Chapter 1: Writing

Writing releases us into a timeless world where all things are possible. Through the play of our imagination, we gain the power to expand our limits, to integrate change and to guide our personal growth. In this magical realm, we can reclaim past events, retrieve former selves, live out what almost was, what could have been. Through writing and visualization we are able to develop a personal language that fills out the hollows and blank spaces in our lives, to make sense of and give reality to our experience. In this private arena where conscious and unconscious meet and interact, we are granted a unique opportunity to negotiate peace settlements between inner and outer, between self and other. In short, to create and maintain core happiness through a time-honored method that is not only free but non-caloric as well.

Chapter 2. Meditation

Meditation is one of those words like cooking that covers many different activities from baking to braising to frying to boiling. There are meditations to produce relaxation, to focus attention, to develop compassion, or to enhance clarity and awareness, to mention just a few. As in cooking, meditation is designed to create some sort of change through its processes.

In the most basic meditations, we simply learn to turn the mind that usually goes outward to look inward instead. We are able to get under the hood of our own minds, so to speak, to glimpse inner workings. By taking up meditation, we don’t lose the ability to navigate and understand the outside world. Far from it, as we withdraw our projections from the outer sphere, it comes into clearer focus, revealing what is actually there.

Chapter 3. Awakening

It’s natural that both writing and meditating work so well in tandem with each other. Both are seeking what’s real, what’s authentic. Through meditation we come to see reality as it is; through writing we learn to find ways to live comfortably with things as they are.