At the end of this week, I’ll be heading to the Oregon for the Earth Joy Writing Book Tour! I’ll be blogging here daily to share insights, discoveries, and images…

Today we move into the third step of our deep, mindful listening process. (See the last two posts for the first two steps.)

Step 3: Now listen to yourself.

We cannot really listen to our deepest selves until we learn to listen to others.

That friend who always talks about herself?

And how boring and annoying she is?

It’s because she doesn’t really listen to the world or to others.

So after spending some time in mindful listening for the last two days, now we are ready to move to listening to ourselves.

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Write in your journal for 1 minute in response to each of the following statements.

Time yourself so you put sacred boundaries around your writing. 

This will enable you to go deeper, knowing that the time is limited and you must go directly into the truth of what you want to say and that you will be able to come back up from that deep place of truth fairly soon.

Write whatever comes. Do not censor or criticize or cross out. Keep writing. Allow yourself to say what needs to be said.

What I want to say is…

I am afraid to write about…

I dream of writing about…

If I had the courage, my writing would focus on…

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I’d love to hear how you are listening more deeply today. Leave a comment below and let me know how Earth Joy Writing is helping you understand the importance of listening to others in your own life.

At the end of this week, I’ll be heading to Oregon for the Earth Joy Writing Book Tour! I’ll be blogging here daily to share insights, discoveries, and images. But in the meantime.

It’s Monday. Back to work. Back to shuttling kids back and forth to camp.

As we continue to reflect on mindful listening today, we take another step on the journey we began yesterday.

 

Step 2: Listen to someone else. You may have someone in your life you take for granted. Perhaps this is an acquaintance or a neighbor that you are friendly with but have never really listened to before. Perhaps it is a complete stranger who catches your eye in the subway or a coffee shop. Perhaps it is a dear friend or family member that you haven’t contacted in a while.

Decide that for ten minutes, you will listen.  Really listen.  


Try to hear the song underneath the song that they are singing. 

What are the feelings behind the words that they are saying? 

How can you listen in a way that lets this person know s/he is being heard?

How can your listening be a gift that enables this person to sing a deeper, more meaningful song?

 

After listening, turn to your journal to reflect on the experience. What did your companion say? How did you listen in a new way? Were you quiet or did you respond? What came out that was enabled by your mindful listening?

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I’d love to hear how you are listening more deeply today. Leave a comment below and let me know how Earth Joy Writing is helping you understand the importance of listening to others in your own life.

In a little over a week, I’ll be heading to the Pacific Northwest for the Earth Joy Writing Book Tour! I’ll be blogging here daily to share insights, discoveries, and images… Today we reflect on the importance of beginning to listen.

 

Humans are not very good at listening. We can prefer the life of the mind, and in our minds, we can get stuck in a loop of listening to ourselves telling the same stories over and over.

“I have to say yes to this obligation.”

“There’s not enough time for self-care.”

“I can’t be my true self at work.”

In the next three days, I will share 3 Earth Joy Writing steps to help you listen more mindfully.

           

Step 1: Listen to the world. Spend some time today listening to all the beautiful sounds all around you. Start where you live. Listen to the hum of your refrigerator filled with food, or the heat in your building keeping you warm.  Listen to what is always vibrating in its own beauty that you don’t usually take the time to notice.

Then go outside. Listen to the birds.  The traffic. The airplane overhead. Perhaps you will hear children's voices.  Music on the radio.  The wind in the trees.

Now go about your day, your ears opened to all the beauty that we take for granted and overlook in the world.  Listen to your own heartbeat.  Listen to the silence between the sounds.

Realize that the world is making music for us all the time, and in order to be in harmony, all we have to do is listen with open ears and an open mind.  After spending a day listening in this open way, take ten minutes to record what you heard. Try to list every sound you remember. You might find that the sounds themselves live on the page, too. You might find yourself writing a poem—or a song.

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I’d love to hear how you are listening more deeply today. Leave a comment below and let me know how Earth Joy Writing is helping you understand the importance of listening in your own life.

In a little over a week, I’ll be heading to Oregon for the Earth Joy Writing Book Tour! I’ll be blogging here daily to share insights, discoveries, and images… As I think about heading out on this path, I onvite you to reflect on your own.

We make many choices in our lives based on chance, history, inheritance, and contingency.  These are choices that are largely determined by circumstances out of our control, and they have consequences for our individual and collective futures. 

This is where Earth Joy Writers are when they come up against a “path block.” Most of their choices have been largely determined for them up to this point, and now they must decide for themselves which path to take next.

When we realize the path is up to us, and we accept the freedom that is inherently ours, it is as if a parallel path opens for us, one that is both higher and deeper than the daily path we have been walking.  It is a path that every living thing on earth also walks, and it is eternal, endless, and universal. From this higher perspective of freedom, we can begin to make new choices more easily.

Take some time to discover this higher, deeper path for yourself by journaling in response to the following questions:

Where do you want to be at the end of your life?

What would you want to know that you have accomplished?

Is there a place you've always wanted to visit?

Is there something you've always wanted to do?

What is missing from your life right now?

What would it mean to have lived a good life?

What can you do to make a step toward that good life?

What first step do you need to take for yourself?

When Earth Joy Writers have done this exercise, they have discovered the freedom that comes from claiming one’s own path in life. They have made decisions that opened them to doing the deeper work that they always wanted to do but held themselves back from because it took them in a new direction.

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And I’d love to hear how you are clearing your path for your greatest work. Leave a comment below and let me know how connecting with nature and journaling through Earth Joy Writing is helping you understand how much freedom you really have and where you are going on your own path.

In a little over a week, I’ll be heading to Oregon for the Earth Joy Writing Book Tour! I’ll be blogging here daily to share insights, discoveries, and images…

In the meantime, I thought I’d reflect on what it means to move forward on your path.

One of the stumbling blocks Earth Joy Writers come up against at a certain point in their life is what I call “path block.” This usually happens, ironically, after a big success.

I understand this block and I have experienced it myself. Nature even gave me a literal experience of this block one day many years ago when I was walking in the woods behind my house and the briars and brambles around me stopped me in my tracks. I thought to myself, “It would be so much easier if I had a path.”

I looked down and there on the ground was a hawk feather. I picked it up and realized I must make my own path.

Allow me to share with you how Earth Joy Writers can transform this insight of making your own path into action that propels them forward.

The first step comes through understanding that all the natural elements around you-- the stones and mountains and grasses and trees and creeks-- are not “things.” They are not opposed to “culture.” Instead, they have helped co-create culture and they hold the stories of culture.  They even hold biological knowledge that pre-dates the human. 

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Look out your window at whatever is around you right now.  Do you know the history of the tree closest to you? Do you know what was there before the time of humans?  For me, my back yard, which is now over a hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean, was once the edge between the land and the sea.  Knowing this allows me to imagine a time, perhaps as a result of global warming, when it might be the coastline again.  This knowledge changes my relationship to what is there.  The land is no longer a timeless thing but rather a changing and temporary subject. 

In short, it is alive.

Just as you are.

This next step is to conceptualize our creating, not as something we do by “using” nature and “applying” natural principles, but as something we do with nature. This kind of collaboration means opening to nature as an equal partner in our human practices and learning from nature as a teacher.

Go out to a place where you can sit with an element in nature surrounded by human culture.  Look for nature in unlikely places, no matter how small-- it could be a tree beside a busy city street, a creek running under a bridge, or the hedge that divides your yard from your neighbor’s. 

Once there, sit and listen.

Watch.

Pay attention.

Be present.

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I’d love to hear how you are clearing your path for your greatest work. Leave a comment below and let me know how connecting with nature and journaling through Earth Joy Writing is helping you understand how much freedom you really have and where you are going on your own path.