Mark Matousek – Writing as a Spiritual Practice

Every life is a work of fiction. Behind our worldly mask is an essential self — a soul identity — whose powerful voice communicates our unique truth and deepest desires. Many of us suffer from mistaken identity. Until we access this soul awareness, we’re split off from our own true nature and distanced from our gifts, passion and purpose. This week, we’ll be exploring the gap in our lives between how we show up in our writing (and the world) and our true authenticity, and how to examine it through self-inquiry.

You’ll learn to:

• Gain access to your soul identity.
• Identify your authentic desires.
• Discern the ego’s voice from your soul voice.
• Listen to creative counsel from within.
• Consider your life myth from a soul perspective.

The first step toward authenticity is surveying your secret life. Without exception, each of us has one — that vicinity of self that is yours alone — filled with memories, totems, obsessions, longings, dreams and vulnerabilities. This inner refuge contains a wellspring of inspiration and self-discovery. The soul loves specificity, intimacy and subjective uniqueness. This week, we’ll be inquiring into our own secret lives, and how they provide us with wisdom and balance.

You’ll learn to:

• Build an inner refuge of wisdom.
• Examine the obstacles to this refuge.
• Transcend shame about your shadow.
• Connect with shadow wisdom (this is where the juice is).
• Identify your secret passions.

The tension between fear and desire determines our quality of life. To live passionately, we must learn to walk this edge between both. But how is this possible? Our impulse toward control often prevents us from venturing through fear toward our deepest longing. How can you surrender control and abandon yourself to desire (without hurting others in so doing)? When is it wise to listen to fear? Why are you afraid of things that you crave (and vice versa)? This week, we’ll be looking at this interface between fear and desire: How we walk this line — and sometimes tumble over it into passion — and the role of moral conditioning in this dance.

You’ll learn to:

• Identify where fear arises.
• Isolate where fear blocks desire in your life.
• Step outside the moral matrix that binds soul to ego.
• Practice the “art of abandon”.
• Understand a non-dual approach to desire.

From a soul perspective, what does your life really mean? Do you wonder whether you matter or not, and for what purpose you have been born? Our quest for meaning is hard-wired in us. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion, and from these stories, we derive meaning. Without meaning, life’s tribulations lose their power to transform us. As Viktor Frankl famously taught, suffering without meaning equals despair (S-M=D). This week, we’ll look at what our existence means (to ourselves and the world), where our sense of purpose comes from — and how to harness our energies to reach higher goals.

You’ll learn to:

• Locate your personal source of meaning.
• Overcome obstacles to meaning in your life.
• Strengthen your commitment to purpose.
• Connect your personal meaning to the greater good.
• Reconstruct your life myth to accommodate authentic meaning.

When Viktor Frankl was in Auschwitz, it was the hope of seeing his beloved wife again that gave his life meaning. The power of love enabled this great psychiatrist to survive. Love is the greatest mystery — our very reason for being. Why, then, can it be so enigmatic, unstable, unpredictable and challenging? The answer is that love is a practice. Like every practice, it is often difficult and requires discipline, commitment and tolerance of discomfort. This is how love yields its joy, “against the grain,” in the Buddhist saying. This week, we’ll be using our writing to plumb the mystery of love in its myriad varieties — passionate, platonic and familial.

You’ll learn to:

• Access your soul’s power to love.
• Heal from breaches of love in your life.
• Appreciate the variety of love relationships you have.
• Accept the shadow in love.
• Reaffirm love for your precious existence.

The soul is a power source. We plug into this source through intention. Intention shapes and guides us through life, holds our aim, keeps us on our path. The world is full of brilliant people whose lives would change dramatically if only their intentions were focused. Without that, there’s no creativity. Manifestation requires single-mindedness. This week, we’ll learn practices for focusing, and strengthening, personal intention in order to reach our goals.

You’ll learn to:

• Focus your intentions.
• Find the path of least resistance to what you desire.
• Stop procrastinating.
• Practice kind and consistent discipline.
• Commit to your own dreams.

Each of us is born with a unique gift. The Romans called this gift our “genius.” We come into this world with a “tutelary deity” that guides us toward our own fruition. The deity is our soul itself. When we free this soul, we liberate our inherent creativity and the inborn offering waiting to be born. If you do not offer your gift to the world, it will never truly exist. But what is your particular genius? What will the flowering of your soul be? In this module, we’ll learn about efflorescence (what Christian mystics called “viriditas”) — the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” — and how we fuse with this power in daily life.

You’ll learn to:

• Identify your personal genius.
• Understand what its voice is telling you.
• Fuse with your creative genius.
• Manifest the gifts you were born with.
• Connect these gifts with the world around you.

In this intimate dialogue Mark will be talking with his friend and renowned playwright Eve Ensler about the challenges and joys of memoir writing, their different approaches to spiritual practice, Eve’s recent book In the Body of the World, and the transformative power of telling the truth.

Eve Ensler, Tony Award winning playwright, performer, and activist, is the author of The Vagina Monologues, which has been translated into over 48 languages, performed in over 140 countries. Ensler has written numerous articles for The Guardian, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Utne Reader, International Herald Tribune, Glamour Magazine and Marie Claire as well as a regular column in O Magazine. In November 2009, Ensler was named one of US News & World Report’ s ”Best Leaders” in association with the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at Harvard Kennedy School. In 2010 she was named one of “125 Women Who Changed Our World” by Good Housekeeping Magazine. In 2011 she was named one of Newsweek ’s “150 Women Who Changed the World” and The Guardian ’s “100 Most Influential Women.”

In this session, Mark speaks with renowned writer Natalie Goldberg about some of the many secrets she has picked up during her mega-successful writing career. Learn how a good writing practice is like a good business practice — you want to have integrity, know who you are and know what you want. Natalie also shares how getting beneath the surface of our everyday thoughts through writing reveals what we truly think, who we really are and what we want. She also emphasizes the importance of writing with others to help maintain your commitment to your writing practice and shares many ways to access your writer within.

Natalie Goldberg is the author of Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within, which broke open the world of creativity and started a revolution in the way we practice writing in this country. The book has sold over one million copies and been translated into fourteen languages. Since then she has written nine other books, including the novel Banana Rose. Her New Book, The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life With Language, is a brilliant distillation of the True Secret workshops that Natalie has been giving for years near her home in Taos, New Mexico and around the globe.

An inspirational conversation with the renowned poet, Jane Hirshfield, about why writing is a sacred practice and the relationship between mindfulness and creativity. This session will be a great complement to your deepening journey.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six books of poetry, most recently After which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her work also includes a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, and she has edited and translated The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan and Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women. Hirshfield has received The Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, and the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal. In the fall 2004, she was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. She has taught at UC Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and Bennington College.

Hear firsthand from Julia Cameron, the grand dame of writing and creativity, about the transformative power of writing. Julia is well known as the creator of Morning Pages, the daily practice of jump-starting your day and your writing by putting pen to paper each morning to allow your unconscious to flow forth and your writing voice to be released. Julia finds that by its very nature writing is transformational and the more writing we do the more closely connected we become to a higher power or the muse. When we write and begin to articulate our thoughts, we get those thoughts out of ourselves and can look at them more objectively. This session will be a great support in learning to use writing as a direct avenue to self-discovery, a form of solace and the foundation for transformation.

Julia Cameron is an American teacher, author, artist, and journalist best known for her book The Artist’s Way. She started her journalism career at the Washington Post, then moved on to Rolling Stone. She met Martin Scorsese when interviewing him for Rolling Stone. They married in 1975, collaborated on three films, and divorced in 1977. Cameron’s memoir Floor Sample details her descent into alcoholism and drug addiction, which induced blackouts, paranoia and psychosis. In 1978, reaching a point in her life when writing and drinking could no longer coexist, Cameron stopped the drugs and alcohol, and began teaching creative unblocking, eventually publishing The Artist’s Way, which has sold millions of copies worldwide.