Teaching Methods: Write Free!

Writing as Spiritual Practice: Embracing the Middle Path of Jnana Yoga

A significant aspect of teaching meditation involves writing and eventually presenting material to students. While spontaneity plays a role in addressing questions, we must also be prepared to articulate the topic clearly and concisely, while remaining true to our personal experience and the lineage of the practice. This essay aims to teach you a new way of approaching the writing process that is both Yogi and Academia approved. The concept couldn’t be simpler— writing from the heart, free from the never ending editing of our minds. But how and why we do it will take some explanation, as well as time to practice. The goal is that this method of writing will not only make your writing and presenting of meditation concepts clearer and more effective, but it will make the writing process a new extension of your spiritual practice, giving you new tools and motivation to find your heart amidst the swirl of external reality.

Writing Free (of the mind)

The method we're employing in this essay originated in 1973 with Peter Elbow's book "Writing Without Teachers," where he introduced the concept of 'free writing.' Since then, it has become a staple in writing curricula across colleges, including where I first encountered it. Free writing challenges the conventional notion that writing is merely a tool for expressing pre-formed ideas. Instead, it acknowledges that often we write to discover and articulate our perspectives on a topic. For instance, when tasked with a 500-word essay on "Mantra and the Mind," the possibilities are endless, reflecting our individual experiences. As we delve into writing about mantra and the mind, our initial ideas may evolve and transform during the writing process. This dynamic exploration is not only acceptable but essential for genuine creativity. Free writing encourages us to embrace this journey of exploration, prioritizing discovery over immediate refinement. Initially, it may seem daunting, with the temptation to refine ideas prematurely. However, we often find that clarity emerges naturally as we engage in the process. An apt analogy is likening our approach to letting a plant grow before pruning it—allowing ideas to develop before attempting to shape them. Later, we'll delve into the editing process, but for now, our focus is on nurturing your topic organically through free writing.

The Practice Over Time Equals Free Writing

Jnana Yoga entails using scripture and philosophy to reveal our true nature. We are taught to understand wisdom as something that is revealed through surrender, rather than created. This can be confusing when writing— if we don’t write something on the page how can we reveal the wisdom? And if we write something how can we get out of the way? This is the middle path of being a yogi in the world. You do your practice, and then you seek to access that practice while in the external world. As the Sutras say, you ignite the spark, and then eventually the spark goes out, and then you re-ignite the spark, and then it eventually goes out, and in this way we grow. Practice is not about being perfect, and its not about being ‘done’, its about being willing to do the work over and over again— that’s how we build an amazing inner mechanism, and the art of writing and teaching about meditation is no different.

The challenge of writing from the heart is the same as the challenge of practice itself— our attention continually drifts into our patterns and thoughts while we write and practice. Staying focused on a topic and keeping our attention in the present while we write takes practice. Just like it was challenging to keep your focus on your mantra during your first 108 repetitions, it is hard to keep your focus on your writing during your first 108 words, or 108 essays. But, just like mantra, each conscious repetition strengthens your capacity to do it with more awareness. As Sri Shambhavananda teaches, “You should focus on what you are doing. An unfocused mind is a sign of a weak mind. We have been conditioned by our culture and by the media and all the technology that we have to seek more and more input, information, and stimulation. That makes our minds flabby. To focus our awareness and attention and keep it on one thing is a forgotten skill in our culture…It is important to be present in the moment. Then all of our psychic and emotional debris arises. If we don’t glom onto it, the debris loosens up and begins to dissolve. I know it makes us feel uncomfortable to dissolve some things, but that is what we must do to grow” (SP, 13).

Teaching Teaches

We might ask ourselves, why write about it at all, why not just meditate. That’s true, you don’t have to write about meditation to become enlightened. But the act of teaching might actually be the very thing you need to reach the next level in your practice. The sage Bharadvaja, which you may recognize from the yoga posture Bharadvajasana, sequestered himself away to meditate and study the sutras for many lifetimes, until one day Shiva showed up on his doorstep to inform him that teaching was the key element to bring all of this knowledge into perspective. As Babaji often says, ‘teaching teaches you what you don’t know’, the act of teaching will force you to recognize what you are missing, and break you free of your patterns. Perhaps this is also why numerous studies on learning efficiency conclude that the best way to learn anything is to teach it. We retain 90% of information when we teach it, and only a mere 15% when we listen to a lecture. The Shiva Sutras summarize this in their own way, teaching that when we meditate we may attain a state of samadhi, or inner focus, and that when we come out of our practice that focus may be ‘destroyed’ by the inferior outer world, but it is in the act of reaching back in, within that outer world, that gives rise to the Supreme nature of the Self. As the Shiva Sutra 3.24 teaches, “When a yogī, in coming out from samādhi, also attempts to maintain awareness of God consciousness in the objective world, then, even though their real nature of self is destroyed by the inferior generation of self-consciousness, they again rise in that supreme nature of the Self.” Writing from the heart is an incredible training ground to do just that.

Identifying Head from Heart

Similarly to our practice, we can’t force ourselves to be centered, we can only recognize a wandering mind and re-direct it over and over again. At first you may not recognize the difference between writing from the head and writing from the heart, you may not recognize a wandering or frustrating mind— you may feel like ‘writing is always hard and frustrating, that’s just how it is’. One key indicator of whether you're writing from your head or your heart is the experience you have while writing. If you feel rushed, or are ‘trying to finish this thing’, you’re likely writing from your head. However, if you can sense your breath and feel a sense of contentment, you're writing from your heart. Its not that different from the way we practice mantra— why rush through a mantra? What good does it do? Quality over quantity is true in all forms of practice. This distinction is especially evident when writing by hand, as handwriting offers more quality control than typing. Rushing is often more apparent in handwriting, as rushed writing can be illegible. Additionally, the way you grip your pen can reveal whether you're writing from a relaxed, surrendered space or a tense, gripping one.

Gotta give it time

Most of us have only written essays for school, and for many of us it was a very tense process, often involving late nights, stress and coffee. I remember a time in college when I thought a paper was a due, spent all night writing it, and then found out the next morning it was due a week later. When I actually had time to sit with it, and re-write it, it became a really enjoyable process and felt like a completely different assignment. We hope you can make extra time in your life to allow writing to take on a new shape for you as well.

If you have ever had the experience of writing about an experience you had, you know what free writing from the heart is all about. When you re-read this kind of work you can feel that connection and you trust your work. Even if the work has grammatical errors, or isn’t as concise as it could be, those heartfelt journal entries seem to abide by an astral level of poetic license that lives above the by-laws of literary analysis. This doesn’t mean your presentation is a stream-of-consciousness poem, it simply means that your work is flowing from the heart with minimal editing by the head. The only way to allow this kind of open hearted writing to unfold is to give yourself time to explore it.

The Practice Itself

So let’s get practical — how do you begin to make writing a part of your practice? Here is one way that has been recommended in formal writing settings, and has been used by myself for years in preparing meditation presentations.

Always start with your actual meditation practice. If you have not done any mediation practice that night, then you should prioritize your normal evening practice and sit for the time before writing. If you have already done your practice previously that evening, then sitting for 5 minutes and working directly with the practice you are writing about should be sufficient.

Try to keep your pen and paper nearby so you can transition smoothly from sitting to writing. Take care as you begin writing to stay connected to your breath, to notice the quality of your grip on the pen (handwriting is recommended highly), and try to let yourself write steadily without hurry worry. If you don’t know where to begin, just start writing that you don’t know where to begin, write about your day, just let yourself write. After the ten minutes, or more, is complete, put the pen down and actually read what you wrote. Underline what worked, where you really said something that matters to you, and allow that to be the opening direction of your next writing session, stating a proclamation that really matters to you, “Mantra is…”, or “The Mind is…” for example. If the work drifts a lot from the opening line, that’s fine! Re-read it at the end as ask yourself which direction you want to go in now, then the next day, or right then, you try that direction.

After 3 or 4 sessions, you will naturally start to feel your concept take shape. If you have the time you can do multiple session in one day, or you can take a day for each session, that’s up to you. As you progress, certain quotes, resources, and/or anecdotal life moments that helped point you in your direction become clearer. At this point, you can lay out a few notes and quotes, reviewing what direction you want to go in, and then start your final session. Guess what? The final session will also be in the form of a free write! No way!? Yes Way! You will take the final free write and small edits for clarity, and that will be your paper. In the future we will talk more about editing, opening lines, outlines etc, but for now, the work is letting yourself write free.

To recap the process:

1. Practice and Reflect: Reach for a new level in your personal practice, and watch yourself doing it. Pay attention to what motivates you, and how you work on and off your cushion.

2. Write Free & Regularly: Set aside time each night to write about your experience with mantra, and the teachings that motivate you, in order to find your path and teachings on the topic. Use your practice to stay connected while you write. You might not need to say as much as you think.

3. Re-Read and Re-direct: Read your work, underline what works. Respect the space you wrote it from and see what resonates. Start your next session with a strong statement, and let the work take shape. Shape and Re-shape over the course of 3-4 writing sessions.

4. Final Free Write: Put your notes and quotes in front of you and let yourself write the final piece in one straight session. It might not be perfect, that comes later, but it will probably be a huge upgrade.

At that point, just type out your work and post it in the comments section of the blog titled “Your Essay.” Normally a 5 minute presentation is around 500 words, but that is a just a rough estimate that changes with each person’s talking speed. Plan to submit this any time before the start of class.

KonalaniAugust 5, 2021Comment