Our past deeply impacts our present. Our childhood experiences have a huge impact on how we view the world today. We are deeply influenced, for better or worse, by the dynamics in our family, our religious upbringing, our cultural experiences, any bullying or trauma we endured, and the list goes on. All of these experiences are part of our autobiography and influence how we behave, think, and feel. In addition, how we experience life today, will impact how we experience life tomorrow.
Posts filed under Writing
Kindred Conversations: with Hilary Nichols
Where does music begin? When you’re a musician, the search is inward. David Magumba realized that, “Beyond inspiration, you do the work. You make it happen. As a songwriter, that is the effort I am making right now.”
Visual Journaling: Image and Word, a Journey to Self-expression
This quote is sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, who said, "A good sketch is better than a long speech." Creating a journal with images and words is a place to honor your experiences through exercises that expand your own process of describing your world and your distinct expression of it. It is a journey into the heart of self-expression, free from competition and comparison.
Healing Writer's Block Through the Mystery School
The temptation to hang up the phone burnt my fingertips like I had touched a car bumper that had been sitting under a hot sun for hours. I did not call Lynn Andrews—a shaman healer, mystic, and an internationally best-selling author with 20 books to her name—to talk about my childhood as if I was sitting in front of a psychiatrist or a talk show host. I’d hoped that this one-hour phone session could resolve some issues I had been having with my writing career.
Honoring the writings of Rachel Urist
It is with great sadness that we share with you the death of a great friend and writer for the Crazy Wisdom Journal, Rochel Urist. It is with our sincere appreciation for her wonderful writing that we share with you today some of our favorite articles published in the journal and written by her deft hand. We hope you will honor her life, and journalistic gift, by reading and sharing her words.
Abandonment Blues — An Adoption Memoir
I was adopted when I was six months old. My adoptive mother told me this when I was nine. Whenever I asked whom my birth mother was she said that she didn’t know. After she died at age sixty-one, when I was thirty-five, I found letters from my birth mother amongst her papers. I found her, we met her once, but she would never tell me who my biological father was.
From the Ground Up — How Groundcover News Took Roots on the Streets of Ann Arbor: A Conversation with Susan Beckett
Susan Beckett is the publisher of Groundcover News, a street newspaper sold in Ann Arbor and throughout Washtenaw County directly by vendors – many of whom are experiencing challenges related to poverty. Groundcover’s stated mission is: “Creating opportunity and a voice for low-income people while taking action to end homelessness and poverty.”
Coffee with Chris Forte, Author of The Humble Warrior
Chris Forte is a Birmingham-based yogi, author, spiritual fitness coach, former Division I athlete, and creator of The Humble Warrior podcast and memoir. On Christmas Day, 2014, in the midst of his marriage dissolving, Chris hit his knees on the floor and heard, “Book, blog, podcast.” He spent two years doing yoga and meditation every day, attending Hay House writing and speaking conferences, and getting certified as a yoga teacher. His book, “The Humble Warrior: Spiritual tools for living a purposeful life” came out in June 2017.
Making Friends with Your Subconscious in Creative Writing
There are such depths within us all — how do we, as writers, access and use the material that is in our subconscious minds? In her book, Archetypes for Writers, Jennifer Van Bergen affirms that “Writing takes place in the subconscious…. The subconscious actually operates — in everyone — as an independent mind. It perceives, processes, and retains things that never enter the conscious mind at all.
City of Crows
I’m preparing to leave a corvid hurly-burly. Beneath its restless swirl I lean against an oak tree, attempting to be unobtrusive. Nearby, under the storm of wings, a man is standing, his back to me, profoundly rooted, silent by a stone marker. We both wear coats as black as the feathers of the birds. Above us, they arrive: alighting and arising, some perching on branches, others in perpetual motion and outcry.
Questions for Camille Noe Pagán, Author of The Art of Forgetting
Camille Noe Pagán, age 33, is an author and journalist. Her successful first novel, The Art of Forgetting, was published in 2011 by Penguin. The book was met with considerable acclaim from readers and critics, with the Chicago Tribune calling it “a quietly compelling literary debut . . . about the power of friendship and the importance of forgiveness.”
Sit. Stay. Go home. by Ali Shapiro
In puppy kindergarten class we are working on stay. Like most of the important commands, stay is taught in stages. Stage 1 is Duration. At first, the dogs only have to stay for a second or two before we release them and reward them with treats. Then, gradually, we up the ante. The dogs have to stay for ten seconds, then thirty, then a minute before the release.
A Conversation with Ari Weinzweig about Journaling
On a beautiful October morning, I sat outside at a picnic table at the well-loved Deli on Detroit Street and talked to Ari, co-founder and CEO of Zingerman’s. One of Ari’s friends, three-year-old Eli, joined the conversation periodically as he explored the recycle bins and reported his findings to us.
Swaying in the Sangha of Trees: The "Tree"-Quel
By Lenny Bass
For those of you who are ardent readers of The Crazy Wisdom Community Journal, you will recall an article published a couple years back written by a mad man who talked with a tree while sitting in a hot tub outside a cabin built by his wife’s family in the shadows of the Alleghany Mountains in upstate New York. Well, that mad man is back at it again. The gift of one week of solitude my wife and I afford to one another as our one and only holiday gift has come to pass, and once again I come to rest in this mystical spruce grove.
