I want to share something with you about creativity and its source.
It really has to do with creativity, about the place from which our creativity flows, and about how we long to communicate with each other what is inside of us and how difficult of a task that really is. And on some level, it is about the (truly) unconditional love and understanding that holds us as we attempt this communication. Even when we feel we haven’t been understood, on some level something is always understanding. Even when we feel as if we haven’t been loved, something is always loving us.
When I first offered Writing Raw, I wrote something out to read on the very first call, hoping to answer this question for myself first:
What is Writing Raw?
And then on one of our calls this week, I was asked this question. And, so, I read what I wrote a few years back…
Writing Raw is writing from the edge of experience. Writing from the Soul. Writing that is formed in its own way and form that does not (have to) fit any currently acceptable writing format (e.g. essay, poetry, paragraph sentence, word. Writing that comes out of something else, first, before the words form.
Writing Raw has no particular outcome or result is intended. Instead, it is simple to deepen your capacity to listen, to feel, to hear, to open to and receive what is emerging from within your own body and soul so that it can be shared into this world.
Writing directly from these sources: sensation, internal images, visions, feelings, and the sense using guided visualization and  sense-guided exercises, and (not included on our calls) music and movement.
Writing Raw is learning to trust in what you sense is here, trusting that it will tell you what it is, trusting in the unseen and what you know and sense.
As I read the words aloud, my awareness moved down into this place from where words arise, a place deep within. And, out of this question and my sincere response, something opened up in me – a place that I’ve felt before, but never so clearly and powerfully. And my writing in this same session reflected this place…
My voice reverberates throughout my body,
Liquid words rising up out of
This dark pool of Being,
The ground of all that is.
As I hear my words, I feel
A velvet sense of love here, a radically kind presence,
Simple in its being, always
Holding me in radical kindness.
Bathed in Understanding, no matter
What I write or say, I am understood.
This radical kindness holds everything close, in love.
Nothing I do can push this presence away.
There is no away. There is no away.
And so,
I rest,
Here in this kindness,
A speechless wind on my lips.
And then in the next writing,
Held in this Absolute Understanding,
I am free. I am gradual ecstasy.
Nothing holds me but love,
A radical kindness that never leaves.
Nowhere to be found and everywhere, too,
I am
Held in nothingness.
Loved in everything.
Kindness finds its way into my cells,
Always fluid, in flux, changing
With the breath. Up and down.
Rise and fall, heart echoing against these nowhere-to-be-found walls.
This dance between worlds appears in words
And the spaces in between, each word
A wholeness in itself, each word
A world coming into being, that dies away as soon as it comes.
There is no solidity, and yet
We communicate.
Me to you and you to me,
Passing words back and forth
In the hope of landing in a place of
Understanding for just a moment,
In the hope of standing,
Together on some small patch of ground.
I share this with you because it has been so hard to articulate what Writing Raw is and offers. I see it is the nature of what we are doing – learning to write from a place that is before words, learning to trust in what is unseen yet felt and intuited.
I know the other women on the call felt this place of radical kindness and understanding. I could feel that we found this understanding between all of us, for just a moment, together standing on this small patch of ground, for a moment, just a moment, until it changed with the next breath. But what doesn’t leave, doesn’t change, is the radical kindness and deeper Understanding that is love at its core, as well as the sense of connection and community that flowers when we share from this place with one another.
This is where we write from. This is Writing Raw.
We have finished our first week, yet you can still join. All of our calls are recorded, so you can catch up by listening and writing to these recordings, and by entering into our Facebook group and introducing yourself.
Find out more and register here.
