Writing to Heal: Using Meditation in the Writing Process
Author(s): JoAnn Campbell
Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 45, No. 2 (May, 1994), pp. 246-251
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/359010
Accessed: 23-07-2018 22:12 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to College Composition and Communication
This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Mon, 23 Jul 2018 22:12:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
246 CCC 45/May 1994
At our conferences and in our journals wh
and power, we have meant intellectual, e
power. Perhaps it is time for us to include t
for us to see all the multifaceted ways actua
compose power in their daily lives.
Writing to Heal:
Using Meditation in the Writing Pro
JoAnn Campbell
Indiana University
Unifying the many definitions and practice
training the mind, which suggests that the
usefully supplement courses designed to t
critically, analytically, or academically. In R
Meditation from Shamanism to Science, Willa
tion has no intrinsic goal or meaning; it
developing consciousness" (3). Coming fr
Easwaran similarly defines meditation as "a
ing hold of and concentrating to the utm
power" (9). Most frequently meditation i
context, yet for beginning college student
keeping their minds on what they read, pra
useful as other study techniques frequent
writing, mapping, and dialogic reading logs.
Yet work linking writing and meditation r
discipline. In this essay I want to review the
between meditation and writing, analyze o
tion in a writing classroom, and suggest
using meditation with apprehensive or b
have studied and seen it serve. Most of my e
writing has occurred outside the academy
store, in a therapist's office, and most frequ
for spiritual growth. Teaching at a spiritual
from helping writers produce good prose to
of meditating and writing regardless of
taught in elementary and high school classes
day of meditating and writing in my univ
enthusiastic student response, the marg
within the academy has discouraged me, as a
from regularly offering meditation to writ
similar reluctance to bring new practices in
This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Mon, 23 Jul 2018 22:12:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Cambell/Spiritual Sites 247
question in teaching is always where to find an o
out, because it always feels you can't try it out
We need arenas to do these things" ("Interview
Although the workshops I've led were not assoc
many participants were undergraduate and gr
re-discover some joy in writing or seeking help w
stories, as well as hundreds of other literacy hist
wounds too frequently inflicted by English te
"heal" in the title of this essay (despite being war
for claiming something I cannot deliver) because,
wounding or healing, I want to move toward the
heard in academic discussions of writing and te
has become the province of those credentialize
chologists, perhaps ministers--but surely not w
already have enough to do? In a context of tra
the word healing may connote a passivity of the
healer that I do not intend. Rather I invoke t
healing as being from the holy, the spiritual, an
which I am a participant rather than creator.
James Pennebaker, a psychologist who has s
effects of writing, reports on experiments wher
written about their thoughts and feelings abo
evidenced significant improvement in immune
controls" (162). These beneficial physical and psyc
ing have been used outside the academy, for ex
programs that Beth Daniell examines. Writing
included in self-help books, such as Courage to He
Davis, which instructs survivors of sexual abus
ences. In other popular texts, meditation is add
enrich the writer's experience. Christina Baldwin's
Writing as a Spiritual Quest includes a guided me
section to expand and complicate the reader's a
explored through journaling. In her popular book
Self, Elaine Farris Hughes, a college writing teach
of guided visualization exercises designed to he
they might not otherwise explore. And Gabriele
includes reports from workshop participants t
meditation and writing combined.
Very successful outside the academy but cited i
tion studies is Ira Progoff, whose books and jo
on a systematic study of depth psychology and in
tation" with writing prompts. Progoff defines me
This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Mon, 23 Jul 2018 22:12:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
248 CCC 45/May 1994
forms and methods by which we reach tow
by which we seek the depth beyond the doct
phy" (226). While any journal prompt mig
meaning, Progoff includes meditation to "acc
scious."
In the early history of composition, meditation was sometimes included
as a part of writing instruction. D. Gordon Rohman's 1965 article "Pre
Writing: The Stage of Discovery in the Writing Process" suggested imitation, analogies, and meditation as techniques to help students "imitate the
creative principle itself which produces finished works" (107). Meditation
allowed students to experience their subjects "concretely" and "personally"
because it was "a heuristic model, something which served to unlock
discovery" (110). Rohman maintained that once students had experience
their subject "the urge to 'get it down' usually increases to the point that
the will directs the actual writing of words to begin" (110).
But it has been the work of James Moffett that has so far brought the
use of meditation in a writing classroom closest to legitimacy. Coming from
a prominent composition theorist, Moffett's 1982 article "Writing, Inne
Speech, and Meditation" provides an overview of meditation practices
(including his own) from many cultures and locates the common trait i
"some notion of transcending intellectual knowledge" (235). He propose
inner speech as the "bridge" between meditation and writing and write
that meditation helps one gain "some control of inner speech ranging from
merely watching it to focusing it to suspending it altogether" (236). Th
allows a writer to engage in "authentic authoring" by helping the write
perceive "the deeper self that abides at least somewhat independently o
the outside," a trait he believes necessary for effective writing (236). The
article concludes with an exhortation to teachers who meditate to "come
out of the closet" as well as a proposal to include meditation training in
regular staff development programs (246).
College English published three responses to Moffett's article: a wholehearted acceptance of the article with minor adjustments, a sarcastic dis-
missal of Moffett and his sources, and a detailed response from James
Crosswhite, in which he objects to the idea that we can transcend our
circumstances to perceive a "higher" knowledge, arguing that all abilities
are rooted in language and history. He calls Moffett's proposal "illiberal,"
because "being critical of language in a historic and political and cultural
way" is the root of a liberal education (402). Crosswhite's objection sounds
like one that might come from many social constructionists, anti-founda-
tionalists, and postmodernists today, namely, that there is nowhere to
transcend to and no absolute to found our notions on, so we must be aware
that when we privilege a discourse or idea that we are also privileging and
This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Mon, 23 Jul 2018 22:12:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Cambell/Spiritual Sites 249
serving a particular group of people. Moffett ant
approach was too personal by acknowledging
forces in language, observing that "one's revised
convention so much as hardly to bear a person
But rather than fight for the supremacy of his t
schools to include any technique that helps a stud
beings rely on several authorities for their kno
comes from excluding some. If it is a mode o
("Comment" 404).
Perhaps the continued exclusion of meditation as a classroom practice
is based in part on a distrust of the idea of a "deep" self so often sought by
the meditating spiritual seeker. Swami Muktananda, for example writes,
"We do not attain the Self through spiritual practices, because the Self is
already attained. The Self is always with us. Just as the sun cannot be
separated from its light, the Self cannot be separated from us" (12). The
capitalized "Self" seems to indicate a singular essence at the core of each
individual, similar to that valorized by many advocates of expressive writing. For example, Ira Progoff uses as a basic metaphor for the individual a
water well which in turn is "connected to an underground stream . .. that
is the source of all wells" (33). For Progoff, unity is possible amidst
individual differences, for once "we have gone deeply enough we find that
we have gone through our personal life beyond our personal life" (34). Or
in Moffett's words "spirituality depends on widening the identity" of the
person and institution ("Censorship" 117).
In postmodern theory, this idea of transpersonal unity is not possible or
desirable, and instead difference is foregrounded. Lester Faigley defines the
postmodern subject "as a play of differences that cannot be reduced to a
whole" (232), and he cites the damage done to marginalized people when
a single, unified voice is demanded in a writing classroom. Faigley's word
reduced reflects past religious or liberal treatments of difference where unity
is evoked without acknowledging difference-you can be one with us if
you leave your race, class, gender, or sexual orientation at the door.
Drawing on the work of political theorist Iris Young, Faigley writes that,
"In order to practice a politics of differences, there must be discourses and
spaces where differences are preserved and appreciated" (232).
Because religious groups have historically suppressed differences,
with tragic consequences, in the name of a single path to God, any technique used by religion seems suspect to some. This conflation of religion
and spirituality leads both postmodernists and fundamentalists to distrust
meditation as a practice of peace. Postmodernists essentialize difference
and religious fundamentalists fear it. But in the spirituality that stems
from mediation, the perception of oneness does not erase difference but
This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Mon, 23 Jul 2018 22:12:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
250 CCC 45/May 1994
creates an arena where that difference is
but ultimately loved. Faigley's aim is to b
not in order to study absolute right and wr
sibility for judgment," "reflect on the lim
respect... diversity and unassimilated oth
facilitate all three ends, whether a person se
or uses meditation as a technique to create
Even those who acknowledge the value o
vations about writing teachers employing it
we aren't trained as therapists and shoul
understand the concern for students in t
(and potentially radical) to acknowledge th
lectual but also physical, emotional, and s
elements are as present in a classroom as
address. Further, I would contend that a t
during meditation than during most other p
offer suggestions for physical relaxation wi
For blocked or anxious writers, meditation
to move through that pain. Moffett writes
relaxed body and an alert awareness" ("Wr
tion can help apprehensive writers discover
fear of writing and begin releasing it. For i
worked with in getting past writing block h
even migraines, before or during a projec
places of perceived safety, the headaches
express their ideas in writing. As Rohman h
facilitate invention, which can ease anxi
before writing helps writing run throu
phrases before committing any of them to
at a high school, the students seemed most i
to write once they had visualized a subjec
graders I worked with doubled the amoun
duced in one sitting and were astonished
tions the meditation had tapped. One boy
have never experienced anything like that i
could hear birds twerping, feel the mist thr
and then slowly come back to the room."
Meditation and writing often work well in
blocked or apprehensive writers. For inst
meetings, Marianne, a graduate student I
her writing block only after she saw her di
tion and continued writing the dialogue w
This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Mon, 23 Jul 2018 22:12:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Swearingen/Spiritual Sites 251
conversations and further meditations helped her chan
habits so that she was able to write daily, to use a diffe
writing, to include personal information for an academic a
finish her project in time to submit it for publication
accepted.
It's perhaps a particularly capitalist perspective to think of meditation as
a means to an end. In Buddhism the practice of meditation is all, and
meditators are cautioned against becoming attached to outcomes or insights. Yet in a discipline which talks of process but where teachers often
must still evaluate products, and in universities where students want class
activities to feed directly into the papers they write, it's difficult to avoid
arguing for the practical benefits of offering meditation-at the very least,
to students with writing block. Just as Elbow argues for the inclusion of
personal writing in the curriculum because, as he puts it, "Life is long and
college is short" ("Reflections" 136), I urge meditating writing teachers to
combine meditation with writing to provide an anodyne for the wounds
of schooling and to offer a model for healthy living.
Women's Ways of Writing, or,
Images, Self-Images, and Graven Images
C. Jan Swearingen
University of Texas, Arlington
In his most recent-and he claims last-study of childhood, The Spiritual
Life of Children, Harvard psychologist Robert Coles brings his work on
children full circle by recounting one of its starting points. Working in the
Deep South during the early 1950s with grade school children who were
among the first to integrate the public schools, he experienced a conversion of sorts. He came face to face with the power of religious conviction
as something far more than psychiatric neurosis as he listened to an eight
year old patient, Laurie:
I was all alone, and those people were screaming, and suddenly I saw God
smiling, and I smiled.... A woman was standing there [near the school
door], and she shouted at me, "Hey, you little nigger, what you smiling at?"
I looked right at her face, and I said, "At God." Then she looked up at the sky,
and she looked at me, and she didn't call me any more names. (19-20)
Steeped in Freudian psychology, Coles had been trained to regard
religion at its worst, as hate-filled, mean-spirited, ignorantly superstitious-as a social lie based on the need people have for self-deception. Yet,
he asks, what would Freud have made of Laurie, from Greenville, North
Carolina, "or, for that matter, of the heckler who was stopped in her tracks
This content downloaded from 131.247.112.3 on Mon, 23 Jul 2018 22:12:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Purchase answer to see full
attachment