Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down on cold It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk to you about a topic that is extremely relevant to the professional work that I do in writing and publishing. It is a topic that comes up in virtually every session that I work with with every single author or aspiring author, no matter how experienced, and yet this is a topic that has a ton of application beyond and outside the world of writing and publishing. Hence why it fits perfectly with this podcast. So if you're someone who does not consider yourself a writer, maybe you're someone who does not have aspirations to write a book, don't worry that this episode doesn't apply to you. In fact, I think it almost applies more to you than it does to someone who's facing kind of surface level writer's block. But I want to unpack this topic from the standpoint of writer's block, because I think that writer's block has a lot to teach us about what these blocks really are, about what they mean, and about how we overcome them. So when I say surface level writer's block, this is kind of where I want to begin the topic today. Surface level writer's block is that feeling that we've all had in our lives. Whether you're a writer or not, you've had the feeling where a writing assignment is given to you, maybe by a teacher, maybe because you need to give a speech at a wedding, maybe by a publisher, maybe for something totally different, Maybe you're just trying to come up with a caption on Instagram. So you have this writing assignment in front of you, and you sit down to get the writing done, and you find yourself staring at that blinking cursor. And I always feel like that blinking cursor feels like it's mocking you. It's just like you're never going to get this written. So we've all had this experience. Even if the last time you remember feeling this way was high school trying to write a paper, you understand that feeling of sitting and staring at the blinking cursor, feeling like I'm going to I'm going to poke my own eyeballs out. It can feel like you're banging your head against a wall. It just feels like you're almost like you're bumping up against a physical obstacle. And I want to talk about this because in a way, you kind of are bumping up against against a physical obstacle. It's not material physical obstacle, but it is an actual obstacle that you're trying to overcome. And I think what a lot of us do when we get into this position where we know we have this writing assignment that needs to be done by maybe X date or X time even puts more pressure on us when there's a timeline, is we think, Okay, I've got to overcome this block, and we kind of end up in this fight with the block where we're trying to outreason it outthink it. And the main point that I want to make on today's episode is, regardless of whether it's a surface level writer's block that you're facing or you're facing another kind of block in your life, which is the way that this topic expands beyond writing and publishing, these blocks are all the same. So whether it's a surface level writer's block. You're staring at a blinking cursor, can't seem to get the assignment done. Or whether this is a block of you know, I want to sign up for this training, or I want to go on this trip, or I want to do this thing, but no matter what I do, I can't seem to get myself to a place where I'm brave enough to do it. Maybe I want to get on stage and speak in front of a group of people, but I'm absolutely terrified and I can't bring myself to imagine what it would take for me, you know, to physically get up there. Maybe you can get up there in your mind, but you can't seem to get up there in your body. This is what I want to talk about, is that the blocks that we face in our lives are not just spiritual block. They are spiritual, they're immaterial, but they have substance to them. The thing I find myself saying over and over and over again to writers when I'm working with them is that writer's block is not just writer's block, it's life block, and that when you're facing a block in your writing, it is diagnostic. It shows you where in your life, there's something you want to say or do that you feel it that you cannot say or do, and so that block shows up in your writing. And so even surface level writer's block, whatever i'm calling surface level writer's block, is not really just surface level writer's block. There's on the surface of the water, the block of the writing where we think I've got a deadline, I've got to get this to the publisher. I can't seem to get the writing done. But underneath the surface, there's so much more going on that spinning your wheels, sitting at the computer trying to think your way out of this block will never get you there. The block doesn't even live in your mind. It lives in your body. And that's why I guess I'm calling it physical, even though it's really kind of immaterial, so not really physical. I know that's confusing, but what I'm getting at is that this is not just a block of not knowing the words to se say. The block is much deeper than that. And when we can really see the block for what it is, a couple of really amazing things happen when we really see the block for what it is. First of all, writing as a tool becomes diagnostic. So by that I mean now in my writing, when I meet a block, I go, oh, this isn't just a writer's block, This isn't just me not knowing the words to say. This is showing me where in my life I'm bumping up against a limitation. And so now I can use that diagnostic tool to go there, to meet that block where it is, to work with the block, and to hopefully find some release and some expansion so that I can step into a new version of myself or into a more expanded version of myself. So that's one thing is that it acts as this diagnostic tool, and another thing is that it also acts as a healing modality. And I write about this in my book called The Power of Writing It Down, where I talk about journaling exercises and how powerful journaling exercises can be to help us unlock those blocks, because sometimes it takes bumping up against the block to see where the block is. Then it takes putting the words on the page to give language and meaning to it, and then that allows us to unlock the block in our physical lives. So let me give you just a really quick example of this. I may have shared parts of this story before on the podcast, but I'm going to share it again because I think it bears repeating. Inside of this topic, which is that back in twenty fifteen, I was working on a book proposal with an agent, planning to pitch this as my second book to all of the usual suspects, all of the usual publishers I had written Packing Light. Packing Light came out in twenty thirteen. It did very well in the marketplace. It did better than the publishers expected it to do. I was a new author, so a publisher took a risk on me and gave me a very small advance, and then the book ended up selling very well, and so publishers in that space were all kind of waiting to see, Okay, what's the next thing that she's going to write, and waiting to see if they would like to publish it. So I was really I was working on this new project. The working title for the book was Our First Years, and it was supposed to be a book about how complicated and challenging the first years of marriage can be. So it was going to be written in a memoir style. I was going to share stories from the first couple of years of my marriage, and I was in process of working on the book, doing the same thing that I had done for my first book, and the same thing that I had done for every writing project before this, which was wake up in the morning, get my cup of coffee, sit down at the table, set my timer for fifty minutes five zero, before I look at my phone, before I touch my email, before I get online. I sit down at the table. I set my timer for fifty minutes. I write for a fifty minute stretch. I take a ten minute break to pee, get some water, do whatever I need to do. I come back do a second fifty minute stretch. And so if I'm setting my alarm for say five in the morning, I'm starting by like five ten. Then by seven am, I'm done with my two stretches of and I've got hopefully two to three thousand words under my belt. That's how I had written Packing Light, That's how I was planning to write this book. And yet, for some reason, with this book, I was bumping up against this invisible block. I was sitting down to get my writing done, I was staring at a blinking cursor. I couldn't seem to find the words to say. I had so many things I wanted to share about how tricky and challenging and frustrating and upsetting and horrifying my first few years of marriage had been. And yet when I sat down to write, I couldn't seem to get the words out, and it was just a frustrating feeling. It was that very familiar writer's blocky feeling, feeling like you're hitting your head against a brick wall and you're not making any progress. Well, as this was all happening, I also seemingly as a side note, decided to sign up for yoga classes. I had been previously in my life a long distance runner. I had run a few half marathons and a full marathon, and I had gotten a hip injury and wasn't able to do any long distance running anymore, and so I was looking for another way to exercise and kind of like improve my mental health and just feel better all the way around. And found a yoga studio in my neighborhood and decided yoga would be a really great way for me to do all of those things. So I signed up for yoga, and I started going to yoga like four or five days a week at the time, so now I was sometimes waking up early in writing and sometimes waking up early and going to yoga. So sometimes I'd set my alarm for five and I would sit down and do my writing for two hours. And sometimes I'd set my alarm for five and I'd go to a six am yoga class. And one of the things that I started to notice as I went to yoga is yoga was changing my relationship to the writing, and it was changing my relationship to myself. The big reason for this is just you're moving your body. I mean, yoga is in itself a really specific way to move your body that does it's meditative, so it helps you to connect yourself. It helps you connect to your higher self, which I've talked about on the show before. So it's a specific type of moving meditation that is specifically designed to help you move in to that meditative state. But I also think that there are other forms of exercise that do the same thing. But it's no surprise that while I'm doing this four to five days a week of yoga, I begin to get suspicions about my At the time husband and I started to feel this eerie feeling that things were not as they seemed. It's both not surprising and is surprising to me that this hadn't occurred to me before, because we, you know, we had been married for four years. We did meet and get engaged and get married very quickly. That whole thing happened in about four months, which is insanely fast and I do not recommend. But we've been living together for about four years. So it's odd to me that these thoughts that I started having as I was taking these yoga classes hadn't really occurred to me, or hadn't occurred to me on a conscious level before I was taking yoga, But as soon as I was in this regular yoga practice, these thoughts were almost like coming up like a flood. And one of the things that I say about writer's block is that writer's block is almost always something you want to say or do in your life that you feel you cannot say or do. So I was living in this inner conflict where I was having these thoughts and feelings about my marriage that I didn't feel like I could share with him or in this piece of writing, because on the most obvious level, he was going to read this piece of writing, but also because I knew other people were going to read this piece of writing, and it was a book that I planned on publishing. So I felt stuck. I felt like I was feeling these feelings and having these thoughts that I couldn't share with my then husband. I couldn't share them in this piece of writing. I didn't feel like they had anywhere to go. I didn't feel like I had any people in my life who would understand the thoughts that I was having, and so they were coming up and getting kind of stuck. So I was sitting down in the morning to write, couldn't think of anything to write. When I would write something, it wasn't very connective. I would send it to my agent and be like, no, this isn't it. You know, back to the drawing board. Try again. And there's a reason that what I was putting on the page wasn't that connective. It's because I wasn't telling my truth. And I didn't even really know that at the time. It wasn't like I was conscious of it. But there was this collision between what I really wanted to say and what was being said on the page, and what I really wanted to say was building and building and building, like this fire inside because I was going to this yoga practice. I was moving my body, I was sweating, I was doing these moving meditations. I was becoming more connected to myself. Well, not even three weeks after all of this is going on, one day I was sitting at the kitchen counter and my then husband's iPad was sitting at the counter next to me, and I don't know what got into me. I had maybe six months prior to this, at one point picked up his phone for no real reason. I wasn't like going to go through his text messages or anything. I think I was looking to just use his Safari app or something to look something up. But I went to open his phone and realize that he had changed his code and so I couldn't look on his phone. And when he noticed that I had his phone, he got really frustrated and upset and was like, Hey, why are you looking through my phone? You know, are you? Do you not trust me? La la lah when we got into an argument. So that had happened maybe six months prior to this, But beyond that, I had never once had the inclination or had the thought to pick up his phone or pick up his iPad and look through his messages. That was just not something that had ever happened, and yet here it was. Something came over me. I'm sitting at the kitchen counter. His iPad is right there, and I just pick it up. Try the code. It works. I open it. I'm looking through his messages and I suddenly find messages in his phone that send me on this rabbit trail. Within the course of about ten or fifteen minutes, I found messages, emails, so much stuff that I quickly sent to my phone, dragged and dropped into a folder on my computer, and saved them for later. Some part of me knew that I would need that, you know, quote unquote evidence later. And this all took place on November nineteenth. Remember I was saying earlier that it was September that I was working on that book proposal document started going to yoga. A few weeks later, November nineteenth, I find these messages, and by January I had filed for divorce. So all of this unraveled extremely quickly. But it wasn't until January February March, I'm spending a winter alone in my house, reflecting on everything that has unfolded in the last several months. When I realized, no wonder I was facing this block in my writing. I was trying to write a book about how difficult the first few years of marriage had been, and in my head, the moral of the story was, first few years of marriage can be really tricky. Here's how you overcome it. Marriage is worth fighting for. Stay in your marriage. And as I was entering into this yoga practice, becoming more connected to myself, realizing what I really thought, what I felt, what I believed, what I discovered was something that I was too scared to say on the page, which is that sometimes marriage is worth fighting for. And sometimes what you're facing in your marriage is too dark and too upsetting and shouldn't be happening and isn't worth fighting for, and sometimes you need to run for the hills and protect yourself over your marriage. Those were words that I didn't have access to at the time. That I didn't feel I could say. It was too much of a contrast to who I saw myself to be, who I wanted to be, the type of life that I wanted to live, where I saw my story going. It was too big of a contrast, and I simply couldn't get there in that writing assignment and also imagine this. I mean, even if I had been able to say those things, it doesn't fit inside of a book about how difficult the first few years of marriage can be. If the conclusion of the story is get divorce, it just simply didn't fit inside of that book project. The book project, like my life, needed to evolve, needed to expand, needed to develop beyond what I could see at that point, and I needed to give it permission to do that. And the only way to really do that was to move through the block in my life so that the block in the writing could be untangled. If I had just focused on moving through the block in my writing so that I could get the book published, if I had just seen this as a surface level block, all I would have done is published a book called Our First Years that would have preceded my divorce. It would have been a book about how first few years of marriage can be really tricky and complicated. You're probably going to fight a lot, but you can get through this, and a good marriage comes from two people who stick it out. Which, although there is some truth in that message, it is not the whole truth. And what was happening as I was facing that block is I was touching into reaching, for the first time in my life, my whole truth, and the block was demonstrating to me that there was more to be seen, there more to be explored, there more truth that I had not yet accessed. And in order to access the truth, I needed to first see that there's a writer's block. That's the diagnostic tool. So you see, oh, there's a block here. This is not just about getting a writing assignment done. There's something more going on here. This block does not just live in my mind. It lives in my body. And in order to work through the block, I have to get into the body. I have to do something like yoga or move my body or sweat on a daily basis and access that part of myself that is still unconscious. And then I have to pull it up. And when it's ready, it will show itself on the page and it will alter the course of my story forever. So this is just one example of how this works. But I've watched this unfold in my life over and over and over again so many times. Where you bump up against a writing block, you think it's just writer's block, You think you need to think your way out of it. But you cannot possibly think your way out of a writer's block. It will just tangle the knots even further. The only way through this is to see the block for what it is, not as just a surface level block, but is it a block that's in your body. To move into the body, to move your body, to sweat, to get more connected to the block, to allow the block to sort of untangle unhook from there, and the block moves into words that come out of your mouth or out of your fingertips, through the keys, into the piece of writing, and the story evolves from there, and it usually evolves into something you never in a million years dreamed it would be. It evolves into something that will change the way that you see yourself forever. Now, the problem with this way of seeing it is this type of a journey is not for the faint of heart. This is not a quick, simple, easy hack answer to the question how do I overcome writer's block? There is no simple, easy hack to overcome writer's block. You know, I could tell you to go take a run around the house a couple of times and come back with a fresh mind and fresh oxygen to your brain, and that would on one level work. If I had done that with my our first year's book, maybe the book would have made it to the right publisher, maybe the publisher would have published it, maybe it would be out there now in the world for all to read. And Yet what was really trying to happen for me wasn't that this book was trying to be written. What was trying to happen for me was that the course of my relationship was trying to change. The course of my life was trying to change my consciousness, was trying to evolve into something different, something new, something more expansive. And if I would have just focused on getting the book out the door, that never would have happened. So, if you're listening to this episode and you're facing what I'm calling surface level writer's block, here's my advice to you, begin to see this experience of writer's block as much deeper than you ever experienced it before. It is not just a block to getting published, a block to getting this caption on Instagram, a block to getting the speech done. More than likely, there is something you want to say or do in your piece of writing that you feel you cannot say or do, a space where your story is trying to evolve that you're not ready to go to yet physically, like the matter in your body is not ready to go there yet, and you need more time to allow that story to unfold and to evolve. So, if you're facing writer's block, you can try to sort of cheat the system and think your way through it, and you might seem like you get through the writer's block and you get the piece of writing done, but you're not actually getting through the block. You're not actually getting through the block until you move into your body, until you start to move the block and the block comes out as words and the story evolves into something that you never expected. The second direction I want to take this conversation is about if you're facing a block in your life, because I want to show you how you can not only use writing as a diagnostic tool, but you can also use writing as a healing tool to move you through the block. Now, if you're not working on a writing project, but you're facing a block in another part of your life, I want to talk to you about how you can use writing not only as a diagnostic tool to show you where you're stuck, but also writing as a healing tool to help you begin to untithe the knots, because writing, contrary to what you might think, writing is actually a tool that helps you get into the body. Sometimes we get stuck in this mode of using writing as a tool to communicate what our brains or what our minds are trying to say. So it seems like, at the surface, it seems like writing would be an incredibly intellectual tool. But the way that I see writing is not so much an intellectual tool. It's actually more a spiritual tool. Writing is a way to help you move what is unconscious into the conscious. So it helps you go into the body, pull up what's in the body already, and move it into words, which is consciousness. There's this amazing study that a friend of mine did at Vanderbilt, and I referenced this in one of the later chapters of the Power of Writing It Down, where they studied groups of people and their mental health outcomes in conjunction with their vocabulary. So essentially, what they found is that the broader the vocabulary someone has, the greater their mental health outcomes. Because, for example, this was the example that my friend gave me when I asked him about the study, if someone orders a pizza, and the pizza comes with incorrect toppings, and they would say like, Oh, that sucks. And then let's say something really tragic also happens in their life, like they lose a friend, and the only word that they have for it is the same word that they would use for the pizzas it's like, oh, that sucks. When you conflate two different events of different levels of severity because you only have one word to describe them, then your mind kind of categorizes those two things the exact same way, and so the event the experience is actually way more heavily on you. The pizza weighs more heavily on you than it would if you had another word to describe it, and even the tragedy weighs more heavily on you than it would because you only have this one kind of category to lump it into. Whereas if you have a broader vocabulary and you have different words that you can use for different sets of experiences, that it actually allows your brain to kind of categorize these experiences into different groups and to think of them differently. And so essentially, what this study is showing is that the more words we have to describe our experiences, the better we actually do with filing these experiences away in our minds, or the way that I would discri it is kind of moving these experiences through our bodies. And I've heard this said before too. I don't know where this idea originated, but it feels really true to me that a traumatic experience is only traumatic because we don't know how to kind of filter the experience through our body. We don't know how to integrate the experience, which is why one experience could feel really traumatic to one person and not feel that traumatic to someone else. When we don't have the proper support to kind of integrate the experience and move it through our body, then it lives in our body as trauma. And when we do have that support, then the experiences can kind of flow through us effortlessly and don't tend to stay with us and feel heavy the way that trauma does when it gets stuck in our body. And so writing provides us this really amazing tool to take an experience from our life, to metabolize it, to move it through our body and to usher it out and to give it a meaning and give it a place to live in our brains so that it doesn't have to live in us as trauma. It gives us unexpanded vocabulary so that we can file experiences a way in different categories. It's not the same to get a pizza with the wrong toppings as it is to lose a friend, and we need different words. We need different vocabulary and different language to be able to describe that. And when you sit down to the page to write about your experiences, it allows you to see the ways that you're using, for example, repetitive words. That's one thing that I'll notice immediately when I read a piece of writing, is Oh, someone's using this word over and over and over again, which not only makes for a less interesting piece of writing that's kind of one level that we could talk about it, but also shows you, well, this is a word that is a category that is being overused in their brain. And maybe if we diversify the vocabulary and diversify the language, it could help them kind of recategorize some of these experiences. Or it also can show you if you see a repetitive word and a piece of writing, it also can show you a theme or a thread that's showing up in this person's life that needs to be better understood. It needs to be looked at, It needs to be given compassion, it needs to be held. There needs to be space held for it. And writing provides us with that opportunity that we wouldn't otherwise get to really zoom in on these experiences and see how are we processing them, how could we process them better? What extra support do we need? What morals to the story have we made up that need to be reimagined? And I'm a firm believer that the conjunction the two things together of both writing and also moving your body in some kind of meaningful way. And that doesn't have to mean exercise necessarily, although there is some really compelling data that shows getting the heart rate up is helpful to move some of these blocks, So getting the heart rate up, but it doesn't have to be exercised necessarily, or could just be walking, but also moving your body into the position that you wanted to go. And let's say the block you're facing is you really want to speak on stage, but you're terrified, you have so much stage fright. Moving your body into the position of standing on the stage and actually moving the body to do it is a way to help unstick the block that is more effective than just doing it in your mind. So these two things in conjunction, both the writing using that as a diagnostic tool, and the moving of your body work together to help you move the block, which again is not in your mind. It's not in your brain, it's in your body. It lives in your body. So in order to unstick those blocks, in order to move them, we have to both use writing as a diagnostic tool as a healing tool and also move the body. The moving of the body does not have to be exercise, although there is some really compelling data that shows that getting your heart rate up can be extremely helpful to moving these blocks, but it doesn't have to be exercised. For example, when Packing Light came out and the book started to sell very well, my publisher was really encouraging me to get out and do some speaking engagements. I was under the assumption that when you published a book, you never had to be in public speaking in front of anybody, because I had no desire to do that. I was terrified of being on a stage. I had no interest in speaking in front of a group of people, and yet the publisher was really encouraging me, and I felt like Okay, there's an opportunity here. I really want to be able to overcome this fear and stand on a stage and deliver a message. So I started taking these speaking engagements, and I would practice, practice, practice, and I would feel like I had my message, my keynote presentation totally down. It would be like just locked in, dialed in. I had so many amazing things I wanted to say, and then I would get on the stage and it would just be like silence, like I could not access it when I was standing on the stage. So I started working with this speaking coach and she said that she could help me overcome the block of a fear of public speaking. And one of the things that she had me do was, instead of practicing the speech in my mind, she had me stand on the stage and practice it. It's like, okay, duh, of course, move your body onto the stage. Now, when I'm practicing on the stage, there's no audience sitting in the seats, but still I'm standing on the stage. I'm moving my body in the way that I would be moving my body in front of this group, and I'm practicing my words that I'm actually letting the words come out of my mouth while I stand on the stage. Moving your body in the position that you want it to be in will help you to access the blocks that are there. They're not in your mind, they're not in my mind. I could do the speech no problem, start to finish with so many brilliant things to say. When I moved my body, it would shut that down. There was a disconnect between my mind and my body. The block was actually in my body. So moving your body and then also using writing as a tool for healing. The way to use writing as a tool for healing is to write about what you're experiencing and notice what you say. It's that simple two steps. Write about what you're experiencing and notice what you say or notice what you write. Pay attention to repeated words, pay attention to repeated phrases. Pay attention to where you get stuck. That's kind of using it as a diagnostic tool. But notice where on the page as you're telling the story, where there's gaps in the story, where you don't remember details. Pay attention to that that can have valuable information for you. Pay attention to what you feel you don't want to share. One of the reasons why writing can be so healing. Or one of the ways it can be so healing, I should say, is when we use writing as a tool for healing instead of as a tool for publishing. Now, sometimes the writing that we do for healing becomes published, and that's great. But when you can take publishing off the table and just use writing as a healing tool, you can say whatever you need to say in order to heal, and you don't have to worry about who's going to read this, who's going to find it? What are they going to think? What are they going to say? What will my mom think? What will my kids think? You know, what will I X think? Just write it the way that you need to write it. Tell your truth the way you need to hear yourself say it. The truth is truth you can possibly imagine, get it on the page, and don't worry about the publishing piece, and writing becomes extremely, extremely healing. So writer's block is not just writer's block, it's life block. When you're facing a block on the page, almost always it's because there's something you want to say or something you want to do that you feel you cannot say or do. Writing is both a diagnostic tool. It's also a tool for healing. It's an extremely powerful way to leverage yourself out of a block in any area of your life, in your relationships, in your career, in your aspirations, whatever it is. Wherever you feel that sense like I know that I'm capable of this thing and yet I'm not actualizing that potential in my life. Use writing as a tool and let me know how it goes. I can't wait to hear more and I can't wait to see you next week on the Right Place Story Podcast. Thanks for being here, m

Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back together with the words you write, all the beauty and piece and the magic that you'll start too fun when you write your story. You got the words and said, don't you think it's down to let them out and write them down on cold It's all about and write your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm your host, and on today's episode, I want to talk to you about a topic that is extremely relevant to the professional work that I do in writing and publishing. It is a topic that comes up in virtually every session that I work with with every single author or aspiring author, no matter how experienced, and yet this is a topic that has a ton of application beyond and outside the world of writing and publishing. Hence why it fits perfectly with this podcast. So if you're someone who does not consider yourself a writer, maybe you're someone who does not have aspirations to write a book, don't worry that this episode doesn't apply to you. In fact, I think it almost applies more to you than it does to someone who's facing kind of surface level writer's block. But I want to unpack this topic from the standpoint of writer's block, because I think that writer's block has a lot to teach us about what these blocks really are, about what they mean, and about how we overcome them. So when I say surface level writer's block, this is kind of where I want to begin the topic today. Surface level writer's block is that feeling that we've all had in our lives. Whether you're a writer or not, you've had the feeling where a writing assignment is given to you, maybe by a teacher, maybe because you need to give a speech at a wedding, maybe by a publisher, maybe for something totally different, Maybe you're just trying to come up with a caption on Instagram. So you have this writing assignment in front of you, and you sit down to get the writing done, and you find yourself staring at that blinking cursor. And I always feel like that blinking cursor feels like it's mocking you. It's just like you're never going to get this written. So we've all had this experience. Even if the last time you remember feeling this way was high school trying to write a paper, you understand that feeling of sitting and staring at the blinking cursor, feeling like I'm going to I'm going to poke my own eyeballs out. It can feel like you're banging your head against a wall. It just feels like you're almost like you're bumping up against a physical obstacle. And I want to talk about this because in a way, you kind of are bumping up against against a physical obstacle. It's not material physical obstacle, but it is an actual obstacle that you're trying to overcome. And I think what a lot of us do when we get into this position where we know we have this writing assignment that needs to be done by maybe X date or X time even puts more pressure on us when there's a timeline, is we think, Okay, I've got to overcome this block, and we kind of end up in this fight with the block where we're trying to outreason it outthink it. And the main point that I want to make on today's episode is, regardless of whether it's a surface level writer's block that you're facing or you're facing another kind of block in your life, which is the way that this topic expands beyond writing and publishing, these blocks are all the same. So whether it's a surface level writer's block. You're staring at a blinking cursor, can't seem to get the assignment done. Or whether this is a block of you know, I want to sign up for this training, or I want to go on this trip, or I want to do this thing, but no matter what I do, I can't seem to get myself to a place where I'm brave enough to do it. Maybe I want to get on stage and speak in front of a group of people, but I'm absolutely terrified and I can't bring myself to imagine what it would take for me, you know, to physically get up there. Maybe you can get up there in your mind, but you can't seem to get up there in your body. This is what I want to talk about, is that the blocks that we face in our lives are not just spiritual block. They are spiritual, they're immaterial, but they have substance to them. The thing I find myself saying over and over and over again to writers when I'm working with them is that writer's block is not just writer's block, it's life block, and that when you're facing a block in your writing, it is diagnostic. It shows you where in your life, there's something you want to say or do that you feel it that you cannot say or do, and so that block shows up in your writing. And so even surface level writer's block, whatever i'm calling surface level writer's block, is not really just surface level writer's block. There's on the surface of the water, the block of the writing where we think I've got a deadline, I've got to get this to the publisher. I can't seem to get the writing done. But underneath the surface, there's so much more going on that spinning your wheels, sitting at the computer trying to think your way out of this block will never get you there. The block doesn't even live in your mind. It lives in your body. And that's why I guess I'm calling it physical, even though it's really kind of immaterial, so not really physical. I know that's confusing, but what I'm getting at is that this is not just a block of not knowing the words to se say. The block is much deeper than that. And when we can really see the block for what it is, a couple of really amazing things happen when we really see the block for what it is. First of all, writing as a tool becomes diagnostic. So by that I mean now in my writing, when I meet a block, I go, oh, this isn't just a writer's block, This isn't just me not knowing the words to say. This is showing me where in my life I'm bumping up against a limitation. And so now I can use that diagnostic tool to go there, to meet that block where it is, to work with the block, and to hopefully find some release and some expansion so that I can step into a new version of myself or into a more expanded version of myself. So that's one thing is that it acts as this diagnostic tool, and another thing is that it also acts as a healing modality. And I write about this in my book called The Power of Writing It Down, where I talk about journaling exercises and how powerful journaling exercises can be to help us unlock those blocks, because sometimes it takes bumping up against the block to see where the block is. Then it takes putting the words on the page to give language and meaning to it, and then that allows us to unlock the block in our physical lives. So let me give you just a really quick example of this. I may have shared parts of this story before on the podcast, but I'm going to share it again because I think it bears repeating. Inside of this topic, which is that back in twenty fifteen, I was working on a book proposal with an agent, planning to pitch this as my second book to all of the usual suspects, all of the usual publishers I had written Packing Light. Packing Light came out in twenty thirteen. It did very well in the marketplace. It did better than the publishers expected it to do. I was a new author, so a publisher took a risk on me and gave me a very small advance, and then the book ended up selling very well, and so publishers in that space were all kind of waiting to see, Okay, what's the next thing that she's going to write, and waiting to see if they would like to publish it. So I was really I was working on this new project. The working title for the book was Our First Years, and it was supposed to be a book about how complicated and challenging the first years of marriage can be. So it was going to be written in a memoir style. I was going to share stories from the first couple of years of my marriage, and I was in process of working on the book, doing the same thing that I had done for my first book, and the same thing that I had done for every writing project before this, which was wake up in the morning, get my cup of coffee, sit down at the table, set my timer for fifty minutes five zero, before I look at my phone, before I touch my email, before I get online. I sit down at the table. I set my timer for fifty minutes. I write for a fifty minute stretch. I take a ten minute break to pee, get some water, do whatever I need to do. I come back do a second fifty minute stretch. And so if I'm setting my alarm for say five in the morning, I'm starting by like five ten. Then by seven am, I'm done with my two stretches of and I've got hopefully two to three thousand words under my belt. That's how I had written Packing Light, That's how I was planning to write this book. And yet, for some reason, with this book, I was bumping up against this invisible block. I was sitting down to get my writing done, I was staring at a blinking cursor. I couldn't seem to find the words to say. I had so many things I wanted to share about how tricky and challenging and frustrating and upsetting and horrifying my first few years of marriage had been. And yet when I sat down to write, I couldn't seem to get the words out, and it was just a frustrating feeling. It was that very familiar writer's blocky feeling, feeling like you're hitting your head against a brick wall and you're not making any progress. Well, as this was all happening, I also seemingly as a side note, decided to sign up for yoga classes. I had been previously in my life a long distance runner. I had run a few half marathons and a full marathon, and I had gotten a hip injury and wasn't able to do any long distance running anymore, and so I was looking for another way to exercise and kind of like improve my mental health and just feel better all the way around. And found a yoga studio in my neighborhood and decided yoga would be a really great way for me to do all of those things. So I signed up for yoga, and I started going to yoga like four or five days a week at the time, so now I was sometimes waking up early in writing and sometimes waking up early and going to yoga. So sometimes I'd set my alarm for five and I would sit down and do my writing for two hours. And sometimes I'd set my alarm for five and I'd go to a six am yoga class. And one of the things that I started to notice as I went to yoga is yoga was changing my relationship to the writing, and it was changing my relationship to myself. The big reason for this is just you're moving your body. I mean, yoga is in itself a really specific way to move your body that does it's meditative, so it helps you to connect yourself. It helps you connect to your higher self, which I've talked about on the show before. So it's a specific type of moving meditation that is specifically designed to help you move in to that meditative state. But I also think that there are other forms of exercise that do the same thing. But it's no surprise that while I'm doing this four to five days a week of yoga, I begin to get suspicions about my At the time husband and I started to feel this eerie feeling that things were not as they seemed. It's both not surprising and is surprising to me that this hadn't occurred to me before, because we, you know, we had been married for four years. We did meet and get engaged and get married very quickly. That whole thing happened in about four months, which is insanely fast and I do not recommend. But we've been living together for about four years. So it's odd to me that these thoughts that I started having as I was taking these yoga classes hadn't really occurred to me, or hadn't occurred to me on a conscious level before I was taking yoga, But as soon as I was in this regular yoga practice, these thoughts were almost like coming up like a flood. And one of the things that I say about writer's block is that writer's block is almost always something you want to say or do in your life that you feel you cannot say or do. So I was living in this inner conflict where I was having these thoughts and feelings about my marriage that I didn't feel like I could share with him or in this piece of writing, because on the most obvious level, he was going to read this piece of writing, but also because I knew other people were going to read this piece of writing, and it was a book that I planned on publishing. So I felt stuck. I felt like I was feeling these feelings and having these thoughts that I couldn't share with my then husband. I couldn't share them in this piece of writing. I didn't feel like they had anywhere to go. I didn't feel like I had any people in my life who would understand the thoughts that I was having, and so they were coming up and getting kind of stuck. So I was sitting down in the morning to write, couldn't think of anything to write. When I would write something, it wasn't very connective. I would send it to my agent and be like, no, this isn't it. You know, back to the drawing board. Try again. And there's a reason that what I was putting on the page wasn't that connective. It's because I wasn't telling my truth. And I didn't even really know that at the time. It wasn't like I was conscious of it. But there was this collision between what I really wanted to say and what was being said on the page, and what I really wanted to say was building and building and building, like this fire inside because I was going to this yoga practice. I was moving my body, I was sweating, I was doing these moving meditations. I was becoming more connected to myself. Well, not even three weeks after all of this is going on, one day I was sitting at the kitchen counter and my then husband's iPad was sitting at the counter next to me, and I don't know what got into me. I had maybe six months prior to this, at one point picked up his phone for no real reason. I wasn't like going to go through his text messages or anything. I think I was looking to just use his Safari app or something to look something up. But I went to open his phone and realize that he had changed his code and so I couldn't look on his phone. And when he noticed that I had his phone, he got really frustrated and upset and was like, Hey, why are you looking through my phone? You know, are you? Do you not trust me? La la lah when we got into an argument. So that had happened maybe six months prior to this, But beyond that, I had never once had the inclination or had the thought to pick up his phone or pick up his iPad and look through his messages. That was just not something that had ever happened, and yet here it was. Something came over me. I'm sitting at the kitchen counter. His iPad is right there, and I just pick it up. Try the code. It works. I open it. I'm looking through his messages and I suddenly find messages in his phone that send me on this rabbit trail. Within the course of about ten or fifteen minutes, I found messages, emails, so much stuff that I quickly sent to my phone, dragged and dropped into a folder on my computer, and saved them for later. Some part of me knew that I would need that, you know, quote unquote evidence later. And this all took place on November nineteenth. Remember I was saying earlier that it was September that I was working on that book proposal document started going to yoga. A few weeks later, November nineteenth, I find these messages, and by January I had filed for divorce. So all of this unraveled extremely quickly. But it wasn't until January February March, I'm spending a winter alone in my house, reflecting on everything that has unfolded in the last several months. When I realized, no wonder I was facing this block in my writing. I was trying to write a book about how difficult the first few years of marriage had been, and in my head, the moral of the story was, first few years of marriage can be really tricky. Here's how you overcome it. Marriage is worth fighting for. Stay in your marriage. And as I was entering into this yoga practice, becoming more connected to myself, realizing what I really thought, what I felt, what I believed, what I discovered was something that I was too scared to say on the page, which is that sometimes marriage is worth fighting for. And sometimes what you're facing in your marriage is too dark and too upsetting and shouldn't be happening and isn't worth fighting for, and sometimes you need to run for the hills and protect yourself over your marriage. Those were words that I didn't have access to at the time. That I didn't feel I could say. It was too much of a contrast to who I saw myself to be, who I wanted to be, the type of life that I wanted to live, where I saw my story going. It was too big of a contrast, and I simply couldn't get there in that writing assignment and also imagine this. I mean, even if I had been able to say those things, it doesn't fit inside of a book about how difficult the first few years of marriage can be. If the conclusion of the story is get divorce, it just simply didn't fit inside of that book project. The book project, like my life, needed to evolve, needed to expand, needed to develop beyond what I could see at that point, and I needed to give it permission to do that. And the only way to really do that was to move through the block in my life so that the block in the writing could be untangled. If I had just focused on moving through the block in my writing so that I could get the book published, if I had just seen this as a surface level block, all I would have done is published a book called Our First Years that would have preceded my divorce. It would have been a book about how first few years of marriage can be really tricky and complicated. You're probably going to fight a lot, but you can get through this, and a good marriage comes from two people who stick it out. Which, although there is some truth in that message, it is not the whole truth. And what was happening as I was facing that block is I was touching into reaching, for the first time in my life, my whole truth, and the block was demonstrating to me that there was more to be seen, there more to be explored, there more truth that I had not yet accessed. And in order to access the truth, I needed to first see that there's a writer's block. That's the diagnostic tool. So you see, oh, there's a block here. This is not just about getting a writing assignment done. There's something more going on here. This block does not just live in my mind. It lives in my body. And in order to work through the block, I have to get into the body. I have to do something like yoga or move my body or sweat on a daily basis and access that part of myself that is still unconscious. And then I have to pull it up. And when it's ready, it will show itself on the page and it will alter the course of my story forever. So this is just one example of how this works. But I've watched this unfold in my life over and over and over again so many times. Where you bump up against a writing block, you think it's just writer's block, You think you need to think your way out of it. But you cannot possibly think your way out of a writer's block. It will just tangle the knots even further. The only way through this is to see the block for what it is, not as just a surface level block, but is it a block that's in your body. To move into the body, to move your body, to sweat, to get more connected to the block, to allow the block to sort of untangle unhook from there, and the block moves into words that come out of your mouth or out of your fingertips, through the keys, into the piece of writing, and the story evolves from there, and it usually evolves into something you never in a million years dreamed it would be. It evolves into something that will change the way that you see yourself forever. Now, the problem with this way of seeing it is this type of a journey is not for the faint of heart. This is not a quick, simple, easy hack answer to the question how do I overcome writer's block? There is no simple, easy hack to overcome writer's block. You know, I could tell you to go take a run around the house a couple of times and come back with a fresh mind and fresh oxygen to your brain, and that would on one level work. If I had done that with my our first year's book, maybe the book would have made it to the right publisher, maybe the publisher would have published it, maybe it would be out there now in the world for all to read. And Yet what was really trying to happen for me wasn't that this book was trying to be written. What was trying to happen for me was that the course of my relationship was trying to change. The course of my life was trying to change my consciousness, was trying to evolve into something different, something new, something more expansive. And if I would have just focused on getting the book out the door, that never would have happened. So, if you're listening to this episode and you're facing what I'm calling surface level writer's block, here's my advice to you, begin to see this experience of writer's block as much deeper than you ever experienced it before. It is not just a block to getting published, a block to getting this caption on Instagram, a block to getting the speech done. More than likely, there is something you want to say or do in your piece of writing that you feel you cannot say or do, a space where your story is trying to evolve that you're not ready to go to yet physically, like the matter in your body is not ready to go there yet, and you need more time to allow that story to unfold and to evolve. So, if you're facing writer's block, you can try to sort of cheat the system and think your way through it, and you might seem like you get through the writer's block and you get the piece of writing done, but you're not actually getting through the block. You're not actually getting through the block until you move into your body, until you start to move the block and the block comes out as words and the story evolves into something that you never expected. The second direction I want to take this conversation is about if you're facing a block in your life, because I want to show you how you can not only use writing as a diagnostic tool, but you can also use writing as a healing tool to move you through the block. Now, if you're not working on a writing project, but you're facing a block in another part of your life, I want to talk to you about how you can use writing not only as a diagnostic tool to show you where you're stuck, but also writing as a healing tool to help you begin to untithe the knots, because writing, contrary to what you might think, writing is actually a tool that helps you get into the body. Sometimes we get stuck in this mode of using writing as a tool to communicate what our brains or what our minds are trying to say. So it seems like, at the surface, it seems like writing would be an incredibly intellectual tool. But the way that I see writing is not so much an intellectual tool. It's actually more a spiritual tool. Writing is a way to help you move what is unconscious into the conscious. So it helps you go into the body, pull up what's in the body already, and move it into words, which is consciousness. There's this amazing study that a friend of mine did at Vanderbilt, and I referenced this in one of the later chapters of the Power of Writing It Down, where they studied groups of people and their mental health outcomes in conjunction with their vocabulary. So essentially, what they found is that the broader the vocabulary someone has, the greater their mental health outcomes. Because, for example, this was the example that my friend gave me when I asked him about the study, if someone orders a pizza, and the pizza comes with incorrect toppings, and they would say like, Oh, that sucks. And then let's say something really tragic also happens in their life, like they lose a friend, and the only word that they have for it is the same word that they would use for the pizzas it's like, oh, that sucks. When you conflate two different events of different levels of severity because you only have one word to describe them, then your mind kind of categorizes those two things the exact same way, and so the event the experience is actually way more heavily on you. The pizza weighs more heavily on you than it would if you had another word to describe it, and even the tragedy weighs more heavily on you than it would because you only have this one kind of category to lump it into. Whereas if you have a broader vocabulary and you have different words that you can use for different sets of experiences, that it actually allows your brain to kind of categorize these experiences into different groups and to think of them differently. And so essentially, what this study is showing is that the more words we have to describe our experiences, the better we actually do with filing these experiences away in our minds, or the way that I would discri it is kind of moving these experiences through our bodies. And I've heard this said before too. I don't know where this idea originated, but it feels really true to me that a traumatic experience is only traumatic because we don't know how to kind of filter the experience through our body. We don't know how to integrate the experience, which is why one experience could feel really traumatic to one person and not feel that traumatic to someone else. When we don't have the proper support to kind of integrate the experience and move it through our body, then it lives in our body as trauma. And when we do have that support, then the experiences can kind of flow through us effortlessly and don't tend to stay with us and feel heavy the way that trauma does when it gets stuck in our body. And so writing provides us this really amazing tool to take an experience from our life, to metabolize it, to move it through our body and to usher it out and to give it a meaning and give it a place to live in our brains so that it doesn't have to live in us as trauma. It gives us unexpanded vocabulary so that we can file experiences a way in different categories. It's not the same to get a pizza with the wrong toppings as it is to lose a friend, and we need different words. We need different vocabulary and different language to be able to describe that. And when you sit down to the page to write about your experiences, it allows you to see the ways that you're using, for example, repetitive words. That's one thing that I'll notice immediately when I read a piece of writing, is Oh, someone's using this word over and over and over again, which not only makes for a less interesting piece of writing that's kind of one level that we could talk about it, but also shows you, well, this is a word that is a category that is being overused in their brain. And maybe if we diversify the vocabulary and diversify the language, it could help them kind of recategorize some of these experiences. Or it also can show you if you see a repetitive word and a piece of writing, it also can show you a theme or a thread that's showing up in this person's life that needs to be better understood. It needs to be looked at, It needs to be given compassion, it needs to be held. There needs to be space held for it. And writing provides us with that opportunity that we wouldn't otherwise get to really zoom in on these experiences and see how are we processing them, how could we process them better? What extra support do we need? What morals to the story have we made up that need to be reimagined? And I'm a firm believer that the conjunction the two things together of both writing and also moving your body in some kind of meaningful way. And that doesn't have to mean exercise necessarily, although there is some really compelling data that shows getting the heart rate up is helpful to move some of these blocks, So getting the heart rate up, but it doesn't have to be exercised necessarily, or could just be walking, but also moving your body into the position that you wanted to go. And let's say the block you're facing is you really want to speak on stage, but you're terrified, you have so much stage fright. Moving your body into the position of standing on the stage and actually moving the body to do it is a way to help unstick the block that is more effective than just doing it in your mind. So these two things in conjunction, both the writing using that as a diagnostic tool, and the moving of your body work together to help you move the block, which again is not in your mind. It's not in your brain, it's in your body. It lives in your body. So in order to unstick those blocks, in order to move them, we have to both use writing as a diagnostic tool as a healing tool and also move the body. The moving of the body does not have to be exercise, although there is some really compelling data that shows that getting your heart rate up can be extremely helpful to moving these blocks, but it doesn't have to be exercised. For example, when Packing Light came out and the book started to sell very well, my publisher was really encouraging me to get out and do some speaking engagements. I was under the assumption that when you published a book, you never had to be in public speaking in front of anybody, because I had no desire to do that. I was terrified of being on a stage. I had no interest in speaking in front of a group of people, and yet the publisher was really encouraging me, and I felt like Okay, there's an opportunity here. I really want to be able to overcome this fear and stand on a stage and deliver a message. So I started taking these speaking engagements, and I would practice, practice, practice, and I would feel like I had my message, my keynote presentation totally down. It would be like just locked in, dialed in. I had so many amazing things I wanted to say, and then I would get on the stage and it would just be like silence, like I could not access it when I was standing on the stage. So I started working with this speaking coach and she said that she could help me overcome the block of a fear of public speaking. And one of the things that she had me do was, instead of practicing the speech in my mind, she had me stand on the stage and practice it. It's like, okay, duh, of course, move your body onto the stage. Now, when I'm practicing on the stage, there's no audience sitting in the seats, but still I'm standing on the stage. I'm moving my body in the way that I would be moving my body in front of this group, and I'm practicing my words that I'm actually letting the words come out of my mouth while I stand on the stage. Moving your body in the position that you want it to be in will help you to access the blocks that are there. They're not in your mind, they're not in my mind. I could do the speech no problem, start to finish with so many brilliant things to say. When I moved my body, it would shut that down. There was a disconnect between my mind and my body. The block was actually in my body. So moving your body and then also using writing as a tool for healing. The way to use writing as a tool for healing is to write about what you're experiencing and notice what you say. It's that simple two steps. Write about what you're experiencing and notice what you say or notice what you write. Pay attention to repeated words, pay attention to repeated phrases. Pay attention to where you get stuck. That's kind of using it as a diagnostic tool. But notice where on the page as you're telling the story, where there's gaps in the story, where you don't remember details. Pay attention to that that can have valuable information for you. Pay attention to what you feel you don't want to share. One of the reasons why writing can be so healing. Or one of the ways it can be so healing, I should say, is when we use writing as a tool for healing instead of as a tool for publishing. Now, sometimes the writing that we do for healing becomes published, and that's great. But when you can take publishing off the table and just use writing as a healing tool, you can say whatever you need to say in order to heal, and you don't have to worry about who's going to read this, who's going to find it? What are they going to think? What are they going to say? What will my mom think? What will my kids think? You know, what will I X think? Just write it the way that you need to write it. Tell your truth the way you need to hear yourself say it. The truth is truth you can possibly imagine, get it on the page, and don't worry about the publishing piece, and writing becomes extremely, extremely healing. So writer's block is not just writer's block, it's life block. When you're facing a block on the page, almost always it's because there's something you want to say or something you want to do that you feel you cannot say or do. Writing is both a diagnostic tool. It's also a tool for healing. It's an extremely powerful way to leverage yourself out of a block in any area of your life, in your relationships, in your career, in your aspirations, whatever it is. Wherever you feel that sense like I know that I'm capable of this thing and yet I'm not actualizing that potential in my life. Use writing as a tool and let me know how it goes. I can't wait to hear more and I can't wait to see you next week on the Right Place Story Podcast. Thanks for being here, m