How To Make Writing a Sacred Practice
This modern twist on the ancient contemplative practice of ‘scriptio divina’ can help you heal
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Three decades ago, research by James Pennebaker revealed that expressing one’s deeper thoughts and feelings through writing can result in significant physical and psychological health benefits. Since then, “writing to heal” — also known as expressive writing, emotional writing, written disclosure, and writing therapy — has become a sought-after source of research and tool in clinical practice from disciplines including psychology, psychiatry, medicine, social work, and religious/spiritual studies.
Of course, this is not surprising. The desire to record the most challenging or intimate details of one’s life is as old as handwriting itself. From Augustine’s Confessions to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s own autobiography Confessions, Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, and poets such as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton’s confessional poetry, it seems to be almost an innate part of the human condition to reveal intensely personal, often painful perceptions and feelings as an expressive, curative release.
