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
6. Discovering Needs and Desires
7. Has Writing Ever Changed Your Life?
8. Buy a Box
10. Conjuring New Images and Metaphors for Healing
11. A Scavenger Hunt
12. Falling Apart
13. Lifelines
16. A Walk on a Strange Street
17. Steps for Making a Written Collage
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
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
40. A Clean Copy
41. Reading to Discover What You Most Want to Write
42. Making Peace with the Body
44. Rest Hour
Emotional Baggage Check: Song as Medicine
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...
Writing about Gratitude as an Antidote to the Pain of Receiving Criticism?
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...
What to do with the salt of suffering?
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...
Report from a Far Place by William Stafford
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...
Writing and Healing Prompt: Ira Progoff’s Stepping Stones in Three Dimensions
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...
Writing and Healing Prompt: Stepping Stones as a Way to Examine Your Life
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,...