Caroline Allen's Blog - Posts Tagged "writer"

I believe when you’re called to purpose, and when you answer that call, you become one of the healers of the world. As you align yourself with your higher calling, you become an example to others. Often the call we answer goes further than just finding ourselves. Often we’re called to go out and help others. I describe this call to purpose as I follow one protagonist around the world in the coming of age series I’m writing called The Elemental Journey Series, especially in the most recent novel, Water.

On my own path, and in my work as a coach, I see very clearly how following the call to purpose aligns with the five stages of grief:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

These are exactly what one goes through in owning and living purpose. There was a reason we put away our dreams as a child, and when we’re called to purpose, those dreams resurface and all of the grief and fear of “giving up on ourselves” rises to the surface. We want to close that drawer, not look at how much we’ve lost.

Read my story to get an even better idea of how these stages have played out in my life, in finding my calling as a novelist, visual artist and coach to others. Here are the five stages of grief as they apply to finding purpose:

Denial
The gods knock. If you ignore them, they’ll knock again, and again and again. And if you ignore that, their knocking will become the clash of mythological fists against the rock of your resistance.

You pushed her down into your belly, and now she wants out. At first, you put your head down and get back to your normal job, your normal day and pretend she isn’t wailing beneath the surface.

Many people know my story of denial. I was so unhappy. Depressed. Living in rainy Seattle, roaming around lost. I was given a tarot reading and was told: “You are a visual artist.” I snorted, chin in hand. There went $65 down the drain. Afterwards, I roamed the Capitol Hill district, smoking cigarettes, in a dark funk.

It would take five more years before I’d pick up a paintbrush and start my career as a visual artist. I was an artist as a little girl, winning awards almost every time I entered a show. I’d forgotten about her, buried her deep inside. My parents roared against the concept of me becoming an artist. What do you want to become a bag lady? It wasn’t stated, but implied. Art was something you gave up. Like hope. Like your heart.

Anger
With the call to purpose comes a rage so monstrous you cannot breathe. How dare I be put in a straight jacket for 30, 40, 50 years? How DARE you make me hate my life for so long, parents, school system, unfair economic system.

We are enraged with ourselves for wasting so much time, half our lives. We are enraged with parents who themselves didn’t follow their purpose, who didn’t have the courage to nurture themselves first, and then the wherewithal to nurture us.

Oh, how we’d rather not feel so much rage. Oh, we’ll self medicate, or use pharmaceuticals or play online games for hours, anything but to FEEL. We must honor the anger. It’s one of our best friends. It’s pointing the way to our transformation.

I’ll tell you, my rage was so epic it could’ve destroyed whole cities. I wonder sometimes if all the world’s rage doesn’t come down to this, all the war and crime and destruction: Are we so angry because we’ve been told we must lose ourselves that we’d prefer to destroy the entire planet than look at ourselves?

Bargaining
I gave up journalism to follow my path of bliss as an artist. I worked in newsrooms in Tokyo and London. People picked up when I called. I jet-setted around Asia and Europe. Doors opened for me.

When I gave up journalism, I gave up the perks too. I gave up London, one of my favorite cities on the planet. I gave up travel. I gave up seeing my name in print all of the time.

I didn’t know that exploring myself would be so hard. I started writing fiction and expected to have a book published in five years. Hilarious! Apparently finding one’s lost self takes a lot longer than five years.

So, fed up with how hard it all was, I got another job in journalism, at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Newspaper. I bargained with the gods: Just let me do this for a while, get my ego back, have a wild life like I used to. OK? Please?

Within two months, I was sitting at the monitor in the newsroom, when both of my arms went dead. Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. It would take three months of intense physical therapy to be able to move my arms at all. It would take another 10 years to heal it. I would never work in a newsroom again.

Bargaining is when you try to go back to the boyfriend you broke up, and it all becomes much worse than it was before and you have to extract yourself again.

Bargaining is necessary. We have to learn the hard way, that there is no way out to the other side but through.

Depression
You want to follow your purpose, but it’s so hard. You don’t have any extra money, you’ve lost your old lifestyle, you outgrew people on your journey toward authentic self. You’re alone. It’s too hard. The world is so horribly messed up.

You’re right. The journey is difficult. The world is a mess. You’re depressed because it IS all depressing.

I believe in the darkness. I am not one of those people who asks people to deny their depression. I believe this darkness can be a very honest friend. It’s only when it goes on too long that it’s a problem. Only then do we need to get up, exercise our bodies, go to an art gallery, do whatever it takes to move the energy, so we can get on with the hard work of living our purpose.

Acceptance
How can you get to a place of acceptance? This is your path and you’re going to commit to it, despite the ups and downs and financial insecurity and loss of friends. If you’re like me, you cycled through anger and depression and bargaining for a long time. I want to accept this path fully. How? Shaking fist at the heavens. How?

The world NEEDS you. You’re a hero. You know it deep in your soul. This is what it means to be a hero. We’re globally flushing ourselves down a toilet, and we need you to find your way, so you can show others the way out of the whirlpool of destruction.

How do you accept this path? I have found re-scripting your life story into a heroic journey goes a long way toward acceptance. Look at the events of your life from the perspective of compassion for all parties. We’ve all been duped in giving up our souls. Have compassion for yourself: this is a heroic, epic journey you’re on, and nobody ever said it was going to be easy. Here are some examples of re-scripting:

My parents were so hard on me. “Look at how hard my parents were on themselves. They were so frightened of their own creative spirit. In healing myself, I begin to heal my family from this great loss of self.”

I can’t stand my job. “My soul so deeply wants to follow its authentic purpose, and the love for this call to purpose is so great, no ‘normal’ job is going to make me happy.”

I hate being so broke as I figure out how to align my passion with making money. “I am part of a new paradigm that is going to change the entire world, away from doing work we hate, to doing work we love. I’m part of that exciting new paradigm, and I’m working hard to find my way.”

My husband/boyfriend left me. “As I become more authentically aligned, I will outgrow people. This is why this is the heroic path. It takes courage to grow. I have tremendous courage.”

Of course, you won’t go through the above stages in linear fashion, and you won’t only cycle through them once. The good news is this: If you’re now answering the call to purpose and really going through it hard (most of us have found this to be the most difficult thing we’ve ever done), know this: It will change. You’ll still have the hard times, but you get used to it, you learn how to ride the waves. You start to see what a difference you’re making in your own life and the lives of others, and that gives you the boost of confidence and energy to keep going.

I will not diminish how hard this path is. But I will say: You are doing what you were put on this planet to fulfill. You are living a life you can look back on with deep pride and deepest gratitude. You are saving the world. And isn’t that worth it?

I'm a creativity coach and a book coach. carolineallen.com,

I was at the beach at Nehalem Bay in Oregon a few months ago. A 5-year-old girl was doing the worm in the sand, her mother standing nearby.

"Is that the worm?" I asked her.

"Yes!" She wormed some more.

She jumped up and ran up to me and my dog Atlas. I held his leash tight. He's twice her size and weight, and I was worried he might hurt her. He's always jumping. I often fear he'll hurt an elderly person or child with his overwhelming love.

I looked to the mother.

"It's OK. She has the touch."

She put her tiny hands on both sides of Atlas' face. He calmed down profoundly.

She did have the touch.

We talked some more. Something about her profoundly moved me.

She was pure soul.

She was magic.

You are magic. We are all magic.

Often, though, that magic is lost beneath piles of conditioning by society and our parents. Our traumas, our parents' trauma, our cultural mandates, they change us. It's our spiritual journey, it's the whole reason we're born I believe, to spend our lives coming back to our authentic selves. It's not an easy journey. I've been on this path for 27 years and it's the hardest thing I've ever done. When we touch the raw place of our lost authentic selves it draws up all sorts of grief, rage, denial, fear. That's why they call it a Hero's Journey because it takes serious courage. I write about my challenges on my journey to purpose in fiction form in my novels Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.

If you want to find your purpose, the only way is through this excavation. Your purpose is the essence of who you are. In an imperfect world, we have to go on a journey to find this essence if we are to truly find our purpose.

One great way to engage our innate magic is to revisit our younger selves. Here are 5 tips for doing that.

1. Write down a list of things you loved to do when you were little. Do one of them!
2. Look at a picture of your younger self. Ask her what she's feeling, what she needs, what she wants, what she thinks. Write it down. Listen to her.
3. Finger paint. We're taught to be so practical as adults. Be impractical. Goof around.
4. Read children's books. They're magic and will remind you of your magic.
5. Play. Play. Play -- in whatever way that comes to you.

Now, bring any one of the above into your current spiritual/creative practice. Invoke and involve this younger self when you meditate, or journal, or write, or do art. It will reinvigorate your practice.

It's all about what you love. It's all about love.

For more than two decades I’ve been honing the scheduling around my creative practice. And I’ve been helping book clients and others do the same. As a novelist, visual artist, and coach, I’ve had to learn the magic of transition from helping others to working on my craft. I’ve had to figure out the best schedule for my creative energies on a daily, monthly, seasonal, and annual basis. And as is the case with novel-writing, I’ve had to find the balance over a series of years.

I’ve had to switch between clients and my own creative practice, and I’ve had to learn how to move from novel writing to visual art and back again.

How do we find the time we need to wonder and wander and fill the creative well, when we have family obligations or a full-time job? (No one can create with an empty creative well.)

How do we switch from the left linear brain to the right creative brain even when we do have some extra time?

How do we manage a long-term creative project like a novel? I tell clients novel-writing isn’t a sprint, it’s a triathlon that lasts three to five years!

Here are five steps that have worked for me:

1. Vision Comes First
Start with the vision of the project. Spend days or weeks envisioning what you want to create. I have to “dream” the novel or artwork to create it. Start with soulful exploration. Explore other artists and writers. I just finished my middle grade novel BLUE and for two years prior to writing it, I devoured delicious middle grade literature. How can you envision your project first? Create a vision board. Look through art books or online at great artists’ works. Inspire yourself. This is especially useful if you feel your creative well is dry.

2. The Beginning is the Hardest
For me, starting a novel or a new piece of artwork is the hardest part. I need the vroom to get started. I get myself revved up by first focusing on my biorhythms. I’m a morning person. What are you? Where do you find you have most energy and focus during the day? The hardest work of structuring a painting or a novel comes first thing in the morning when I’m fresh and “on”. In fact, I find when I first wake up, I can do in one hour what takes three hours if I wait to tackle it in the afternoon. If you can, schedule errands or money-making work during the times of your day when you have less energy. Conserve your best most beautiful energy for your own creative work. This can take years to set up. I’ve spent decades transforming my schedule to focus first and foremost on my own creative process. Be creatively selfish. I give you permission. 🙂

3. Scheduling is Crucial
This is huge! A consistent schedule for your creativity is the single greatest factor in determining your success, especially as a novelist. Work at the same time and on the same days each week, week to week, month to month. I schedule clients around my own consistent art/novel time and not the other way around. That tight consistency helps me get a lot done (5 novels, 4 published, hundreds of paintings). Three days a week of three hours of creativity each day seems to be the sweet spot for most people.

4. Posting is Fun
Don’t let social media override your creative practice. Schedule it at the end of the day. I love sharing my work. What is the story of the painting or the novel? What is your creative process? Use social media, blogs and podcasts to share the love. I believe our creativity inspires others especially during these times.

5. Blocks are Creative too
We all have blocks. Sometimes debilitating ones. You might have read the first four points here and thought: That’s all fine and good, but what if I can’t even get myself to do anything creative. I have a trick I use with clients. Take that block and paint it. Take that block and give it to a character in your novel. Take that block and write a self help book about it. Use the block. So if a parent was shaming, do an abstract painting where you put colors to your feelings. Finger paint it. I often give characters my blocks. In my middle grade novel BLUE, I have a little girl who is scared to tell the world what she sees as a mystic. This is definitely a block I’ve been working with for a long time. Use your block to own the block, explore the block, even love the block.

Studies show that creativity decreases anxiety and depression. We need creativity in our lives. The more we structure it into our days, the more joy we can feel and express, especially in these difficult times.

Is our purpose limited only to the work we do, or is it more than that? Is it just what we turn on for clients or a zone we only get into when we're writing our books? Do we turn it off for the most of the day and week?

What if we let that passion and purpose permeate everything, all of our relationships, even how we keep our house, how we cook food, how we look at the view out the window, how we perceive the world? What if our purpose and passion gave more SOUL to every aspect of our lives.

While thinking about this, I had a dream where I was reminded of a scene in my novel Water.

In the following autobiographical scene, I describe my first workshop on shamanism in Seattle with the famous shamanic teacher Michael Harner. A large group of us sit in a circle. For those who don't know shamanism, part of it includes doing visualizations, taking "journeys" to meet spirit guides to ask them questions. The following recounts my first time ever "journeying" for another person.

***

I turn to the woman beside me. She looks like Tammy Faye. Short and round, a tight perm, pearl necklace, pearl earrings. Her perfume overwhelms me. As I look her over, she looks me over. My skinny jeans, tight concert t-shirt, combat boots. We are an odd couple. We are two people who would never hang out.

The assistant says we must give our partner a question, and we will go on simultaneous shamanic journeys to ask the other person's guides for answers.

I ask her what her question is and she says, “How can I expand my work as a Christian missionary?” I think: how odd and wonderful that she’s Christian, and she’s here doing this shamanic workshop, something so pagan.

We’re told to lie back and have the sides of our bodies touching. The drumming starts. I find myself immediately transported.

I'm at a river bank. The grit and mud, the sparse grass like balding hair, it’s as real to me as anything in normal reality. A guide comes up beside me; he looks like Jesus. In front of me is a small pool of water. Beyond the small pool is a narrow strip of land, and beyond that a wide river with a strong current. It’s muddy and reminds me of the Missouri River.

Jesus hands me a wafer, the body of Christ. I know it well from Catholic Mass. He tells me, “Put the wafer on the ground, in the grass.” I do so. He traces around it with his finger. “This is the extent of the space it takes up,” he says. “You see the space it occupies?”

I nod.

“Now put it in the pool.”

I do so, placing it into the tiny, still pool in front of me. It breaks apart and dissolves.

“Now, in this small pool, it has dissolved, and see what space it takes up," Jesus says. The pool is less than two feet in diameter.

I nod.

“Now watch this.” The river swells, breaks the bank, and swirls into the tiny pool. The river absorbs the pool and the tiny particles within it, and the current pulls it out and away. “Now see the space the wafer takes up. It flows in vast directions.”

I nod.

He says, “Tell her to bring her Christianity into every area of her life, not just church. Tell her to dissolve it into the waters of her soul and have it permeate her every breath.”

I hear rapid drumming and this is the cue that we're meant to come out of the meditation. I do so and sit up and blink my eyes. The woman also sits up.

I give her the message word for word, with all of the visuals. She melts. She cries.

“Yes, I keep my Christianity at the church. You’re right. It needs to be everywhere in my life.” She has the bluest, most gentle eyes. I didn’t notice them before. She thinks for a while, then looks at me with such trust until I melt. “Thank you.” (She tells me the answer to my question but I'm editing that out here for brevity.)

She hugs me. I don’t see her as “other” anymore, like I did before. I realize we are both just people, just living, just doing our best.

***

Think about this for yourself. How much of your spiritual/creative life is a wafer that you keep limited to the grassy area of client calls or the 30 minutes you do yoga? How much of your spiritual/creative work is compartmentalized?

I know when I attempt to let soul permeate everything, I'm so much happier, so much more fulfilled. When I see a person or the forest or even my dog as a painting of lights and darks, when I see it all as poetry, my soul sings. What if we could see the soul in paying our bills?

What if our soul work is a conversation we bring everywhere, waters we swim in all day, an energy we bring with us wherever we go, the very air we breathe.

What if you dissolved your soul expression into the very current of your life?

When you write memoir, you're not just telling your story, you're relaying the tales of the seven generations before you. When you're healing with memoir, you're not just mending yourself, you're restoring your ancestors (yes, even those who have passed).

It's an tremendous, sacred, sometimes overwhelming task.

Semi-autobiographical fiction also invokes the stories of our predecessors. I know this happened to me in the writing of my novel, Earth. Oh how it drew up the specters of my Missouri kinfolk.

Often you're the very first person ever to chronicle this multi-generational journey -- you're giving the women before you a voice. You're invoking their thwarted hopes and dreams. Their traumas. Their love. Their regrets.

What a beautiful weighty purpose.

I've worked with dozens of memoir writers, and have found this in my own writing -- emotions can become overwhelming during the writing process. The beauty and the poetry are there, too, but the grief can weigh heavily on a writer's shoulders.

Here are five tips for handling telling your story, and the story of your ancestors.

1. Go slowly. Really slowly. Like a snail's pace. Write just one story. Sit for a few days with the emotions. We feel our mother's repressed emotions when we're growing up. We feel her mother's and her mother's mother's. Finally these stories are getting aired, chronicled, acknowledged. You're not just dealing with your emotions -- you have ancestral emotions embedded in your DNA.

2. Don't worry if you can't verify all of the stories you've been told about your predecessors. Tell the ones you know. That's all you can do. Verify where you can. But don't shut the project down simply because you don't have written proof. It's your job as the family chronicler to tell the stories for posterity. Don't forget to write the happy tales too! Don't forget the joy.

3. Circle the wagons. Let friends and loved ones know what you're doing. Call in your healers, therapists, your self-care practices, like yoga, meditation, journaling -- I wouldn't recommend writing a memoir without a great deal of self-care. You may experience body pain. Your back goes out. Hip pain. Stomach problems. These are common. Take great care. Keep a process journal, and write out the emotions that come up.

4. Boundary your writing sessions. Open and close your writing session with a ritual, light a candle, acknowledge that you're diving into the soul of the work, and when the session is finished, blow out the candle, release the writing. Even when you do this, sometimes the pain of your people can bleed into your every day life. Keep practicing. Over time, the boundaries solidify.

5. Create an altar and invoke spiritual help. There is so much help just waiting for you to open the door. Put photos of your ancestors onto the altar. Objects they love. Light a candle. Invoke ease. Invoke help. We deserve all the assistance we can get as the chroniclers of our family lineage.

Do not underestimate the task you've agreed to undertake this lifetime. Treat it and yourself gently. Take great care. Accept help. This is a karmic, epic heroine's journey. And you've been called.