Is Your Most Personal Experience Also the Most Universal?

Writing poetry can be a practice of mindful awareness — but does anyone else want to read it?

Writing, just putting pen to paper and writing without stopping, without looking forward or back, maybe for a set amount of time, is a great way to come unstuck, get into the flow, bypass the internal censor and break through into a kind of nonjudgmental awareness. (See my previous post “Writing My Way Out of a Corner”.)

But what to do with this state of awareness: how does writing arise from this which is relevant to other people? Would anyone ever want to read the traces of your experience?

Carl Rogers said, somewhere, “One of the things I have gradually learned is that what is most private to me is also most universal”. He was certainly not the only one to discover this truth! What is real, our direct experience, turns out to be universal. This is how at the heart of suffering we find compassion for others. This truth also holds when it comes to creative work. If we go to the rawest and realest places in our work, it is bound to connect with others. But a universal content is not enough. Our words must be directly linked to the living experience, be that a physical, emotional or mental experience. Cutting out the ‘talking about’, ‘thinking about’ is the first step towards creating — let’s call it ‘a good poem’! In fact my acid test for a good poem is one that is not an attempt to express or explain an idea (you can always feel the gap between the idea and the expression) but which is the idea, which could not be expressed any other way.

In this way writing poetry for me is a practice of mindful awareness, noticing the points where the idea comes unhinged from what is actually there, at the moment. And that practice, in all the various ways it comes, is the single most helpful thing in my life.

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