We’re delighted to host a guest post today from Laraine Herring, author of Shambhala Publications’ brand new The Writing Warrior: Discovering the Courage to Free Your True Voice (the front cover is pictured to the left). My thanks to Shambhala publicist Jennifer Campaniolo for making this happen, and to Laraine for her offering. Enjoy, everyone!
– Danny
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The Writing Warrior Way: On Discernment and Attachment
by Laraine Herring
A decade ago, a friend of mine broke me of attachment. This was not something I had any intention of looking at, or even something I was willing to acknowledge existed, but the lesson came crashing through, invited or not, in the form of a lover who no longer wanted to be lovers.
I should admit right away that I hold onto things. I love old letters and photographs. I love yearbooks and old magazines and metal Snoopy lunch boxes that remind me of someone I used to be, or maybe more accurately, someone who still could have been anyone at all. I love long sentences that loop around themselves, acknowledging that the sentence only is because of everything that came before it. To me, even a good sentence holds onto things. I want moments to freeze so I can write about them and preserve them forever.
I also like to gather. I gather things and then keep them. Usually too long. Usually long after they lose their usefulness, if they had usefulness in the first place. I feel safe surrounded by the things I’ve gathered. This includes books, clothes, writing, and people. My mother warned me about hoarding when I was a girl. Maybe she was worried that I’d become one of those people who lived alone in ancient apartments surrounded by stacks of magazines and rotting food. Maybe I was worried about that a little bit too. I mean, you never really know, do you?
When I am surrounded I feel safe – whether by trees, people, stuff, houses – my natural environment is urban. I love crowds, noise, movement. My lover-who-no-longer-wanted-to-be-my-lover lived in a small house in the middle of the Arizona desert. He had a picture of Greg Brown on his wall, and a meditation table next to the window with a single statue of Buddha and an ivory cat. His zabutan was black, and his cat was white. He was a musician and his hair was long and curly. The rooms of his house with empty walls, empty corners, empty floors, freaked me out. The first time this lover-who-no-longer-wanted-to-be-my-lover came over to my house, he said, “I can’t breathe here.” Strange. I couldn’t breathe at his house – too empty, too open, too sharp.
I didn’t have the vocabulary then to discuss attachment. I seemed to be hard-wired to hold on to everything and everyone that had ever entered my world. My friend with the incredibly long hair was a master at paring things down. Too much. Too messy. Too heavy. Too crowded. Many years later, another teacher I was working with came to my house. We were landscaping the front garden. He was helping me pare down even further. “Walk through your house,” he told me. “Ask everything – every corner, every room, every surface, if it can breathe. If it answers no, then ask it what has to change so it can.”
This is the practice: Discernment. Awareness. Attentiveness.
This practice showed me how my strengths can become a source of my suffering. I write the way I write because I see layers and layers of lives and histories hanging on a building, a tree, a person. Because I am able to do that, I can tell stories. Also, because I do that, I can stifle my own story. I can bury what is real with what is not. I can trap my own bones with clutter; I can break my own back with weight. But only I know what is excess and what is essential. Only I can ask the question - can I breathe? Only I can hear the whisper of a reply. And only I can know if I’m ignoring the first answer pretending to hear the answer I wanted instead.
Each moment presents its own opportunity for self-study, for self-awareness, for change. In that magic pause between actions, like the space between the inhale and the exhale, I have the opportunity to ask myself: Is this essential? Is this beneficial? If I do/buy/engage in/acquire this, can I still breathe? When I stop paying attention, I begin to become buried alive by my own nature. Understand your tendencies – how they serve you and how they hold you back, and work toward the middle way.
During the closing session of a recent workshop I led at The Omega Institute in New York, one of my students sang a song she wrote. The refrain was, “Make me a hollow bone.” This idea is the foundation of the way of the writing warrior – the way of any warrior doing anything. Maintain space and structure. Hold both softness and steadiness. Be the container for breath to move in and empty out. It is enough for you to breathe fully. Look in the mirror every day with fierceness and compassion and exhale what you no longer need. No judgment. No assessment. No quantifying or comparing. Just look. Notice. And move.
Laraine Herring’s newest book, The Writing Warrior: Discovering the Courage to Free Your True Voice is now available from Shambhala Publications. Find out more at laraineherring.com.
