Go to places that scare you

a prompt for you with a little help from Sarah Polley, Pema Chodron & Nancy Reddy

Have you ever had the experience of the universe sending you the same message over and over in different ways? For the last half a year, I keep getting the same message: “Go to places that scare you.”

One of the messengers was Sarah Polley, in her stunning memoir, Run Towards the Danger, in which she writes:

“I know now that I will become weaker at what I avoid, that what I run towards will strengthen in me. I know to listen to my body, but not so much that I convince myself I can’t do things or that I can’t push myself; not so much that I can use the concept of listening to my body as a weapon against my vitality. I do the highway drive I’m nervous about doing. I prepare to make a film. I write the book I’ve always wanted to write. “Run towards the danger” is a way of being that I have taken into my life with me; a treasure, a spell, a sword.”

Polley’s command, which quotes her doctor at a concussion clinic here in Pittsburgh, encapsulates a core Buddhist principle I’ve stumbled upon in work by Pema Chodron and many other teachers over the past few years.

The epigraph to Chodron’s book, The Places That Scare You, is:

     Confess your hidden faults.
     Approach what you find repulsive.
     Help those you think you cannot help.
     Anything you are attached to, let it go.
     Go to places that scare you.

                       —Advice from her teacher to the Tibetan Yogini Machik Labdrön

Chodron explains, “The Buddha taught that flexibility and openness bring strength and that running from groundlessness weakens us and brings pain. But do we understand that becoming familiar with the running away is the key? Openness doesn’t come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well” (11).

If we want to be more present and open in our lives, we have to get to know the forces that tighten our bodies and hearts and minds. If we want to develop our strength, we have to get to know our pain. I’d been trying to do this in my meditation life, but I hadn’t really been doing it in my writing.

Then, Nancy Reddy visited my Madwomen in the Attic poetry workshop last month and reminded me of why this matters for writing—a truth I knew but had, of course, forgotten.

She was talking about her journey with the poems that became Pocket Universe, and she said once she had a sizable pile of poems, she asked herself, “What do you not have in there? What are you avoiding? What are you scared to write?” She used those questions as a prompt to write the poems that became the real heart of the book.

“Maybe what we don’t send out or what we think is weird is exactly what we should dig into,” she said.

This is the very process that, years ago, gave me one of the core poems of my book, The Falls. A poem that scared me when I wrote it, but that once I had written it, felt like it rolled out a pathway toward finishing my book. I’d conveniently forgotten to do this work myself with the manuscript I’m working on now. Because it scared me? Yup.

I asked myself these questions and wrote a poem I’ve wanted to write for years. The poem came to me quickly, like it had been waiting in the wings, impatiently tapping its foot, rolling its eyes until I opened the door.

If you want to write the whole story, you have to “go to the places that scare you.” You have to ask the hard questions, listen to the answer, and do what that answer requires of you. As Sarah Polley says, if you practice this, it becomes “a way of being…a treasure, a spell, a sword.”

Prompt: 

• Take a few minutes to reflect on the question, “What are you avoiding? What are you scared of?” Write about that. (*note: if the subject you’re avoiding writing about is traumatic and you do not feel ready to write about it, that’s ok. Listen to your gut with this). 

• Then write or reflect or talk out your answer(s). If you’re writing and it’s difficult, perhaps try approaching your subject from an angle (third person, through a metaphor, etc). I think of it like approaching an animal from the side, so you don’t scare it off.

• Follow where it leads.

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I was scared to go roller skating again for the first time after a decade with my messed-up, arthritic knees, but I wanted to take my kids, so I did it. And, wow, it was so life-giving. Looking to get some light-up skates now.

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