I attended the Heart-t-Heart online meeting this morning, and as always was so blessed by the experience. Here’s what I shared about the tool (gift) of writing:
Hi, Colleen here in beautiful Cache Valley, UT.
I would like to share on the tool of writing and how it has become such a tool of sanity and even personal revelation for me over the years.
In my years before being led to the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions based program of OA, back in Mesa, so many years ago, I did some journal-keeping. Maybe 20 or 30 pages a year. A couple of years, maybe 50 pages for the whole year.
But, then, in OA, I was asked to write a response to a prompt every day. Not a question where I had to give a specific/certain answer. But a “prompt” — a thought jogging question — to which I was free to learn something about myself by the response I gave. And it was amazing.
That’s where I got the idea to use that technique in He Did Deliver Me from Bondage. I’ve seen Big Book studies where someone has gone through the entire Big Book (first 11 chapters at least) and done the same thing. It is such a powerful way to start getting down past the surface and in touch with what’s really going on that is setting you up for reaching for that unhealthy food, or whatever.
It helps you to find out, What am I really thinking and feeling?? Why do I feel like just throwing the gift of abstinence/deliverance over again and running into the food, or whatever other form of acting out. With me, food is always my first choice of numb-out, escape methods.
Anyway, as time went by and I watched truthful, sane, and even super-sane, wise ideas come to the surface in the midst of my writing, I began to realize I was actually “hearing” and recording the words of Wisdom–far beyond my own.
I realized that my writing was serving as a prayer and that the words of Truth (of God, of Christ) were flowing into my mind through my willingness to slow down and face the truth about my feelings/thoughts/behaviors.
I found that what I believed about myself and others, and life generally — was really what came first–at the root of my feelings and thoughts and behaviors! And belief is a spiritual concept. And thus the testimony of the AA Big Book was validated that addiction is at its roots a spiritual malady and must include a spiritual component in the recovery process.
And from that day to this, writing is a daily experience as foundational as prayer.
Believe me, it takes plenty of prayers to get me through a day of deliverance/abstinence (every thought unto the Lord type of practice–not perfection–at it). But every morning (or later on days that require it), I sit down and write the things of my life, my heart and the words of Truth/ of God that come through the veil to me.
Thus, my journals have become, most literally, my personal scriptures. As I capture from the Book of Mormon and other Standard Works, I have a repository of dialogic revelations between the Lord and I—a personalized extension of the scriptures in the Standard Works.
That’s all. Thanks. . . .
P.S. Heart-t-Heart online meetings are held every week day morning, (Utah time zone) at 6:30. They’re great. You can find your way to them by going to the Heart-t-Heart website.
Colleen thank you for this, so beautiful. As I have followed your lead and example over the years, I have come to know these blessings of writing and meditation with the Lord as well.
Thanks, Julie, for your fellowship in recovery (surviving mortality) through our Savior’s willingness to give us His counsel and comfort. What a blessing it is to be more than friends–sisters!–in His Gospel.