Mindfulness meditation, creative writing and the art of coming home. – 17

In this episode of listenN, we speak with creative writer, teacher and mindfulness meditation instructor, Dr. Ranjini George.  Highlights include:

How titles are just a part of the egoic form and structure that holds us back from the joy and happiness that writing can give to us.

How the writing process requires practice and mastering the craft. It is not just something that we can do without a period of apprentaship.

The importance of understanding that working on writing does not need or have to be published to have meaning.

You can write without having to be a writer. Just take 10 minutes and write.

Natalie Goldberg’s book ‘Writing Down the Bones.’ Learning to trust your own voice. Step aside and let the words come through. Writers have to live twice

The Paramita’s of Patience, right effort, discipline and how they manifest in the writing life.

Being present to the page.

Getting hung up as a writer on the end result, recognition, awards, publishing etc. and how it is the downfall to writing and we should be more like cooks that pour time, and love into food that is enjoyed but gone. It’s the words you are putting down and not the end result that matters.

Always wanting to be a teacher since the age of 5. The story about her deep desire to bring the vastness of her spiritual journey and the practices she had learned into the writing classroom.

All writers have to be awake and present to themselves

The practice of deep listening. Connecting to a state of flow.

The importance of not having a fixed mind even about mindfulness.

Meditation helps her drop into herself, connect to her own authenticity and to her own story and mind. And it helps her stay with the process of writing.

Using the practice to stabilize oneself during the emotional destabilizing process that writing can be.

Writers have to live twice. Reliving every experience and in memoir writing that can be a very difficult process.

The invisible work and hard work and energy that is going on during the writing process.

Our suffering can be garbage but it can also be compost from which fruits and vegetable can grow. – Thich Nhat Hanh – Buddhist Monk

With writing you are encountering your experience, your heart you are creating your lotus. Your offering tohe world.

The sharing of stories can uplift another person. Your loss, your suffering is less solid by sharing.

How as writers we take that suffering and find shape and share it and it becomes less solid.

Discussing the significance of journaling as a practice of mindfulness because like meditation, journaling takes us home; we are listening to ourselves.

Journaling keeps us in touch with words.

The importance of reading a lot.

Learning to be friends with yourself and listening to yourself.

How meditation helps us in being awake to the radical grace of being alive.

How meditation is a way of going home and listening to yourself and that is what you are doing in a journaling.

She takes us through a mindfulness exercise that we can use to help bring us home to ourselves, the page and our creative process.

The importance of breathe breaks. How it is in all traditions, the idea of returning home and slowing down.

Sharing her love of food and how it taught her the significance to the awareness that in this incarnation, it is the love and process that matters and not the end result.

Her book, Through my mother’s window. Stories from her time teaching ermati students in Dubi.

The importance of having a talent and using it. Do it with playfulness and generosity and in a way to benefits others. Do not take ourselves so seriously. Playful creativity. Express it without being hung up on the hope of the end result.

We often do not see the final purpose of what we do.

FULL EPISODE NOTES  |  PDF

Links from episode 017

Connect with Ranjini: Facebook

Her Book: Through My Mother’s Window: Emirati Women Tell
Their Stories and Recipes

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