Practicing: the wellness community workshop and 5 minute exercises

                                             Handshome1               

We did writing exercises at the Wellness Community writing workshop last weekend that made me realize (again) that the practice of writing can yield amazing results. Like learning to play the piano, or laying bricks, or shooting baskets, you need to do it over and over and over. Most of the people in the workshop aren’t interested in becoming writers, they’re there because they have cancer, or have had it, or love someone who’s had cancer, and they’re writing as therapy. Writing out their fears and anger and grief as well as gratitude. The whole workshop is run on five minute exercises: I read a poem (often by Mary Oliver, Billy Collins) or an excerpt from a memoir (last Saturday it was the Tania Katan’s hilarious and moving  My One Night Stand With Cancer, and Roger M. Cohen’s brave and honest book about his M.S. and colon cancer entitled Blindsided). What this group comes up with in five minutes blows me away. Most of them have been in the workshop for a number of years and they prove my point about practice. They’re used to writing about their most personal experiences, their deepest emotions and they write with such ease and honesty that new members get carried along with the group momentum and start writing about things they never dreamed they’d share with strangers.

What’s different about this workshop from my UCLA class is of course the therapy angle. At the Wellness Community they write and no one comments (except for crying or laughing). It’s different than talk therapy because when you’re writing fast in just five minutes you really do get out of your own way and surprising things can come up.  It occurred to me that some of the exercises we did this month might be good for writing in your journal.  Check them out below in the To Do section.  Also, a lot of what the Wellness workshop has come up with in the past appears in my book Writing Out the Storm (published by St. Martin’s Press in 2002.)

Wellness_community

To Do: (five minute exercises for your journal)

1. Write a list of the pains and pleasures of the past week or month.

2. Write about a childhood experience with serious illness or death.

3. Write about a moment of anger in the past month – what caused it, what did you do, and how did your body feel?  Write about a moment of gratitude.

4. Picture a big pink bubble, and place everybody negative in your life, everything that’s no longer working for you inside this bubble. And then blow it away.  Write about who and what you put in your bubble. This idea comes from My One Night Stand With Cancer by Tania Katan. “It’s a little woo-woo,” she writes, “but I think it’s perfect for the occasion.” (Anne Lamott has a wonderful version of this in Bird by Bird – turning those toxic people into mice and dropping them by their tails into a large jar.)

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