A Slower Rhythm Can Restore and Inspire You to Write a Book

I was born into a family of writers, but that doesn’t mean it was always easy for me to write. It’s one thing to be good at it, and another to be connected to yourself while you’re writing. Getting the accolades of high grades, published articles, and other in-the-world writing accomplishments is great, but in itself it can’t make up for that thing we all long for — to really know and be fully at home with ourselves.

It was a lengthy spiritual and psychological journey to get to the place within where the Hidden Treasure resides, but oh, how worth it!

Why is it called “Hidden”? Is it a game of hide and seek? No, it’s hidden because we tend not to look there, where it’s waiting for us. We tend to look outward, even everywhere but there. But we can learn to reverse this, and a slower rhythm can help in a simple, doable, always accessible way.

Try this, if you are called to:

Realize that you are breathing. (Of course you’re breathing — you’re always breathing — but you’re not always aware of it.)

This “realizing” isn’t a to-do effort. It just means notice that what’s been going on in the background all this time is available to your attention now.

And an interesting thing happens when we pay attention to the breath — it responds! It’s as if it says, “Oh, you noticed me. Well in that case, I’ll open up to you.”

Really — try it. With this incoming breath right now. Notice that you’re breathing in, and what it feels like: the temperature of the air, the density or lightness, the rhythm too. Does something in your breathing shift because you are paying attention to it?

We are trained to see ourselves as — well, I hate to say “machines,” but let’s say less than fully alive, less than made up of life. So we push ourselves around (I know I can), we try to make ourselves accomplish things, we judge ourselves for being too much of this and too little of that. All this creates a chaotic arhythm rather than a steady, supportive rhythm in the breath.

But now that you are conscious of your breath — it responds. Even if slightly, at first. The more you realize that your attention to the breath brings about a response, the more you enter into the life-giving experience of breathing. It becomes a relationship, a collaboration.

You may even begin to have the sense that you are being breathed.

When you slow down to the pace of living in this way, it affects any book writing you may do. Instead of reacting to the thoughts going on in your head and writing them down in a state of stress, you now have access to an internal inspiration that reaches your awareness through your breath.

Book-writing tools are great, but your awareness may be the best writing tool you’ve got.

Why not play with this a bit, and see what glimmers come to you to write down in a sweet and rhythmic way?