​Emotional Consciousness in Life and Writing: World into Word

Stewart Park, 2020

I prefer the word consciousness over intelligence when referring to our emotional awareness because consciousness resides throughout our physical and emotional body. Intelligence implies that our emotional wisdom is located in our mind. Also, an emotional consciousness connects us to the metaphorical and natural world. 
 
Everything we need to know is inside us and is offered to us in our present experiences. We access our inner wisdom by listening deeply, hosting our edges and "lifting the burdensome question of how,” as Rebecca reflects in her poem (below).
 
When we listen to our emotional body, and trust our experiences, the world is ours to explore, engage in and create from. The best life is lived listening to the body. The best stories are written from the body whole. 
 
This is the reason I consistently encourage both my writers and my clients to read David R. Hawkin’s book, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender. “Letting go involves being aware of feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it.” This allows us to be conscious of the emotion while not being reactive. My technique of Hosting The Edge gives us a way to simply listen deeply without being reactive; without being caught up in assumptions, a negative narrative or someone else’s agenda for us. This technique will be in my upcoming book The Red Thread (released this summer, 2020). We host the edge as writers and are able to harvest the entire experience onto the page. We can take the world and turn it into word. 
 
The internal and external edges of our life will forever be present. So, as writers we host our edges and write from this edge, listening deeply from the whole of our body. In our day to day life we do the same and walk more freely and joyfully along, and forward from, our many edges.  
 
With emotional consciousness we become the Cause of our Life rather than the effect. “The rationalizing mind prefers to keep the true causes of emotion out of awareness and utilizes the mechanism of projection to do this. It blames events or other people for “causing” a feeling and views itself as the helpless innocent victim of external causes.”  –Hawkins, David R.. Letting Go 
 
This poem of Rebecca Cecchini speaks to how we live and write from the body. And how this emotional consciousness and faith of being here on this edge, will allow us to live our life forward in meaningful ways. 
 
 
Beginning Begins
 
Thoughts to stop me
cold in my tracks,
pile around in heaps like worn-out rail ties.
 
My legs too, seem of a hard poisoned wood. 
How to bend and walk toward the calling,
beyond the frozen here and now
into blazing who knows what? - to find the next,
the new,
to where beginning begins?
 
I might just stay on the still, frozen ground.
But here’s how, without a word, say the Cranes.  Those pencil-legged champions
of faith, 
show up again, lifting the burdensome question
of how,
in their just go
of migration.
 
They don’t even lift their heads, but say what’s the question?
Just go where you're expected.
The ground will thaw under your steps.

–Rebecca Cecchini,  Wisconsin Poet 
 
 (You will find Rebecca's poems threaded throughout my upcoming book: The Red Thread). 

“It’s pleasing to discover that it isn’t necessary to drive oneself forward; instead, one can simply allow oneself to move forward as blocks are removed. Thus, one becomes attracted by the future rather than propelled by the past.”  –David Hawkins, Power VS Force

FREE WRITING RETREAT coming up Friday January 24th in a friend's beautiful home outside Barneveld. 10 to 4:00. Email me to sign up:  [email protected]