This week I am on vacation at a writing workshop. I came to this workshop because I learned this particular writing technique in the past, and it served my writing well. I want to get back in the saddle of doing it regularly. Unfortunately, I think I discovered why this technique is such an issue for me.

The technique is relatively straight-forward, and I’m going to over simplify it here for the sake of explanation. Number your paper from 1-25 first. Then you meditate for at least two minutes. You take a topic, any topic really, but in my case it was churches, and you start listing images that come to you from age 6 to the present day, one image per line. You have 7 minutes to do your listing. My head immediately began to hurt as I started this exercise. I felt a flood of peeps and selves start to tweak out simultaneously. I fought it because I wanted to do the exercise, and the more I fought it the more tired and floaty I became. The room started to take on a haze for me.

“By meditating you are making yourself available to the images. The memories are there, and they will come if you make yourself available to them.” This was one of the takeaways from the exercise.

I’m struck by what she said because it was very similar to what Doc often tells me about being open to the extrinsic memories when odd things happen to me that make no immediate sense.

It looks like the universe is sending me a message, be available to the memories. I’m afraid to know what lies ahead.