When I was teaching writing at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio while raising two teenagers, assisting in-laws who lived in Ohio move through their final years, as well as completing a three-year process of certification as a poetic medicine practitioner, I often felt overwhelmed by all I was trying to respond to thoughtfully and with empathy. How to stay focused and present one day at a time?
A haiku with a single, resonating image sustained me. Written by American poet James W. Hackett, it simply says:
Deep within the stream
the huge fish lie motionless
facing the current.
When I first read this aloud, I noticed feeling calmer and more grounded within my body. As a year-round swimmer, I feel at home within water, so I related to the fish instantly. I pictured a large, silvery fish within my core, providing a source of balance as I faced the currents of my responsibilities. If I felt caught in a whirlpool, I could stand still, and make mindful contact with this inner fish. I could hold my own. Through this haiku, I internalized an image of quiet steadfastness that spoke to my body and my spirit. During years of constant change and a series of losses, I mindfully attuned to my inner fish many times, enhancing my emotional equilibrium. This is poetry as medicine.
Poems emerge from deep listening, from the poet paying deep attention to both ordinary and extraordinary happenings in the world. Poems also emerge from deep listening inward to intense experiences that burrow into our bones, and to the barely audible voice of the soul. Thus, when we slow down to listen to poems already written, and to hear the unwritten poems within ourselves waiting to be heard, we come into contact with our own inner truth, our own soulfulness.
Even more than the medicine I have received from internalized guiding images from the poems of others, I have received healing and spiritual expansiveness from my practice of writing poems. My poems have been crucial to processing childhood trauma, pregnancy loss, death of loved ones, outrage at social injustice, witnessing the decline of elders due to various illnesses, and relational struggles. My poems also attune me to the constant presence of the natural world with its cycles of seasons of dormancy, emergence, flourishing, and decay. My poems help me feel held within a transformative order mirrored by the natural world.
Cultivating an inner haven where we can hear our soul speak, and receive our soul’s imagery is vital to cultivating our resilience and equanimity as well as our capacity for discernment. A writing practice can build paths to and from our soulful centers through truthful, heartfelt, mindful, body-infused words. This wordful practice enhances our access to our soul’s imagery, messages and energies. By writing down what we experience and receive from our sacred center, we can continue to receive this sacred sight—integrating the soul’s knowing into our awareness.
Guiding and inspiring us through this process are carefully curated poems. Think poems with rhythms and metaphors, pauses and sensory experiences. Think poems that speak clearly to personal experience, offering their words as a way for you, for us to write our way toward inner havens. This process of being with poems as medicine is not about analyzing a poem for its literary devices and meaning. This process is about allowing ourselves to feel life forces within the words as alive, and speaking to us through the words. This process involves us to listen with our bodies as well as with our hearts, minds and spirits. No experience with studying or writing poetry is needed.
Join me on November 1 from 1:00 – 5:00 pm at Prairiewoods Spirituality Center for a deeper discussion: “Words Make a Way Inward to the Soul”. You may register at www.prairiewoods.org.