Why Story Matters A SIX-PART WRITING INVESTIGATION PERSONAL E-STUDY COURSE MARK MATOUSEK MEDIA TRUTH STORY TRANSFORMATION
A WELCOME NOTE FROM MARK Greetings! I m glad that you re participating in my Personal e-study Course and wanted to make a few suggestions before you begin this six-week course. First, try to take no longer than a week to do each lesson; by keeping up this pace, your work (and insight) will build momentum. If this is impossible, no worries! The material will be enlightening in whatever dose and at whichever speed works for you. Second, I encourage you to use these lessons as points of departure rather than as strict assignments. If you are working on a piece of writing, for example, feel free to use the week s lesson to move your project forward. If the lesson prompts you to write something unrelated to the topic, let the inspiration carry you. There is no right or wrong way to do these lessons. They are meant to reveal themselves to you through the lens of your personal tastes, needs, and proclivities. I also recommend that you not share this work with others until you have completed the course. I m a strong believer in keeping the oven door closed when doing intensive creative inner work, so that the heat can build and the ideas can cook in the privacy of your imagination. Finally, I hope that you will join me for The Seekers Forum, my monthly teleconference and ongoing discussion group, where topics linked to creativity, personal growth, writing, spiritual practice, and ethical well-being are discussed. If you flip to the last page of this packet, you will find the registration information. I look forward to hearing from you about your experience! My contact information is listed on the last page as well. That s all for now. Enjoy yourself! Let your imagination soar. Don t be afraid to DIVE into the darker places where so much of our passion and wisdom resides. As the philosopher Martin Buber wrote, Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware. My hope and prayer is that this writing journey delivers you to a destination you may not be aware of yet filled with inspiration, insight, and surprise. Warmest Wishes, Mark Mark s work focuses on self-realization through life writing. He provides an environment that cultivates personal insight, increased creativity, passion, purpose, and self-revelation through the art of questioning. Mark brings three decades of experience as a bestselling author, teacher, editor, reporter, survivor of illness, and spiritual seeker to his unique method of helping others achieve their artistic and personal goals. When you tell the truth, your story changes. When your story changes, your life is transformed.
WHY STORY MATTERS: A SIX-WEEK WRITING INVESTIGATION We tell ourselves stories in order to live. While our ancestors grunted, cooed, and hissed, it was not until around fifty thousand years ago that humans gained full linguistic ability and developed, for the first time, the power of words. Words make us authentically human; we alone in creation explain ourselves to ourselves, articulate insight, have thoughts about feelings, and awaken deliberately from animal habits. We alone use story to situate ourselves in the universe, transmit wisdom, and give meaning to experience. Without words, we could not create systems of moral conduct, right and wrong, justice and fairness. Without story, we would lack a medium for telling the truth to set ourselves free. But how do we learn to tell the truth? Where does our life myth arise from, exactly, and how does it help us in our survival? How do we choose which character to play in this great human drama? Hero or villain, teacher or Don Juan, miser or saint? The role we decide on defines the story and the story, in turn, is shaped by the role. Does this character the self-described star of our personal life myth lead us toward awakening? Does the story we re living make room for passion, spirit, and genius the potential we are born to embody or do we feel cramped, stifled, and neglected, shrunk-to-fit in too small an existence? Until we question the nature of our story, we cannot truly know ourselves nor discover our true identity, the eternal power under the skin of superficial biography. Waking up to the fact that we are not our story changes a seeker s life completely. We become the authors of our own lives rather than the unwitting victims, and then story can serve its sacred function as a tool for enlightenment. Many people sleepwalk through their own lives and rarely tell the whole truth, either to themselves or others. When we do reveal the 'scary story' of our lives, the experience can be shocking. I see this with students all the time: a light bulb goes on when they finally say the unsayable things and pierce the heart of their inner lives. This six-week course is designed to initiate students into the transformative power of telling the truth as writers and seekers. We habitually lie to create the story we want to tell people and ourselves. We lie for compassion s sake, to save face, and to protect others from sensitive information. For many of us, it's not until we make a conscious decision to tell the truth, or we're forced into a corner, that we drop the mask. This is how crisis awakens us, by stopping us -- trapping us -- long enough to finally express the truth without
evasion. When the luxury of lying is taken from us -- by catastrophe or the choice to fess up -- the rubber of enlightenment hits the road. The more we tell the truth, the more powerful our work and writing become. We remember that our job as creators of story is to transform the suffering, confusion, loss, disaster, uncertainty, greed, selfishness, and lunacy of everyday life into vehicles for transformation. We remember that story is our ammunition against the life of victimhood and that, when we set our hearts on knowing the truth, we assist one another in the long, tender work of awakening. Telling the truth reminds us that storytelling is how we survive, alone and together, passing through the parcel of our words the wisdom of living and suffering, losing, learning, recording, examining and asking essential questions.
LESSON 1: SECRETS AND LIES Many years ago, a teacher told me something that I have never forgotten: You cannot transform what you have not first blessed. This is why we are starting a class about the transformative power of telling the truth by locating and describing our secrets and lies. As Carl Jung put it, Enlightenment consists not merely in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, but in making the darkness visible. Until we excavate our own secrets, cover-ups, obstacles, and self-deception, we remain strangers to ourselves and the story we tell about our lives remains a fiction. We are taught to use language decoratively, and descriptively, as a thing of beauty that can produce gorgeous writing. But words are also power tools for excavating, revealing, penetrating, and understanding the nature of our experience and this will be our focus here together: how to describe the inner journey. How to find language that captures emotion. How to articulate spiritual insights in fresh, original ways without lapsing into cliché. How to use beginner's mind as a platform for selfunderstanding. What is the role of mindfulness in truth telling and writing, and how do we avoid paying attention? Finally, how is it possible to view ourselves anew with truthful eyes and recognize our life story for what it is: a pieced-together yet not-inherently-solid narrative made up of biography, expectations, prejudice, fear, desire, and so much more? This is why crisis can be so useful for seekers and writers striving for increased authenticity. Crisis cracks open our story and forces us to admit how fragile and impermanent life really is, and how permeable the identity we imagine for ourselves can be. Suddenly, the person you thought you were is gone or at least seriously shaken and the story you've told yourself about who you are, where you re headed, what you value, and what your life means, are suddenly thrust into question. This is why, paradoxically, crisis also presents opportunity, and why so many people lead increasingly brightened, wise, and passionate lives after surviving a catastrophic life change. When forced to question our own stories, the survivor understands the power of self-reinvention and the opportunity for change. It is this increasingly truthful, vitalizing approach to ourselves, our stories, and our lives, that will motivate our inquiry together. We don't need to wait for a crisis to crack open our lives we can begin the excavation right now.
Here are a few books that may inspire you: If You Want to Write The Writing Life The Situation and the Story The Art of Time in Memoir The Places That Scare You When You're Falling, Dive Brenda Ueland Annie Dillard Vivian Gornick Sven Birkerts Pema Chodron Mark Matousek Write down a secret that you have never told anyone in your life. This can be personal or peripheral (involving someone you know). The secret need not be dramatic. It could have been a subtle lie, lifechanging event, or simply a feeling you have had in your life but never shared with a soul. What matters is that you have never revealed this information to anyone. It is likely that your secret will have caused you some kind of shame, embarrassment, or confusion. Our shame is the door to our greatest healing. It is the fast track to enlightenment. Tell not only the surface situation, but also the story of why it matters to you, why you have not revealed it before, and how it may have impacted some aspect of your life. Be as bold and shameless as possible.
Dear Friend, I hope you are enjoying and finding the lessons inspiring. I suggest that you keep these exercises together in a journal, and add additional thoughts, feelings, and insights to this journal as a map for tracing your own development over time. Remember that insight always focuses on the journey not the destination; there is no wrong or right way to take this journey, only your particular path with its unique twists, cul-de-sacs, and vistas: the earned wisdom of your personal effort. Taking a journey empowers you to use muscles of perception and creativity that may be new to you. This is the purpose of life writing. I also welcome you to join The Seekers Forum, my monthly teleconference and ongoing discussion group. This monthly series focuses on topics linked to creativity, personal growth, writing, spiritual practice, and ethical well-being. The Seekers Forum is an interactive discussion group for like-minded seekers designed to ignite personal wisdom, develop intimacy, and create lasting change in your life. Send an email to contact@markmatousek.com with Please register me for The Seekers Forum in the subject line. We will sign you up and forward all of the necessary information. More information on The Seekers Forum in addition to a complete list of my Personal e-study Courses, books, podcasts and other digital products can be found at www.markmatousek.com. There you will find a calendar of workshops, online classes, speaking engagements, and events where I do hope to meet you soon! Until then, keep asking questions, Mark Mark Matousek is the author of two award-winning memoirs, Sex Death, Enlightenment: A True Story (an international bestseller) and The Boy He Left Behind: A Man's Search For His Lost Father (Los Angeles Times Discovery Book), as well as When You're Falling, Dive: Lessons in the Art of Living. A featured blogger for Psychology Today and the Huffington Post, he has contributed to numerous publications including The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine (where he was contributing editor), The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Yoga Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Details, AARP, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (contributing editor), and many others. A popular lecturer and writing teacher, he is the Creative Director of V-Men (with Eve Ensler), an organization devoted to ending violence against women and girls. His latest book is Ethical Wisdom: The Search for a Moral Life.