Personal Development through Writing

News Flash!

From 20 February 2010, view my blogs at 

www.arnfridbeier.com!

News Flash!

From 20 February 2010, view my blogs at 

www.arnfridbeier.com!

You stop, you look round and wonder how you got to where you are.  Do you ever feel as if you blinked years ago and now it’s your life?

Whenever I feel hemmed in by life or by people or by circumstances or even by the glorious British climate I try to remember that the ‘hemming in’ isn’t real.  It’s a construct I’ve made, a story I’ve created about myself.

I suppose we all make meaning of what happens to us, of our lives.  We construct our perceptions into a shape that suits us at the time. I’ve begun to realise as I’ve got older that my construct of meaning has at times been a suit of armour holding me back.

My strict Lutheran parents (who else do you trust as a child?) guided me with principles that felt irrefutable.  Each one of these principles had the ring of absolute truth. 

The horror that would befall me if I stepped from their path of righteousness was too terrible to contemplate.  Outwardly, as a boy, I conformed with only minor forays into the land of disobedience like buying jeans with my first pay packet.

I tried to shed that initial ‘imposed’ construct by running away from there to here and never really wanting to go back again.  But here’s a thing, those principles lived on in me even though I didn’t want them.

My back was against a wall of irrefutable truths and absolutes.  Good and bad, right and wrong, immorality and morality, work and laziness - the Protestant ethic.  That wall I had felt at my back as a child came with me into adulthood.  I have often felt driven into a corner, albeit a metaphorical one.

Aha though, a light has crept in through a chink in that wall.  That corner, that wall, that construct was, is, of my own making, a story I created.  If I I’ve created my construct, I could have a go at deconstructing it?

No, that’s more navel-gazing and reflecting on my narrow childhood and upbringing which aimed to keep me a ‘good boy’, colouring my life as I was growing up.  Instead of thinking woe is me, I’ve been done wrong to by them these parents, I’ve started constructing a different meaning to my life.

Maybe it will soon feel as if I’m in a corner again and this back of mine is again against a wall.  But do you know what?  My back has strengthened through a lifetime of being forced into corners and it’s ready for what life throws at it.

I still stop from time to time and wonder how the hell I got to where I am, but it’s no longer a set position.

Maybe I haven’t been a perfect Dad or even much of a friend but I’m looking, I’m moving.

My past is there and always will be, but it has come out of that corner and is now in the light.

N.B. Much of this has been described by me in my novel LOVE LIES: A Journal, where I’ve used Andre as a mirror image of myself.

You wake up in the morning with words in your chest, bursting to come out.  They may not make much sense and I’ve been trained to reread and edit, punctuate and make things look and read elegantly, but there’s something so fresh available to me now in writing blogs.

I love the works of Thomas Mann.  I languish in his language, I grasp at his thoughts, I am riveted by the force of his characters and the way he expresses himself.  My God, the way he expresses himself!

But I’m not Thomas Mann and anyway, when I wake up with the urge to write I want to write it raw.  All my life I’ve inhabited a strait-jacket of other people’s expectations: ‘Arnfrid is good at English’, ‘Arnfrid writes elegantly’, but writing blogs have freed me from the constrictions and convolutions of writing things ‘properly’.

I write things on my blog almost verbatim from my thoughts.

I’ve developed a healthy alter ego, I call him Joe Bloggo.  He’s quite ordinary and likes writing blogs about things I feel hot about.  Some of my thinking is convoluted and some of it probably verges on the mad, but that’s me.

Joe Bloggo inhabits a different world, a new world.  He writes bits.  Sometimes they’re clever bits, sometimes they’re bits of rants, but they are always fresh for me and feel like drinking a glass of cool water when I’m thirsty.

Thomas Mann I ain’t, but I feel more like Joe Bloggo, because I trust what he has to say.

Are you at a stage in your personal or professional life where you’ve lost sense of your needs?

We ran four workshops based on Mindful Writing, all four were useful for our clients.  Our work raised as many questions as it offered solutions, but often it is more helpful simply to get a sense of where we are, to see how the land lies.  For in the seeing lie seeds of a new beginning.

It was wonderful to witness how all the clients, with the right prompting and listening, bloomed and grew, and their potential was tantalising.

I am tempted to think of ourselves as ‘Writing Doulas’.  ‘Doula’ is the Greek word for slave.  In our times, the word is usually associated with the growing trend to use ‘Birthing Doulas’ who support women during childbirth.  They give help and preparation, connect with the mother emotionally and mentally and support her through the birth step by step, just by being there.

When I read about them in the Observer*, I felt I was on familiar ground.  Everything ‘Birthing Doulas’ do, we do for our clients.  Maybe we are ‘Writing Doulas’.

With Mindful Writing we prepare people to look at themselves using their words as a mirror; we get to the heart of things; we spot potential and tease it out.  We accept things as they are, thus making it easy for our clients to accept their problems.

We’re amazed how much talent lies dormant in people.  Not just in terms of performance but simply by being more of themselves.  Somehow life has closed doors and set limits and lights have gone out that make people brave.

We always say ‘You don’t know what you know till you’ve written it down mindfully’.  That is, without judgement or anxiety or even much in the way of punctuation and grammar.  In effect, our clients are free to relinquish responsibility for what they write and they are somehow enabled by this approach to reach greater depths of memory and imagination.

We’re using Mindfulness practices to help people, professional as well as private, focus on themselves for a short time, or even initiate change.  Sharing both process and result with us as their ‘Writing Doulas’ is very confidence-building.  Their experience and creativity feels supported and valued.  Instead of a baby confidence ‘pops out’.

Instead of always looking at the changing, shifting outside world we encourage clients to look inwards, to express in their writing what they know at a deep level, to give birth, as it were, to new life within their lives.

*Observer 04.10.09, News, p.7, ‘Boom in Birth Coaches for Mothers’.

‘Inny’ and ‘Outy’ are words we sometimes use to describe our navels.  Does yours stick out or go in?  Is yours an Inny or an Outy?  I don’t really want to know, but the word navel interests me in the context of navel-gazing and writing.

Are you someone who likes to go deep as a writer or are you a writer of the world that passes by?  So are you inclined to be an ‘inny’ writer or an ‘outy’ writer?

I love to read other people’s innermost thoughts.  I enjoy the turmoil and pain of a good think.  I want to know as much as possible about the workings of my internal world and less about the machinations of what’s out there.  I’m an Inny, for sure.

Everywhere I look, newspapers, magazines, books, TV, films, are stories with beginnings, middles and ends.  The characters always remain the same.  There is little inner development with the promise of a qualitative change in these characters.

What appears like change is a set of stereotypical personalities being moved around in the various episodes of the stories like so many pieces of furniture repositioned again and again to produce different visual effects.

A historical setting for a story will not do much for the characters, either.  The same stereotypes keep reappearing, being driven by the plot, beginning, middle and end, pain and pleasure, misery and happiness, it’s all there, and often superbly crafted.  But to what end?

I know we make meaning with stories and they help us deal with difficulties in our lives.  Or do they?  Well, what can I say?  Repositioning the furniture is not the kind of change I am interested in, nor would it help me find any meaning in my life.

I love just sitting there in my thoughts, in a world of my own creation.  Sometimes there is a bit of navel-gazing, I cannot deny it.  But more often than not it’s the antics of the mind - my mind - that I watch performing on my inner stage.

Philosophers and mathematicians are brilliant at dealing with thought.  They can take a thought back to its illogical conclusion and start again, asking question upon question.  They too write a story, but they call it theory or hypothesis.

If you look at my novel LOVE LIES: A Journal, you’ll find I have done just that.  I’ve used Andre, the protagonist, as a device to illustrate the antics characteristic of the human mind.  This has led to the novel becoming a series of illogical conclusions and restarts.

How does the book work for you, the reader?  Well, as the dyed-in-the-wool Inny that I am, I invite you into the magic space of my imagination but don’t tell you the rules of the game.  You have to pick up clues as you go along, figuring out for yourself what’s really happening to Andre.

Keep watching Andre as he goes in and out of his flat and in and out of his mind.  Trying to make sense of him is a creative enterprise.  You may discover something of yourself in the process.  That is the author’s intention for the reader.

I’m trying, God knows I’m trying, to love my lentils and get close to oily fish a couple of times a week.  I’m German and though long ago eschewed my beloved wurst or sausage, I still crave a bit of pork.

When I eat out, I choose pork.  I’ve been known to gaze longingly at the pork sections in supermarkets and I am guilty of trying to start conversations about my experience of working on a pig farm when Adam was a lad…  I drone on about ‘the pigs in their quarters’, but I wonder if I’m really thinking about the tasty quarters of pigs.

So, to come back to my starting point, when I eat out I invariably choose a nice pork dish.  Well, apart from the odd sausage/mash/gastro-trendy offering, there’s usually only one glorious porky dish on the menu.

I used to frequent a pub in Yorkshire.  It’s surrounded by corkers of porkers farms, you’d think you’d be guaranteed a nice bit of pork.  You see, when I pay ten quid for my pork I expect a beautiful section of pig to dominate the plate.  Aha, I say, well sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.  Or, to put it another way, it used to. 

The recession has hit my lovely porklings!  That’s the only explanation I can think of.  Of course, when you read on a menu ‘Thick-cut pork chops with apple sauce served with mixed vegetables and chips and/or new potatoes’, you expect the mighty pig to smack you in the eye.

OK, it’s not just about quantity any more, as we now like our piggies to be smaller and leaner than the fat chaps of my youth.  But at least you expect to be able to spot the chop, to spear a succulent mouthful on your fork and then, to find it so tender and white you don’t need a knife.

Oh, I have been woefully disappointed of late! The pig, he gets smaller and he gets nastier to eat.  My pig has started to come riddled with gristle and lines of fat camouflaged by tempting outer crusts.  And the vegetables!  They now have such power on your plate. 

They seem to have taken notice of the government’s health campaign and used it for their own ends by shouting their fibrous message ‘Eat all five of us, mate, because you’ll have to as there isn’t enough protein on this plate to fill a spoon.’

It’s the recession, restaurants still want to give you a big plateful at the same price, but something has had to give, and it’s my beloved piggy-wiggy.  They wouldn’t mess with a lamb chop or a beefsteak as we’re used to the size of their portions on our plates, but the pig seems to be up for grabs.

I believe it was the custom in Yorkshire to fill up on Yorkshire pud covered in thick gravy as a first course so that you didn’t need as much meat on your plate.  God help me if, as a German, I end up being served a great waffly thing with greasy gravy giving off a whiff of bacon as my starter. 

My main course then comes as a plate of soupy vegetables with a token bright orange bread-crumbed square masking the ‘white gold of pork’. 

I’ll have to eat at home more…

I’m wrestling with something after reading Brian Dillon’s article ‘Malignant Sadness’ (Saturday Guardian, 22.08.09) chronicling the history of creative people’s predisposition to hypochondria.*

Freud thought it was a ’state of being in love with one’s own illness’, but I support Charles Darwin who claimed that ‘ill-health … has saved me from the distractions of society and amusement.’

I’m aware that most people would class me as one of the ‘worried well’ as I seem to always have a bit of an illness on the go.  Even when the doctor prescribes the right medicine, I’m susceptible to the side effects and get iller from the cure.

I’ve come to accept it’s just the way I am.  At the moment I have Dupuytren’s Contracture of my right middle finger, a sprained knee, blocked up Eustachian tubes and paroxysmal positional vertigo.

Alice James, sister of the starry Henry and William, who, according to Dillon, was labelled as a ‘life long … cheerful and ironic malingerer’, almost welcomed it when she was finally diagnosed with cancer and ‘truly began to live at the moment she knew she was dying.’

I am at a stage in my life when I begin to see that the illness is beside the point.  Perhaps we need a new social network site like Facebook or Twitter for people like me to share our current anxiety about our ills.  What would we call it?  Healthy anxiety.com?  Tormented. com?  Hopes and Fears.com?

After reading this brilliant piece by Brian Dillon, I’ve come to realise that I don ‘t have  a wish to die, a death wish, but rather that responses to mortality vary and we all deal with it in our very own ways.

My girlfriend expects to have 100% bouncing health and is surprised at a sniffle.  I’m not like that.  My creativity seems to be wrapped up in human suffering and I’m that human.  Oddly enough that cheers me.

*Brian Dillon, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, Penguin, 2009

I have been quietly excited about launching our Mindful Writing workshops since the page has gone up on the website.  And then doubts set in.  I began to think, what do I really know of Mindfulness and what fundamentally is the purpose of writing? 

Even though for me there is something truly marvellous about the act of writing things down and I’ve always thought it’s worth exploring how our thoughts and feelings can connect neural networks in our brain and then those thoughts and feelings travel down our arms to our fingers.  The fingers then take up some kind of tool that makes marks and it comes out as ‘Suddenly I awoke, confused, disorientated, a veil of sleepiness draped over my eyes.’ *  But, is this all there is to it?  Just writing things down?  Telling a tale, a story with an exciting plot?

I realised that what I wanted was to dig much deeper.  I’m interested in trying to crack the code that keeps us shackled to old patterns of thought and behaviour.  Maybe we have an urge to communicate what is most important to us.  But often it’s so important that describing things from the outside won’t do the trick.  We have to crack the code first before we can know what it’s all about.  What struck me when writing LOVE LIES: A Journal was that through Andre, the main character, I’d actually engaged in cracking the code, breaking the template that I thought I had to live by.

The difficulty is once we’re getting an awareness that there is a code to be cracked we can feel desolate.  There is so much truth in the phrase ‘better the devil you know’.  However, if that code or template has kept us living in a restrained, constricted way and the way we’ve lived makes no sense to us any more, then we have no choice but to crack it, to reassess this template so that we may lead our best life.

My mother is still alive in Germany.  She had me when she was 19.  When I go back to Germany as a man in his sixties and with half a century of UK living under my belt, I still behave with my ancient mother as if I were 16 years old, drawn back inexorably into adolescent behaviours that I thought I had long shed.  The difference, now I have embraced Mindfulness, is that I’m able to look at my present ‘experience of Mother’ for what it is rather than let it besiege me.

This blog has become an example of Mindful Writing for me.  Let’s go back to what I kicked off with, my worries and fears about the efficacy of Mindful Writing workshops.  Well, all I can say is that just writing this today in a mindful way, has been helpful for looking at myself.

*A. Beier, LOVE LIES: A Journal, p.140, Eaglepeace Publications

I believe in writing things down.  Writing my novel LOVE LIES: A Journal allowed me to make sense of dark periods in my life and the act of writing served as a catalyst for my creativity.  So I am very interested in people who also have written things down and therefore made a difference to the world.

We’re kind of muddled up about writing as we are about a lot of things nowadays.  We think if we write it’s got to be for an external purpose, to be famous, to achieve things, to show our smarts.  But I believe in the transformative power of writing.  So I was intrigued to discover William Petty.

William Petty is probably best known as the father of taxation and a good friend of Samuel Pepys.  What fascinated me was his mapping of Ireland in the 17th century.  Ireland was a bit of a problem, because Oliver Cromwell needed to carve it up to pay his Protestant soldiers and there was no map available other than one drawn by monks, a map that looked more like a pictogram with lines of trees on it.

What William Petty did was to get the soldiers to write down everything they saw while they were walking about.  So how does William Petty fit with Mindful Writing?  Let me quote him: “I would sooner live upon Herb Pottage all the dais of my life than not to study truth.”  A complex personality, he had a compulsion to write his thoughts down and the British Library is a testament to that with its Petty papers.

I believe he used ‘writing down’ as a way to develop his ideas and organise his thoughts.  The compulsion of ‘writing down’ was so strong in Petty that when he was tired he employed amanuenses to capture everything.  He wrote because he simply had to, even in 1679 he wrote to his wife telling her that a “wolf’s tooth under the pillow is a certain cure for gum swelling.”

One can see a struggle in Petty to find his truth, a shifting away from the external world to introspection.  Anything that occurred to Petty, whether verifiable or purely superstitious, he gave value to by writing it down.  Petty is a prime example of just having to keep on writing, if this means that in the middle of all the muddy dross a few specks of gold shine through.