The Healing Power of Words

Last weekend, I had a chance to attend a 3-day interactive experience at The Chopra Center in southern California called Healing the Heart. Chopra Center co-founder David Simon, MD led about 130 of us through a deep process in which we explored our emotional constraints. Integrating the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda with modern psychological principles, we identified, mobilized and released the pain in our hearts, and replaced it with emotional freedom and an expanded capacity to forgive, heal and believe in love once again.

The first full day of the course was intense. Many of us ended that day feeling spent and unresolved. Stories were shared. Tears were shed. Wounds were exposed. “You’ll feel worse before you feel better,” David cautioned us, “because you’re calling your ‘stuff’ out of its hiding place.” He likened it to what happens when cleaning a fish tank—the bottom gunk gets stirred up. Everything looks murkier. The fish thrash around, confused. But eventually, things settle into a renewed clarity—which they did by our final day of the course.

Part of what made this process so effective was journaling our thoughts. David gently glided us into the writing process by way of meditation, music and reading soul-stirring poetry from 14th Century Sufi master Hafiz. As we each found our still point, David instructed us to keep our pens moving until he said “stop”. What came out of me and onto the page was my own internal jagged poetry about my present life—expressions of disbelief, grief, acceptance and surrender. Writing is what moved me, by day three, into the light of self-understanding. My own words freed and healed me.

So when you’re feeling conflicted and murky, stir things up even more by grabbing a pen and going further into that space. Do as Hafiz advises:

Don’t
Surrender
Your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more
Deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.