This exercise is designed to help me develop a clearer sense of my past by writing my own story. Understanding the defining moments of my life can help to illuminate my present situation and make it easier to plan and determine my future direction.
During this exercise, I will be presented with a series of pages, providing information or asking me to define and describe different periods or epochs of my life and the experiences I had during those epochs.
Memory, Emotion and Stress:
Your mind is always trying to determine the level of danger your environment presents. When bad things happen to you, your mind and body react by treating the environment as dangerous and preparing for emergencies. This preparation is stressful and depletes you mentally and physically.
If something terrible has happened to you in the past, your mind cannot be at peace until you have figured out how to avoid having the same thing happen to you again. You can tell how well you have managed this by remembering different vital events from the past. If you recall memories that make you feel ashamed, guilty, angry, or hurt, and these memories are more than a year and a half old, then your mind is not at peace, and you are still carrying the weight of your past.
Unresolved past issues make your mind and body react as if your environment is permanently dangerous. Under such conditions, your body reacts to stress with more preparation for action: for fight or flight, which you may feel, respectively, as anger or fear and emotional pain. Your mental and physical health can be damaged if this preparation becomes chronic. This happens in part because your body produces more cortisol, a stress hormone when you are endangered. Cortisol prepares you to act, but your body gets the energy for such action by stealing from your future reserves. Cortisol shuts down your higher mental functions, inhibits your immune system, burns up your available energy, and, over time, damages the brain areas responsible for memory and emotional control. Thus it is essential to keep your stress levels within reasonable boundaries.
Writing
Why write? Writing is a sophisticated form of thinking. Thinking prepares you to perceive appropriately and act intelligently. If you don’t think things through, you will likely make serious mistakes and hurt yourself and others. When you write about personally essential matters, you can start to identify the causes of events that might hurt and damage you. You can understand how you might have to change how you see and think to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering.
You must mine the information the past provides to ensure that the present and future emerge positively and productively.
It is best to do the writing associated with this exercise by entering into a state of contemplation, like a daydream – the movie that runs in your head – is more dream- or story-like. To complete this exercise correctly, you must daydream about the past and let thoughts and images come to you instead of controlling them. This can be frightening if you start to remember unpleasant events from the past. However, it can be beneficial to voluntarily confront things you are afraid of, mainly if your fears stop you from living correctly in the present and future.
Don’t rush! These are not something to merely complete. You have to take your time. In a daydream, parts of your mind that haven’t been able to speak because of your focused concentration or moral opinions can let themselves be known. These are parts of you that need a voice. If you take your time, you can contact parts of yourself that have been shut away. You will need the abilities and energies within these shut-away parts to deal with the present and future challenges.
Sleeping
Doing this and the present and future authoring exercises may be best over several days. The research on the relationship between writing and mental and physical health has demonstrated that sleeping and, more particularly, dreaming can help you participate more deeply in the writing exercise and consolidate your new ideas.
So take your time and let yourself get deeply into the exercise.
Attitude While Writing
If you are rushed, distracted, or bored, you are not doing the writing in a manner that will benefit you. If you are writing about important events, you may find the exercise complex and emotionally challenging, but it should not be boring. If you are rushed or distracted, you are trying too hard to finish or have not put enough time aside to do the writing.
Negotiating with yourself properly when trying to write about important things is essential. Remember that dealing with your past can benefit you in many ways. It can help you escape from the ghosts of the past. It can lower your level of stress. It can help you think more clearly now and in the future. It can help you know who you really are and how your life has affected you, positively and negatively. It can help you become healthier, mentally and physically. It can help you enjoy your life in the present, eliminate your resentment and misery, and prepare you to plan for the future.
It is worth putting in the time to reap such benefits.
When a person writes, they often write for another person or some outside reason. If you have done this writing exercise correctly, you will work primarily for yourself. What you produce should be a profoundly personal document.