Tag Archives: blogging

Transcendental Meditation, Blogging and Changing Priorities.

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We see our creative side all the time.

It comes up in conversation when we least expect it, and sometimes, though not often, we find ourselves within the realm of finding writing and creativity that astounds us and amplifies what we believed in ourselves.

It’s been nearly a year since I began TM and though I’ve talked more about how it’s changed my life concerning depression, there is another way it’s changed me.

I’ve been writing a blog for 10 years, and though Delusions of Ink isn’t my first blog, it’s the one that I’ve been able to help people with and because of that the confidence I have in myself and my writing has grown.

A year ago I seriously thought I would stop writing.

I mean this seriously. I was going to delete my blog, all the stories I’ve written, the novels I’ve finished and quit writing.

When I began TM, and I began figuring out what I wanted to do with my writing, I never thought I would keep blogging, nor that I would help readers with their depression issues or have my blog featured on TM.org.

Writing is something I’ve loved since I was a child. I made up stories, wrote some of them down, but when I was in high school I began writing a lot more and somewhere between 18 and 22 I got lost and didn’t write.

After I quit college after my first year and spent more time reading, I learned to write again, though it was in baby steps.

I wrote a novel, though it was bad, and finished a second a year after that. But I haven’t finished a novel in a couple of years and I feel I need to do that.

I’ve written short stories, blog posts, but no finished novels. I’ve started a dozen or more, but I’ve always been stuck in the middle.

I started a novel shortly after beginning TM and it’s been sitting on my hard drive for too long and now that I’ve found my voice in blogging and have helped people find their voices through TM, it’s time to reduce my time commitments from Delusions of Ink for a little while and get some words on the page.

My reasons for this are many, first: I have day job commitments and family commitments which I must meet and along with plans to move in the next six months, finding the time to do all the things I want to this year while keeping my sanity will prove hard. I want to do at least a post a week, and more than likely will, but that’s all I’ll be doing.

I would like to thank all of my readers and especially the administrators of TM.org for their faith in my writing, especially when I had none, and for giving me a chance to help people with my words.

 

How Transcendental Meditation Helped Me Live in the Present Moment.

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A soft flurry, like shredded tissue paper from God’s hands fell around me.

I watched the three of them play, one snowball, another.

Their laughter and smiles infectious as they struggled to stay upright on the damp grass.

I stood at the top of the hill, a smile from ear to ear as I watched my wife and kids play and I wondered, “how many of these moments have I missed?”

When I think about the selfish person I was a year ago (and I’m not referring to suicide). I wonder about the times days like the snowballs and laughter happened, but I was too busy worrying about myself?

I could have done more for my wife and kids, I see that now, but then, I couldn’t see anything but my own ambition and ego.

Ambition which had led me astray, ego which had nearly killed my marriage, but now that I’m better and see who I was, I think about moments, small moments that I may have missed because I wasn’t paying attention to the “moment’.

But what thing stands out among everything. The person I was missed some awesome things, things which I’ll never get back, but I’m trying.

I look at my children playing, my son tearing it up on video games, my daughter and her Palace Pets, and I broke a promise to them, one I’ve been working to repair.

For my wife, whose trust and love I often took for granted, I try to make new moments for us. Moments only we know about, whether it’s laughter about me acting out something that happened at work, or doing one of the numerous voices I’m able to do, I’ve begun to find myself in the ego I once held sacred.

I look for ways to make up for the person I was, whether that’s my son telling me about school, showing me the details of his new Lego collection, or my daughter explaining the intricacies of which Palace Pet belongs to which Disney Princess.

I listen more to them now. My wife, I truly hear her. I don’t judge her as I once did. I take notice of her more and that’s the one thing I’ve noticed about TM and who I am now, I find myself more in love with my wife than I believe I’ve ever been.

I see the way she fixes her hair to try to hide the grey and the way she looks at me as if I were an alien when I respond to a question in a way my former self wouldn’t have.

I see all these things about my family, and to think, I’m different because of 20 minutes twice a day. That’s all I’ve changed.

Why I Rethought The Way I Look at My Writing.

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Each day we’re stuck living someone else’s dream.

We go to a job where oftentimes, we’re creating something for someone else, because it pays the bills.

What if we decided to live our dream, pay the bills and still keep people happy?

This was something I thought about the other day when I was writing.

I work a day job, which I had considered my main job, obviously neglecting my writing and anything creative in the process.

That was until this past week, when I was struck with something, I’m not a writer. I’m pretending to be a writer.

What I realized in that “moment of clarity” is that I’ve been looking at my writing as a second job, sure it doesn’t pay the bills right now, but as long as I treat my writing as the second job and not the first, it will always suffer.

In this realization I thought, “Damn, if I think this way, others do as well.”

What do we do about it?

We rethink our creative side, redo the way we look at our day and come up with ways to put our creative efforts first, and other things second.

I say this as a husband and father, “If your creative side isn’t in first place, it will never win.”

I have obligations, it’s not like I’m going to quit my day job, not right now. I see the time coming when that will happen, but it’s not right now.

The thing is, we all have things we want to do, but we put them in second place out of fear, shame or other reasons.

Fear of rejection, fear of someone not understanding and the fear of failure. And shame, damn, shame is the worst. When we look at the things we’ve failed at there could be a big list, and because we failed at those the shame and fear of it happening again makes us not want to try, not want to do it again.

But, when we come to the realization, as I did, that what we wake up for in the morning should be first. That the thing we want to do most in our life should be first, then, and only then will we discover the will to do it.

I’m not going to lie, it’s going to be hard. There will be people who say you can’t do it, there will be that damn voice in your head and when the voice in your head talks, tell it to F off.

The only way you’re going to do what you want with your life is to put your creative pursuits first and anything else second.

We live someone else’s dream every day, isn’t it about time we live our dream?

When Your Feeling the Writing Flow…Or How I Spent My Tuesday

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It was empty when I walked in, the freshly polished floor shone in the early light. The smell of coffee and cinnamon rolls rolled through the mall in waves of ecstasy.
My footsteps echoed though I only wore Vans.
The mall was my savior.
I people watched, wrote new chapters of my new project and took notes on what I saw.
When you’re in the mall there are things you don’t see, unless you’re there wasting time for five or six hours, as I did on Tuesday.
There’s something different about being there with only the security guards, the mall walkers doing their laps, a laptop and a Moleskine.
There’s a different feeling to it when the stores are preparing to open on a Tuesday. There’s no anticipation of it being busy. The shop keepers seem to understand, “Today is a get your hours and go home day.”
Sitting in the Starbucks, a pool of wetness at the base of my Venti iced latte, I started to write.
It wasn’t like the other times, it didn’t sputter, it wasn’t clogged with traffic or nonsense.
It was the beginning of The Flow.
There were glimmers it might happen, the morning TM was amazing, breakfast tasted better, but I couldn’t believe that I would write with such energy.
The first few sentences weren’t remarkable, but they were sentences with structure, flavor and they flowed.
With each description, each piece of the story I didn’t notice my latte was creating an lake in the middle of the table, nor did I notice the two people watching me write, who incidentally saw me look up at them and turned away.
I wasn’t sure how long I was writing, maybe thirty minutes, possibly forty, but they moved together as fast as my fingers across the keyboard.
It’s an incredible feeling to make the scene the way your mind sees it. To create the atmosphere the way your bones feel it and to feel the flow of the words without noticing how much time had gone by.
When the flow comes, the writing moves without effort.
It’s the Zone, the box or your own little world.
It moves and you don’t see how fast the words come until you’re staring at your words, look at the clock and see it’s been forty minutes since you looked up.
That’s the best type of writing.
Feeling the flow.

When you Find the Strength to Continue…

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Strength, physical or mental has always been something I’ve dealt with.

When I was in ninth grade I weighed 75 lbs, and worried every day about being bullied. There were days I’d want to give up, and though most don’t know it I use to scratch myself, it’s called cutting now, but I never did it very deep, it was always a way for me to control something.

I couldn’t gain weight, much to me dad’s dismay. I didn’t do well in school and there were many times I’d wish the world would go away. Most of those times I’d sit in my room with a small knife and rub it against my arm, sometimes I’d bleed, others not, but it’s been a long time since I last cut, and I’m finally happy with where my life is.

We reach the darkest places in our lives when we no one is listening, watching or otherwise paying attention.

No one knew I cut, I’m sure my parents had no idea, probably still don’t.

I got through the hardest parts of my childhood by keeping things inside. I’d never tell anyone what was really wrong. I feared they’d throw me in the white padded room wearing a hug-me jacket.

The things I kept inside were the hate I had for myself and the guilt I felt for things in my life. I knew I wasn’t a great person at the time, I knew that cutting was wrong, but I didn’t care, it gave me comfort when I felt there was none.

The truth was, I felt that if my parents had stayed married, I would have been a different person.

When they divorced I was outgoing and liked who I was, I was eight, but still. I knew these things then.

Afterwards, not so much. I hated my life and wished I was anything but who I was. That went on for a long time, longer than I thought, especially as I’ve been rather reflective of my teenage years lately I’ve found that life isn’t fair, for anyone.

We live, die and move on, but in the middle of it all we have to find time to live, truly live. If we don’t live the life we want, why are we trying so hard to live?

Each year since my parents divorced I hated the start of the school year, except when I became a dad. I’ve learned when the kids go back to school it’s not about me, it’s about them, and they’ll always matter more than I do.

As my kids have grown I’ve discovered my parents did right by me for getting divorced. I know it was the only option they had at the moment and now that I’ve been married nearly 15 years, I know how hard it is to keep things going, and they’d just had enough.

I don’t blame them, fault them or have any bad feelings about coming from divorced parents. I’m proud they discovered they weren’t compatible anymore and decided it was for the best they not live in the same house.

Now I’m five months into TM and I can reflect on who I was for most of my life, I’m not happy with how I treated others, but most of all I’m not happy with how I treated myself. I’ve learned my life is under my control and any mistakes are my own and it’s time to own up for things I’ve done.

To all those I’ve wronged in one way or another, I’m sorry.

To be in control of oneself is a different feeling, and it’s something I plan to keep doing. Transcendental Meditation has been the greatest blessing I’ve ever been given and will continue for the rest of my life, I just want others to discover it and finally be comfortable with themselves.

Bri