Bigger On The Inside
It’s been a bit quiet over here on ye olde Lotus and Pen these past few months because I’ve been leading the Spring Writer’s Practice Period, which was an intensive nine weeks of working among a small group of women with various writing prompts and supportive texts that all centered around themes of longing, curiosity, and figuring out how to work amidst these deeply troubling times.
I’m back now - hello! I hope you all have had a lovely spring. I hope you’re safe. I hope words are a comfort to you, whether you are in a place to write them or if you’re only able to read right now. Don’t feel guilty if writing feels tough. We’ll get there. Keep reading - I’ve got a couple of exercises for you at the end.
Stimulus / Response
I recently came across this Viktor Frankl quote (if Man’s Search for Meaning is still on your TBR, I implore you to read it posthaste - it’s one of my core texts):
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
This one is hitting me on every conceivable level right now—micro, mezzo, macro, stratospheric. It feels as though the power of choice is eroding before our eyes, but this—the power to choose our response—this cannot be taken away. Frankl survived the concentration camps, he should know. Okay, I have the power to choose my response to whatever the circumstances are. Whether we’re talking writing (rejection, publishing, AI, you name it). Or democracy (people being disappeared, artists and journalists under threat), the economy (tariffs, recession)….I can control my response.
So how do we become intimate with that space between stimulus and response? How do we make room for it and stay there a while? This is a question I’m living into (it’s what Rilke tells us to do, live the questions now so that someday we may live into the answer). I find my power in silence. I find it in words. I find it when I slow down. When I listen to other’s stories. I find my power when it recognizes its kin in another’s power, as though a fire from the same source burns in both of us.
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In order to have that space we need to feel bigger on the inside. Expansive. Wide open and curious. I recently wrote my first picture book. I don’t know if it will ever get published, but I did submit it to a contest and that felt high stakes. It’s called Bigger on the Inside and it’s about trauma in the family system and how, in order to heal, we need to find the things that make us feel bigger on the inside, instead of trying to appear big on the outside through posturing, yelling, armoring.
The other day when I was journaling, I decided to write a list of all the things that make me feel big on the inside—it was really long! Nothing on it surprised me, but I realized how many things truly crack me wide open. I felt a lot of gratitude that there were so many simple and free and accessible things in this world that light me up.
Here are a few:
The sound of wind chimes
Sitting in front of large bodies of water
Bowie’s Starman
Dancing to Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat”
Watching autumn leaves dance in the wind
Sunrises
Sunsets
Giving people presents
Being in flow
So we find this space where we feel bigger on the inside. We cultivate that so that our sense of power comes from our highest self, our very best self. Us on our best day. And it is from this place that we choose our responses. And the response is where growth and freedom are.
But if the response isn’t from a place that is wide-open and curious, then there’s no space between stimulus and response. It’s just reacting all the time. It’s living and working and creating out of fear and depression and scarcity and anxiety.
When I think about writers who seem to have discovered this space between stimulus and response, I immediately think of Mary Oliver.
Only someone who has that kind of capacity can write the following poem as a gay woman in the kind of country we live in (stimulus / response):
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
I don’t think I’m up for publicly doing the math on how often I do or don’t have access to my space between stimulus and response in these times. It’s pretty good in some areas of my life and there are others that could really use a Mary Poppins to come on down with her umbrella and carpetbag and set things straight.
This is why we have people like Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust and can say, Look, I’ve been through the worst and I’m telling you—there is a space. You can do this.
One of the ways I have created space for…space…is that I have stepped down from my role as the Executive Director of my Zen center so that I can focus my time when I’m not in clinicals for social work on my coaching practice for writers. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing highlights from the spring practice period - we got into some really powerful material and I’d love to dip into some of the insights with you all. I’ll have more time for 1:1 work, too. I’m looking forward to finding space together, to walking this path, in these times, side by side.
In the meantime…
Dust Off Your Journal….
What makes you feel bigger on the inside? Write your list. Then, go do some of those things. Make some space for the space between stimulus and response.
Next, write down Frankl’s quote and have a little journal session with it. Where are you at with this whole stimulus / response? What do you feel compelled to write about? Go for it. Get it down. It’s rough out there. Spill some ink.
Next Steps for the Summer
I’ve got my usual offerings, but I’m doing two special things I’m really excited about - things that make me AND my the writers I work 1:1 with feel particularly bigger on the inside:
Process Mapping: This package is on sale and you get my You Have A Process course for free with the call. This is my FAVORITE thing to do with clients. We do a 90-minute call where we figure out your beautiful, unique process that ACTUALLY does work for you. It’s so fun, and so eye-opening. We record the call and you get curated materials and resources from me afterwards that are for your process. It’s so empowering to see all the things you do that are working and when we find something that doesn’t work, we revise that and figure out what you can do instead. $300
First 100 Deep Dive: One of the things I’ve come to see is that my writers get A LOT of benefit from having me read just the first 100 pages of their manuscript and give them a serious editorial critique on it, complete with track changes, an extensive editorial letter, loads of resources, a 90-minute editorial call, and a follow-up email with additional curated resources. This is for writers who just feel super lost with their book, or they are stuck about halfway through and they want to do some serious brainstorming. This REALLY gets them back on track.
It’s also for writers who are working on highly personal material (fiction or memoir) and they feel like their own stuff is getting in the way. They need my eyes on the page to help they figure out how to work with what’s coming up for them emotionally while in the writer’s seat. They may have lost the thread and they need support figuring out what they story is really about or how to separate their story from the fictional one. Contact me if this feels like you might want to do this. Space is limited and I have to stagger them throughout the summer. $1,000.
I can’t wait to get back to writing to you all more frequently! I’ve missed this space.
Wishing you so much S-P-A-C-E,
