Discovering myself

Discovering myself

As I string words together, sentence after sentence, my conscious mind slowly gains access to a storehouse of impressions, ideas, memories, and knowledge from my past. From brainstorming, to rough, working, and final drafts, I become aware of what other parts of me already know.

There is a gap between our thoughts…..a delay between the arrival of new thoughts (or feelings), and our conscious awareness of them. Before a thought/feeling becomes fully conscious, we may only sense it through elusive moods, or physical symptoms. If we don’t take the time to contemplate (sitting quietly, talking to a good listener, or journaling) the thought/feeling may never come to consciousness. We then can’t retrieve the information, and if the thoughts/feelings are a trigger for us, we may react without ever knowing why.

With patience, writing pulls forth all this latent information. We can discover not only our hidden feelings and beliefs, but also creative ideas that have been haunting us. To reach our inner knowledge, we need only take the time to keep writing, through the clichés and banality, until we find an idea that feels both familiar and new. We can then keep asking ourselves, what is this idea (or feeling)? What do I know about it? What else can I say about it? I am often astounded when, after withstanding the temptation to give up on a subject, I breakthrough and brainstorm many new pages on it.

When writing I don’t worry about aesthetics and form. I simply write to discover the goldmine of useful information inside. We have an inexhaustible source of knowledge, not only about our self (which is priceless and exceptionally useful) but about any problem we face. I’ve always found that creative solutions are already present within a dilemma. We only have to dig for them…….

“What are you afraid of?” the man asked his heart. The heart didn’t reply.
“There is no one out there that will hurt you, I’ll protect you. I have grown strong, I’m a warrior now, you have nothing to fear.” Still the heart did not reply.

“Tell me, heart. Was it our father? Was it our brothers? Was it one of our lovers? None of that matters now, I am a grown man, no one can do anything to us.” The heart remained quiet…closed.

The man grew frustrated. “Heart, you are a coward. Maybe you are defective. Maybe I just don’t have a heart that works properly. No wonder I can’t feel love.” The heart closed even tighter.

For months the man walked around, falling ever deeper into despair about his defective heart. Then one day the man grew very quiet. Quiet enough that he thought he could almost hear a whisper coming from his heart. He asked with all the compassion he was capable of, “Heart, what are you afraid of?”

The heart whispered back, “You. I’m afraid of you.”

The man cried. He had protected his heart from everyone but the one person that could hurt it the most– the critic inside.

Love and light ….. Christina