Letter to a Friend

Magic trick: you can calm yourself down by writing. It is the most powerful tool I know besides swimming. No punctuation or grammar or any sense of sentence structure needed. This is like scribbling in the dark. Welcome to the greatest tool.

I write stuff down and I never show it to anyone and I never even reread it. It's my spittoon and it clears my head. I have a habit of doing it with my morning coffee in place of turning on my computer.

Then it's there for me throughout the day when I am in need of clearing the cobwebs or trying to work up courage in my studio to face a painting or ruminate about an annoying neighbor or anything occupying me. It's my emotional gymnasium --all is welcome here.

The act of writing is magic. It opens you up. It's more powerful than talk therapy. The magic continues to work even after you put the pen down and as you sleep. But early is better because you sneak up on your critic, your ego and your defenses. You need to sneak past the guards to get into the castle!

What you are doing by scribbling is giving the anxiety and darkness a place to be heard. You need not keep it --the act of writing itself has done the work and you can even throw it away. Give yourself permission to have a landing pad, a base, a place to stand.
This quote is on my desk:

But when at last I wrote my first words on the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and more words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first time in my life. The island grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited by people I knew and mapped with the life I lived.
-Jimmy Santiago Baca

You will develop your wisdom... the very nature of moods and emotions is when you feel good you forget the bad and when you feel bad you forget the good. When you develop the middle-wisdom you will develop your capacity to know them both (good mood and bad mood) are just, metaphorically speaking, rooms in your house. It still hurts like hell to be sad grief stricken or full of rage, but there's a part of you that is watching. The MIDDLE WAY is the witness. Develop your WITNESS and you'll always have a place to stand. Take a look at some quotes by Ram Dass, Lao Tzu , Pema Chodron. They all have wrestled with this too.

We are all filled to the brim, stuffed to overflowing. We need to spit out to make room. To develop our hunger for learning, to be able to make space for taking in the world.

Be sure to take good care of your body. Sometimes a walk can lift a mood. Oxygen to the brain and changing scenery works wonders. I find a shower and clean clothes does wonders (I love water to look at, to drink, and to bathe in). All of this can shake us out of a bad mood and return to the body wisdom.

Chasing moods is like chasing a puppy. Better to teach the puppy how to live with you; regular feeding exercise naps and play time.

I used to think that when I felt good I had figured something out. I was devastated when inevitably I would feel bad again. I tried to clutch at the good to keep it. I even tried clutching at the bad to stay there since switching back and forth was so awful. Then I learned I was emotionally built like a wagon wheel vs a train track. Wheels within wheels. And it is my job to learn as much as I can about it so I can provide the right support and habits to foster my growth and wisdom and take care of my darkness angst and misery. For my work, for my life. It's the same thing.

I hope this is good food for thought. I am right there with you revisiting relearning this stuff EVERY DAY. I am never done. I am a wheel, relearning the alphabet every day, every week, every season. It's not about CONTROL it's about SUBMITTING and being a witness. Cultivate a climate of wisdom and growth for the rest of our days.