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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
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Writing to Heal: Using Meditation in the Writing Process
Thesis statement: Writing is a critical component of the academic process of learning.
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Writing to Heal: Using Meditation in the Writing Process
Writing is a critical component of the academic process of learning. It is arguably the
only activity that has distinguished the literate from the illiterate for decades and one that
continues long after one completes formal education. However, it is no easy task, and most
people struggle to find ...


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