How You Can Use Writing to Cultivate Clarity & Ease in Uncertain Times

Are you in the middle of change, transition, or uncertainty? Are there circumstances beyond your control forcing you out of something familiar—your home, your job, your relationship, your idea of what your country or the world is?

Or maybe there’s something in you that’s been calling you to make a change and step more fully into your life’s full expression in a way you haven’t done before…but you don’t know what that is or how to do it?

Are you walking a path of uncertainty, looking for more ease and clarity?

I can help.

Uncertainty doesn’t mean you can’t have clarity. In fact, clarity often comes from the chaos of change and uncertainty.

I want to share how writing can help you cultivate clarity and ease in uncertain times,

but first I want to share a story.

Lynn sat at her kitchen table, sobbing. Her whole body trembled. Just hours before, she’d come home from work, swung her car into her driveway and felt a weird thump. When she got out to look, she saw that she’d accidentally run over her cat, Blackie. After rushing her to the vet and being told it was too late, she held Blackie in her arms for the last time as the vet gave her the shot that would end her life completely. When Lynn got home all she wanted from her partner of ten-years was to be held, comforted, told it wasn’t her fault, and that it was all going to be okay. Instead, he looked at her from across the kitchen table and said, “I can’t comfort you. I don’t like you and I don’t love you.”

Two weeks later, Lynn was living across town in a new apartment. That moment at the kitchen table wasn’t the reason the relationship ended; it was simply a reflection of something deeper. Lynn’s outer environment had come to reflect something that had been going on inside her for years, most of her life, in fact. She was not being fully honest with herself, her partner, or the world.

She was not communicating her soul.

What I mean by that is she was not sharing the full truth of who she is—her desires, her needs, her fears, her wisdom, her knowing, her ideas, her pain, her demands, her creativity, and her deep inner life and spirituality—with her partner.

She’d fallen into a pattern of bending them to fit his desires, his needs, his fears, his demands, his world. In the process, she’d lost touch with the truth of herself and started to feel numb, angry, resentful, and had more frequent bouts of jealous anxiety, which was a pattern for her in relationships.

“I have trust issues,” she’d willingly admit. Through multiple marriages and long-term relationships, Lynn hoped that her partner would see her wound and understand, support and reassure her. She hoped that he would love every part of her unconditionally. She even told herself and others, “I can only heal my trust issue in a relationship.”

That was true, but the relationship Lynn needed to be in to heal was with herself, her soul. That was the real communication she was seeking, and she found it through writing.

Lynn started to write what wanted to be written, what her soul wanted to express. In our work together, she tapped into truths, memories, and stories, that made it clear that her sense of betrayal and distrust went way back to when she was a little girl and was forced to stay with people she didn’t really know while her mom was in the hospital having surgery. No one told her what was going on or what was happening. Not long after that experience, Lynn came home from school one day to find her brother no longer lived in her house. He had physical and developmental disabilities and her parents chose to get him the support he needed by putting him in facility, but they didn’t tell Lynn it was happening. There had been no real, honest communication.

Through writing, Lynn is hearing her own voice again. She’s clearly seeing that there isn’t something wrong with her because of her “trust” issue. She’s remembering that throughout her life, she’s been a strong, independent woman who has raised three kids starting when she was 17, completed her degree at 45 after dropping out of high school, walked a pilgrimage alone 500 miles on a the El Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain, spent a birthday celebrating with the members of the Rolling Stones, and has always had and nurtured (often secretly) a deep and powerful spiritual life that has given her much wisdom.

Through writing, she’s fully seeing the power and value of her story and that it is worth sharing with herself and the world.

And while she is still in the uncertain “place between” where an old part of her life has ended and the new has not yet fully begun, she is finding ease and is clear that she is worthy of unconditional love and that she is no longer willing to accept anything less from herself or anyone else.

And she’s now considering writing a memoir.

Do you have your own version of Lynn’s story?

Are you hiding and not communicating your soul?

ALIVE Writing is a Practice You Can Do Now to Help You Cultivate Clarity & Ease

When you sit down to write you become real. The voices and ideas in your head coalesce into naming what is most important, most pressing, most in need of being expressed. I call this ALIVE Writing, (or writing what wants to be written) and it’s the heart of my own life and the work I do with people. If you can engage in ALIVE Writing on a daily basis it will offer you deep clarity no matter what is happening in your outer world.

Here’s how to start:

1. Take out a pen and paper or open a new document on your computer.
2. Write this question at the top of the page: What do I know deep down in my bones?
3. Take 3 deep breaths focusing specifically on the exhale.
4. Set a timer. If you are not a regular writer, start with 5 minutes. The ideal is 20 minutes.
5. Start with the line: “What I know deep down in my bones is…. “ and keep repeating that line and writing what follows until the timer goes off. Don’t stop. Don’t edit or censor yourself. Keep the pen or fingers moving and just allow and accept anything and everything that comes. If you want to keep going reset the timer so you always have an end point.
6. Read what you wrote out loud. You can do it right when you are done, or wait a day. This can give some distance and allow you to really hear what’s there.

This process will bring you clarity and can even boost your immune system. Studies are now showing that writing can actually improve your overall health.

I have walked a path of uncertainty and change my entire life and have discovered that writing what wants to be expressed brings ease when life just isn’t easy and helps give clarity while walking head-on into the unknown.

It’s my soul’s mission to create structures of nourishment and support for you to write so you can hear your voice, see your value, come home to yourself and communicate and express your soul and bring it alive into the world.

This is work that can’t be done alone. You can’t fully see yourself by yourself. It does take support.

As writer and poet Terry Tempest Williams says of writing, “We do it alone. We cannot do it alone.”

I invite you to go deep into this work in a powerful way with me and others on this journey in my upcoming,

Written on Your Soul, 5-day residential writing retreat happening October 8-13th.

Click here to find out more and apply.

I also invite you to schedule a time to talk with me about how I can support you to use writing to communicate what’s written on your soul and bring it alive into the world. Click here to schedule a conversation with me.

May you know and live your brilliance!