, women who were not married, women who lived outside the “norm” were accused of practicing witchcraft. The accused was often tested physically for witchcraft by various means. Some women were put in a chair and dunked in water. If she was a witch, she wouldn’t drown. If she was a normal human being, which she was, she would drown. Another test was called needling, a woman’s skin was pricked and pricked and pricked and pricked with a needle, all over her body, because somewhere on a witch was a bit of flesh that would not bleed. And if she bled, which she did, she was not a witch. And likely dead.

Isn’t it interesting how the tests for witch always leave a woman dead. And isn’t it interesting how Gladys was told she was at death’s door if she didn’t do something for herself.

I think that before the writing class, Gladys’s life was the equivalent to being needled. She was pricked and pricked and pricked and pricked by an abusive husband. Pricked too by a society that didn’t care about her as a human being. Likely pricked by things she’d learned and absorbed as a child, about how a woman needs to make sacrifices, stand by her man, have dinner on the table at a certain time, etc. etc. etc. Thankfully Gladys had someone in her life, a doctor, who could see beyond immediate medical needs into the soul of a woman who needed, simply, to do something for herself. And thankfully the thing she chose to do was attend my writing class. And thankfully, even though I was new to teaching, I was able to create an environment where, for one week, Gladys could be with her story. She could tell it and have it received. As the week went on she began to understand the concept of emotional safety, and she began to see that she didn’t have that at home.

At the end of the week Gladys wrote a piece about coming down off the mountain and ending her marriage. We responded to it as we had responded to everything else. Without judgement. None of us knew if Gladys would leave her husband or not, but we could see that the week had affected her, and that she was stronger for it. The space we provided for writing gave her space to trust herself.

This is the alchemy of writing. In my work as a teacher, I’ve witnessed this alchemy again and again, women and men coming back to themselves, hearing themselves, hearing each other, becoming stronger. I’ve seen the tough and guarded made vulnerable. I’ve seen the meek and voiceless start to speak up for themselves. I’ve seen barriers break down and humanity show through. I’ve seen tears burst forth from my writing prompts, not because my prompts are so great, but because the process and the safe space I create in my workshops allow people to reach deep inside themselves and bring forth their truth. Be it fiction, memoir, poetry, essay – writing is always about truth. Art is always about relationship to self.

And frankly, if bringing people to writing, bring people to themselves, is the work of witch then I accept it. Even in these burning times.

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