Mark Matousek – Writing as a Spiritual Practice
Description Of Writing as a Spiritual Practice
Discover a powerful, transformative writing practice that will fuel your creativity, deepen your personal relationships, and bring greater clarity to your life path.
Experience a profound sense of freedom by uncovering the gifts of your darkest shadows and boldest visions through pouring your heart’s deepest truths into your writing.
During Writing as a Spiritual Practice, Mark Matousek will take you on a structured journey through seven key areas of writing which can help free you from old limitations that are compromising your sense of self, your relationships, and your innate genius.
Mark Matousek is direct and will hold you accountable — in a loving and healthy way. He’ll challenge you to strive for a level of emotional intimacy beyond your current capacity.
Yes, you may find yourself on the outer limits of your comfort zone… yet waiting on the other side of your discomfort is the liberating realization that you were as strong and as brave as you hoped you would be.
In addition to receiving Mark’s teachings, the third session of each module will be a group coaching session designed to deepen your transformation by integrating Mark’s feedback into your writing journey.
In each module, you’ll have the opportunity to send Mark Matousek a piece of writing for review. He’ll then select three of these submissions for live coaching, and masterfully pinpoint areas to deepen the inquiry process.
Whether or not your writing is selected for group coaching, you’ll benefit from other participants’ examples, experiences, and insights, which will help you take your own writing to the next level.
Under Mark’s patient, compassionate guidance, you’ll enter a safe container for honest self-inquiry, supported by a compassionate, like-minded global community.
You’ll be in good hands to take a deep dive into healing, freedom, and awakening through writing… where you’ll discover and develop skills you can draw on for a lifetime.
What You’ll Learn In Writing as a Spiritual Practice
In Writing as a Spiritual Practice, Mark Matousek will guide you through the fundamental spiritual skills and competencies you’ll need to successfully navigate your past experiences and mine them for your journey of transformation through writing, which will in turn improve the quality of your life.
Module 1: Who Am I?: Accessing Your Soul
Every life is a work of fiction. Behind our worldly mask is an essential self — a soul identity — whose powerful voice communicates our unique truth and deepest desires. Many of us suffer from mistaken identity. Until we access this soul awareness, we’re split off from our own true nature and distanced from our gifts, passion and purpose. This week, we’ll be exploring the gap in our lives between how we show up in our writing (and the world) and our true authenticity, and how to examine it through self-inquiry.
Module 2: The Secret Life: Finding Your Inner Refuge
The first step toward authenticity is surveying your secret life. Without exception, each of us has one — that vicinity of self that is yours alone — filled with memories, totems, obsessions, longings, dreams and vulnerabilities. This inner refuge contains a wellspring of inspiration and self-discovery. The soul loves specificity, intimacy and subjective uniqueness. This week, we’ll be inquiring into our own secret lives, and how they provide us with wisdom and balance.
Module 3: Fear & Desire: Liberating Your True Passions
The tension between fear and desire determines our quality of life. To live passionately, we must learn to walk this edge between both. But how is this possible? Our impulse toward control often prevents us from venturing through fear toward our deepest longing. How can you surrender control and abandon yourself to desire (without hurting others in so doing)? When is it wise to listen to fear? Why are you afraid of things that you crave (and vice versa)? This week, we’ll be looking at this interface between fear and desire: How we walk this line — and sometimes tumble over it into passion — and the role of moral conditioning in this dance.
Module 4: The Quest for Meaning: Finding What Truly Matters to You
From a soul perspective, what does your life really mean? Do you wonder whether you matter or not, and for what purpose you have been born? Our quest for meaning is hard-wired in us. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion, and from these stories, we derive meaning. Without meaning, life’s tribulations lose their power to transform us. As Viktor Frankl famously taught, suffering without meaning equals despair (S-M=D). This week, we’ll look at what our existence means (to ourselves and the world), where our sense of purpose comes from — and how to harness our energies to reach higher goals.
Module 5: The Mystery of Love: Deepening Your Intimate Relationships
When Viktor Frankl was in Auschwitz, it was the hope of seeing his beloved wife again that gave his life meaning. The power of love enabled this great psychiatrist to survive. Love is the greatest mystery — our very reason for being. Why, then, can it be so enigmatic, unstable, unpredictable and challenging? The answer is that love is a practice. Like every practice, it is often difficult and requires discipline, commitment and tolerance of discomfort. This is how love yields its joy, “against the grain,” in the Buddhist saying. This week, we’ll be using our writing to plumb the mystery of love in its myriad varieties — passionate, platonic and familial.
Module 6: Intention & Power: Creating from Your Inner Source
The soul is a power source. We plug into this source through intention. Intention shapes and guides us through life, holds our aim, keeps us on our path. The world is full of brilliant people whose lives would change dramatically if only their intentions were focused. Without that, there’s no creativity. Manifestation requires single-mindedness. This week, we’ll learn practices for focusing, and strengthening, personal intention in order to reach our goals.
Module 7: Awakening Genius: Discovering Your Unique Gift
Each of us is born with a unique gift. The Romans called this gift our “genius.” We come into this world with a “tutelary deity” that guides us toward our own fruition. The deity is our soul itself. When we free this soul, we liberate our inherent creativity and the inborn offering waiting to be born. If you do not offer your gift to the world, it will never truly exist. But what is your particular genius? What will the flowering of your soul be? In this module, we’ll learn about efflorescence (what Christian mystics called “viriditas”) — the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” — and how we fuse with this power in daily life.
About Mark Matousek
Mark Matousek is a bestselling author, teacher, and speaker whose work focuses on personal awakening and creative excellence through self-inquiry and life writing. He’s an award-winning author of five books, has worked on The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and collaborated with Andrew Harvey on Dialogues with a Modern Mystic. His first book, Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story, became an international bestseller that was published in 10 countries and nominated for two Books for a Better Life awards.
A featured blogger for Psychology Today, Purple Clover, andHuffPost, he’s contributed to numerous anthologies and publications, including The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine (contributing editor), The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Yoga Journal, Details, The Saturday Evening Post, AARP, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and many others.
Mark Matousek, who’s on the faculty of Omega Institute for Holistic Studies and the New York Open Center, teaches transformational writing workshops around the U.S. and in Europe, and is the Creative Director of V-Men (with Eve Ensler), an organization devoted to ending violence against women and girls.
He brings three decades of experience as a memoirist, editor, interviewer, survivor, activist, and spiritual seeker to his penetrating and thought-provoking work with students. His workshops, classes, and mentoring have inspired thousands of people around the world to reach their artistic and personal goals and transform their lives.
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