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Archive for October, 2015

For the Week of October 25, 2015: The Comfort in Personal Rituals

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, music and healing, writing and nature, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal on October 25, 2015 | 2 Comments »

The shoes put on each time
left first, then right.

The morning potion’s teaspoon
of sweetness stirred always
for seven circlings, no fewer, no more,
into the cracked blue cup.

Touching the pocket for wallet,
for keys,
before closing the door.

How did we come
to believe these small rituals’ promise,
that we are today the selves we yesterday knew,
tomorrow will be?

(Excerpt from “Habit” by Jane Hirshfield, in Given Sugar, Given Salt)

I awakened this morning to an aching body, one that I can only blame on myself.  After a month and a half of disruption, our home visited each day by a variety of contractors:  arborists, painters, plumbers, electricians, landscapers and roofers, this weekend was a chance to reorder the house and patio.

And re-order I did.  Against the advice of my husband (who was busy cleaning the garage) and my better judgment,  I set to work:  moving potted plants, chairs, creating a fountain from an old Chinese porcelain bowl, on and on.  I bent, pushed, and lifted—for hours.  As the afternoon sun began to set, I sat alone on the deck in quiet satisfaction,  feeling as if I’d reclaimed the necessary quiet and calm that I hunger for in my daily life.  It was worth the aches and pains, I told myself, the ones already beginning to throb in my knees and back.  I confess  I am a person of habit.   I needed to reclaim the space for my daily ritual, beginning each day outdoors, sitting in silence, drinking in the morning sunrise, birdsong and canyon view.  In the midst of our go-go world, I need the solace and comfort of this small ritual to begin each day with a sense of calm and gratitude.

Rituals not only calm, but they help us heal, and have been recognized as part of the healing process since ancient times.  They help us cope with life difficulties, but, As Jeanne Achtenberg and her colleagues tell us, rituals also provide significance to the normal passages of our lives.  They are our outer expressions of inner experiences, important in helping us relax, re-connect with ourselves and re-discover simple joys of everyday life (Rituals of Healing, 1994).

According to a 2013 article in Scientific American, even simple rituals can be extremely effective. Rituals performed after experiencing losses …do alleviate grief, and rituals performed before high-pressure tasks – like singing in public – do in fact reduce anxiety and increase people’s confidence.  The article cited recent investigations by psychologists which demonstrated that rituals can have a causal impact on people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  Some of their examples, taken from the world of sports revealed rituals were common among sports figures, for example:

Basketball superstar Michael Jordan wore his North Carolina shorts underneath his Chicago Bulls shorts in every game; Curtis Martin of the New York Jets reads Psalm 91 before every game. And Wade Boggs, former third baseman for the Boston Red Sox, woke up at the same time each day, ate chicken before each game, took exactly 117 ground balls in practice, took batting practice at 5:17, and ran sprints at 7:17. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-rituals-work/)

Our personal rituals even function as talismans against fear in times of illness, offering a kind of assurance we will be all right.   Alice Trillin, describing her experience as a lung cancer patient in “Of Dragons and Garden Peas:  A Cancer Patient Talks to Doctors,” discussed how her reliance on ritual, talismans and personal will provided a constant source of renewal and a reminder of the constancy of everyday life throughout her illness(New England Journal of Medicine, 1981).

In “Girding for Battle, “cancer patient Amy Haddad described the talismans and rituals she used to go her doctor’s appointment during her treatment:

The tiny, silver Celtic goddess
placidly hangs from a burgundy cord
around my neck…

My husband’s shirt fastens the wrong way…
My last name stamped in black ink
inside his collar…
His idea to wear the shirt…

So I wear these talismans
to protect me in the doctor’s office.

(From:   The Poetry of Nursing, Judy Schaefer, Ed., 2006)

Rituals, whether to reduce anxiety, alleviate grief, bring “luck” to an athlete, or help us abate fear in the face of illness, and be active participants in our healing process.  Our rituals, as Trillin, Haddad, and others affirm, offer time for quiet and a time to focus ourselves.  They can help us feel connected—to the world, each other and ourselves.

Healing rituals can take many forms.  They may be ones of release, for example, drumming; of nurturance and self-care, like having a massage; or of healing, such as journaling, meditation or prayer.  What they have in common is that they help us find solace, feel grounded and replenished in the midst of life’s upheavals or  day-to-day living.  They don’t require a lot of preparation.  They can be as simple as a warm bath with candlelight, time for prayer or meditation, a solitary walk along in the woods, an afternoon run, listening to music, gardening or sitting quietly at a window with a cup of freshly brewed tea or coffee.  What matters most is that your healing ritual gives you the space or quiet to replenish your spirit and listen to what is in your heart and mind.  In the noisy and rush-rush world we live in today, our  daily habits, these healing rituals, help ground us, clear our minds and rediscover ourselves.

Writing Suggestion: 

This week, reflect on the habits or rituals that are most comforting or calming in your daily life.  Which have helped you in times of pain or illness?   What helped you find solace in the midst of doctors’ appointments and treatments or a period of time that threatened to consume you with its demands?,  Think about your habits, the small comforting rituals of your daily life.  Why do they matter to you?  Write about their importance in your daily life.

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For the Week of October 17, 2015: What Does It Mean to Heal?

Posted in art and writing, expressive writing, healing arts, music and healing, writing and nature, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal on October 19, 2015 | Leave a Comment »

“What does it mean to heal?”   I posed the question to my writing group at Moores Cancer Center Friday morning.  Being healed.  It’s a topic never out of consciousness in the experience of cancer, used often in combination with terms like “treatment”, “recovery”, “cure”, or “in remission”.  Yet “healing” connotes deeper meaning, and what we consider healing may be entirely unique to each of us.

We began by reviewing the dictionary definition, “the natural process by which the body repairs itself,” “tending to cure or restore to health,” “improve or make better.”  Heal or healing is a word used frequently in many contexts.  Google it, and you’re confronted with multiple variations in its use whether by traditional medicine, psychology, religion, alternative healing methods or even “writing as a way of healing.”

In a 2005 article entitled “The Meaning of Healing:  Transcending Suffering,” appearing in the Annals of Family Medicine, author Thomas Egnew explored the meaning of healing and attempted to translate it into behaviors that could help doctors enhance their own abilities as healers. He includes three major themes in his definition:  wholeness (to become or make whole), narrative (a reinterpretation of life), and spirituality (the search to be human; to transcend).

Jeremy Geffen, MD and oncologist, defined seven different levels of healing in his 2006 book,  The Journey Through Cancer: Healing and Transforming the Whole Person, which he argued are necessary to regain our whole selves. They are:

  1. Information or knowledge
  2. Connecting with others
  3. Exploring safe and effective ways of tending to our health
  4. Emotional healing
  5. Harnessing the power of the mind
  6. Assessing our life’s purpose and meaning
  7. A spiritual connection

Geffen’s work, like Egnew’s, went beyond the traditional concept of healing, and both are particularly relevant to the cancer experience.  A serious illness like cancer threatens your very sense of self.  What you took for granted is turned upside down.  Your life is redefined, but so is your perspective on life, death and healing.  Who better, then,  to ask what it means to heal than a group of cancer patients and survivors?  Here are some of their responses emerging out of the writing last Friday morning:

“A process of making me whole”

“Peace with what is.”

“Three grandchildren.”

“My mind and soul at peace.”

“Acceptance of unknown challenges”

“Connecting the mind and body”

“Things that make me forget I need healing.”

“Wind chimes, homemade soup, a kitten’s purr”

“A gentle smile, a sunset, the smell of moist soil”

“leading me away from fear toward hope”

As we went around the table, I was touched by each person’s expression of what it meant to heal.  But one response in particular stayed with me.  M. began by telling us of the years she and her family lived in Japan where they learned about the Japanese legend of folding 1000 origami cranes to have one’s wishes granted.

In Japan, cranes are symbols of good luck and longevity, but after World War II, the act of making 1,000 cranes to grant wishes took on larger meaning:  a hope for world peace and healing.  It began with the work of a 12-year-old girl dying of leukemia due to radiation exposure from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  She was, apparently, determined to fold 1,000 cranes to have her wish, that she continue to live, granted, but sadly, she died with just over 600 cranes folded.  Her classmates finished folding the remaining cranes for her, and now, her statue stands at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, along with strings of paper cranes. (From:  “Paper cranes to bring message of healing,” by Robert Miller, Newstimes ,December 31, 2012,)

As it turns out, when M. was diagnosed with cancer, her daughter set to work and began folding paper cranes for her mother.  “It took her two years,” she said, “but she folded 1000 paper cranes for me.  Every time I look at them, I feel healed.”  M. had tears in her eyes as she read what she’d written aloud—and frankly, so did I.

Writing Suggestion:

This week, think about how you use the word “heal” in your life.  What does “healing” mean to you.  What, in your experience, has been a healing experience for you?  What people, places or activities have been important in your healing process?    Write about healing.

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For the Week of October 11, 2015: Tidying Up a Life

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, life writing, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal on October 11, 2015 | 6 Comments »

Like my grandmother now, I save teabags for a second
cup.  String, stamps without postmarks, aluminum foil.
Wrapping paper, paper bags, bags of scrap fabric,
blue rubber bands, clothes hangers.  I save newspaper
clippings, recipes, bits of yarn, photographs in
shoeboxes, tins of buttons.  I save cancelled checks,
instruction manuals, warranties for appliances
long since thrown away.  Feathers, shells, pebbles,
acorns.

(From “What I Save,” by Cheryl Savageau, In:  Dirt Road Home, 1995)

Like many of you, I save things, but it’s not string, stamps or tins of buttons I keep.  It’s mementos from the past, old notebooks filled with writing, prints and paintings, and books—lots and lots of books—all things I love.  Don’t get me wrong, my house is neat, but the walls are covered in artwork, books.  What isn’t displayed or used is stored in the multiple boxes occupying the garage shelves.  Here’s the embarrassing truth:  I hadn’t realized just how much I’d accumulated until last week, when the painters arrived to applying a fresh paint and color on several of our interior walls.  It meant everything had to be removed from walls, shelves and desktops..  Small towers of my favorite belongings formed and stood on the floors of the two rooms not being re-painted.  As the house felt more “undone,” so did I.  Worse, another heat wave arrived, making it nearly intolerable to be inside or out.  My mind felt as cluttered as my house had become.

“I’m held hostage by heat and household repairs,” I complained to my husband.  He shrugged his shoulders and sighed.  There was little to do but endure; he was much less bothered by the temporary upheaval.  But surprisingly, once the walls were painted, I held back, hesitating to return the rooms to their prior state.  I hung fewer pictures; began to list the books to donate to the library or give away.  I even resisted sending another box out to the garage, realizing how our garage storage masks our years of household accumulation.  “Putting things away,” Marie Kondo writes in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, (Ten Speed Press, 2014)  “creates the illusion that the clutter problem has been solved.”

John and I began downsizing our living space a few years ago, but we haven’t been as successful in downsizing our lives, not really. Now that he has retired, we’re faced with a significant shift in lifestyle, and I am much more aware of what “letting go” means. Beloved things or not, I simply have too much stuff.

This week, I’ve begun a task that will take several weeks,  a process of tidying up.  This is no casual process of dusting and straightening.  It’s a change of life and habit.  Acknowledging a life change is not without its emotional challenges.  I know I will be tempted time and again to hang onto things I’ve loved, yet no longer have a place or a purpose in my daily life.  Kondo writes, “Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination.”  My final destination is a change of habit and lifestyle.

Yesterday a postcard arrived from  the nonprofit, AMVETS, seeking household donations for veterans’ assistance.  “We will be in your neighborhood next week,” it stated.  “Call to schedule a pick-up.”  Perfect timing.   I’ll be donating goods more than once to nonprofit organizations over the coming weeks.  Tidying up will take time; clearing out old, unused items is often about overcoming the urge to hang onto them.  “But I might use that next year…”  It also triggers reminiscence and discovery.  “Remember when she drew this picture in first grade?” or “I’ve wondered where this went…”

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

(From:  “Advice to Writers,” by Billy Collins, In:  The Apple That Astonished Paris, 1988)

I’m taking Collins’ advice.  I’m tidying up, because I know it’s also a process of preparing to write a new life chapter.  It will require a lot of  letting go, making necessary changes or difficult choices as we age, experience loss, illness, or a change in circumstance.  Every week,  I hear evidence of those difficult life choices in my writing groups.  This kind of tidying up is not easy.

But remember:  as our lives change, the story we tell about ourselves changes too. Clinging to a past that no longer applies to our present only seeds regret.   Letting go is a necessary process, like tidying up, choosing what to discard, what to retain and what to carry as we discover the new possibilities our lives now.

So to you, Friend, I confide my secret:
to be a discoverer you hold close whatever
you find, and after a while you decide
what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,
you turn to the open sea and let go

(From:  “Security,” by William Stafford, In:  Passswords, 1991)
—————
Writing Suggestion:  This week, write about holding on and letting go, about cleaning out the old to embrace the new, about new beginnings that could alter the story of your life you’ve told before.

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For the Week of October 4, 2015: Healing Our Spirits: Embracing Stillness

Posted in expressive writing, healing arts, writing and nature, writing as a way of healing, writing for wellness, writing prompts for cancer survivors, writing to heal on October 4, 2015 | 1 Comment »

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

(“The Peace of Wild Things,” By Wendell Berry, in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998)

The day after the Roseburg, Oregon shooting, my friend Alecia posted Wendell Berry’s poem on her Facebook page.  I, as so many others, needed the comfort of his words to find some refuge from the constant assault of crises, war, and violence in the world.  Another shooting.  Another troubled human being whose actions seem inconceivable, and yet, as we were reminded how this country has become numb to these senseless acts of violence so prevalent in our society.  I too felt “despair for the world” enlarge and grow within me.  I needed respite from the woes of the world to regain my footing.

I live in a city, and escaping to a place of peace and quiet can sometimes be difficult.  But for the past year and a half, I have been taking refuge in the quiet of early mornings, six a.m. walks with my dog and a ritual of sitting in silence outdoors afterward.  It is there, and in that practice, that I regain a sense of peace and gratitude that comes with stillness.  I rest in the grace of the world.

 What is stillness?  According to Pico Iyer, travel writer and author of The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (2014), it’s not so much about meditation, but “sanity and balance…a chance to put things in perspective.”  “Going nowhere,” he states, “isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.”

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

(From:  “Keep Quiet” by Pablo Neruda (In: ,  1974)

Perhaps our societal numbness to what the President called “routine” violence in our country is, in part, the constant motion and noise that fill our daily lives.  We race from meeting to meeting, social event to social event, respond to dozens of emails and texts each day, spend hours in front of screens when we’re alone, assaulted by the constant over-stimulation of news, trivia, games, retail offerings, advertisements, on and on.  “A big luxury for so many people today,” Iyer says, “ is a little blank space in the calendar where you collect yourself.”  It’s stillness, being quiet that allows us to care for our inner lives, to feed our malnourished spirits.

Writing for the New York Times in 2012, Iyer cited Nicholas Carr’s 2011 book, The Shallows:  What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.  Carr noted that Americans spend eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen and that the average American teenager sends or receives 75 test messages daily.  Ironically, it was many years ago that Canadian author Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message, 1967), warned us, “When things come at you very fast, …you lose touch with yourself.”(From:  “The Joy of Quiet”).  Perhaps we weren’t listening.

Think about it.  It’s not unlike the noise in the rush of information and appointments that anyone with a cancer diagnosis experiences.  You’re overwhelmed, exhausted, and trying to navigate between opinions and deciding on treatment options.  The physicians’ voice may temporarily become your own.  But gradually, you regain the ability to listen to yourself, your heart.  You find your voice, clarity of what matters, what is important to you here and now.

But little by little,

…as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world…

(From:  “The Journey,” by Mary Oliver, in Dreamwork, 1986)

How do you find your voice–what you truly believe is important to you?  Stillness, being in the moment, can help.  Cancer, or any chronic illness, as Dr. Paul Brenner, MD states, “is Life:  You hope it can get better but fear it will get worse.  There is no choice other than to live into what is happening now.”  Those with cancer, he notes, live in the truth of the moment because that is all that exists.  It is, ultimately, about being present to the now, not living with regret for the past or worrying what the future holds.

Stillness, time to be fully present in the moment, can help us clear away the static,  clarify and discover what is truly important.  Meditation, yoga, tai chi—all help ground us in the present, the here and now and in quiet.  As Iyer reminds us, stillness–learning to be in the moment is periodically stepping away from your busy life “so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.”  With clarity comes understanding.  With understanding, a sense of peace.

I have come to believe that stillness, being fully present to the here and now, is part of what heals us, whether we live with loss, cancer, or other chronic illness.  During a  2004 PBS  interview former poet laureate, Ted Kooser, spoke about his recovery from oral cancer in 1968.  During the period when I was in surgery and going through radiation, I really didn’t do any writing. But as I came up out of radiation and was trying to get myself back in some sort of physical shape, I would walk a couple of miles every morning and then find something along that route to write about…It was very important for me to see something from each day that I could do something with and find some order in, because I was surrounded by medical chaos or health chaos of some kind.

Kooser wrote over 100 poems about what he noticed on those solitary winter morning walks, pasting them on postcards and sending them to his friend, author Jim Harrison.  Kooser describes how his morning walks helped him heal:

“During the previous summer, depressed by my illness, preoccupied by the routines of my treatment, and feeling miserably sorry for myself, I’d all but given up on reading and writing…  One morning in November, following my walk, I surprised myself by trying my hand at a poem.  Soon I was writing every day… I began pasting my morning poems on postcards and sending them to Jim…”  The result of those poems on postcards was his 2001 volume of poetry, Winter Morning Walks : 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison, 2001.

Annie Dillard, in her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, offers a “recipe” for embracing stillness “At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world~ now I am ready,. “Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

It is a practice I have embraced in my daily life, one that always helps me right myself and remember what is good and important in the world.  I have come to cherish stillness as my life has become more complex.  Perhaps you have discovered the power of it too.  Why not write about it?

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A suggestion for writing:   For this week, consider how quiet and stillness have been part of your healing process.  What practices have helped you learn to embrace quiet and turn your attention to what is, instead of what was or could be?

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