What You’re Holding On to Could Be Holding Back Your Writing

The Pain in My Neck

I went to the chiropractor for the first time in a decade today. I’ve been having a literal pain in my neck and shoulders and wanted to find the culprit. Although the results were inconclusive, the chiropractor did tell me something intriguing. He said my posture was messed up. Okay he didn’t say that exactly, but he did tell me that I was tensing one of my shoulders and hunching my back. I realized that just as we hold onto bad ideas, dysfunctional relationships and negative thoughts, we also unconsciously hold onto our bodies willing it to work in ways that cause us pain and discomfort.

It’s the same for our creative endeavors.

What You Give Out Comes Back to You

If you’re not mindful of how you’re holding your postures, your thoughts, your inaccurate beliefs of what is possible for your life, they could control you. An old college classmate once said, “You walk like you don’t have any self-confidence.”

The energy I was bringing to the world was once that was a gross misrepresentation of what I wanted to express in the world. And that energy was literally causing me a pain in my neck.

How You Could be Sabotaging Your Work-In-Progress 

As I have been unaware of how I was holding myself up, how many of you are letting your work-in-progress down by being unconscious? For example, you may have the following thoughts:

• that your writing is not good enough
• that you’ll never make it as a writer
• that the work you do has no meaning
• that no one will like it
• that everyone will laugh at you when they read it.

Well those seemingly innocuous thoughts can sabotage your success, eating away at your efforts to get published.

Letting Go

In order to confront these shadows, it’s important to have be conscious of them and then let them go. Sometimes mean, old, bitter critics that live in our mind come from the words of relatives and friends who said something to us at one point in time. And even though it’s difficult to believe, sometimes their words feel comforting because we’re scared. Believing their words can keep us from confronting our own fears.

But if you want to be a writer, you need to not just write, but write for the world to see. Let go of the idea of perfection. Let go of the belief that you’re not good enough. Let go because doing so will let in something greater to your life.

And watch as they float on by like balloons in your mind.

All writers take risks with the knowledge that doing so will reap far greater benefits that the comfort of squelching their dreams will.

Being a writer is not easy. So the real question is:

How much will you risk to be the writer you always wanted to be?