By Caroline Plasket, CT
What are the spaces in which we are able to feel validated, seen, and connected to our core selves? How can we use those spaces to live our fullest lives? Awareness is one way. Awareness allows us to find these spaces, know them, and then keep them in our lived experiences with intentionality.
One highly overlooked space that creates this opportunity is the wild and wide world of poetry.
What does it mean to be present with your most core self? This will elicit as many answers as people you ask. Just like when asking people to define poetry, each person will present an operational definition specific to them, and each answer is the truth. Sometimes connection with ourselves can come through access to our emotions. Emotions are communication, and when we are able to have awareness of and access to them, we can better understand ourselves and make meaning of situations, relationships and more! Some more easily recognizable spaces where you might have had this experience could be other art forms such as the emotional response a film, music, or visual art might pull from us--like strings of understanding back to ourselves and our connection to others and the world.
In fact, research has found that poetry and therapy create the same response in our brains. We have this amazing capacity for cognition and language not present in other animals, and while this creates an opportunity for us to live with debilitating anxiety, rumination and negative self-talk, it also means we have a fascinating capability (that is kind of like magic) in the other direction. At the level of brain functioning poetry, like therapy, integrates brain processes that might need reconnection after trauma or addiction. Both therapy and poetry stimulate the insular cortex (the part of our brain responsible for self-awareness, pro-social emotional expression, and sensory processing).
Researchers have found the type of thinking required in therapy to also be present in poetry. The type that prevents black-and-white thinking; the kind that adores the liminality that most of life exists in. Poetry and therapy both engage the right hemisphere and increase a person’s ability to make connections between seemingly disparate pieces of their life and lived experiences. This can result in personal meaning making, understanding of the self and world, and understanding of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral connections. Our human experiences are complex and varied, and activating our brain in these ways creates opportunity for meaning making. Raise your hand if you would like more insight into your own understanding of yourself and your world.
Consider playing around with poetry. Read something over and over that fills you up. Don’t be afraid of what you don’t understand. Keep a folded poem in your pocket to pull out and read when you need grounding—when you need to feel like your truest self. Maybe it’s only one or two lines that break you down, bring those into the counseling room and talk about them within that curated safety. Open yourself up and see what falls out.
There are many free literary journals online in which you can access poetry easily and frequently. Some of my favorites are:
The National Poetry Foundation Online
There are so many. May I nudge you toward taking time to explore, read, feel, and connect?
