Discovering Your Truth
Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves, and there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours.
—ERICH FROMM
The most exciting part of finding out who we are is discovering our own uniqueness, who we are “outside the box,” beyond the categories in a Psychology 101 textbook. In our inimitable singularity, there is an infinite range of possibility that cannot be tied to any one description of what it means to be human or healthy. Just as our fingerprints are one-of-a-kind, so is our identity. Each of us is a once-only articulation of what humans can be. We are rare, unmatched, mysterious. This is why the quality of openness is so crucial to our self-discovery. We cannot know ourselves by who we think we are, who others take us to be, or what our driver’s license may say. We are fields of potential, some now actualized, most not yet. Poetry goes to that quarter of what humanness is about. It is what openness looks like on a page.
There is a natural and inviolable tendency in things to bloom into whatever they truly are in the core of their being. This process is sometimes called autopoiesis, which means “self-creation” or “self-organization.” We come into the world with certain talents and gifts. These seek activation in our own unique voice and in our own manner. All we have to do is align ourselves with what wants to happen naturally and put in the effort that is our part in helping it happen.
The object-relations therapist Margaret Mahler wrote, “There is in us an innate given, a thrust toward individuation, which seems to continue during the entire life cycle.” The drive in us to self-actualize is irresistible and fully connected to the unflappable urge of the universe to evolve through each of us. Something bigger than us wants us to evolve. If as children we were parented with what I call the “five A’s”—attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing—we blossom more readily into the people we were meant to be, because we have a sense of our own self-worth and are continually activating our powers. If we were not nurtured with the five A’s of love, we are challenged to do the work it takes to heal and advance ourselves. Writing a poem can be part of that practice. (Later we will revisit the five A’s with a specific example and its application to writing a poem.)
Poetry is what words want to do so that they can release far-reaching realizations—or gentle intimations—about the vast uncharted terrain in ourselves. Our poems are how we find ourselves attentively, acceptingly, appreciatively, affectionately, and with full allowing of all that we are and can be. In other words, poetry is a pathway of autopoiesis.
Finding Your Authentic Voice
Finding our authentic voice is a path to self-realization, and our poems offer a wonderful way of making the journey. This is because all that we do and all that happens to us can be the subject of poetry, with nothing left out. Poems arise from every chapter of any biography. A poem may articulate an emotional experience that is attractive or repulsive. In that sense, a poem makes all life events and predicaments equal and fosters equanimity in the face of life’s blows or kudos.
Success in life is finding and declaring our own truth in our own way. Presenting our authentic voice in our poems is of greater value than having our poems published. Giving precedence to articulating our true voice flows from contentment with who we are right now. A poem is one way our true identity opens, and it is a joy to let that happen. This is how our writing a poem to contemplate or explore our experience can be life-giving, that is, produce more of the life that we are.
When we write a poem, we may be surprised at the variety of voices that emerge from us. Indeed, there are many voices in us. Some are unique to us, arising from our own life story. Others are universal, since they reflect archetypes from the collective human story. The creative process is an activation of many archetypal images and an elaboration of these images into metaphors about ourselves and our world. This is just how it is in the evolutionary lifetime of beings like us who are too vast to be depicted in portraits. We are galleries, after all.
When our sense of ourselves is tied to one story from our past, our full voice cannot emerge. When we work through our past issues, we discover new unexplored sectors in ourselves. This is how our psychological work on ourselves can contribute to the growth of our imagination. A one-note story about who we are keeps us limited in range so that we are less likely to sing with what John Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale” called “full-throated ease.”
Finding our own voice includes the discovery of the darker continents in our psyche, which we may have only guessed were there, and naming them, as explorers do. One of the scariest universal human archetypes is the negative shadow, the side of ourselves that may be unacceptable to the conventional world, the side that may be unappealing even to ourselves. It is unconscious and disavowed, but writing a poem often accesses that darkness and evokes it into the light. Then we can work with it and find ways for it to become an ally. Creativity and imagination are our midwives in this process.
We have a positive shadow too, a side of us that holds an incalculable treasury of gifts, talents, and potentials that we may not believe could possibly be in us. A poem can gain access to those heretofore disowned and recondite riches. Thus our shadow is the mother lode of our creativity. What lies waiting in my darkness beyond what I allow myself to think?
Poetry writing can release both creative shadow sides of us and produce images that reveal them or let them finally speak. In this way, writing a poem can correct the one-sidedness of our ego by exposing and integrating what has been overlooked in our personality. We do not plan this. Our writing of a poem kindly deceives us into a more remote precinct of ourselves. The pen draws some unconscious data up into consciousness. Now we are hearing from some of our disparate but native voices. This is yet another example of how personal discovery and what happens in the composing of poetry are intertwined.
Henry David Thoreau said that if one sits in a clearing long enough and quietly enough, soon all the animals come out of the woods and present themselves. When we chase after experience or run away from it, we miss our chance at such a festive visitation. This friendly event is just what can happen in mindfulness and imagination. We sit in the here and now and then open ourselves to the images that want to greet us. We meet the many faces in us that want to be in our album. We sit to invite; we sit to welcome; we sit to include.
We can see our inner life as a playroom in which every energy and archetype of humanity can find camaraderie and even amusement. Once we let go of the importance of like and dislike, we begin to include all the selves that we are, each depending on the causes and conditions around us. We let go of the idea of a single self at the controls, and our true identity reveals itself to be an amphictyony, a word referring to a group of states that cooperate, especially in the care of temples and shrines. Our true presence is indeed a sacred marriage.
Discovery and integration of our submerged selves is an empowerment and a fortification, because now we know ourselves all the way rather than only halfway—the half that the world approves. Now we can bravely acknowledge our fears or longings no matter how unappealing they may seem to us or how they may repulse others. Our poems can then become our emancipation proclamations. This may be what Pablo Picasso meant when he said, “Art helps us seize power by giving a form to our terrors and desires.”
Writing poetry is full permission to find, explore, and confront our true selves—quite a challenge. Once we are free of constraint, inhibition, or ignorance of our own truth, we can open fearlessly to who we are. This is liberation from the limits of our constricted ego. We have nothing to fear in what may arise; it is all rising into the light so that it can become useful for the revelation of our own truth. The poet Matthew Arnold wrote, “Poetry is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man, that in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth.”
Our core self is the reality of us. It is often not safe to show, yet it waits to be found by us and others and embraced with the five A’s. That embrace makes for safety. Poems are so often the best vehicle for an exposition of the true self. We are not on guard, that is, caught in the default setting of the scared or defensive ego. We open ourselves from the heart, the locus of our spiritual powers.
To write poetry is certainly initiatory as we go through the pain of hunting for the words that can say exactly what we mean. The result of our conscientiousness is access to a world beyond our ordinary limits, where just the right words and images fly in. Indeed, the twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens said that a poem is “a meteor.” To live through struggles in life is also initiatory. The result of our conscientious work on ourselves to become more psychologically fit grants access to a world beyond our usual limits, where meteors abound!
Becoming a Fair and Alert Observer
Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song. . . .
—WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF MYSELF”
Writing a good poem—a poem that is meaningful, healing, or liberating—requires a candidness about ourselves and a loyalty to our experience. We let ourselves appear just as we are with all our gifts and limitations. We avoid the tendency to sand down the rough edges of reality in order to make it cosmetically pleasing. We give up trying to moralize or push our point of view onto others. We avoid the tendency to tie things together with a bow rather than to say yes to the unkemptness we may be observing in reality. Finally, we do not simply copy what we see but give our own take on it. Then we are witnesses, not thinkers; we are “wide receivers,” not “tight ends.”
Our minds work in many ways. Two ways that stand out are thinking and witnessing. For instance, we may think about learning to swim, then study our options, and finally arrive at a well-thought-out decision about which swimming class to take. At another time, while crossing a bridge, we might see a person drowning. There is no time to think. We simply see and jump in the water to save the person in crisis, whether or not we have swimming skills.
Our thinking mind conceptualizes a specific take on reality and then may present it as a truth. “Message poems” can come from that quarter. The style of our witnessing mind is awareness. When we sit in meditation, focusing on our breath and not entertaining thoughts, we are not thinkers but witnesses.
Mindfulness increases witness consciousness. Then we can see all that happens to us without an attachment to permanent definitions but rather with an openness to what wants to come through to us in the present moment. This is precisely the requisite and preparatory course in the writing of poetry from our own reality but with no attempt to force our view on others. Writing poetry helps us grow, because it is an art of contact. It does this by preferring here-and-now experience to formulated message, immediate awareness to lengthy conceptualizing.
We are ready to release our imagination into poetry as we empty ourselves of the need to be sure about things, to take refuge in the tried and true, to follow accustomed pathways, or to get the rightness of our point across. It is not that having a message is wrong in any way. It is appropriate in any form of communication, including poetry. It is problematic when we are forcing our view on the reader rather than simply sharing it. Here, too, we see how the rules for a good poem are the same as those for a healthy style of communication in general.
Mindfulness helps us in all this because it opens our perception to the present moment rather than miring us in conceptions about it. Writing is entering the reality of something like an explorer, with no preconceived notions of what the landscape will look like. We are brave enough to remove what the poet Shelley called “the film of familiarity” so that we can see something new and newly.
Freud recommended that the analyst maintain “free-floating [that is, evenly spread] attention” during the therapy hour. This means paying attention but without any single focus. We may thereby allow our consciousness to move openly without stopping anywhere in particular. Such free-floating attentiveness is a form of mindfulness since it fosters a limitless, moving, spacious presence rather than a narrow, ego-driven focus. We let in what is but with no attempt to debate or evaluate. We simply float and flow with what is happening, internally or externally. Freud’s intuition about the usefulness of free-floating attention can help us expand both our spiritual practice and our entering into the poetic mind.
When you finally get it, there’s no place for it but in a poem.
—WU PEN (779–843)
EXERCISES
Getting Started with Poetry
We will not be discouraged by anything except not writing at all. We will be successful when we remain committed to continual practice. After all, in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna has encouraged us to “let go of the fruits of action but never the action itself.”
Jumping in and writing a poem, no matter how amateurish the result may look, may prove more valuable than waiting for inspiration or studying poetic forms. Here are some helpful exercises to get you started.
Choose an image or object that appeals to you. Apply the “five A’s” of mindfulness to it: Pay close attention to the object with no attempt to change or improve it. Accept the object as itself, not attempting to jimmy it into a position that fits your agenda or projections. Let yourself feel an affection for and an appreciation of the object. Finally, allow it to speak to you in its own words.
For example, you might be looking at an apple and notice it has a gash, is not so red, or is lying on its side rather than straight up. While you’re holding this apple in your awareness, you might recall that you like Macintosh more than Golden Delicious apples. Let go of your preferences and any need to rearrange the apple and simply let it be what it is, as it is. In this mindful space, you are ready to hear what the apple itself has to say to you. Then write what you hear in lines not paragraphs, phrases not sentences.
Sit silently for a few moments. Silence does not mean that we are mute. It is an attitude of listening to our inner world while we are not talking or getting lost in thoughts. Silence is a path to witnessing and becoming more aware. Breathe in while forming the image of opening your mind. Breathe out with the image of relaxing your body. Do this several times and then write automatically without thinking, using short, poetic lines. Then rewrite as you see fit.
Try a walking meditation in which you stride slowly, rhythmically, and deliberately with no specific destination. A walk in nature with attention to what you see, hear, and smell can be a form of walking meditation. Compose a three-line poem that reflects anything that you felt, noticed, or learned. For example, you noticed a pine tree standing alone and thought of how alone you feel sometimes. You were touched by a sense of courage in how the pine tree stood. You write, “Pine tree, you look brave standing alone.” You can also write it this way:
Pine tree,
You look brave
Standing alone.
Later, you can play with these short lines. For example, the word pine might make you think of the word pining. You also like the o sound in alone; it seems soulful. So you change brave into bold since it, too, has the o sound. Now your poem looks like this:
Consider these words by Wallace Stevens, from his poem “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”:
Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake,
. . . a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.1
Freud said, “The body never lies.” We can trust our bodies to bring us authentic news about who we are and are becoming, what others mean to us or can mean, what the world is doing to us or how it asks us to help it evolve. Pay close attention to your body and its sensations. Notice how each of your five senses reacts to the world, to others, and to events. Keep note of these reactions and build poems from them.
Wallace Stevens wrote, “With my whole body I taste these peaches.” Inspiration can arise from our bodily reactions to everyday events. Carl Jung referred to the body as “the densest part of the unconscious.” Thus, we can begin to appreciate bodily sensations, feelings, even symptoms, as sources of inspiration, a spirit of creativity breathing through us.
For some people, stopping and paying attention to the body can be daunting. We might find that our body has become a storehouse of painful memories. Or perhaps we feel numbed by our life experiences. It’s worth noticing that the body combines opposites: it holds tension but is also a resource for healing, as happens when taking deep breaths relaxes us. We no longer have to think of our bodies as a repository of painful memories. We can discover that it offers equal opportunities for healing. Writing about what our body is feeling or telling us opens that treasury.
Notice your sensations and bodily reactions and write short poems that identify the felt sense and felt mood of them, a bodily resonance that describes what you feel. Do this with no motivation to change anything, only to report the many dimensions of your experience.
An important path to finding out who we are is knowing what we really want. Here is a simple exercise that may help you get there. Ask yourself these three questions: What do I want to start doing? What do I want to stop doing? What do I want to keep doing? By answering these three questions, you are auditing your life to see if it is in keeping with what you really want to be. Answer each question in your journal, writing in any way at all. Look at your entry three days later and revise it if necessary so that each of your responses is authentic—neither too grand nor too minimal.
Two days later, rewrite each answer so that it becomes a challenge to you and is specific about how your life can change to reflect your deepest needs, values, and wishes accurately. One day after that, rewrite your journal entry in poetic lines and as empowering affirmations. Then place your poem in a place that will be visible so you can remind yourself to look for ways to put them into practice. You can trust that synchronicities will occur, that is, challenges will arise that match your affirmations and call you on your commitment. The universe has joined you in your evolutionary plan. Your path comes to meet you; you don’t have to wait to find it.
Authentic tidings of invisible things,
Of ebb and flow, and ever-enduring power . . .
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, “THE EXCURSION”
1. From The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).