If You Read Good Books, When You

In Writing Practice, There's No Direction. You Enter Your Own Mind And Follow It Where It Takes You. We Have A Great Need To Connect With Our Own Mind And Our Own True Self. And All Of Us Have A Story To Tell.

In The Past Few Years I've Assigned Books To Be Read Before A Student Attends One Of My Weeklong Seminars. I Have Been Astonished By How Few People -- People Who Supposedly Want To Write -- Read Books, And If They Read Them, How Little They Examine Them.

We Are Searching For The Core Of Our Lives; Our Culture Intuits That Writing, That Ancient Activity, Might Be The Pathway...awakening Does Not Feed Ego's Needs And Desires; It Pulverizes The Self. Our Society Couldn't Knowingly Bear Such Reduction, So We've Tricked Ourselves Into The Same Path But Call It Writing.

Can We Walk That Thin Line Between Constant Change And Continuation? And In The Middle Of This Flux, Feel Gratitude But Not Hold On? Gratitude Greases The Joints To Let Us Let Go, And At The Same Time To Stop And Realize We Received Something. Gratitude Is The Most Developed And Mature Of Human Emotions.

We Have To Look At Our Own Inertia, Insecurities, Self-hate, Fear That, In Truth, We Have Nothing Valuable To Say. When Your Writing Blooms Out Of The Back Of This Garbage Compost, It Is Very Stable. You Are Not Running From Anything. You Can Have A Sense Of Artistic Security. If You Are Not Afraid Of The Voices Inside You, You Will Not Fear The Critics Outside You.