When you engage the Witness while writing, it helps quiet the brilliant, inventive left hemisphere of the brain. The discursive mind settles, and your intuition and emotional intelligence can emerge.

It’s important to realize that meaning is a changing story; what matters is what we say matters, which is constantly in flux.

thinking. By stepping onto the banks of awareness, we create a half-inch of distance between the story and the part of consciousness that is watching the flow. This is how transformation happens, because we are acknowledging a part of us that is always and forever free.

your ability to love and be loved, feel as if you belong in the world, know your worth, connect with others, feel safe rather than threatened, and be strong and independent rather than abandoned and needy. All of these have their earliest roots in the primal relationship between you and your first caregiver.

Emotional groundwork is laid by the time we are seven months old, so long before you began to speak, an encyclopedia of preverbal information was transmitted to your baby brain.

“We learn to care, quite literally, by observing the caring behavior of our parents toward us,” Siegel explains. Children deprived of the mothering gaze are more likely to feel disconnected from others later in life.

Enjoy your solitude. As writers, we must learn to enjoy our own company. We must enjoy visiting our own minds, hearing what we have to say, and remembering that we are okay on our own. We can step away from the crowd and neither panic nor lose a sense of who we are. Practice enjoying the unfilled space and hearing the sounds within the silence.

Solitude is different from loneliness. Solitude is rich, inspiring, and restful; replete with space and possibility.

Just as newborn babies are unable to see in the sunlight, your new eyes need darkness and protection in order to focus. The two greatest challenges in writing practice—solitude and entering the shadow—are also the doorways to self-revelation.