Suzanne’s Blog

This past week in my Writing as a “Righting” Journey group, I gave an assignment that incorporates some of the work I’ve been reading about emotional balance and the brain and my close reading of Jane Hirshfield’s poem Between the Material World and the World of Feeling, below.

I asked the participants to focus their attention on a time when they were worried about their child’s health. Then I asked them to complete a number of sentences that all began with “When I am worried about my child’s health I feel…or I am…” I gave them a list of things to think about: what color they felt, if they were the weather what would it be, some kind of food, a taste, smell, animal or sound of an animal, etc.  Then I asked them to do the same thing for when they feel grounded.

Next, I asked them to think of something that connects one thing to another.  I wanted them to write one sentence about when they are worried, write about traveling on whatever it was that connects them from one place to another (for one it was an airplane, for another a path through a bamboo grove) and then write a sentence that corresponds to that aspect of worry but is from the grounded side of their list.

I was looking for a way to create a pathway from worry to groundedness using language. I was also thinking about the poem below and how Jane Hirshfield (also her mentors, Rilke and Cavafy) uses an object to embody her feelings. In this poem, she imagines or wishes for, a particular chair, bentwood, and a very specific vase, blue-green, that could hold her and a range of feelings in “an equally tender balance.” And so finally I asked the writers to think of an object in their house they dearly loved and to write descriptively about that object.

This exercise seemed to grab the participants at different junctures. One found it easy to write about certain worries as she compared it to various other senses, objects or experiences while another took awhile to find an object in her house that she cared about. But when she thought about her piano, that had belonged to her grandmother, a whole new ‘aha’ moment opened for her.

Finally, we all read this poem together, aloud. We spent time looking for the feeling words, the words of materia and the connectors or vessels that held things and the immateria of feelings.  The poem has become for me another vessel.  One I return to again and again, so I may pour myself into it and have it echo back.

 

Between The Material World And The World Of Feeling

 

Between the material world and the world of feeling there must be a
border—on one side, the person grieves and the cells of the body grieve also;
the molecules also; the atoms. Of this there are many proofs. On the other,
the iron will of the earth goes on. The torture-broken femur continues to
heal even in the last hour, perhaps beyond; the wool coat left behind does
not mourn the loss of its master. And yet Cavafy wrote, “In me now
everything is turned into feeling—furniture, streets.” And Saba found in
a bleating goat his own and all beings’ sorrow, and this morning the voice
of that long-dead goat—which is only, after all, a few black-inked words—
cries and cries in my ears. Rilke, too, believed the object longs to awaken in
us. But I long for the calm acceptance of a bentwood chair and envy the
blue-green curve of a vase’s shoulder, which holds whatever is placed
within it—the living flower or the dead—with an equally tender balance,
and knows no difference between them.

 

–Jane Hirshfield   from After

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Continuing my trajectory about writing as a “righting” journey and the brain, I came across an article by Judy Willis, neuroscientist and writing teacher/consultant in education.  Though she is talking about optimal parameters for learning, I am convinced that these same parameters work in favor of writing and emotional balance.

In review, the amygdala is the emotion center of the brain and the prefrontal cortex is where we can think about our emotions and make choices about how to react.  When we write, we are using our brain to do a great many tasks at once.  Here is Ms. Willis on the importance of writing.

“Consider all of the important ways that writing supports the development of higher-process thinking: conceptual thinking; transfer of knowledge; judgment; critical analysis; induction; deduction; prior-knowledge evaluation (not just activation) for prediction; delay of immediate gratification for long-term goals; recognition of relationships for symbolic conceptualization; evaluation of emotions, including recognizing and analyzing response choices; (my emphasis) and the ability to recognize and activate information stored in memory circuits throughout the brain’s cerebral cortex that are relevant to evaluating and responding to new information or for producing new creative insights—whether academic, artistic, physical, emotional, or social.”

If I had wanted any more validation than this, I couldn’t have asked for a better elucidation.

What is new in my understanding though is why writing, in a supportive emotional atmosphere, can also be healing. From my personal experiences and observations of others, I have written about why I think groups can be very important for healing, (see When Words Matter).  Here, Ms. Willis talks about learning in supportive atmospheres, (when we are writing about difficult experiences, we are also trying to “learn” how to deal with those feelings), and defines a “positive brain state”.

“The brain evolved to better protect the well-being of its owner and species. One way that this is important for the classroom is that effort and attention are limited commodities the brain parses out to the actions it predicts will be successful in protection or pleasure.

So, for example, when students participate in engaging learning activities in well-designed, supportive, cooperative groups, there is a positive emotional response in the brain. The pleasure of learning with one’s peers increases the brain’s release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that increases pleasure, motivation, perseverance through challenges, and resilience to setbacks.

In addition, there is a beneficial response in the amygdala. The amygdala is a switching station (there’s one on each side of the brain) in the brain’s emotional-monitoring limbic system that determines if input will go to the reflective, higher cognitive brain (the prefrontal cortex) or down to the reactive, involuntary brain.

The brain scans of subjects learning in supportive and emotionally pleasurable situations show facilitated passage of information through the amygdala up to the higher cognitive brain, so learning associated with positive emotion is retained longer. Stress, however, determines if the intake is sent to that lower reactive brain.”

It may be that not only talking about stressful and painful emotional events, like how to deal with a chronically ill child, in a supportive group atmosphere unlocks dopamine (a lot of research has been done on the beneficial effects of all the arts on heart health) thereby reducing stress and providing people with more capacity to think, persevere and become resilient, but adding the activity of writing about those events and sharing pieces of that work with others, might heighten all of those beneficial effects.

It is time we integrated more art and writing programs into all of our medical care..

I have been teaching a workshop called Writing as a “Righting” Journey for parents of children with chronic illness. It is my belief that writing helps us find ways to negotiate the roller coaster of emotions when our children are ill. Somehow, writing mediates our feelings and we may in fact be able to think more clearly after writing about something that is upsetting to us. While I have been convinced of this for myself, and there are legions of others who feel this way, I have become curious if anyone is actually studying this phenomenon scientifically.

So I Googled, writing and the brain and presto, found an article on this subject. Dr. Matthew Lieberman, a neuroscientist at UCLA has been studying this very question.

OK, emotions are seated in the amygdala, that information is fairly well known.  Rational thinking or the ability to modulate one’s feelings seems to lie in the prefrontal cortex (and this takes well into our 20’s to really develop, so we need to give teens a break), yup, that is well studied too.  But the thing that made me sit up and take note was that “scientists suggest that the less vivid and descriptive the piece, the better.” Hence, bad poetry?

Apparently, if you write about something in a “detached” sort of way, rather than really going into detail, the amygdala calms down and the prefrontal cortex lights up. But if you write in more detail, it seems to make one relive the painful or negative experience.

Hmm, now that is not what I expected to hear, but it does make some sense.  I have written my worst poetry in the middle of crisis times. But I have felt better getting it out my body and onto paper.

Yet as a poet, I also know enough to let those words sit for awhile, maybe even a year before I go back to them and revise. So maybe bad poetry and lyrics are being published “right out of the box” as it were.  The heart/brain box that is.  And maybe when we go back to revise our work, whether we were detached or overwrought to begin with, we add more detail and metaphor or hone and strip the narrative, the descriptions or style, so the flood of emotions we felt initially becomes modulated too. The poem takes on a life of its own, it takes a journey that may have a different ending from its origin.

The reader is then able to sense or respond to the piece without being swamped by the load of emotion that prompted the piece in the first place.

And I may now have to encourage my students to be more “dull” in their approaches to writing, so they will feel better. Even if no one reads their work..