It all comes down, in the end, to breathing, and your ability to close your eyes and focus on your breath.
Following your breath will lead you to that place where you can find your center.
It’s there, finally, where you can truly find your story and discover how the lives of the characters inhabiting it are linked to the breath of life that sustains all beings.
It’s the breath that lets you see the world. Not with your eyes, but with your inner eye, your intuition, your sense of how your characters live, which paths they'll choose to follow, whether you need to write more quickly to keep up with them or sit back and listen.
Your breath reveals these secrets to you if you listen closely to it entering your body,
bringing with it the wisdom of the ages, which has passed–like the air itself–from writer to writer, generation to generation, linking all those who have written to all those who will write... through the breath of stories.
It’s such a powerful idea–the breath as the entryway into stories.
Breathe gently, one breath after another.
Listen to the sound of your breathing as you sit at your desk and notice the changes in your breath from moment to moment, hour to hour.
Listen: your breath is telling you a secret.
Open fully to each moment and write of life as it flows through you.
That moment of embrace is, I think, what we strive for when we lift our pens and begin to write.
It’s what we strive for when we begin a story.
We want to feel life fully, and, when we pass from this world to the next, following our breath, we want to be able to say: yes, we have lived, we have written, we have imagined worlds that we hadn't known until we picked up our pens and began to write, and we entered those worlds through our breath.
Follow your breath: it will teach you what you need to know.
For more on writing and following your breath, visit:
http://writingbeginswiththebreath.blogspot.com/
http://gimmebliss.blogspot.com/2007/09/free-your-breath-to-unclutter-your-mind.html
http://www.silver-threads.org/assets/Becoming%20Whole%20sample.pdf
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1 comment:
Amen. I think a daily session of meditation, including the breathing awareness, can be an awesome complement to writing. I don't look for any insights or flashes as I meditate, in fact I try to empty my mind, but I believe a lot of the ambitions, frustrations, and complexities of a story seep more thoroughly into the subconscious at such a time. Often, perhaps days after returning to writing, after my own subconscious has had time to grow around the input, a new opening seems to arrive. Anyhow, that's my 'string theory' of the interaction. Back to writing.
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