F-R-E-E-Writing Benefits

  • F-R-E-E-Writing clears. Sometimes, yes, we may be overwrought. Or whiny or sad orsand free angry. Or joyful or irreverent or fantastical.  Or daft. Over time, all our emotions will find their way in and we come to see how transient they are.  Allowing all the emotions, ideas and feelings within us, especially those we label “negative”, and giving them free vent in our notebooks, siphons them off. This greatly lessens their hold on us.  (This is why some people see F-R-E-E-Writing as a form of meditation).
  • F-R-E-E-Writing rights. sand freeAt a daily level, it improves your psychic state, elevates your mood, makes you feel centred, sets you up for your day. Everybody feels better after a F-R-E-E-Writing session than before.
  • FREE-Writing connects. We connect with ourselves — the inner self, at all levels: mind, emotion and spirit. We connect with the outer world, by increasing our awareness of all our relationships, with people, places and things
  • FREE-Writing uncovers. Because we write as fast as possible, thoughts and emotions are allowed to rise without the internal censor kicking in. This brings us to new understandings — concealed meanings and significances are brought to the surface. Woolf calls them “shocks”, those moments of profound insight that come from examining our past, because of how they force an awareness we wouldn’t otherwise have had.
  • F-R-E-E-Writing unblocks. The new recognitions, ideas and emotions overcome habitual anxieties or self-sabotage. This is a very different dynamic from attempting to control what we perceive to be our flaws or bad habits. Consciously disciplining ourselves into change is generally doomed. We manage it for a time but our old, ingrained ways resurface, stronger than ever. (We see this dynamic clearly in binge drinkers or compulsive eaters but it is there to an extent in us all.) With regular FREE-Writing, the shells of our bad habits fall away as new experiences and preferences emerge – without conscious manipulation.
  • FREE-Writing contextualises. Over time, we realise that our lives have been going somewhere, however blind we may have been to the direction. We find the connections beneath the surface fractures, the meaning that has been trying to establish itself in us. Re-entering the experiences of our lives allows them to serve as starting points for new, often unpredictable, inner movements that yield profound transformations.
  • FREE-Writing liberates.  We come to see that it is not the events that happen to us – as individuals or as artists – that count, so much as our inner relationship to those events. Regular F-R-E-E-Writing ensures we become a channel for the deep stuff rather than a mouthpiece for surface ego moans, rants or self-indulgences.  We acquire the distance that is the prerequisite of art – and artful living.
  • F-R-E-E-Writing stabilises. Regular and committed use of FREE-Writing generates a progressive strengthening of the psyche as truly allowing all the voices inside diminishes the power of any one. Our inner critics shrink to their proper size.
  • F-R-E-E-Writing inspires. As you F-R-E-E-Write, great ideas emerge, seemingly from nowhere.
  • F-R-E-E-Writing empowers.  F-R-E-E-Writing teaches us to trust our own experience of the world, our own intuition – essential to an artist – and gives us the confidence to express our personal viewpoint and vision.

    • PHYSICAL BENEFITS OF F-R-E-E-Writing
    In his book Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, James Pennebaker, Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, summarises ten years of scientific research into the connection between writing and increased physical and mental wellbeing.

    He concludes that writing is a tremendously powerful tool, “far more powerful” than they had predicted when setting up their study. The effect isn’t just emotional or spiritual. F-R-E-E-Writing, it seems, isn’t just good for your soul — but for your blood pressure, insomnia, psychological wellbeing and immune function.

    Professor Pennebaker is not alone. Dozens of studies have found that most people, from schoolchildren to nursing-home residents, feel happier and healthier after writing about their experiences of trauma. One study found that those who wrote in this way had more active T-lymphocyte cells, an indication of improved immune system.

    Other studies have found that they tend to take fewer trips to the doctor, function better in day-to-day tasks, and score higher on tests of psychological health.

    The benefits occur regardless of literacy or educational level: all that is needed is a sufficient level of literacy to communicate with oneself. And the more often people write, the more beneficial the effects.

    As a result of such findings, Writing Therapy is now used to help people with all kinds of physical and emotional problems, including life-threatening illnesses such as cancer; chronic conditions such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis; drug and alcohol addictions; eating disorders; and trauma. It has also been shown to be beneficial for combating low self-esteem, depression, and stress-related ailments and, more surprisingly perhaps, to have a positive impact on heart health: heart rate and blood pressure.

    In addition, writing therapy is ideal in helping people cope with grief and loss. For example, poetry therapists were asked to work with the students of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, after the shooting tragedy there in 1999.

    Virginia Woolf writes eloquently of this in her memoir, “A Sketch of the Past”. By writing of her experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brother, she felt she did for herself what the then new practice of psychoanalysis was doing for its patients: “I expressed some very long and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it, I explained it and then laid it to rest”.