Sometimes a general feeling of unease comes over me, and I am unable to shift it. I know it is just thought but knowing that doesn’t make a difference. Sometimes the feeling shifts with a good night’s sleep, but sometimes I get many good nights’ sleep and the feeling continues anyway.

On those occasions, writing in my journal works. But I cannot approach the writing trying to analyse my experience from the inside out ‘understandings’ that I know. Trying to interpret my experience in those moments through those understandings does not work. But if I approach my writing with an open mind, allowing my thoughts and writing to meander where they will, without ‘imposing’, something magic happens. Staying in the openness is different to staying in what I already know. Staying in the openness is where I discover and see anew.

Writing is a process of discovery. Thought is both conscious and unconscious and possibly everything in between.  If I am caught up in unconscious thinking, then perhaps an open writing process in which I am guided by wisdom/possibility/thought from beyond my usual habits can bring clarity to the surface, both about the thoughts building the feelings of malaise, and the possibility that awaits. Writing allows form to emerge around both. When possibility births into form, my experience changes. I change.

This morning’s journal writing brought clarity to both. I began by writing down what occupied my mind. I had been reflecting upon my personal states of mind that weren’t comfortable and wondered if a better state was more accessible. I recalled a quote from Syd Banks which I attempted to locate through someone I follow on Twitter, only to find that the quote could be saying something completely different to what I had understood when I read it. So I wrote that, I wrote about what it could mean and what I thought it meant. My mind then moved on people and events currently in my life. I kept writing what surfaced. I stayed honest with myself and before long some interesting thoughts emerged that I had not been aware of. “Oh, so that is what this is all about.” I continued with no censoring, just allowing the next thought to arrive and I recorded it.

I kept on in this way until the writing felt finished. I was clearer, I could now see some of the thoughts that had been at play. As nothing felt like it needed to be written I walked to the bathroom to take a shower. My thoughts were still floating through and as I turned on the hot water I had an insight about the words of another person and the meaning I was imposing onto those words. Ooh, another moment of liberation in which I could see how my thinking was contributing to the ill at ease feelings I was experiencing. An image of a different possibility for myself came in next, with such clarity that all the other stuff fell away. I had shifted.

I wrote in my journal what had come to me in the shower. What do I know deeper from this experience? It doesn’t matter how much we understand how we create an inside out experience of life via thought, when we hit those times when we feel dispirited and have no clarity, be open to allowing thought to flow – even when what surfaces flies in the face of where an inside out understanding tells us to focus. The depth of our inside out understanding is also evolving. Each of us has to be true to what is unfolding for ourselves if we are to be part of a broader evolution. When working with writing, be open to starting somewhere and allowing your flow of thought to take you where you need to go.

Maybe our experiences of writing from a state of openness is the bigger teacher.