Writing as medicine
For many years I struggled with endocrine and hormone imbalances.
The process by which I found healing included a long path of different modalities… modalities which eventually became the beginning of The Mind Key Project almost six years ago.
The most powerful modality, however, has been writing. Writing, in fact, is how the Mind Key Project began. Perhaps writing has helped because it provided emotional perspective, processing and release. But there’s more to it than that. Writing has also offered a real, physical healing as well.
The body is an amazing machine. From the moment of conception, it is creating, maintaining, regulating and regenerating. Mind Key began under the premise that the body contains all the answers an individual needs to attain perfect health. The question is how to access these answers.
Throughout my life I’ve known that my mental and physical health worked with (and oftentimes against) one another. Stress induced illness. Depression elicited deterioration. Exercise promoted mental wellness. Eating regularly – finally – all but cured the severe depression that drugs only acerbated. Taking yoga classes alleviated symptomatic stress and anxiety. Eating healthy helped me achieve balance.
Each person has their own path to follow, however. One modality of health is never right for everyone. Many alternative health care practitioners revolve their practice around accessing the unconscious workings of the body (think respiratory, circulation and other life-sustaining systems) and in this way discovering an individual’s personal health plan. But years of schooling or access to such a practitioner is not the only way to access one’s innate knowledge.
A college level course introduced me to focusing, a process of visualizing issues, whether it be emotional/mental or physical, giving them form, sound, scent—and then writing these visualizations down. After accessing and giving form to these issues and writing them in a place we can access fully, we have the conscious ability to discovery the cause of the issue, and change those experiences.
For me writing has always been as a form of connection between the conscious and unconscious mind, becoming a way to access and discover many answers—including those to health. It also became a way to hear those things I otherwise ignored—a place to discover meaning in the signs around me, to hear my guides, and to unravel mystery.
Make no mistake, for writing to be medicine, it often needs to happen in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The inner editor (i.e.: the ego) needs to be put aside for the moment. Blogs, academic papers, social media posts, and generally anything that is being written for an audience doesn’t count. Not that healing pieces of writing can’t be put out into the world, but the only audience needs to be oneself, or at the very most a trusted friend. Think journal entries, letters, and wishes. The most healing writing tends to be that which can be burned moments after being written. Of course, often this is when we discover our most brilliant self, and we often discover gems in this automatic-type writing that is worth sharing with the world. They key in writing for medicine is to throw that thought away the moment the pen hits paper.
