Happy Birthday!
A man can be a father, but it takes a special person to be a dad. ~Anonymous
The Yoga of Writing
The word yoga means “union” in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India where yoga originated. Now after practicing it for few years, I do agree that the union is occurring between the mind, body and spirit. Indeed, through yoga I learned that with mental and spiritual well being, it would be easier to get motivated, get moving and stretch the limits in every aspect of our life.
One of the things I would like to relate to yoga is writing. The more I explore what writing means to me, the more I’m convinced that there are a number of important similarities between the lesson learned in the two endeavors which can transform life into one of joy, love and purpose.
Keep your balance. Yoga is really about creating balance in the body through developing both strength and flexibility. This is done through the performance of constant poses though the approach varies depending on the tradition you may follow. In writing, it means staying objective, open-minded and balanced in your perspectives and in your expression.
Make it a regular practice. The amazing thing about yoga is that your practice is always evolving and changing, so it never gets boring. Although the poses themselves don’t change, your relationship to them will. When I seriously started writing a year ago, I encountered difficulties to make it flow. However, things would develop over times when you keep learning and practicing.
Keep breathing and smile. The practice of yoga depends heavily on careful and controlled breathing. Always have a smile in your heart is also a way to lift the burden out of your mind. When I write, it’s very important to settle the mind and spirit in order to have clear and focus thoughts.
Encourage the noncompetitive spirit. One of the most difficult, but ultimately most liberating things about yoga is letting go of the ego and accepting that no one is better than anyone else. Everyone is just doing their best on any given day. To become a good writer, you need to develop a sense of humility though being humble is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve.
Health benefits. Practicing yoga helps you maintain physical and mental health. Physical benefits include flexibility, strength, muscle tone, pain prevention and better breathing. Concentrating so intently on what your body is doing has the effect of bringing a calmness to the mind, stress reduction and body awareness. For me, writing is not jut putting my thoughts on paper. It’s a healing act that takes control of my emotion.
The experience of yoga and then writing really helps me to know myself better and to improve my abilities in a way than I would ever have imagined. Like yoga, writing is also therapeutic. It brings a new insights into myself and my relationships. It is completely relax and honest.
Writing a Diary
When I finished reading ‘The New Diary’ written by Tristine Rainer about six months ago, I wanted to start my own diary immediately. However, taking first steps was not always easy. I had to consider where was the best place to start writing a diary and how I could maintain it? So, after careful and thoughtful consideration, on January 7, 2010, I decided to set up a blog and keep a diary.
WHAT IS THE DIARY? According to Tristine Rainer, the diary is the only form of writing that encourages total freedom of expression. Because of its very private nature, it has remained immune to any formal rules of content, structure, or style. As a result, the diary can come closest to reproducing how consciousness evolves.
WHY WRITING A DIARY? As a new writer, I need more room to practice in order to improve my writing skills. Definitely, writing a diary will allow myself to write spontaneously and honestly following my intuition, my thoughts and my feelings. I would also have chance to experiment more with the knowledge I’ve learned from Rainer’s book. On the other hand, I’m still stuck in the middle of my memoir writing and yet need a bit of confidence to continue. I believe that keeping a diary would at last help me gain the confidence I need.
WHERE TO BEGIN?
1. Begin with the recent period. This approach will keep us in touch with the immediacy of our life. Where are we in our life now? How do we live? What are we feeling, thinking and experiencing? What do we care about? What is the significance of the present moment on the context of our life? And, what do we desire?
2. Begin with a self-portrait. Rather than begin with a detailed autobiography, write a description as how we see ourselves at the present moment. What recent or past events of our life have contributed to the person we are today? And where do we think our life is leading?
3. Begin with the day. This is a valuable exercise to describe each day of your life. However, this daily description could become exhausting and dull if we just write our daily activities. So, begin with a selection of outpouring of strong feelings if we are happy, or exited, or angry, or lonely, or sad, or record a dream, a statement of purpose in keeping the journal, a drawing, or anything else that comes to us.
BASIC DIARY DEVICES
There are four natural modes of expression:
- Catharsis
- Description
- Free-Intuitive Writing
- Reflection
1. Catharsis. According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, catharsis is the process of releasing strong feelings, for example through plays or other artistic activities, as a way of providing relief from anger, suffering, etc. The use of the diary for catharsis, or emotional release is to free ourselves from excessive negative feelings, such as anger, confusion, grief, etc. Putting the pain the diary keeps it from destroying our life. For example, it could be as simple as a statement as, “I hate you!” or “I’m crazy without you!” Then we could elaborate it up to the length we desire.
2. Description. Perhaps this is the most common and familiar form of expression in diaries. It includes any narrative account of events, feelings, dreams, people, places, or anything that derives from our life experience. Description doesn’t transcribe reality; it re-creates our view of experience. We can describe people, places, aspects of nature, human interactions, works of art, books we have read, or films we have seen in a way that is more interesting according to our point of view.
3. Free-Intuitive Writing. Free-intuitive writing is primarily an intuitive language conveying a message from the inner consciousness. For example, we might consciously ask ourselves, “What is bothering me?” and allow a voice of wisdom from deep inside to answer in its own imaginative language and uncensored words.
4. Reflection. Reflection is an observation of the process of our life and writing. It can also be called musing, self-observation, or contemplation. It is characterized by the psychological perspectives. It tends to deal with the general and the overall perspective, unlike description which concentrates on the physical and the specific. The combination of both description and reflection will make your writing emotionally and intellectually fulfilling.
For me, after writing a diary for more than a month, I now gain confidence and have chances to really practice and improve my writing skills. Without doubt, keeping a diary will give us an opportunity to express our thoughts, our feelings and our experience. It also help us dredge up memories from the depths of our mind, both consciousness or subconsciousness. So, would you like to start writing your own diary?
Keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you. ~Mae West
A New Look
After Toastmasters meeting last Tuesday, I had a short chat with my best friend, Lina. When I told her my intention to gradually move my blog from Blogspot to here, she objected.
“Please don’t delete your blog, Vin.”
“But, it will be more efficient for me to maintain my blogs under one roof, Lin,” I said
“It doesn’t matter, Vin. At the same time, you still can maintain identical blog contents both with Blogspot and WordPress. And it’s very easy.”
“Okay, but why do I need to maintain two blogs with same content but different providers? The only difference is the title. One is in Indonesian and the other one in English.”
“The names of your blog! That’s the main reason.”
“But, I don’t want to re-type everything there, Lin.”
“You don’t have too, Vin. Just copy the writings from any places and paste it there.”
“Are you sure that I can do that. I did try once but was not successfully paste them @ Blogspot. It turned into a mess and I had to retyped everything. That’s why I’m not so enthusiastic blogging there,” I explained my reason.
“Believe me! What you need to do is just copy your writing and paste it there.”
“Okay, I’ll try, Lin.”
Today, after surfing for hours I decided to give my blog @ Blogspot a new look. Lina was right, I could easily copy my writing from other places and paste it there.
Thank you so much for your advice, Lin.
PS: To see the new look of Sang Kuda Api @ Blogspot, please click –> SANG KUDA API
Moving
Dear Readers,
On March 9, 2009, this blog was first created under the name of SANG KUDA API @ Blogspot.com. Today, after almost a year blogging in English, I realized that I should be more productive to have regular updates. So, after thoughtful consideration, I have decided to move it here to join my other two Indonesian blogs, i.e. SANG KUDA API and BUKU HARIAN SANG KUDA API.
Of course, it was a tough decision of whether to still maintain it at blogspot or move it here. However, for the reason that it would be easier and more efficient to put all my blogs together under one roof, I determined to eventually move forward. Please note that name has also been changed to THE FIRE HORSE.
Thank you for your understanding and kind attention.
Kind regards,
Vina
PS : Sang Kuda Api @ Blogspot todate; visits = 1.359, page views = 1.904
Happy New Year 2010
Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on,
with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
~Hal Borland
A Special Note for You
My love,
You don’t have to say you love me.
You don’t need to prove that you care for me.
In fact, you are the most understanding person I’ve ever met in my life.
You asked how many books do I have now?
“Around eight hundred,” I answered.
“Including seventy which have not been read.”
You were flabbergasted and fell silent for a moment.
But, when I smiled at you, you smiled back.
Then, I continued, “In spite of this, I still couldn’t resist
the temptation to stay away from Gramedia or amazon.com.”
You were speechless for a while.
Afterward, when you looked at me, I saw a bigger smile on your face.
What a relief, my dear!
“You know me inside out and outside in, don’t you?”
You nodded as if you don’t mind how many books I still need to have.
You didn’t even try to stop me cause you know I’m a bookworm.
You did tell me many times.
That as long as I’m happy, you’ll be happy, too.
So, thank you so much for being a supportive husband.
The Roast
In Toastmasters, if you happen to work on the Special Occasion Speeches Manual then you would be familiar with its third project called ‘The Roast’. Few weeks ago, when my fellow Toastmasters, Matthew Price asked if he could ‘roast’ me in this project, I definitely said ‘YES’. For me, it was a great honor to be included in his speech. Matthew promised me that after his delivery, he would send the script and let me post it to this blog. “Thank you, Matthew!”
Last night, I was really entertained by his speech and delivery. I knew that he had put a great deal of effort to poke fun at me in a good-natured way. Quoted from the manual: “Used in the speaking sense, the word ‘roast’ implies that heat is being applied to someone – that someone is being ‘cooked’ or embarrassed in some way. Actually, a roast can be considered a positive recognition, in which an individual and his or her achievements are honored by friends, co-workers and family. A roast relies on wit, humor and satire to convey the message.”
So, here is the script of Matthew’s speech and I hope you enjoy reading it.
“You know I’m bad, I’m bad, you know it, you know I’m bad…”
My fellow Toastmasters and guests. When I first thought about doing this Roast Speech on Wivina, I thought it was going to be really hard because Wivina is such a nice person – she is not bad at all. What would I talk about? But then I got to know her a bit more and here are some of the things I thought about.
Now – there is no doubt about it – Wivina likes to sing and she often starts a speech by singing just like I did at the opening here. So, when I heard that she used to be a radio announcer when she was 15, well it made me wonder – what she was like on the radio? Hmmm…
“And the time is five minutes past ten, next we have the weather coming up, but first a song from me: “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane…”
“That was the latest song from the Rolling Stones, almost as good as the song from my first album “I Believe the Children are Our Future, Teach Them Well.”
I was also surprised to learn that Wivina thinks she is a serious person. Serious? I’ve never heard someone laugh so much every single meeting we have! Does this look like the face of a serious person to you? I don’t even have to pay her to laugh at my jokes – I love having her around.
Speaking of love, it’s no secret and no surprise that Wivina has many admirers – they contact her from her facebook site. Even though she has been married for 19 years, they still contact her. What did you do to them 19 years ago??? My parents have been married for 39 years and none of their old partners contacts them – that I know of.
And, many of you know that besides Facebook, Wivina has a blog. I think she has this just in case many admirers from her youth miss her Facebook account. It’s like bait, that she casts lure them all in. And if that doesn’t work, well at least you could always write a book. Oh wait – no, you already are. Hmmm…
No, it’s not true – Wivina is a very family oriented person – she still loves her husband very much. I mean we all hear about him, don’t we? Every time she gets up to speak. Have you ever noticed that? My husband this, my husband that. In every speech!
Did you know her husband once told her… He said, “You are an endangered species and should be put into a museum.” Now – I was a bit confused – is that because you were rare and priceless, or because he just wanted you out of the house for a while?
But, let’s move on to her Toastmasters career. The speech that Wivina was most the proud of giving was her Basic Manual number 10 “Inspire Your Audience” which she called “Pour Your Heart Into It.” This was no surprise to me – I see Wivina as someone that likes to inspire people, and I know that she has inspired me a lot. For instance, she has inspired me to NEVER SING ON STAGE. She has inspired me to laugh quietly and calmly in a PROPER manner. And she has inspired me to participate fully and become a member of any Toastmasters clubs that I have been involved in. Many of you know that Wivina is not actually a member of this club. But we are hoping she will become a member soon…
Now I would like to say that after I have come to know Wivina a bit better, I can see that she has grown so much over her life, and I respect this all the more as I know that her family life has not always been easy. This is of course quite different from my family, where my parents didn’t have to struggle at all to raise the three of us children.
So – to finish off, I would like to thank you for being willing to be the subject of my humble little speech tonight. I think that all of your experience have helped you appreciate life all the more. She once said that she considers herself to be the “luckiest person in the world.” And well, I think that if you aren’t the luckiest person in the world, then I would say that your husband must be the luckiest person in the world to have you.
The Unexpected
You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. ~Paolo Coelho
This morning, I had a speaking schedule at a National Plus School in South Jakarta. As usual, it was about parenting and this time I received a special request. Instead of choosing one of the three topics I have prepared for this term, i.e. ‘Boundaries with Kids’, ‘Positive Push’ and ‘No Excuse Parenting’, the school’s representative would like me to present the parents with both ‘Boundaries with Kids’ and ‘Positive Push’.
“No big deal, I’m sure I can do it,” This is what I said to myself when I received the news. So few days ago, I started to glance through the slides and remove few of them in order to have a good flow for my presentation. In other words, I get used to prepare myself before speaking in front of public.
So far, I only deliver my presentation in English when I’m with Toastmasters. I remember it was only once when most of the parents were Indian and Korean then I had to do it bilingual in English and Indonesian.
When I arrived at the school this morning, it was still forty minutes before the seminar began. So, I looked around and paid attention to the kids who were still playing with their basket balls on the right side of the hall. When a small group of parents came in and I heard them speaking in Japanese, I began to wonder. Does this group of people understand Indonesian because my seminar will be in Bahasa? I was not informed if I should speak in English.
Nevertheless, I did not have ample time to ponder as it was time for the Master of Ceremony (MC) to start the session. Suddenly, when the MC just started his introduction, I heard a spontaneous comment from the audience, “Can you do it in English?” Fortunately, our MC can speak English, so no problem. At that very moment, I realized that I also had to give my seminar in English, too.
I was definitely right. When I asked the audience if I need to speak in English, they nodded their had and said YES. I then explained to them that this is an unexpected circumstances. But, for sure I would do my best to deliver it in English.
Deep in my heart, I was so grateful to Toastmasters. Ever since I joined the club in August 2005, I have found the right place to practice and improve my spoken English. The time, money and effort I have spent to come to Toastmasters really paid off this morning. I was thrilled to bits that I could do it. It was really such an invaluable experience!
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