Welcome to Christin’s Mentor Notes!
- Don’t worry if you missed the first session 😊
I’m available for 1:1 chats, book here: https://tidycal.com/christinchong/30min
- Personalized help with your WOP journey 🗺️
- Any questions about WOP ❓
- Just to say hi 👋
Session 1 Recap
- Music to get into our feelings 🎵
- Reframe writer’s block from a “vague sense of blockage” 🧱 to the surfacing of difficult emotions 🐉
- Difficult emotions are like the heads of a hydra: the more we “slay” them 🤺 the more they pop up! 🐲🐲🐲
- The most prolific writers from Write of Passage are those who are kind to themselves and learn to befriend their emotions 🥰
- 2X Your Potential through a wise, kind, and contemplative path
- Publish Quality Ideas: Uncover YOUR truths and personal monopoly - the “covering” here are layers of difficult emotions accumulated through…being alive and experiencing humanity
- Find Your People: In happy relationships, each partner puts in 60% of the effort (hence 60/60)
- Hold Sacred Space: Ask open-ended questions, avoid giving advice, hold 💕 tenderly
Exercises
How to Befriend “First Sentence” Fear
✍️ Open Google Docs (type docs.new in browser)
✍️ Write the first sentence of your FAQ assignment
⏲️ Do this in 1 min
🫶 Where are your feet? Let yourself feel grounded and rooted to Mother Earth.
🫶 Recognize WHERE your body feels discomfort, be as precise as possible
🫶 Soothe that part of your body
✍️ Write 2-3 sentences describing:
- WHERE you feel discomfort in your body
- How soothing it made you feel
- Use colorful metaphors…
⏲️ Do this in 3 min
Breakout room:
✅ Introduce yourself + your most overused emoji ✅ Share what you wrote ✅ What surprised/didn't surprise you, and why?
🐉 Befriend first sentence fear by recognizing and soothing your body
👩🏻🔬 Science factoid:
- It is challenging for us to notice how “emotions” manifest in the body unless we direct our attention.
- It’s much easier to establish this mind-body connection if we use physical touch to acknowledge and allow the discomfort to be sensed, and then soothed.
🧘🏻♀️ Spiritual tidbit:
- Noticing our body the first step for establishing mindfulness and developing skillful states of mind.
- Then it is typical in Buddhist teachings to use the mindfulness of body to ground ourselves, so then we can be mindful of our emotions too.
- Together these practices establish a base of calmness that is conducive to the development of kindness and wisdom (satipaṭṭhāna.)
How to Make Self-Doubt Work With You
✍️ Write 1 more sentence for your FAQ draft
⏲️ Do this in 1 min
✍️ Change font to Italics, journal what you thought while writing your FAQ sentence
⏲️ Do this in 3 min
Large Group Sharing:
✅ Share what you wrote during this exercise ✅ What surprised/didn't surprise you, and why?
🐉 Make self-doubt work with you by journaling while writing
👩🏻🔬 Science factoid:
- Sometimes our subconscious mind interferes with our writing process, but we don’t know why.
- We can remedy this by listening to our subconscious mind through journaling while writing.
- Although our subconscious mind does contribute to our self-doubt, it also embeds gems of wisdom about our past and our potential paths for the future.
- These gems can help us develop nuance in our writing and amplify the “personal” in POP writing (Personal, Observational, Playful) - which you will learn in an upcoming live session!
🧘🏻♀️ Spiritual tidbit:
- Introspection through journaling is a powerful contemplative path.
- Through journaling, we can recognize that our minds operate through deep-seated patterns, and begin to understand and release ourselves from these patterns that cause stress and suffering (dukkha.)
Exercise Benefits According To Attendees 💌
- Really helpful in refining my FAQ
- Just being present with my emotions today made this super worth it
- Writing out my feelings about writing while writing is extremely helpful
- Just has been a forcing function on the personal
- Every thought is valuable...just get it down on paper!
- Anxiety seems to hit more than one body part and I can write a lot more when I am writing about what I am feeling
- Use journaling to help get into flow
- Get raw emotions in your writing!
- I don't know myself as well as I sometimes think!
- How to address writers' block in the moment is so powerful. Every block is a microcosm of our greater limiting patterns.
- We face a lot of the same emotions
- Self doubt —> informative for how to dig deeper
- Ground myself and feel my feet on my ground before I start. This was so centering for me and a lovely reminder
- When you are stuck with how to start, write about how you feel (jounral) it instead
- Locating stress in our body is important to release it
- Being aware of the way self doubt manifests in the body is powerful for making the feelings more managable
- This helped me be aware of why I don't write what I want to write about!
- The idea of journaling about one's writing is interesting
- Look inwards while expressing outwards
- Writing your emotions down under time constraints helps you identify them
- Recognize the painful emotions and pay attention to them. It will help dispel them
- Writer's emotional block imagery
- Journaling seems to help me find what I really need to be writing about!
- I’ve gone from (my typical) academic type perspective on things to recognizing some personal