Albert Flynn DeSilver - Writing as a Path to Awakening: A Year to Becoming an Excellent Writer and Living an Awakened Life

This book is for all my Writing as a Path to Awakening students, past, present, and future. Thank you for your brilliant writing and creative geniusness, your support, courage, and inspiration!

To tap into your deepest talent, you need to seek out a calm, restful state of mind where your head isnt defending your delicate ego and your heart can bloom open a little.

MARY KARR

Contents

Acknowledgments

T hanks first and foremost to Loren Olds for the love and friendship, and for helping to complete the circle. And to Robert Lee for his excellence in editing and beingyour support and belief in this book have been paramount! Thanks also to Haven Iverson, Christine Day, Tami Simon, and the rest of the crew at Sounds True.

With infinite love and gratitude always to Megan Freeman, teacher and guiding angel. To Karen Benke in love and friendship via writing, teaching, and being. And to my great Writing as a Path to Awakening primary venues, beginning with the mothership Spirit Rock, where it all began for me spiritually, emotionally, even poetically. Thanks to Jack Kornfield, Ajahn Jumnian, Heather Sundberg, Anna Douglas, and Anne Cushman especially. With thanks to the Omega Institute, Esalen Institute, and Shambhala Mountain Center. Thanks to Adayashanti and the many journeys of awakening through silence. To the late Bill Berkson who supported and encouraged and redirected my creative intentions toward poetry and writing. Thanks always to Todd Pickering, friend and bright creative catalyst. To the crew at TEDx Santa Cruz, who gave me the stage on which to clarify some of the core ideas for this book. To Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert, whose presence, creativity, and courage have been a perpetual guiding light. Thanks to Jennifer Urban Brown for your kind and generous help with the framework for this book. Thanks to all my friends, colleagues, and students at California Poets in the Schools. Though it has been a while, you are my eternal inspiration!

To Margaret and Serena with love and strength, and to the memory of Collette Ray Flynn and Carll Harrison DeSilver forever in love and gratitude. And to Marian, always with love.

Preface

Premise, Promise, and Precepts

I would like to begin this book the same way I like to begin my workshopsby reminding everyone of their true nature via a very basic premise: You are enough. You are more than enoughyou are a creative genius. And Im not being nice, trying to endear you to me and my lovely little book here. This is basic original truth. Merely by the fact of your existence you cant help being a creative genius. This is your very nature; its who you arewhatever your story or situation. You are constantly creating all the time. And yet like most of us, you might be creating from a familiar default set point of limited conditioning rather than from refined, unlimited open awareness. You might be a little out of alignment with the full force and flow of the universal creation energy that is you. Now is your time to realign your awareness and best intentions with that full creation energy. Take a deep breath, put your hand on your heart, and say it loud and proud (or if you are in a public location, loudly to yourself): I am a creative genius, I am a brilliant writer! Good. Welcome back. How does that feel?

Now being a creative genius and a brilliant writer doesnt necessarily mean that you are suddenly intellectually superior and advanced, particularly skilled, or even published. What it does mean is that by activating the truth of who you are in voice and body, you have begun to re-member and reactivate your full potential for all those things. Its just been dormant within you, waiting for the right time and the right catalyst to help set it free within you and the world. Let this book, this moment, be that reminding spark.

A brilliant writer is someone who is devoted to expressing their creativity through the written word. Devotion is the key. I like to say a writer is someone who writes, not someone who is published. Practice, repetition, and consistency are essential. This book is designed to help you master all three. And because writing is not a separate activity from living, its ultimately a book about Being with a capital B, about the integration of life and art.

The promise: If you read carefully and openly, truly give yourself to the practices in this book, tweaking them for your own development, and continue devotedly and consistently meditating, writing, reading, studying, attending live events (preferably one of mine), and letting go, you will become a more awake person and a better writer. It really is that simple in concept, and that challenging and rewarding in practice. In the meantime, happy reading! Enjoy the stories and have fun practicing the meditations and experimenting with the exercises. And if you gain something valuable from this book (or even if you dontha!), I sincerely hope to see you at some of my upcoming live workshops, retreats, or daylong intensives to help you integrate the material and further propel you along your path of creativity and awakening.

The precepts: Every great human spiritual tradition from around the world is structured around precepts in one way, shape, or form. From the most remote and obscure animistic hunter-gatherer cultures to the major Western religious traditions, humans have always sought grounding and connection in guidelines for behavior and action in regards to self, family, society, and the world at large. There is a reason such precepts and guidelines are common to virtually all cultures, religions, and integrated social units: they keep us connected, balanced, and engaged with community in a healthy, supportive way. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life disconnected, without any knowledge, understanding, or engagement with such a simple intentional frameworkand it almost killed me. By following such an open and flexible code, we can stay grounded, motivated, and supported in our practices of creativity and spirituality. Its about keeping the collective safe and sane and rooting our highest spiritual and creative intentions in community support.

You can think of such precepts as an open moral code of conductthe Eightfold Path of Buddhism, the Ten Commandments of Christianity, the principles of faith in Judaism, the codes of yogic discipline found in Hinduism, or the Five Pillars of Islambut in a way free of the dogma and control that limits traditional religious frameworks. Yes, I too am suspicious of any patriarchal morality police commanding from up on high about how we should live and behave and in what context. For aboriginal cultures, morality codes come about more organically from ritual, storytelling, singing, and dancing, as expressed in action in relationship to an immediate landscape or place. Less doctrinal, more free-flow, which is what were all about here.

In following a version of such precepts myself, I thought it relevant to tweak and orient them specifically to writing as a path to awakening, since this is not just a book about writing and creativity but also about living the awakened life. Again, this isnt some strict religious doctrine I insist you followquite the opposite. Its an invitation to enter this book in an open way, to enter your life in a newly expanded way yet with intentional healing parameters. Here are my ten precepts for writing (being) on the path to awakening. They ask us to commit to: