Writing and Healing Prompts

Like many of these rooms, writing and healing prompts needs a bit of housekeeping attention. I initially started out, years ago, numbering prompts—and then at some point I stopped numbering. Keep the numbering? Let it go? Organize the writing prompts by category?

The first 44 prompts I posted were numbered and are listed here with links.

Below these are the newer ones—not numbered.

1. Designing a Healing Retreat

2. Freewriting

3. The Body as a Healing Place

4. The Easiest Writing and Healing Exercise Ever

5. A Shopping Spree

6. Discovering Needs and Desires

7. Has Writing Ever Changed Your Life?

8. Buy a Box

9. The Mystery of Language

10. Conjuring New Images and Metaphors for Healing

11. A Scavenger Hunt

12. Falling Apart

13. Lifelines

14. Considering a Package

15. Listing What Remains

16. A Walk on a Strange Street

17. Steps for Making a Written Collage

18. The Things We Carry

19. The Good Part in Other People’s Stories

20. Finding a Benefit in Adversity

21. Meanwhile

22. Once Upon a Time

23. What If the Moon’s a Balloon?

24. Deciding Who to Bring on the Train

25. A Memo at Your Breakfast Plate

26. Figuring Out Where One Is on the Map

27. What Am I Here For? (part one) // What Am I Here For? (part two)

28. Consulting with the Wizard of Oz

29. A Title for Your Quest

30. Choosing Chapter Titles

31. Writing a Letter of Resignation

32. Keeping a Process Journal: A Long-Term Solution to Writer’s Block

33. Imagining Refuge

34. The Next Step

35. My Favorite Piece of Writing Advice from Natalie Goldberg

36. A Letter for Breaking Through Resistance

37. A Conversation with a Companion

38. I’ve Always Meant to Tell You: A Different Kind of Mother’s Day Greeting

39. Changing the Plot

40. A Clean Copy

41. Reading to Discover What You Most Want to Write

42. Making Peace with the Body

43. Imagining the Future

44. Rest Hour

Emotional Baggage Check: Song as Medicine

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 25, 2015 in Blog, Healing Corridor, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

A young woman in my sophomore class shared this website with me–and then with the whole class. She told us how the website had helped her during a difficult time–how she was able to check in some difficult baggage and receive some genuine help–and now she tries to go onto the site on the weekends and carry baggage for someone else–pay it forward. First, it’s a visually attractive site–simple and elegant–with few choices. You can “check it”–that is check in a piece of your own emotional baggage by writing briefly about it–or you can “carry it”–carry someone else’s baggage for a moment. The way to carry someone’s baggage is simply to read what they’ve posted–the problem they’re dealing with–and then send them a link to a song that you think might help them with whatever they’re dealing with. Song as antidote. Song as medicine. Not unlike a poem as medicine. This not a cure-all, of course. But a beautifully simple idea. You can also send along a few encouraging words with the song link if you like. Choosing either path could lead to an opportunity for writing and healing: condensing one’s most pressing problem into a brief description (no more than 1000 characters) or responding to someone else’s baggage–choosing the song–and composing a response (again no more than 1000 characters). What might your emotional baggage look like in 1000 characters or less? What response would you long to hear? What response to someone else’s baggage could itself become a kind of medicine? For me, hearing that this thoughtful young woman in my class had found the website useful–and was now moved to give back–gave the site some credibility. So this morning I decided to try it out. I clicked on “Carry it,” and read a brief and moving story by a young woman in England. There’s a surprising and appealing intimacy about the site. An opportunity for positive, if fleeting, connection–sending a bit of medicine out into the world. The story the young woman checked in is confidential. But here’s the song I sent: “When it Don’t Come Easy.” Emotional Baggage Check is here. A brief article from 2011 about the original history of the site, which was founded by Robyn Overstreet, can be found at Wired. Lyrics to Patty Griffin’s “When It Don’t Come Easy” can be found here....

Writing about Gratitude as an Antidote to the Pain of Receiving Criticism?

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 1, 2014 in Blog, Research, Writing and Healing Prompts

So, because of November, I was browsing for research on writing about gratitude. I found this interesting study, written about in the New York Times in 2011. It offers a way to think about gratitude writing as a kind of intervention when a challenge arises. The quoted passages are directly from the New York Times article. 1. The challenge: Criticism arises. (Ouch!) After turning in a piece of writing, some students received praise for it while others got a scathing evaluation: “This is one of the worst essays I’ve ever read!” (Note: this is not a good way to respond to writing.) 2. Retaliation: Loud blasts as a way to respond? Then each student played a computer game against the person who’d done the evaluation. The winner of the game could administer a blast of white noise to the loser. Not surprisingly, the insulted essayists retaliated against their critics by subjecting them to especially loud blasts — much louder than the noise administered by the students who’d gotten positive evaluations. 3. But what if: What if one were to stop and write an essay on gratitude? But there was an exception to this trend among a subgroup of the students: the ones who had been instructed to write essays about things for which they were grateful. After that exercise in counting their blessings, they weren’t bothered by the nasty criticism — or at least they didn’t feel compelled to amp up the noise against their critics. After that exercise in counting their blessings they weren’t bothered by the nasty criticism. This seems potentially important—as if writing might be able to jump-start an entirely different circuit in the brain. One that doesn’t hurt so much. And perhaps there’s something particularly powerful about gratitude writing that can offer this kind of jump-start. It might be difficult to write an entire essay in the moment when a sting arises. But perhaps the introduction? The outline? The first line? It’s an appealing, though I think challenging, alternative to obsessing on the criticism—or on the loud blast that one could retaliate with. I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and learned just yesterday that they’ve set some kind of record this year by having over 30 inches of snow in November. 30 inches of snow in November! There is such an abundance to be grateful for, but I think the next time criticism arises, I might just start an essay with that—the fact that I do not have to go outside in the cold and shovel the roof. Along with the fact that I do not own a roof shovel, and do not anticipate needing to own one. The study on gratitude was conducted by Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky The New York Times article can be found here The picture is of a woman in Grand Rapids shoveling snow off her roof—with a roof shovel! (The woman is nearly cropped out of the picture, but if you look closely you can see the roof shovel there, arcing over the...

What to do with the salt of suffering?

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 15, 2014 in Blog, Healing Grief, Healing Places, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

Sometimes when I’m at a loss for words it helps to come across other’s words, and just this morning I came across a treasure trove of poems at, of all places, a website of the Frye Museum, an art museum in Seattle, where they hold a weekly mindfulness meditation session on Wednesdays, and have published some poems and pieces they’ve used at these sessions. Here is one piece that seems particularly illuminating this morning. It’s not a poem, but it’s like a poem—a healing story as short as any poem. It’s not attributed to anyone. At another source I found it attributed to a Hindu master. Here’s the story: An aging master grew tired of his apprentice’s complaints. One morning, he sent him to get some salt. When the apprentice returned, the master told him to mix a handful of salt in a glass of water and then drink it. “How does it taste?” the master asked. “Bitter,” said the apprentice. The master chuckled and then asked the young man to take the same handful of salt and put it in the lake. The two walked in silence to the nearby lake and once the apprentice swirled his handful of salt in the water, the old man said, “Now drink from the lake.” As the water dripped down the young man’s chin, the master asked, “How does it taste?” “Fresh,” remarked the apprentice. “Do you taste the salt?” asked the master. “No,” said the young man. At this the master sat beside this serious young man, and explained softly, “The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains exactly the same. However, the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things. Stop being a glass. Become a lake.” Stop being a glass. Become a lake. I feel a small shift when I read that—I feel something get a bit larger. The salt may not change—or there may be a limit to how much I or anyone can change it. But I can change? I can become a lake? Maybe? And feeling this kind of shift when I read can be one of the things that words can do? What would it be like to become a lake? What could help make that happen? What could make the container get even a bit larger and more spacious than it is now? Say, even a pool? How might healing places shift the size of the container? How might meditation shift the size of the container? How might reading poems shift the size of the container? How might writing shift the size of the container? When have you felt the size of the container shift? How could you encourage that to happen again? The poems posted at the Frye museum can be found here. The photo is of Lake Mapourika in New Zealand and is by Richard...

Report from a Far Place by William Stafford

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 28, 2014 in Blog, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

I’ve never thought about words as snowshoes. I’ve never even walked in snowshoes—or seen them up close—I’ve only ever seen them in pictures—but I do love the connection William Stafford makes here in his poem, “Report from a Far Place.” When I was a kid and we lived in Michigan we used to walk to school often in snow. When the snow was very deep I would walk behind my brothers–they would break the snow first and I would step into their footprints. That memory is very vivid. Following became a way to navigate the snow. We could call words anything, I suppose–anything that might become meaningful–but here he’s calling them snowshoes: Making these word things to step on across the world, I could call them snowshoes. They creak, sag, bend, but hold, over the great deep cold, and they turn up at the toes. In war or city or camp they could save your life; you can muse them by the fire. Be careful, though: they burn, or don’t burn, in their own strange way, when you say them. Words as a way to navigate the “great deep cold.” What great deep cold needs to be navigated? This week? This year? This lifetime? What words could make particularly good snow shoes? The poem, “Report from a Far Place,” is from Someday Maybe, 1973 I found it at a community college faculty site which contains many other Stafford poems The photo is by Kim...

Writing and Healing Prompt: Ira Progoff’s Stepping Stones in Three Dimensions

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 13, 2014 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

Another useful way to work with stepping stones, building from last week’s prompt, is to take a set of stones and add another layer: What did I want at each stone? What was my motivation? And why did I want that? And why did that matter? And what was beneath that? It’s like taking a two-dimensional map and adding another dimension—the dimension of depth. The dimension of why. You can begin to deepen the map in this way. You can notice threads that emerge—patterns. You can see how your motivations may have changed over time. The previous piece on stepping stones is here. The photo, Stepping Stones, River Rothay, is by Chris Heaton and can be found...

Writing and Healing Prompt: Stepping Stones as a Way to Examine Your Life

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 6, 2014 in Blog, Map, Writing and Healing Prompts

Ira Progoff, a student of Carl Jung, who developed an elaborate process of journaling for self-discovery, one that involved binders and dividers and multiple colors, used the term stepping stones to describe a way of looking back and examining one’s life. I’ve always found his term evocative. I see the stones on a path with spaces between them, the stones stretching back as well as forward. Our lives are a river of moments. The stones are those key moments—often ones we remember vividly—often ones where something of significance turned, or shifted. In his book, At a Journal Workshop, Progoff writes: They may come as memories or visual images or inner sensations of various kinds. Especially they may state themselves in the form of similes or metaphors in addition to expressing the literal facts of past experience. Let your attitude be receptive enough that the continuity of your life as a whole can present itself to you both in symbolic forms and in literal factual statements. He compares the creation of stepping stones to a running broad jump. “We go back,” he says, “into our past in order to be able to leap forward into our future.” He recommends “placing” eight or ten steppingstones. No more than twelve. Simply naming the stepping stones is a beginning—and later, if one chooses, one can come back to a single stone and explore it in more depth. The book, At a Journal Workshop, can be found here. More about Progoff’s workshop process can be found here. Photo by Chris Heaton at Geograph: a footpath over the River Rothay in Cumbria, Great Britain...

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