You end up writing when...

You end up writing when the need to write is

stronger than the fear of rejection,

when curiosity and your desire to discover

something new about yourself and the world--

and what you think and feel about it all--

is stronger than your fear of failure.

You end up writing when your voice, 

telling you that you must write, 

is stronger than all the voices in your head 

telling you to stop.

You end up writing when you cannot

not write, when it feels as essential to 

staying alive as breathing, and when writing each 

word, your hand shaping each letter on the page, 

is as vital and life-affirming as 

taking a breath.

This is the practice

So you sit waiting, listening to the silence of early morning,
and in the silence you can hear your breath, and in your breath
you can find the words you need to begin.

And the pen begins to move and thoughts unfreeze like flows of ice
breaking away from shore, slowly moving downstream, the current
taking you where you've never been before.

You have to trust your breath, trust your hand holding the pen moving
across the page, trust that the words will make sense later when you put
down your pen and return to read what you've written.

It's as if you are writing in a fog, a daze, a dream, not knowing what
the words mean, just accepting them--the sound of them, the shape of
them--as they spill and fall and tumble onto the page from your pen.

How you find the words or how the words find you is a mystery. Why
this word? Why these words in this order? It's all part of the process of
writing, of letting go, of observing without judgment whatever comes,
whatever life brings you.

This is the practice.

Knitting Words Together

Take a deep breath
and release it slowly
to clear your mind.

Imagine the blank page
is a field of snow
or a sand beach
waiting for you to
take the first step.

Enjoy the feel of
your hand moving
across the page

the sight of words
appearing beneath
your pen

the sound of the
nib scratching
the paper.

You are knitting words
together, stitch by stitch,
word by word,

creating something out
of nothing to keep you
warm on a winter night,

to keep you company
so you're not alone.

Follow Your Breath

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