The Healing Power of Poetry
A poem begins in delight . . . and ends in a clarification of life . . . a momentary stay against confusion.
—ROBERT FROST
This book is based on the captivating and delightful idea that writing a poem can be a powerful tool for self-discovery and healing. In writing a poem about something that touches us we access parts of ourselves, our feelings, and our motivations that other types of language or exploration often leave hidden. Reading or hearing a poem can open us to new depths of understanding. In both writing and reading poetry we are opening to our own truth and processing it in such a way that healing and liberation can result. Indeed, poetry—like psychological work or spiritual practice—can help us explore and deeply understand who we are and what we are here for.
In childhood we may have been given the gift of an Erector Set or a dollhouse. We learned how to enjoy these gifts and we gained many skills by using them. In school, when we memorized the times tables, we gained information for future use. However, if we were lucky enough to be exposed to poetry by a thoughtful teacher and came to appreciate it, something much more powerful was going on than the gaining of skill or information. In reading it, we were reaping the wisdom of the ages. In writing it, we were using a tool to record and process our experiences so that meanings in them not accessible by mere thought could be revealed. The message of this book is that the power and wisdom of poetry is still available to us, whether we think of ourselves as poets or not.
Poetry may seem intimidating to many of us, perhaps due to our experiences having to analyze or memorize it in school. But writing a poem as part of a process of growth and healing can be intriguing and highly satisfying. Such poetry opens us up to the richness of our inner world and connects us to others, our readers.
Writing poetry to express what we are feeling, to celebrate an occasion, to show appreciation, or to follow any lead of creative imagination is a long-standing practice throughout human history. Events that fascinate or frighten us take us by the hand into valuable self-exploration. This book is intended to help you find the uncultivated poetic talents in yourself for just such an exciting journey. You may believe you have no poetic skill, yet anyone who can write words can compose a poem, just as anyone who can talk can sing and anyone who can move can dance.
In this book, we are reconnecting poetry to its healing and spiritual roots. We are discovering that there is poetry in our souls and it is located right where our growth is. We are hearing the poems of others as messages from the soul of humanity. Indeed, when we read poetry with attentiveness, it becomes a Lectio Divina, a divine reading, a contemplative openness to the revelations that keep coming through to us.
Composing poetry is both a psychological and a spiritual event, because the requirements for writing a poem are like those of psychological and spiritual progress. We must learn to live in the moment. We see them in new ways and focus on what is significant. We expand our freedom of imagination. We locate the many voices within us, realizing we are more than our ego. We hear and express the music and rhythms of the natural world.
In using poetry as a tool for growth and healing, we write in our own way and on any theme. We do not have to write perfectly or for publication. We accept imperfection in our craft. In fact, we write with more confidence when we are not insisting on achieving an ideal. Our only purpose is to put something on paper and then use our skills to work with it so that it says best what we feel, what we perceive, what we are passionate about. In true passion, we are not in control. Paradoxically, this surrender to what arises from within us makes us less self-conscious and more open (which are also aspects of psychological and spiritual growth). We are all already poets in the depths of ourselves—as our image-filled and wildly imaginative dreams show us!
What Is Poetry?
A poem is
a party of
Picture words
an itch for rhythms
in the shy verandah light—
Come anytime,
Rowdy to recite,
Tune-drawn—
It won’t be a big bash
like at the bar down the street—
only we few desperadoes of excess,
versed in startle
and finding yet again
our own asylum from the hullabaloo.
Poetry uses words and phrases like unusual dance twists that we know we never saw before and did not quite imagine possible. As we read and write poetry, we find out how far we, too, can stretch, rotate, twirl, and reshape ourselves. We find our range of movement, our capacity to pause, and our depth of silence.
The dictionary definition of a poem may be paraphrased as “a writing in verse that is arranged in lines using rhythm, imagery, figures of speech, and sometimes rhyme to achieve an impact on our thoughts and feelings.” The word poetry comes from the Greek word poiein, meaning “to make or create,” with a further sense of “gathering and collecting.” A poet creates by gathering and saving the images, ideas, and impressions that strike him. Then he synthesizes them and makes a poem from his own contemplations and distillations. He shares his impression through images and metaphors that contribute to the meaning he wants to convey. Thus, a poem is not only made but found, not only found but shared.
The ancient Romans around the time of Virgil referred to a poet as vates, that is, “a prophet or diviner.” A poem is a form of divination, something that helps us look into what appears before us and see more than what ordinarily meets the eye. A poem can foresee or open us to a meaning that would not be immediately recognized. In fact, the Sanskrit word for poet is kavi, which also means “seer.” To write poetry is to see more deeply.
Making poetry is a revolutionary act. Poems say things and present worlds that do not match the standard versions of reality to which we are accustomed or tied. A revolution frees us from attachment to what has been and the fear of what might be, in favor of what can be. To write a poem that challenges the way things are is to grow in courage through self-expression, an important contribution to our common evolutionary goals.
To read a poem is also a challenge in that we are invited to suspend our beliefs. We have to loosen up. We have to let go of our tight and circumscribed creed about what life should be and how language should work. In this way too, reading a poem is certainly a revolutionary and personally liberating exercise. Poets are not afraid to evoke a new or altogether irreverent vision for themselves and their readers. It takes freedom from fear to allow that vision to come through to us as readers—or from us as poets. Reading a poem may incite us to be rebels, since a powerful poem is an insurrection that we are invited to join.
Poetry is too intimate to be nailed down in strictly linear terms. Reading a poem is more like comprehending a multifaceted totality all at once than like following logical steps to a single conclusion. It is more like entering spirals of possibilities than like walking a straight line to a single destination.
Poetry is a mystery that ultimately defies definition, which is a clue to its spiritual scope. Therefore, whatever I affirm in this book is always open to interpretations. This is what is so wonderful about poetry: it will not sit still or stay put.
In the world of poetry, we are called on to relax our intellect and follow the pathways of mindfulness and imagination. Mindfulness means learning how to pay full attention to our moment-to-moment experience without judgment. When we are mindful, nothing in our experience is rejected as “bad”—whether it’s our feelings, our thoughts, or our physical sensations. At the same time, we don’t cling to any feeling or thought. We simply acknowledge whatever arises and then let it go. The exercises and practices presented in this book will help you to cultivate mindfulness as a tool for unlocking your poetic depths.
One of the most powerful ways to develop mindfulness is through sitting meditation. In mindfulness meditation, we sit and follow our breath attentively. As thoughts arise, we silently label them “thoughts,” and then return our awareness to our breath. We neither suppress nor entertain any thoughts or feelings that surface. We let them arise and evaporate, like bubbles from a glass of champagne. Mindfulness meditation shows us the emptiness of ego, the illusion of self, as we see the impermanence of its thoughts and emotions. We begin to discover another dimension of ourselves where sanity and wisdom abide, the virtues that foster our personal growth and spiritual evolution. Mindfulness is an intense wakefulness, a commitment to live consciously in every moment, becoming aware even of what usually goes unnoticed, such as our breathing.
Because mindfulness involves direct seeing without judgment, it can help us approach poetry in a new way. Our fear of poetry is usually based on a judgment about ourselves. In reading a poem, for example, we might feel incapable or lacking in intelligence if we do not immediately understand what it means. This may hearken back to how we were introduced to poetry in school. When we try to compose a poem, we might immediately start to judge its literary merits and criticize or stifle ourselves. Using mindfulness, we can begin to approach poetry in a way that is far more welcoming and respectful of whatever emerges.
The practice of mindfulness can also become our entryway into the freewheeling spaciousness of imagination. In our imagination we are free to explore any images, desires, feelings, and story lines. We begin to see them all as part of our story. We begin to hold them as opportunities to grow. This leads to a kindly attitude toward our own emotions and worries. Such opening is a pathway into the full breadth of our potential as psychological and spiritual beings. We are opening to ourselves and showing more loving-kindness toward ourselves.
We know that imagining ourselves as winners, or positive visualization, helps us mobilize ourselves in the direction we desire to pursue. So imagination has the voltage to energize our potential. So much of what we are is hidden away or disowned. We usually project our untapped positive potential onto others, especially those whom we strongly admire. This keeps our own best qualities hidden. Imagining ourselves as equal to those we admire is a first step toward the actualizing of our gifts. Imagination is the antidote to disavowal.
What in meditation are distractions if we cling to them, in imagination are inroads into our creativity, and there we have the freedom to cling all we want. We let imagination take over where mindfulness leaves off. In mindfulness we disable the default settings of the ego: the mind-sets of fear, desire, judgment, attachment, control, and illusion. In imagination we play with these mind-sets creatively so that they become something new.
The neurotic ego—that is, the one driven by fear or desire—seeks constant entertainment to avoid really looking into itself. The imagination uses entertaining thoughts, memories, and feelings to access our inner world. In mindfulness we do not react to nor resist our thoughts, we simply acknowledge them and let them go. In imagination we are free to react, resist, or dwell on our thoughts in order to mine them for meanings, symbols, associations, as well as simple pleasure too. The practices in this book include visualizations and exercises that deepen our imagination and thus help us explore who we are.
When we give our imagination free rein, we are becoming poets. Freedom is our watchword here, freedom to express as we please, freedom to choose as we see fit, freedom to play with our illusions rather than dispel them. We come to the desk with the focus we gained from a centered meditation; we write with the freedom of a nomadic imagination. Mindfulness is our first step; release of imagination is our next step.
Like meditation, imagination is also a spiritual tool, since it grants us access not only to our personal images but to collective images and symbols. Some are from our own life and some we have inherited from ancestors from ages past. Thus, the universality and commonality of images is an emblem and indicator of the interconnectedness of all humans. Imagination is a path into that exuberantly relational style and the spiritual wisdom that flows from it. Poetry thus grants us a visa into the world of universal meanings; it combines personal and universal self-discovery.
Poetry as Therapy
Today a form of treatment called poetry therapy is used in some mental health settings for healing and growth. Patients read and write poetry to find new ways of being mindful or relaxed. Poetry can open them to new ways of coping. A poem can lead safely into realms of the unconscious that might be frightening ordinarily. Poems open the imagination to see alternatives to the status quo or to chronic suffering. In fact, every poem takes us into a parallel universe.
The realization that poetry has healing power is ancient in the human psyche. Shamans intoned poems as prayers that could bring help to the tribe or to individuals. In Egypt, as early as the fourth millennium B.C.E., poetry was inscribed on papyrus, then dissolved in a solution and ingested by patients so that their illness might subside. We recall in the Hebrew Bible that David soothed the depression of King Saul with his singing of poems in the form of psalms. A Greek physician, Soranus, who practiced in Rome in the first century C.E., was known to prescribe drama—composed of poetry—for healing. He recommended attending tragedies for his manic patients and comedies for his depressed patients.
For many centuries the connection between poetry and medicine remained in people’s consciousness. Pennsylvania Hospital, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1751, used bibliotherapy, reading and writing, as useful treatments for mental patients. Dr. Benjamin Rush, “Father of American Psychiatry,” believed in the effectiveness of music and literature. In all these instances, the evocative power of poetry and the access poetry grants to emotions and catharsis were appreciated as paths to healing. We can see how poetry opens us to parts of ourselves that may not be found otherwise. In chapter 5 we will see how resolution of problems and the healing of our emotional wounds can happen as we bring our poetry to specific stresses that face us all.
Throughout this book we’ll see how poetry can become a pathway of spiritual growth as well as emotional growth and healing. What do I mean by “spiritual growth”? Contacting our spirituality through poetry does not mean that we must write religious poems or haikus. Any poem can lead to awakening when approached with mindful attention. This is because its subject is the present moment, yet from it arise primordial and immortal images.
When poetry is approached as a spiritual practice, it mirrors the phases of an heroic journey, a central and universal theme in the myths of all cultures. The three phases of the heroic journey are leaving home, passing through struggles, and returning home with gifts. When we sit down mindfully to write a poem, we begin at home in our here-and-now world, with a resounding yes to what is. Then we launch out into the complex, conflicted, yet empowering reaches of our imagination, with all its fears and desires. We struggle to find the words that portray our experience. It is a struggle because, as T.S. Eliot wrote in “Burnt Norton”:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
Finally, we come back up with a poem that speaks to our original condition—and may at some future time speak meaningfully to others too. Writing a poem can thus take us on the same journey that a lifetime takes us on.
Indeed there are many psychological and spiritual benefits from writing poetry, including releasing ourselves from ego inhibition (holding ourselves back) and aggression (criticizing or discounting our potential skills). We inhibit and act aggressively toward ourselves when we force ourselves to be impressive or insist that our poems be perfect or be recognized by others as valuable. When poetry is our personal or spiritual practice, we give up attachment to all that and yet are open to what may result from our writing. We see our human abilities as they are and say yes to them. That yes is all we need to begin—and all we gain in the end.
We do not need Shakespeare’s skill, only his enthusiasm, to write poetry. Great fervor makes us poets already, since poetry thrives on feeling. Professional skill in the craft of writing happens with time. Having passion or fervor means having an engaged, sensuous, and lively curiosity about whatever we are focusing on or whatever is beckoning to us. All of that we can achieve right now. Eventually, we may even realize that whatever we appreciate in a poet we like, we can do too—maybe not as elegantly, but certainly as passionately.
When we employ poetry as a tool for healing and transformation, we come to see that we are not only poets while we are writing; we are poets all the time. Our challenge is to remind ourselves to see with our poetic eye, the eye of yes to presence rather than to any defined or confining reality. Then when we write a poem, what comes out is real, a proclamation of our authentic voice. It sounds original, full of our own unique and lively energy, a joy to discover and release. Creativity is thus our finding in ourselves—and in the world—what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep-down things.”
Poetry makes a great contribution to our psychological work as we write about issues from our present or past. The poetic mode evokes a knowledge and insightfulness that was unconscious before we began writing. We notice how our story or predicament takes on a new significance, reveals a surprising insight, shows an unexpected depth. Writing a poem as we face any personal issue can move us into new realizations and solutions too, another surprising benefit.
A hero is one who has lived through pain, been transformed by it, and wants to share his or her gifts with others. The writing of poetry arises from any and all of those three challenges. This is because poetry can make a “Thou” of any experience. It lifts events from the condition of simple occurrences and brings them into a personal relationship to us. Human events open up into meaning, transcendence, and intimacy when there is a poem to celebrate them.
The hero is a personification of the inner urge in all of us to activate the wholeness that is in us. That is why he was born, why he goes on a journey, and how he fulfills himself. We are that hero and our poetry is most meaningful when it illumines our destiny. That destiny is to let go of our fear-based and acquisitive ego so that we can evolve into who we are when love and wisdom abound. These become the gifts we share with fellow humans. Our unique human story is an accumulation of our experiences. They all contribute to how the journey proceeds and how the world grows with us. Poetry is the perennial journal of the human story.
Poetry makes experience legible. We might join the novelist Wallace Stegner in saying that things do not expand into their full meaning, that events have not fully happened, that places have not been truly discovered until they have found a voice in poetry: “No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry.”
Indeed, any event is incomplete until it finds some creative resonance in us. Poetry is one such instance of that personal resonance, a word that in Latin means “to sound through.” In poetry, our experience sings through our words. For instance, our first child is born and we write a poem to him or about him. As our poem takes on a life of its own, we find a grander meaning than simply that of birth. His coming is a gift to us and to the world, an angelic presence among us, a challenge to us to become heart-expanded parents. All of that was in the depth of our unconscious and it came into conscious focus in the writing of our poem. Our poem arose also from the collective depths, since imagination grants us a grasp of what our forebears guessed at too. Freud wrote, “Not I, but the poets discovered the unconscious.” He went further in this statement: “The mind is a poetry-making organ.”
Yet poetry writing has only the potential to make us more psychologically whole and spiritually conscious. Artists of great skill can go through life caught in addiction or anxiety and in no way spiritually oriented. Their work may certainly tap into spiritual depths, but they do not then choose to live in accord with them. For instance, the music of Wagner is sublime and transcendent, yet he was notoriously mean-spirited and a rabid anti-Semite. Poetry does not work like magic, but it can be useful to our growth when we marry it to practice and commitment.
The awakening that is mindfulness is one of freedom from separateness. The awakening that is imagination is one of recognition of symbols and metaphors that show how realities ultimately coalesce. Some distances we can commute only by metaphor or symbol. In fact, metaphor in Greek means “to carry over.” Poetry transports us from the one alone to the many together, a welcome demolition of the ego’s illusion of separateness.
At the same time, a poem can be born of our ego and be about our ego. We do not have to let go of our ego to compose a poem. We can make our ego the subject of our poem. Just as we move from mindfulness to imagination, we can move from letting go of our ego’s illusions to playfulness in recognizing them and writing from or about them.
As we saw above, in mindfulness we have no permission to indulge our fantasies; in imagination it is a requirement. This is not a loss of our spiritual consciousness but an acknowledgment that our ego remains alive and demands a hearing. Once a spiritual master has let go of ego completely, his poems are not so self-centered. Meanwhile, for all the rest of us, self-centeredness has a place in the writing of a poem, since it is our truth in this moment and leads us to existential truths too. In poetry no subject is verboten. Freedom takes precedence over letting go in this instance.
Writing a poem is also an exercise of freedom since we are released from the usual strictures of grammar and logic. We are ushered into an emancipated space in which we can visualize what is ordinarily contradictory or impossible. This happens because in poetry we can put aside grammatical and syntactical limits and, instead, fly to heights that leave rationality and logic in the dust.
Grammar is about clarity and that is important in communication. But it is also about absolute norms that can homogenize us in such a way that we may fail to find our own voice and all its stirring peculiarities. Poetry is a declaration of independence from the uniform world, from rules that bind us, from rulers that lord it over us.
The literary critic Harold Bloom commented that Shakespeare upgraded the English language and showed us its range while at the same time showing us how to be more human. Plato did the same in Greek, as Cicero did in Latin. Their upgrading of language happened in the context of their offering an upgraded way of being more richly human. There is a direct connection between expanding our range of language and expanding our understanding and wisdom.
Discovering the Poet Within
Something kept itself alive after grammar school. It is the poet within. She lives in utter liberty of imagination, shorn of the restrictive mind-sets of linguistic correctness. This is how new vectors of being and perception appear in that center of the human soul where all life’s radii meet. There and only there are we abundantly ourselves. These lines of Walt Whitman (from his poem “One hour to madness and joy” in Leaves of Grass, 1900) celebrate the combining of our voice and our abundance:
To have the gag removed from one’s mouth!
To have the feeling to-day or any day I am sufficient as I am.
Poetry is a field, like a field of gravity, without strict or restricting boundaries. We are suspended in space, upheld only by artistry. We are not in the safe container of syllogisms or syntax that can be trusted to explain the world to us. Sometimes poetry, even our own, defies full explanation. Indeed, good poems are bottomless. They never yield their meaning fully, perhaps not even to the poet. They are inexhaustible, like Shakespeare, like the art in Rome, or like the love in our hearts.
Those of us who loved poetry from the moment we were introduced to it may have noticed that we were either alone or in the minority. Most of our fellow students were perhaps not so turned on. They may have found poetry useless, boring, intimidating, or incomprehensible. All through life, we have probably noticed that we poetry lovers have remained on the outskirts. Yet, to be marginalized leads to a clearer sense of our own distinctive identity. The less we fit into a parochial and safely conventional society, the more able are we to come upon our own truth and the more likely are we to write our own poems and to understand those of our fellow poets. Poets bud when they find authority in their words, no matter how unaccepted, misunderstood, invalidated, or unnoticed by the conventional world.
In our day, poetry is still in the subculture. It has not made it to the top of the list of priorities. It is the “extra,” the warm moment at the presidential inauguration, the poignant cry at the offbeat poetry reading, the toast at the wedding. But it is not yet as impactful or as necessary to us as our consumerism. This is quite different from ancient times, when the poetic voice was thought to be such a powerfully revolutionary force that Plato, who loved poetry, suggested that all poets be banished from the ideal and well-ordered state.
Nonetheless, poetry is experiencing at least a partial rebirth. We find poetry readings and slams (or competitions) everywhere. We listen to songs, every one of which is a poem. We browse the Internet and find hundreds of poems. The margins are wider now than in our school days.
Excitement about songs is the equivalent of a love of poetry, since the lyrics are poems. The motivation of the thousands that attend rock concerts is not only about the appeal of music but of poetry too.
In this new environment, we can learn so much by listening to other poets who bravely voice their feelings and realizations. They offer new forms of self-help, since we find mirroring of our own experience in their words and challenges to widen our own souls in the confessions they make. We hone our own voice as we listen to those of others like—or unlike—us.
What follows in this book is an invitation to you to try your hand at writing poetry and to open your mind to reading it in a new way. There are many exercises that may help you write better than ever and appreciate others’ poems more deeply. You will, as well, discover yet another inspiring and surprising path to psychological growth and spiritual practice. Finally, and most encouraging of all, you will be set free from what may be a stunted imagination and you will watch breathlessly as your soul opens into a sky.
The dancing feet . . .
The songs and vibrating rhythms
Of our dancing Lord,
Imitate them all and bliss is yours.
—MAHADEVI, TWELFTH CENTURY (MY TRANSLATION)