Put yourself right in the present. Start there and that starts the whole unraveling. I choose an event of the day that I felt most strongly about, the most vivid one, the warmest one, the nearest one, the strongest one. That was my method of selection…      -Anais Nin

I thought I’d write something a little more concrete about soul work. A lot of times this interior work feels like being in a little leaky boat in the middle of a huge ocean. Where do we even start and how do we find the next step? Writing is a great way to open up the inside and take a sneak peek behind the scenes. For me it’s the most straightforward way to access what lies hidden, or at least to get a glimpse of what’s going on underneath. It’s an act of creation. We create an idea or a connection we’ve never had before. These connections we make structure our thinking, and become the building blocks that create how we live our lives and move forward.

But our innermost feelings, thoughts, and insecurities can be slippery to get a hold of. They evade and remain hidden. We have to do the excavation on them repeatedly. This process is an on-going one. (Of course it is.) We have to become archaeologists of our lives, stake out our spot, and begin digging. It is mysterious business but this quote from Anais Nin gives a solid place to start from, an event, a feeling, an idea that has heat. This is where we start, and it leads us down into uncharted territory.

Just as Anais said, pick something, an event, a person, an interaction, a feeling, something that happened in the day that ignites a strong emotional reaction. Then get quiet, tap in, and let it unravel. Just let whatever comes out be there on the page. Stay with it, keep writing, let it unfold, let it derail, write nonsense, come back, keep going until there’s nothing left. Then see what you’ve got. This is the jumping off point, the place we work from, to find out what’s going on in those deep, mysterious places within us we rarely think about. From here the excavation begins and we can take that as far as we want. There really is no end to it.

The events or people that stand out show what really matters to us. They lead us to the messages our soul wants to convey. Nin says her diary worked as a way to synthesize her life/persona with who she really was on the inside, her diary brought these two seemingly opposite poles of herself together into an integrated whole. Writing can work this same magic on us as well. The secret ingredient is the level of awareness we bring to it. We cultivate this deeper awareness by writing about what has personal meaning or triggers strong emotion in us. When we’re lost we come back and start with today. What speaks to us in this moment? Forget order, rules, the way you think it ought to be, what we’re looking for is what pulls us in.

Nin was such an incredibly sensitive, thoughtful, and articulate woman. I’ve been reading her lectures, A Woman Speaks, and they are such a lovely summation of the major influences that shaped her life and her writing. So pick up a beautiful journal and start writing and see where it takes you. If you embrace it I can guarantee you will be surprised by what comes out. Don’t be afraid to reread and make connections about has happened in your life, and in your thinking. It is important to go back over it again, it’s like tilling a garden, it creates a fertile place to grow new beginnings.

So much remains hidden if we don’t take the time to connect the dots of our life. When we start writing down what’s important and meaningful to us we make more room for thoughts we’ve buried deep inside. This is exactly what we want to get to, the thoughts we don’t normally have time or space to think about. We want to go deeper, and writing them out helps us find where that energy wants to take us. 

Everyday we could come back to this instruction and see where the writing leads us. Over the weeks and months larger patterns will emerge, connections become apparent. This little exercise done daily will plot a map of what is going on inside, it will get us familiar with the landscape of our interior and help close the gap between who we are in the moment and who we are meant to be in this life.

Happy writing! Happy digging!

kb