Writing To Heal: The Therapy of Handwriting

Writing as therapy, let your pen be the doorway to your soul

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There’s a crazy little secret I’m going to tell you about living a good life — one that simultaneously fills you up and shines a beaming light of inspiration on everyone around you. It starts with writing your heart out. It ends with awareness, insights, “aha’s,” and healing moments that will blow your socks off. Yes, you can write your way to your best self. Go get your pen.

Avid journal lovers know that writing can and will feng shui your soul.

The journals I’ve kept since I was a teenager are a treasure chest… a raw collection of emotions, dreams, hopes, desires, and hormones. Three decades worth of stories later, I’m here to teach you how to use writing as a simple and powerful tool for awareness, growth, and healing. Get ready to uncover your best self, the one that is ready to help heal the world.

My journey to passion and power has brought me to this realization: Writing is how I heal. Change and healing come from awareness. Every time I pull out my journal or click out my thoughts on the keyboard, I make room for divine, creative flow. Once you embrace this secret, trust me, you’ll want to buy stock in Evernote.

When you’re living a life that feels heavy, depressing, resentful, or hopeless and you’re giving in to consistent voices of shame, fear, doubt, and unworthiness, it’s time to wake up, be brave, and heal your shit. It’s time to release the negative feelings — the ones that keep you up at night and make you dread getting up in the morning. You have big dreams and they don’t include living with all this heaviness. So something’s got to change.

Change begins by connecting with the most powerful healer and intuitive guide available: YOU!

You have it all already inside of you — an inner wisdom, a healer, a guide. They are all there, just waiting for you to listen. Their language is feeling, sensation, and emotion. Ready to learn a new language?

Let’s dive in. Try this. Sit quietly and relax, feet on the floor, shoulders down. Take a deep breath and arrive with me here in your body as you read these words. Notice the sensations. What do you feel? What thoughts, sensations, feelings, or emotions are you aware of? Relax into and soften your body. You may not have been in there for a while.

Now grab a sheet of paper, pen, and timer. Set the timer for five minutes and fill in the blank: I feel ______. There are no rules to this kind of writing. Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, grammar, or complete sentences. You’re connecting body to mind to pen. Let whatever’s there flow onto the page without censoring yourself. This is just for you… so let go and just write.

I’ve learned in five minutes of writing that we can move our energy from inside to outside just by putting our thoughts on the page. As we read our words, a tiny piece of healing occurs. When the writing comes from awareness of your body, it becomes the voice of your soul, a source you may not have known was available to you.

Your stories matter. Get them down in writing. If you feel compelled to burn them later, burn them. Whatever you do, don’t block your inspiration and flow by staying paralyzed. Seizing the action of writing pulls the plug. Go ahead and let yourself feel the rush as ideas, thoughts, inspirations, hurts, memories, and shifts come through you. Open up full throttle and let it all spill out onto the page.

What do you do once you’ve written it, read it, and felt it? Don’t start to panic about the huge insight you’ve just gained — do some tapping! If you haven’t read Nick Ortner’s New York Times bestselling book, The Tapping Solution, run, don’t walk, to those pages and start tapping on what came up in your writing. This combination of kick-ass healing tools will forever change the way you think about your life and what is possible.

Without awareness there is no choice. 

~ John F. Barnes

Barnes, a wise healer, teaches that everything available to us for joy and healing resides in our ability to observe ourselves; we just need to give ourselves permission to feel it all. When I write I allow that presence to guide me. The freedom of being whole and perfect despite my imperfections unleashes my soul. Awareness is the path to passion and power. The act of writing my stories, dreams, ideas, opinions, experiences — and especially my feelings — is a special form of awareness.

Grab another piece of paper and set your timer for five minutes. Take a few really deep breaths, and let your attention and focus be with the sensation of your body and the movement of the air into and out of your belly and lungs. Fill in this blank: I need to give myself permission to feel_____. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t get stuck on the prompt itself. No rules, just write.

Now sit back and read the words you’ve written. Notice the sparkling jewels of awareness sitting on that page. If you’re really brave you can try reading them out loud to a friend, someone you can have that kind of discussion with. Notice how reading the words makes you feel. Notice everything.

When you walk through the door of awareness, you gift yourself with the most powerful tool there is to uncover the layers smothering your soul and paralyzing your dreams.

When you write from this place of awareness, you’re transcribing direct messages from your intuition. Thinking about your problems won’t help you connect with that source. Feeling them and writing about them will.

If you don’t own a journal, go buy one today. Begin your own journey to passion and power by setting aside time every day for writing. If you’re already a writer, then go write more. Stop thinking about writing and just write. It doesn’t matter if it’s great or if it sucks. Be willing to write stuff that isn’t good. Be willing to hear your inner critic and write anyway. Be brave. Be willing to write the book that isn’t the one people will read. Then sit back and watch the magic unfold as you discover how the simple act of writing transforms you, heals you, and shines a light on everything you desire for your best self!

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You may also enjoy reading A Walk On The Wild Side: Nature as Therapy by Celeste Orr