Off the Page: Conversations with Authors Exploring Writing as a Practice
Featuring Poet Nadia Colburn
Off the Page is a monthly interview series featuring writers, teachers, and healers exploring writing as a healing mindfulness practice.
Lisa Weinert (LW): How is writing a healing practice?
Nadia Colburn (NC): Writing can be an incredibly healing practice. I will say more about that in a moment, but I also want to say that writing isn’t always healing. Writing can also be caught up in perpetuating old stories and old paradigms.
Many of us are taught to write in schools within systems that are deeply hierarchical, that ignore the body, and that prioritize ideas of conformity. And as a result, for many people, when we first sit down to write, we go back to those old patterns habitually–we worry about “not being good enough” and often run into blocks that stem from disconnecting from our authentic ways of knowing.
There are many unhappy and unhealed writers.
But when we can disrupt those old patterns–first by being aware of them, and then by consciously reconnecting with ourselves–in mind and body– through our writing, then writing can be immensely healing.
LW: How is writing healing?
NC: When we give language to experience, we step outside of the moment and become the witness. We can access our larger mind, our wise mind, a pause between stimulus and response, to use the words of Victor Frankl.
Writing also allows us to step into our authority–to become the author, the creator of our lives. By putting language to our experiences, we shape it, we assume agency. This is deeply empowering and healing. We are no longer the victim, but also are able to make meaning and order of painful experiences.
When we are dealing with trauma, traumatic experiences usually are stored in the part of the brain that does not access language. The neural pathways between the traumatic memory and the rest of the brain, the language using part of the brain, get blocked off in an attempt to protect the self. But, if this is helpful in the short run, in the long run, we remain in a traumatized state until we can come back into integration. Trauma so often expressed in the body because it’s looking for an outlet and that outlet of language is blocked off. But when we write we can re-integrate the brain itself and heal trauma.
For healing to happen, we need to come out of isolation, be seen, heard and understood. As Brene Brown says, “Shame can't survive being spoken. Shame needs three things to survive: secrecy, silence and judgment.”
So we can use our writing to come out of secrecy, silence, and judgment. This is radical. Our writing becomes a space of empathy.
All of this is to say that writing can be incredibly healing.
And to really make writing most healing, it’s good to come to it with that intention of healing. If we come wanting and open to healing, and if we create spaces that trust and make space for the healing process, our healing will be deeper and more transformative.
LW: What is the difference between “traditional writing” and “writing with a healing intention?:
NC: Most traditional schools and most writing programs are skeptical of the very word “healing.” The root of the word means “whole,” but over centuries healing became associated with female-led medicinal practices, and was systematically disparaged by the establishment. It was seen as “witchery”--and we all know what happened to “witches.”
Things that were considered “healing” were considered less serious, less effective–there is a whole gendering there. Often things that are considered “healing,” are not considered as finely wrought. “Healing” and craft often are not seen as supporting each other. But that is nonsense.
I believe that we can take back what “healing” means and how we view it. We can have great art that attends to both craft and well-being. Not only can we have that–we must have that. At this time in our world’s history, we can’t afford to create art that doesn’t look to wholeness, to wellbeing, that doesn’t offer us a place of repair from our fractured experiences–both on the individual and also the collective levels.
When we consciously embrace healint, we can connect our writing to a much larger vision of not just individual but collective healing. We can reconsider our relationship to other beings, to the planet, the earth. We can come out of a mentality of separateness and violence back into wholeness, a vision of life as a cycle that it’s our job to participate in, not disrupt.
LW: What role does movement play in your writing life? Do you return to any somatic practices, mindfulness exercises, or other rituals before or after you write?
NC: When we learned to write in school, it was often the first time that we were made to sit still at a desk and “work.” Our writing has traditionally cut off the mind, the intellect, from the body. But we know this is a false dichotomy–what is mind, what is body? Those are just words–our mind and body inter-are.
Before I write, I often do yoga or meditate, which is a practice of bringing together mind and body consciously. Sometimes I go for a walk, and these days, I’ve been dictating much of my writing as I walk.
When I teach, I usually bring together literary studies–close readings of texts–with writing and also meditation and some embodied practice like yoga. I really want to create a holistic experience for my students, and when I do, all kinds of new doors open.
After all, our stories are stored not only in our minds but also our bodies. And our power, our imagination, our voice must be connected to our bodies.
LW: What role does meditation play in your creative life?
NC: Meditation, the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, my experience as a vipassana meditator–these have shaped almost every aspect of my life, so of course they also shape my creative life.
The teachings of impermanence, of developing a witnessing self, of being non reactive, of sitting with what is, of bringing compassion and non judgment to our experiences, and the teachings of interbeing, of co-dependence– all shape my world view and the way I interact with myself and others.
So of course, when I come to my writing, I come to it with this orientation. I come with a sense of allowing, of accepting, of curiosity, of being with.
I see what wants to take shape. I am able to detach a bit from a more egoic voice of writing from the self to a writing in which there are many selves and non selves that come out of different causes and conditions and that we can witness with awareness and breath.
I often meditate before I write, and then it can feel like I can get out of my own way more and allow what wants to emerge to come forward.
Even my revision comes from a place of deep listening, of paying attention and curiosity.
LW: How have you seen this practice work in your students’ lives?
NC: In my writing classes, I integrate meditation, yoga, and writing so that people can learn to write not only from the mind but also from the body and spirit. It’s always really exciting to see the deep breakthroughs that students have when they bring these practices together.
Many students are introduced to meditation and yoga through my courses. And some students write creatively for the first time in my courses. I also have students who have meditated for years, practiced yoga for years, and written for years, but they never brought those practices together before. They've told me that it was as if these different practices were in different compartments in their minds and bodies. But when they bring them together through my courses, they are able to have all kinds of new insights and a new ease and flow in their writing lives.
Not only does their writing get more alive on the page and more powerful, but students also have new insights into what it is they really want to say--and why.
I've had students who have never written before write and publish books and students who are working on their fourth book have breakthroughs and finally be able to complete that project that has been evading them.
As exciting as these breakthroughs in their writing lives are, it's possibly even more exciting when students tell me that the work they've done in my writing classes leads them to better sex lives, to reducing the medications they are on, to having breakthroughs in their professional lives, to getting along with their families better, to having a deeper connection with the sacred. At the heart of all of these breakthroughs is a more healed relationship with the self, with their own story, their own body, spirit, and purpose.
LW: Where do you find inspiration?
NC: I find inspiration in many things: in the natural world, in people I love, and also in books that speak to me. I find inspiration in movement and meditation. I also find inspiration in listening–not just with my ears, but with my whole being–just being open to what is around me and what wants some attention, what wants to be expressed, what wants to come through me.
And I find inspiration in our very capacity to heal: our bodies and psyches know how to heal. Our earth knows how to heal; we can be part of virtuous cycles.
LW: How has sharing your work changed your life?
NC: I used to feel that sharing my work was the part of writing that I liked the least. I thought of myself as a private writer. I wanted to be anonymous.
I wanted people to be able to stumble across my work in the library; in my ideal world, I would never have to interact with them and I would not have to do any promotion of my work at all.
I think now that was because I held much of my story, still, in secrecy–even from myself.
I think many of us are writers in part because we do that–because there are parts of ourselves that are blocked off that we don’t have full access to. Writing is both a way of revealing and obscuring, of showing and hiding.
But of course if you want to be a writer and have your work read, you need to be able to stand behind it and to be more public with it.
That process of bringing my story and myself out into the open was not always an easy one. But it’s ultimately been ultimately one of a lot of growth and very healing.
As a writer, as a teacher, the more I show up as myself—without masks, in my authentic being and with my authentic voice—the more comfortable I am, the more I enjoy the process, and the more successful I am.
LW: What writers have influenced you the most?
NC: Ah so many but here is a short list:
Poets: W H Auden, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Oliver, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rumi, Walt Whitman, and more.
Prose Literary Writers: Charlotte Bronte, Annie Ernaux, Anne Frank, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leo Tolstoy, Delphine de Vigan.
Nonfiction Writers: Thomas Berry, Thich Nhat Hanh, Paul Hawken, Judith Herman, Derek Jensen, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lewis Mehl Madrona, Alice Miller.
LW: What book are you excited to read next?
NC: Poetry: Andrea Cohen’s new book, The Sorrow Apartments
Prose/ Literary Writing: Delphine de Vigan’s most recent book, Les Gratitudes/ Kids Run the Show
Nonfiction: I just read Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth and I’m really eager to read more books that will help me imagine living in a different relationship to the earth and one another. I'm also looking forward to Paul Hawken's forthcoming book about carbon; his most recent book Regeneration always inspires me.
LW: Is there anything else you’d like us to know?
NC: Thank you so much for this, Lisa–it’s really wonderful to be with you here–and anywhere 🙂
I Say the Sky is available everywhere books are sold, and you can get your copy here. You can also sign up for classes with Nadia and learn more about her here.