A Daily 15-Minute Writing Practice to Get to the Heart of Things

Pain, Desire, Gratitude

Often when people talk to me about their lives—about wanting to make a change, about sensing that something new is coming but they don’t know what, about how to find their way through a fog or a loss or a season of chaos and change, I tell them about this one practice that’s helped me a thousand times at least.

Every morning, I tell them, write for five minutes about pain, and then five minutes about desire. And then before bed, write for five minutes about gratitude. That’s it.

Do that every day for three weeks, and you’ll know something fundamental about your life or your own mind or your own heart of hearts that you didn’t know before, and it’s that knowing that will help you understand the next step to take, big or small, tweak or turn-it-all-around.

Set a timer for five minutes and at the top of a black page, write this question: What hurts?

This is a fundamentally important question, and a risky one, particularly if you’ve been steeped in grin-and-bear-it, the-show-must-go-on, muscle-through-the-pain messaging—like most of us, right? We’ve been taught to ignore our pain, swallow our pain, minimize our pain, explain away our pain, find perspective on our pain. But most of us have not been taught or even permitted to feel our pain. Or talk about it. Or grieve it. Or rage about it.

We just keep going, and we think that somehow by ignoring it it will disappear. This is a myth we love, but loving it doesn’t make it true. Pain wiggles out a thousand other ways when ignored—it becomes resentment, or seeks solace in addiction. It causes us to isolate or deceive. We take it out on people we love who don’t deserve it, or we shame ourselves for not being able to gut it out, teeth gritted.

Here's an alternative: for five minutes a day (to start), FEEL IT. Write about it in great messy detail. Locate it in your body, find words for it, let it pour out of your fingers onto your keyboard and blessedly out of your body, just for a few minutes at least.

What grieves you? What’s breaking your heart? Where is your body holding pain? What can’t you let go of? What do you cry about in the shower or what’s behind the screams into your pillow or what have you been carrying for so so long that you’re desperate to lay down, just for a moment?

Spend five brave, powerful, risky minutes allowing yourself the gift of feeling what hurts. You don’t have to fix it or find a solution for it. You don’t have to understand it or explain it or justify it or talk yourself out of it. Just feel it: what hurts?

And then set another timer for five minutes and at the top of the next blank page, write this question: what do I want?

Big things, small things, sweeping changes, tiny tweaks. Dreams about your future or thoughts on what would made a great evening—all of it. What do you want?

We live in a culture that doesn’t ask women what they want very well or very often. We’re told a million different ways a thousand times a day that desire is bad, wanting is bad, hunger is bad, that we should be content, that we should starve, that we should live on the crumbs of other peoples’ lives and satisfy ourselves by bringing about other peoples’ dreams. This is risky, then, this tiny window-opening of desire. Risky--and so so important.

I’m nearly forty-seven years old, and I’m still unraveling a lifetime of being told to put others’ needs ahead of my own, to suppress my own desires, to facilitate other peoples’ dreams and carry their burdens. But again, just like pain, our wanting has a way of finding the air, even if we‘ve starved it a thousand different ways. It comes out in resentment, jealousy, rage. It comes out in depression and numbing behaviors and escapism.

Spend five minutes making space for longing and dreaming and desire—what’s missing, what inside of you is unmet, what do you dream about, what do you ache for?  What do you want?

And then before bed, set a timer for five minutes one last time, and write at the top of the third page: what do you love?

Write about what brought your joy, made you laugh, filled your heart that day. What’s working? What’s beautiful? What do you love?

Tiny things or the very biggest things, things in nature, things in your home, moments in your work, the taste of a peach, the color of the sky, the work you’ve done to build and strengthen your marriage, the smell of your son’s neck (just like toast and laundry).

What is it about your life or the world or your neighborhood or the sky or the book you’re reading that lifts your heart? Be specific and detailed, and get it all out, a waterfall of all the best, loveliest things.

That’s it. And then do it again tomorrow, and the next day and the next day. And over time, you’ll start to excavate some things, some knowing. You’ll start to hear your inner voice, even if it’s been silenced for a long time—even if you’re the one who silenced it, all those years ago, because there’s so so much pressure, especially on women to listen to voices outside of ourselves instead of within.

Pain, desire, gratitude—this is the way through.

To be clear, this is not the only thing—for Christians, we’re also listening all the time for the voice and guidance of the Holy Spirit. For those of us who are married, our decisions are made in partnership, in the context of our commitment to one another. For those of us who are parents, of course our decisions are made with our hearts bent toward what’s best for our children. We’re sons and daughters, members of communities and neighborhoods. We all make decisions in the greater context of those covenants and commitments…BUT: when you’re in a fog of unknowing, start with a deep excavation of your own self—start by paying attention to your own pain, desire, and gratitude.

Once we know those things, once we’ve done the hard work to listen and discern our own hearts, we can bring those hearts—those dreams, those wounds, those visions—to friends and partners and close family members and therapists and people with whom we pray. I’ve never made a major life decision without inviting in a close circle of people I love and trust. But also: I’m seeing now how often over the years I’ve trusted outside voices not in harmony with my own, but instead of my own. It’s easier to meet expectations instead of rock the boat with my own needs, my own desires, my own knowing.

But boats can handle a little rocking. That’s what I’m coming to know, on a deep level. I want to be a writer that my readers can trust and learn from in meaningful ways. I want to be a mother who truly sees her children and works for their good in deep ways. I want to be a wife who brings her best self to our partnership. And all that depends on being deeply honest with myself about what hurts, what I want, and what I love.

This is the starting point for healthy, grounded, meaningful life.

We live in a world of should—what you should want, what you should love, what you should have already gotten over, what you should be grateful for. This practice is a way of getting out from under should, to a deeper honesty, to the trustworthiness and integrity of our own hearts.

This is the starting place—our hearts, what Proverbs calls the wellspring of life. When you want to know what’s next, or who you are, or who you’re becoming, or what you can offer to this beautiful, terrible world, start by tending to that wellspring.

Start with pain, desire and gratitude.

Start by listening to the voice of your heart.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.