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Welcome to "Write For Life:
Healing Body, Mind & Spirit through Journal Writing!"
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First Edition:
Cleveland Clinic Press, 2007
Revised Edition:
Kaplan Publications, 2010
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Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela's Ashes, raves about "Write For Life"
"Why, oh why, didn't someone walk up to me when I was twenty-five and hand me a book like this?" |
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For reluctant writers as well as those who love to write! Fifteen journeys of self-discovery that will delight you for a lifetime!
Compelling scientific evidence supports the journal-writing process as an alternative, integrative therapy. Journaling now joins yoga, meditation, acupuncture, and other methods of healing. Write For Life: Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit Through Journal Writing is not only for the beginning journal writer, but it offers a program of life-long journal writing for everyone—including people who have been writing for years!
Dr. Sheppard Kominars shows you how and why journaling has such healing powers. How does he know? He's been journaling for more than fifty years. Journaling helped him recover from cancer therapy and other health crises. Initially skeptical, Kominars reluctantly began journaling when his doctor strongly urged him to. After fifty years, he's still journaling, so, obviously, it has worked for him—and he'll tell you how and why it can work for you.
Learn how journal writing can help chart your life's course into the future. Both fun and health-enhancing, uncover the scientific links between self-expression and healing. Begin with the basics of journaling, then gain new insights into self-caring, Native American spirituality, dreams, legacy letters, and more.
Download the Press Kit (PDF)
Book Contents
Preface by Richard G. Petty, MD
Foreword by Frank McCourt
Introduction
PART ONE: Windows on Healing
1 Scientific Research and Writing Techniques
2 Survivors and Surviving
3 Journal Excerpts
4 Healing the Survivor
5 Expectations
PART TWO: Initiating the Process of Journal Writing
6 Getting Started
7 Staying Started
PART THREE: Exploring New Directions into Healing
8 Self-Caring
9 Food and Nourishment
10 Travel
11 Legacy Letters, Part One: Laying the Foundation
12 Dreams
13 Now and Zen
14 "Not Yets"
15 Legacy Letters, Part Two: Creating the Letters
16 American Indian Spirituality
17 Creativity
18 Work and Play
19 Meditation and Prayer
20 The Experience of Joy
21 Last Rights: Embracing Life and Death
22 Pilgrimage
23 Lifelong Journaling
Acknowledgments
Text Credits
Resources
Index
Preface by Richard G. Petty, M.D.
Storytelling is one of our most fundamental and enduring needs. Our stories define us. We all constantly tell stories that shape virtually every human activity, from our emotions to our personal relationships and our politics. Writing our stories introduces another dynamic: Most of us find that putting our thoughts and feelings down on paper helps to give us mental and emotional clarity.
This book is not the first to discuss journal writing as a method of healing, but it is one of the best that I have read.
In the foreword by the author of Angela's Ashes: A Memoir, Frank McCourt says, ""Why, oh why, didn't someone walk up to me when I was 25 and stumbling, and hand me a book like this?""
The answer is that as far as I know, there was no such book. This one is unique, and the fruit of 50 years of regular journaling combined with practical experience of using journal writing for therapy. Sheppard Kominars was first encouraged to use journaling at a time in the mid-1950s when he was suffering from intractable headaches. To his astonishment, they began to become more manageable and then to subside. He continued writing over the years, and his writing supported him during the vicissitudes of life, particularly when he developed another kind of physical illness. In recent years he has taken his method on the road, teaching journal writing to a new generation of people with chronic illnesses, in the hope that writing will help them articulate and make sense of their experiences.
In the last few years, a small body of evidence has indicated that journal writing may be highly therapeutic for people with some kinds of problems, and it may also act to prevent some psychological difficulties. Sheppard's experience would seem to endorse that research.
Write for Life really does begin at the beginning, even dealing with the kind of book and paper to use. Sheppard then takes us through the practicalities of what, when, and where to write.
For many years now I have encouraged people to use storytelling as a method of writing and re-writing their life stories, all the time unaware of Sheppard Kominars's work,, so this book particularly fascinated me. The methods that he details not only help people struggling with health problems, but can also be potent vehicles for building our personal resilience to the slings and arrows that are an inevitable part of life.
I hope that Write for Life not only becomes the catalyst for a wider use of writing in health care and wellness, but that it also prompts further scientific investigations into its use. I highly recommend this book for teachers and for people who would like to maintain their health, as well as for people struggling with physical and psychological problems, this is a must read!
Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life
Foreword by Frank McCourt
In my high school teaching days, I told my English classes, "When in doubt, tell a story. 'Once upon a time' was good enough for the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, and James Joyce, and it's good enough for you and me." I would also quote Jesus, "Be as little children," even though my students were mostly Jewish.
I was telling my classes these things because they were resisting a simple assignment: Keep an account of your life. That's all. One hundred and fifty words a day. Would it kill you?
Yes, they said. It would kill them, and that was because nothing happened in their lives, nothing worth writing about. They envied me for having had a miserable childhood and plenty to write about, while all they had was going to school every day and taking various tests and exams for college and putting up with parents hounding them about one thing or another.
That often irritated me, and I told them so. : "I'm trying to get you to open your eyes and ears, and all you do is whine, whine, whine."
That's where I lost them, and that's where I wanted to tell them I was sorry. I wanted to tell them that even though I was in my 40s I was backward in my ways, a slow learner who had a long way to go. Yes, yes, they did whine, but there was a genuine substratum of despair in their complaints. There was a genuine questioning as to what the hell it was all about. They were looking for meaning in their lives but feeling trapped.
"All right," I said. "All right. Get it on paper. Let it all hang out— – if that's something you can do on paper. And remember what D. H. Lawrence said, 'Write it, and write it hot.'"
Of course, I was talking to myself. Much of teaching, especially when it's teaching English, is talking to yourself. I was whining inwardly, desperate as any teenager, till the teacher part of me said, "Write it."
I could tell the story of a relationship with my journals that went back to my mid-20s. While I think of it I might go and burn those journals, because even though they are a record of certain activities and experiences, they are nothing but one long lament over the futility of it all, etc., etc.
But then I recall reading extracts from the journals of Tolstoy, a litany of despair and disgust with his own gambling and boozing and fornicating self, and if he could be such a fool, then there was hope for me.
In my 20s I knew nothing about the kind of healing Sheppard Kominars writes about in his warm, wise, and wonderful book, Write for Life. The only healing I knew about was what the church had told me: confession. You sin, you confess, you're forgiven. There was some relief in alcohol and sex, but that was ephemeral, and there was always a hangover, physical, emotional, and spiritual.
The subtitle of Dr. Kominars's book is Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit through Journal Writing.. It's a compendium of experience, learning, and practical advice for anyone embarking on a journal or anyone who has been at it for years.
Why, oh why, didn't someone walk up to me when I was 25 and stumbling, and hand me a book like this? Would I have been smart enough to take it to a quiet place, not merely to read it like an ordinary book, but to savor it and learn from it, slowly, slowly. ?
That's how you have to read Write for Life. There's no hurry. Reading this book is a way of being good to yourself and you can't take it all in one greedy gulp. It took a while to get to where you are. It took a while to be what you are.
I have had a lover's quarrel with my journal. In bad times I have scribbled in it as if my life depended on it. (Maybe it did.) At other times I feel as if I have an obligation to write in it, as if I were a college student with a term paper hanging over his head.
And all the time, dear journal, you wanted to be my friend. You wanted to be the safe repository of my ecstasies and my miseries, my hymns and lamentations.
If former students of mine were to read this I would say to them, "Please forgive my short temper back then. When I asked you to keep an account of your days, I should have talked about those days. They were -- and are --unique as fingerprints, and you'll never have them again. Those days were like jewels: Sunday, sapphire; Monday, emerald; Tuesday, diamond; and so on. All days are jewels, aren't they?" Frank McCourt, March, 2006
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"Write For Life," the 6 CD Set
To help you get more out of your journal writing experience and your life, I've created this set of six CDs. Six chapters from "Write For Life" are contained in these special disks along with interviews with six professionals who are also journal writers. The CDs provide a powerful incentive and enhance your efforts to discover new ways to experience the benefits of journal writing to your health and happiness on a daily basis.
Get this 6 CD set, an autographed copy of the First Edition of the book, PLUS 2 hours of one-on-one coaching with Dr. Kominars for only $125, plus shipping.
Order Today From: GoodSheppardBooks.com
Email: write-for-life@pacbell.net
The Revised Edition, Kaplan Publications 2010, can be purchased at BN.com, Amazon.com, in bookstores and in volume, through straussconsultants.com
More Information on Dr. Kominars' journal writing program for young adults:
www.journaltowin.com And www.journaltowin.org
YouTube Interview: http://www.youtube.com/user/genogeng#p/u/32/PgBx69F9v_Q
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