Why I write

When I was in my early forties, it occurred to me I wasn’t going to have an easy life.

Hey, I never claimed to be bright;-)

At some point, reality hits some of us with problem(s) that we can’t handle and we have to dig in and work on how to cope or else start hitting the bottle or whatever other way a person can give up and choose to tune out the pain. Pain sucks- I make no judgments about how folks cope with it.
For me, reality was fibromyalgia, as well as a string of deaths and disabling injuries among family and friends that kneecapped me back in 2006.

I was too big of a control freak to find comfort in drugs or alcohol, so I started trying to write my way out of it.

Writing about it all was cathartic- but the problem was that it unearthed buried stuff within me and left it exposed.

I already have an anxiety disorder from PTSD, which means I sweat the small stuff. Truthfully, I sweat the microscopic stuff… There’s no way I could cope with the big stuff getting dug up like that, but I had to keep writing- it had become like oxygen to me.

Fortunately, a wonderful neighbor started offering Bön meditation and its style of processing emotions both helped me live with what my writing was generating, and also helped calm my hyper-aroused state.

I’d never been able to do meditation before because the more I sit still, the more hyper my mind gets. Bön has you take a deep breath and hold it while moving and only then releasing the breath once the movement is done. You do a specific type of movement for each chakra. Doing this allowed my mind to calm down enough to then sit and meditate.

Bön has largely kept me from writer’s block and also enabled me to keep on track with my writing, allowing the drive to finish the book to win out.

I’ve had quite a ride, trying to heal myself. I’m still a work-in-progress. Maybe how I’ve been trying to help myself might help someone else; maybe it’ll just be helpful to know you’re not alone and someone out there (me) is a bigger nut than you, but I hope you’ll check in now and then on the journey.
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If Bön specifically interests you, learn more here: www.ligmincha.org. I will also be teaching it locally in Santa Barbara combined with other types of meditation and writing to heal. Please contact me if you'd like to know more.