Creative awakening leads to meeting the sacred, however we define that in our life. When you open to this deeper dimension through writing, it reveals the universal aspect of personal experience and the higher tier of human emotions. By looking at what sacredness means, we can see why a sensitivity to the sacred is hardwired in humans as part of our survival toolkit. Time affects this experience, and we need to slow down in order to awaken to our spiritual nature. The hallmarks of sacred experience are wonder and awe, and these emotions change us cognitively as well as spiritually. It’s helpful to have faith, and by knowing our faith story, we can articulate the narrative we use to explain who and what we are in relationship to the cosmos.
Until now, your writing practice has focused on psychological shifts. But understanding the mind takes you only so far. As you’ve learned, by using Witness awareness to unpack mental stories, there is more to who you are than your thoughts and beliefs. Mysteries exist beyond the mind in a spiritual dimension that words can’t capture, but can point the way toward exploring. When you use language as a path to spiritual awareness, writing becomes a sacred practice that leads you through doorways to a self-transcendence that you might not have known could exist.
Anthropologists tell us that human beings cannot survive without a sense of the sacred. We have a need for purity and sacredness—a link to the transcendent. This link to what lies beyond the five senses has helped our species overcome an animalistic existence. Without sacredness, we lose connection to a divine source—however we define that. Whether we believe in God, Buddhanature, or the sanctity of family, art, or nature is of little importance. What matters is that we find sacredness somewhere and use it to link to our loving heart.
It’s often the simple, everyday things that come to hold sacred value. Years ago, I asked a class to write about what they held sacred in their own lives. One woman wrote about a dusty, old, dried rose she kept in a vase on her window sill. Her family members wanted her to throw away. “I’d never do that,” she insisted, “it would break my heart.” That rose was the last flower she picked in her father’s garden before he died. It had become more precious to her than worldly belongings because it was a link with her beloved parent. The sacred is always connected to love and may not have any worldly value. Even when there’s group consensus that something is sacred, it’s our individual emotional connection that determines what’s truly sacred to us.
The sacred connects us to what is most tender and expansive in ourselves. When you write as a way of strengthening that connection, your practice comes to include the transcendent. The importance of this expansion cannot be overstated. We live much of our lives lost in a trance of attachments to past and future, cut off from spiritual awareness. We are rarely fully present to the miracle unfolding in front of our eyes: this precious, irreplaceable moment. Your writing practice forces you to see what’s happening now; it pulls you into the present, reminds you that life is fleeting and sacred, and encourages you not to waste the time that you have. Writing can help you locate the sacred by revealing what fills you with wonder.
Writing is a sacred practice that leads us through doorways to a self-transcendence that we might not have known could exist.
Anthropologists tell us that human beings cannot survive without a sense of the sacred. Without sacredness in one form or other, we lose connection to a divine source—however we define that source.
The sacred is always connected to love and may not have any worldly value. Our emotional connection determines what’s sacred to us.
The sacred connects us to what is most tender, expansive, and loving in us. Spiritual awareness is part of an awakened life.
Does writing help you feel more connected to what you hold sacred and meaningful? Are you using your practice to connect more deeply to your life? These are critical questions to explore as you enter this new phase of sacred practice and widen your lens to include spiritual experience. These deepening practices will help you move forward.
When you rekindle sacredness in your life, you learn to pay attention in a new way. With Beginner’s Mind and eyes that are open to wonder, experience fills you with awe. Awe and wonder are hardwired in our repertoire of higher emotions, and enrich our life in innumerable ways.
Sacredness inspires awe at the grand mystery of existence. The more you write about what you hold sacred, the more vivid your awareness of awe becomes. This helps open the doors of perception, your portals to higher consciousness and awakens you to wonder. As with sacredness, our species is hardwired for awe and wonder. We need these higher emotions to cope with the mystery of all that exists. The body and mind respond to awe in particular ways. Goosebumps are an example, as they prickle up in the presence of things that overwhelm us.
The emotion of awe occurs when two things happen. First, we perceive something physically vast (like the Milky Way), conceptually vast (like a grand theory), or socially vast (like great fame or power). Second, this vast thing can’t be contained by our existing mental structures. Stopping to wonder, our mind is changed cognitively and this creates a sense of space, where new meanings, perceptions, capacities, dreams, possibilities, powers, and insights are born within us. Our most ordinary moments become qualitatively different. In James Joyce’s novel Stephen Hero, his protagonist describes an experience of epiphany as the moment when “the soul of the commonest object…seems to us radiant.” When our perception is changed, so is our world.
Awe is the alarm clock that nature uses to awaken us. We need a slap, climax, or epiphany to stop our ordinary mind in its habitual tracks. Writing helps us set this inner alarm clock by preventing us from sleepwalking through life. Trevor was an engineer who was suddenly laid off when the company he worked for went public. He had a life-insurance policy that provided for psychological distress, so Trevor was living comfortably with his family in a suburb. His life was good, all things considered: Trevor had his health, a happy marriage and family, and time to figure out what to do next. The trouble was that the wonder had gone from his life. “With every option, I can see the end from the beginning. Like it’s already doomed, so why bother? I never thought I’d lose that job and can’t get myself to take the next step. I’ve flatlined, psychologically speaking. The spark is gone and I can’t get it back.” I asked Trevor to write about an experience of awe or wonder that affected him in a lasting way. The next day, he sent in a vivid description of his daughter’s birth.
You can’t take it in, it’s too miraculous. Your brain stops and everything starts going in slow motion. You can see every tiny detail—it’s all accentuated somehow. The piercing sound of my wife’s screams during labor, her clutching my hand so tight it cut off my circulation. Then the top of Mandy’s head and the doctor pulling her out by the shoulders, and then the blood. It was a mess but I was ecstatic and my wife was crying and then it was over. The doc handed the baby to my wife. Then she handed Mandy to me and nothing was ever the same. The world had changed. I was a dad. It was pure magic.
The difference between this ecstatic mood and Trevor’s dull-as-dishwater tone in the first assignment suggested how writing could help him. I asked him to write more about his daughter. In the next six weeks, Trevor wrote one emotionally charged piece after another. Here’s how his writing practice affected him.
Writing about Mandy is lifting me out of my hole. Misery can crowd out other feelings, but when I write about Mandy the love feels stronger than the fatalism. There’s hope in it. I love my daughter’s spirit. She lights up the room. She’s the best of my wife and me combined. When I think of her, I know there’s a reason to get through this. Not for her—she’s fine on her own—but for me. I’m still in awe that we made this person. Nothing’s different—I just went to sleep. And I’m ready to wake up again.
A few months later, Trevor decided to return to premed, which he’d abandoned to become an engineer. He described looking through a microscope in biology class and being awestruck.
When you reconnect to your own amazement, the wonders of the world come alive again. Your vision is intensified and so are your feelings of gratitude for being alive on this glorious planet. Reflect on these realizations as you write about awe and wonder in your life.
Sacredness inspires awe and wonder at the miracle of earthly existence.
Awe occurs when two things happen: when we perceive something vast and when this vast thing can’t be contained by our existing mental structures.
Wonder changes our mind cognitively. When our perception is changed, so is our world.
When we reconnect to our own amazement through writing, the wonders of the world come alive again.
Your perception of reality is deepened and broadened by awe. Your self-awareness and writing are illuminated with the presence of wonder. Learn to rest in unknowing, aware of how little you actually know about who you are, why you’re here, and what this universe means. Wonder requires that you stop to smell the rhododendrons. Stopping to do so can be a challenge, and a hyperactive life can interfere with your sense of the sacred.
Awe doesn’t happen when we’re on the run. It doesn’t happen while we’re multitasking either, just as we can’t write while our hands are busy doing other things. If we want to feel wonder and sacredness, first we need to slow down and stop. The body needs to come to a standstill. The hyperactive mind that skitters around like a maniac and robs us of inner peace needs to cease activity.
In Travels with Epicurus, Daniel Klein wrote about how powerful slowing down can be. A native New Yorker, Klein went to the Greek island of Hydra to contemplate how to live a meaningful, pleasurable life as he aged. He was fascinated by how the Greeks enjoy their days, especially a group of very old men who met daily in the local taverna to gossip, play cards, and drink retsina for hours on end. They delighted in each other’s company and were oblivious to the passage of time. One day, Klein noticed that the oldest of the men was fingering a string of komboloi, what are commonly called “worry beads.” He asked someone whether this ninety year old was a worrier or a religious guy doing his rosary. Klein’s friend explained that on Hydra, komboloi are used as a tool to space out time, make every minute last, and savor the slowness of being.
This is so different from our clock-watching culture, where time is a foe that is always running out. By making time the enemy, we turn existence into a marathon race we’re bound to lose. Klein contrasts the Greek approach of savoring time to his aging friends in New York, the “Forever Youngsters,” who were beating back time by getting face lifts, hair plugs, and ulcers—fleeing their shadows and living in fear.
Humans have lived in harmony with time for the greater part of our history. Most spiritual traditions acknowledge that time as we understand it is an illusion. In early Christianity, there were two kinds of time: nunc fluens (eternal time) and nunc stans (clock time). Eternal time never runs out, while clock time is always diminishing. We mostly experience the latter kind, but most of us have had moments when we lose track of time: being in nature, making love, reading a good book, getting lost in the flow of some creative work. We slow down and touch the eternal now, like the old man with his komboloi. Your writing practice can also be used to slow down the passage of time. You savor the words as they slide off your fingers. Slowing down enough to meet yourself on the page, you create the space for insight to open. You access a subtle dimension of being, the same one you meet in meditation. This encounter deepens your ability to do honest self-investigation and then reflect on what you have written.
Of course, we’ve largely forgotten this in our postindustrial age. That’s why Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now caused such a sensation. It reminded us of the present moment and a sacred attitude toward time. I had a chance to ask Eckhart Tolle about his enlightened approach to time’s passage. We were sitting alone on his porch in upstate New York, watching squirrels play on the lawn. Eckhart explained, “When we are caught in the timekeeping mind, we think our lives rather than live them. But when we quiet the mind, we can be present. Right now. In this very moment. When we can yield, accept, and be open to our lives, a new dimension of consciousness opens up.”
I asked him how present-moment consciousness changes our behavior. “If action is possible or necessary, our action will be in alignment with the whole and supported by creative intelligence,” he told me quietly. “Circumstances and people then become helpful and cooperative. Coincidences happen. If no action is possible,” he explained, watching a squirrel climb a tree, “we rest in the peace and inner stillness that come with surrender. We rest in God.”
This describes what happens in writing to awaken. You show up for your regular practice, quiet your mind, and become aware of the present moment. This presence helps you open to whatever needs to be written that day. It enables you to accept the writing as it is and get out of the way. When you do this, writing will flow more generously, “supported by creative intelligence,” and the truth will reveal itself without being forced. You’ve aligned yourself with the power of now and time will cease to matter so much. As writers, we long for these blessed interludes—which can only happen when we keep showing up.
The next time you’re writing, try removing all timepieces from the room. If you work on a computer, put tape over the clock. Notice the freedom that comes when you do this. Be aware of how your mind and nervous system slow down, and how your writing changes when you drop into your deeper waters. I suggest you do this whenever possible and bring your full attention to the writing at hand. You’ll be surprised by how much more you know—and have to say—once you’ve quieted the thinking mind.
We need to slow down before we can feel wonder and sacredness.
By making time the enemy, we turn existence into a conflict.
Writing can be used to slow down the passage of time. It puts us in touch with the quiet, lesser known regions of our mind where wisdom is waiting to be uncovered.
These deepening practices will help you stop watching the clock and become immersed in the process of self-inquiry.
As you slow down, you begin to notice things you’ve never seen before: details, peculiarities, moments of beauty. Then you can bring them to the page. You begin to think about topics like faith, what you believe in, and how you imagine you came into being spiritually. Not biologically or psychologically. Existentially. This will deepen your inquiry into faith.
By slowing down, we cultivate a sacred awareness of life in the present moment. This leads us to wonder about the nature of existence itself and how the universe was created; in other words, the question of faith. In the same way that each of us has a biological creation myth about the family that brought us into the world, we also carry a spiritual creation myth about the genesis of life itself.
Faith points to our personal story about the metaphysical realm; it is the existential narrative that buoys us up in times of darkness. This story may rely on articles of faith put forth by an organized religion. Or our faith narrative may be more open-ended and secular, free of allegiance to a creator God, yet open to the power of mystery. Faith can have more to do with trust than dogma. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” He was pointing to faith as surrender to what we do not know.
Scott was struggling with a crisis of faith. He was a lapsed Catholic, living in a happy, long-term, gay relationship. While once devoted to the church, he had left it to be a freelance seeker, sampling various spiritual traditions, but was having a hard time finding one that fit. When I asked Scott to describe his own core beliefs, he was at a loss at first.
I was raised with a rigid ideology and rituals for every occasion. I loved them all when I was a kid! The Eucharist, the prayers, the incense. I was an altar boy and sang in the choir. The church was a magical place to me. My stairway to Heaven. But then I realized I was gay—an abomination in their eyes—and had to become an apostate. This left a gigantic hole in my life that’s yet to be filled.
I asked Scott to elaborate on the details of his personal faith—not his relationship to the church. This time, his writing was more penetrating.
All of us are children of God. No one and nothing is a mistake. I have faith that we all have a place at the table and that anything that contradicts love cannot come from God. How does life reproduce on planet earth? Through love. How do you help someone heal when they’re hurting? Through love. So God and love must be one and the same. When I look at my husband with an open heart, that must be God coming through me. That’s the only thing I believe in, but I need a faith community. I want to worship with other people. Jesus said, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I.” That’s what I want more than anything.
I asked Scott to write about what was stopping him from seeking out such a community. That’s when the plot thickened: Scott’s husband was also a lapsed Catholic, but Ed was bitter toward any institution that rejected his lifestyle. He had vowed never to set foot in a church again, which put Scott in the difficult position of having to choose between loyalty to his husband and his longing for spiritual connection. “I feel guilty because I’m jonesing for Jesus but Ed is so antiestablishment. I can’t imagine going back to church without him. Home is what I need right now but how could it feel like home without him?”
To Scott, faith and home represented two different kinds of family. He didn’t know how to integrate the two without sacrificing something, or someone, he loved. I suggested he respond to this writing prompt: “Is there a third position that might satisfy both kinds of belonging?” Scott’s answer surprised me.
Your question filled me with shame and self-judgment. When I asked myself point-blank what’s really bothering me, it turned out that it wasn’t about Ed at all. It’s not that I can’t feel at home in a church if he’s not with me. I can’t feel at home in a church that isn’t Catholic! That’s what I miss most—those rituals, those prayers, that atmosphere. The bottom line is that I have a hunger that my husband can’t satisfy and doesn’t share. Ed can make his own decisions; I’m going to find a church that will have me. My faith is still there, but it needs a context.
This realization was a godsend for Scott, clarifying his questions about faith and dispelling the myth that Ed’s lack of interest was Scott’s central problem. The last time I heard from Scott, he was “auditioning” a couple of Catholic churches where his lifestyle wouldn’t be an obstacle.
Everyone has faith in something. Some put their faith in science. Others have faith in the power of art, or nature, or what the poet John Keats called “the holiness of the Heart’s affections.” There’s a story about a disciple who went to a spiritual teacher and lamented the absence of faith in his life. He’d been praying for a sign or vision to help him through his spiritual crisis. When he expressed his hopelessness to the teacher, she smiled and asked him, “What do you most love in this world?”
“My granddaughter,” the man replied.
The teacher instructed him to use his love for the granddaughter as a channel for faith. “When the heart is open, God can enter. See your granddaughter as a messenger of God and your love for her as the proof of your faith.” The disciple followed his teacher’s advice and felt the weight of self-doubt fall away.
Whatever you love is a doorway to faith, regardless of your stance on religion. If you step through that door, you’ll find what you are looking for: the courage to live with an open heart and to meet each day as a new beginning. These prompts will deepen your understanding of what faith means to you and how it is connected to love.
In the same way that each of us carries a biological creation myth about the family that brought us into the world, we also hold a spiritual creation myth about the genesis of life itself. This has a lot to do with how we relate with faith.
Faith points to our personal story about the metaphysical realm, the existential narrative that buoys us up in times of darkness.
Whether atheist or true believer, traditionalist or freelance seeker, everyone has faith in something.
Whatever we love is a doorway to faith, regardless of our stance on religion.
These are profound questions to explore. You are in the presence of mystery when you write about faith, touching on the eternal. Let yourself dive deep in this inquiry and see where the questions lead you.
Faith lights the way in times of confusion. Whether you believe in God, Buddhanature, or a prevailing goodness in human nature, faith is a necessary power that uplifts you in the face of the unknown. Faith gives you the courage to try again after you’ve been knocked down, and stay curious about what’s coming next. It reminds you of life’s cyclical nature, with daylight coming after night’s darkness, giving you a new day to begin again. This is the faith you can carry with you for the final phase of this journey, as you harness the power of new beginnings.