Free-writing - let yourself flow

I recently took a short online course with Mary Reynolds-Thompson , who is an author, facilitator of poetry and journal therapy, and certified life coach , and who you can find out more about here, https://www.maryreynoldsthompson.com

After four years of writing a book, I wanted to come back to freedom in my writing, without worrying about structure and order and just to write directly from my heart and allow the words to flow through my arms, hands and pen onto paper.

Below is a piece of free-writing I did as part of the course. Free-writing is where you write without stopping - no pausing, no editing, just pure writing. it doesn’t have to be “good”, it doesn’t have to make sense, and this means it can act as a way of freeing and loosening up your creativity and sense of flow. Just in the way yoga becomes rigid and forced when we impose postures on our body, all forms of creativity can dry up and become stilted when we inflict notions and beliefs on what we “should” be doing.

I invite you to take some time today to enjoy and explore free-writing. My starting point was “I believe…” and you could also use this as a springboard, or perhaps choose something to focus your writing on, such as the sky, a tree, a flower. Put out of your mind worries about spelling and grammar and purpose and just let the words flow.

I’d love to hear how you get on…

“I believe in…

I believe in the power of words to open up my soul and awaken new knowing that I could not have possibly thought up myself. I believe in the vastness of the sky and its ability to remind me how amazing it is just to be alive right now. I believe that in the goodness of people and also the darkness, and how little we truly know. I believe in God, or words to that effect. I know this can make me feel both lonely and incredibly connected at the same time. I believe that watching flowers grow teaches me patience, that the birds fill my heart with delight, that the river encourages me to remember that we are all returning to the course, and that, in the rarest of moments we may experience the aliveness of our world and how nature is aware of our very presence and our presence is in fact another form of Nature. 

I believe in grief and fatigue and anger and hurt. I believe in love and hope and evolution of thought. I believe I am so tiny, so small, so insignificant at the same time I believe I am part of a whole which is so incomprehensibly beautiful but which would not be whole if I were not here. I suppose, then, I believe in contraindications, in contrary-ness and confusion. Perhaps I believe confusion is mysticism and mysticism is confusion! I believe that to rest, to reflect is to renew and restore, and I believe so much that this is what I need, perhaps this is what so many of us need, I believe humans are evolving away from earth to air, to thought to meaning and value over pure materialism. Although in fact I don’t believe that at all. I believe the older I get the less I know and I know this makes me anxious. Yet I believe that deep deep down past my tired body and worn out mind that I am being “emptied out for some new arrival”. I believe that it is a wild and precious life. And I hope to find the courage for this life force to move through me. “

Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash