The Hague Online's 'Writer in Residence' Jo Parfitt is musing about . . .

The Calm Creative

Have you ever done something and found that it did not turn out the way you expected? That though you tried to manage your expectations you had a surprise in store? That just happened to me.

I have just done something fairly out of my comfort zone. I went to Oxford, England, and attended a weekend workshop led by the Chopra Centre called Wisdom of Healing. I knew the course would include meditation and yoga but was not at all sure I could do that for two and a half days solid. But my friend Ann recommended it highly having attended a similar course herself earlier this year, and she was bursting with vitality. I think it was Ann's looking me in the eye and saying, "you need this, Jo" that clinched it, so I signed up. After all, I do have a tendency to live my life at 100 kilometres an hour and needed to find some tools to help me slow down and reduce stress. Anyway, I went on the course and it was everything Ann said it would be as well as many things I had not expected at all.

What surprised me most were the extra things I picked up along the way that are closely aligned with my work as a writer, writing mentor and teacher, here in The Hague.

Skillfully taught by the charismatic Davidji, which can't be his real name, I discovered that meditation creates a stillness inside, a calming down that can result in additional creativity. So while I had previously baulked at the thought of having to squeeze another half an hour into my days in which to do it, I found I am finding it to be so rejuvenating that my work seems easier somehow. Meditation can also help you to tune into your instinct and make better choices. Writers cannot survive without creativity, but sometimes too many ideas can be a bad thing. There may be 100 ways to skin a cat, as the saying goes, but there are probably more than 100 ways to write a book or an article, a column like this or even your diary. But when you learn to trust your intuition it can be easier to make a choice that feels right. I need no more convincing. Meditation is now definitely part of my life. I am delighted that I have learned to do this alone, but know the Hague has plenty of meditation centres available for the times that I would prefer to be in a group.

I've long been a fan of using writing as a therapy and choose to pick up a pen and paper whenever I have a dilemma to solve and 'dump' my thoughts on the page in an attempt to sort things out in my mind. It never fails. This was recommended in the workshop too, and so I patted myself on the back for being one step ahead of them there. But they went on to tell us about a similar tool that I had never heard of but is now, also, firmly added to my routine. This was taught to us by Dr David Simon, who co-founded the Chopra Centre with the magnificently well known, Deepak Chopra. He called it 'recapitulation' and recommends we do this at the end of each day, just before we close our eyes. When you recapitulate you simply go back over the day you have just had, in order, listing all the things you did without emotion. It could go like this: woke up, had breakfast, checked my emails, had a shower, went for a walk, met Jane. Just the facts, not the details, not your opinions, not your emotions. Just the bald facts. Simon says that our body already knows how each of these events made us feel so we don't need to remind it. But by listing what we did it allows us to process our day so that we do not have a zillion thoughts racing round our minds that either stop us from falling asleep or wake us up before dawn. Sleep, is, of course, one of the best health supplements there is. While many find themselves more creative without it, I am not one of them.

I was thrilled to get so much more out of the weekend than I would have anticipated. But then, I guess that is another of life's cool surprises. As Natalie Goldberg, author of 'Writing Down the Bones', writes, "shake the apple tree and you get oranges".

Jo Parfitt
www.joparfitt.com

Jo Parfitt runs workshops on writing your life story here in The Hague

The Chopra Centre runs workshops in the USA but comes to Europe every year or so. Find out more at www.chopra.com

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