Thursday, March 8, 2012

YOUR STORY HOLDS YOUR POWER



The Story is what's left. The Story is the destination. The Story is everything in between. Afterall, we dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct gossip, learn, hate and love by narration.

Humans, as conscious beings, are meant to live conscious lives, aware of our every feeling and response-whether painful or pleasurable, conventional or unconventional, pious or irreverent, constructive or destructive-uninhibited by the proscriptions of culture, religion, personal beliefs, or family values. We feel what we feel. Period. And that is neither good nor bad. How we respond to our feelings is another matter.

To retain or regain awareness of feeling is to develop power. To deny or bury feeling is to diminish power and choice: the choice of whether to act on a feeling or not, and if so, how.

The freedom to be conscious of our negative emotions without acting on them leads to a full emotional life, a fully present life, a healed and healthy life. We cannot be scared, angry, bored, or sad when we are living totally in the present. We are healed when we no longer hate or distrust what we feel.

Radical Writing is a spontaneous approach to writing opens doors to expression and identifies energetic leaks in the spirit and psyche. the process intensifies our abilities to sense how and where our subconscious minds affect our physical bodies. With this awareness, we heal internally and externally.

The novelist Don DeLillo has described writing as, "A form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture, but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals."

Whereas psychology tends to focus on the questions of "why" and "how," RADICAL WRITING applies the questions of classic storytelling: What happened? Where and when did it happen? Under what circumstances did it happen? It also asks: Where in my body do I harbor the memory? What is my pattern of response? What do I want the picture of my life to look like? What stands in the way of materializing it? Am I willing and ready for that manifestation? Am I willing to take total responsibility for my own power?

Personal power requires far more responsibility than is required to live in unquestioned accordance with cultural, religious, and family training. Therefore, it is one thing to say we desire more power in our lives and quite another to accept the changes that power will inevitably cause. Only we ourselves can determine the weight of history or the measure of responsibility we are willing to bear. At certain times, we simply may not have the strength to endure the pain of a particular recollection or discovery. Honoring our limits is one way of accepting responsibility for our power.

Resistance to acknowledging our own negativity and emotions often comes from our fear of their power. The more intensely we've kept negative thoughts and feelings under control, the more we are likely to fear that their exposure might obliterate our self-control, precipitating unstoppable rage, depression, or mania. We might well fear that our anguish will be unending or our pain will cause suffering to others. We might discover our inner resources to be inadequate-a terrible blow to the ego.

In truth, suppression of negative feelings provides only the illusion of control. When we freely express our thoughts, we relinquish illusion and release our anguish. When we acknowledge our passions and fears, we liberate ourselves from the physical, emotional, and spiritual tyranny of unhealed wounds.

RADICAL WRITING, an online course that turns up the volume on your perception safely, requires only 15-minutes a day and NO writing experience or expertise, not even any ability in spelling, punctuation, or grammar. You simply allow your hands -- not your head -- do the writing. teaches exactly this freedom. We learn that persistence on the path of self-exploration is a form of communion, that our devotion to that path is the art of healing, and that the role of Creator is ours.