April is National Poetry Month, so today I'm sharing an interview and video with David Richo in which he discusses the connection between poetry and personal growth. David is a psychotherapist and author of Being True to Life. Enjoy!
In Being True to Life, you talk about using writing and reading poetry to move toward self-understanding and emotional healing. What are things that writers can do to enhance their self-understanding while also improving their own writing?
David: The most exciting part of finding out who we are is discovering our own uniqueness, who we are outside the box, beyond the categories in a Psychology 101 textbook. In our inimitable singularity, there is an infinite range of possibility that cannot be tied to any one description of what it means to be human or healthy.
Just as our fingerprints are one-of-a-kind, so is our identity. Each of us is a once-only articulation of what humans can be. We are rare, unmatched, mysterious. This is why the quality of openness is so crucial to our self-discovery. We cannot know ourselves by who we think we are, who others take us to be, or what our driver’s license may say. We are fields of potential, some now actualized, most not yet. Poetry goes to that quarter of what humanness is about. It is what openness looks like on a page.
We can learn so much by listening to other poets who bravely voice their feelings and realizations. They offer new forms of self-help since we find mirroring of our own experience in their words and challenges to widen our own souls in the confessions they make. We hone our own voice as we listen to those of others like—or unlike—us. Finally, and most exciting of all, you will be set free from what may be a stunted imagination.
How does mindfulness factor in to the writing and creative process? How has it helped you in your own writing and creative pursuits?
David: In the world of poetry, we are called on to relax the intellect and follow the pathways of mindfulness and imagination. Mindfulness means learning how to pay full attention to our moment-to-moment experience without judgment. When we are mindful, nothing in our experience—whether it’s our feelings, our thoughts, or our physical sensations—is rejected as “bad.” At the same time, we don’t cling to any feeling or thought nor do we banish them. We simply acknowledge whatever arises and then let it go. This is what helps me prepare for writing.
The practice of mindfulness can also become our entryway into the free-wheeling spaciousness of imagination. In our imagination we are free to explore any of our images, desires, feelings, and storylines both in real or fictionalized ways. We begin to see them all as part of our story. We begin to hold them as opportunities to grow. This leads to a kindly attitude toward our own emotions and worries. Such opening is a pathway into the full breadth of our potential as psychological and spiritual beings. We are opening to ourselves and showing more loving-kindness toward ourselves.
What in meditation are distractions if we cling to them, in imagination are inroads into our creativity and we have the freedom to cling all we want. We let imagination take over where mindfulness leaves off. This is an important realization of mine that has made a big difference in my writing. It is a permission to be free.