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
Writing and Meditation Prompt: On “In Silence” by Thomas Merton
Be still. Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent, they try to speak your name. Listen to the living walls. Who are you? Who are you? Whose silence are you? from “In Silence” by Thomas Merton One way of thinking about meditation, it occurs to me, is to think of it as listening to thoughts in the silence—either one’s own thoughts or the thoughts of someone else, or some combination of the two. And one way of thinking about writing and...
Writing and Healing Prompt: A Poem and a Meditation
________________ “Hurry” by Marie Howe We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store and the gas station and the green market and Hurry up honey, I say, hurry hurry, as she runs along two or three steps behind me her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down. Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave? To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown? Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her, Honey I’m sorry I keep saying...
Writing and Healing Prompt: Locating a Potential for Change
The idea here, coming out of Matthieu Ricard’s instructions in Why Meditate? is to establish a motivation—a why—right at the beginning. His first suggested meditation, “A Vow to Transform,” included in his preliminary instructions, brings together many of the early ideas from his book—especially this notion that change is both desirable and possible—for any of us—for all of us. Though he presents it as one paragraph in his book, I’m presenting it here in 5 pieces—2 questions and 3 pieces of advice. And, of course, you could adapt this...
Writing and Healing Prompt: Choose a Word
This follows from last week’s writing prompt and also from coming across a post recently by Sharon Bray. She’s an author and teacher who posts weekly writing prompts at her site, Writing Through Cancer; she wrote a lovely post in January about choosing a word for the entire year. My notion is that after you’ve looked at some key words you tend to use, you can decide to be more intentional about what word or words you’d like to use—or perhaps what words you’d like to explore. You can...
Writing and Healing Prompt: Count Key Words
After writing last week some early thoughts about happiness, I decided to go back and see if I tend to use the word happiness much—and discovered I don’t! On this site—before last week (when I used it twenty or so times)—I’ve not used the word once, and in the entire draft of my book I’ve only used it seven times. I was interested to see then what words I do use and found, for instance, compassion was much more common: 50 times. Suffering: 42 times. Peace: 37. James Pennebaker...
Writing and Healing Prompt: Opening the Door of Mercy
Last week I shared and analyzed an essay with my sophomores: “Opening the Door of Mercy,” an essay by Karen Round published as part of the “This I Believe” series on NPR. I couldn’t resist discovering the vivid language in her essay and rearranging it into a found poem, something I’ve discovered is helping me read more closely—and attend to language and form. So. . . here are her words rearranged on the page, a kind of distillation of the essay. The sky darkening. The silhouette of a...