I love to write. I love to write about birds and I love to write rhymes. And that has mostly been the extent of my writing in the past. Although I have never written while being specifically mindful about it, I think of myself as being mindful, although I don’t actually know for sure what that means.

For the past 5 days, I most happily participated in an online free “course” just finished yesterday, the “Mindful Writing Challenge,” that has given me a much better idea about it. In fact, it helped me write paragraphs and whole essays that surprised me. After you sign up for the course, you get a link each day that you can click on whenever you want to listen to that day’s session. Beginning with about five minutes of guided meditation, the formal part of each day’s session only lasts fifteen minutes, but of course one can continue writing long after the online session ends. This course immediately helped me to get away from my constant production of rhymes. I wrote prose about all sorts of topics, not just birds. I am not being paid or rewarded or coerced into writing this, but I definitely recommend Nadia Colburn’s “Mindful Writing Challenge (nadia@nadiacolburn.com) for all writers or would-be writers or people who might want to move from a practice of meditation to writing something.

After the five sessions are all over, there is of course the possibility of paying for additional inexpensive sessions, but I did not feel pressured to do so. I may sign up for more. Whatever I do, this course helped me feel more excited about the process of writing, not just about the outcome of the process.

Of course, the outcome is also important. I refer you to my published books, including the one just published.

A CHARISMA OF OWLS (available now from me, see my “shop” page)