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Life Authoring
Life Authoring Web Presence
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What is Life Authoring?
You have certainly come across people who author books. They do research. Then they write and when they write, fantasy comes in. I recently met a fiction author from France who writes a book about the conflicts between Islam and Christianity, back in history and right now, and he artfully weaves information from politics, from history and from particular research in his novels. The plot is of course his own. He dances in his books, but they are not totally invented as the factual background of events is authentic. That is a fascinating profession, isn’t it? What do we admire in authors and why do we admire them? We admire in authors basically two things, their strong fantasy and their art to express themselves very well, very beautifully: we admire how they use language for communicating stuff for the soul. And why do we admire them? This is the stranger part of the question. We admire them because they do something that we know we all can do but are too lazy, too busy, or to low-spirited to do: authoring a piece of art.
When you see that, when you really understand that, you will become rather humble and you do away with the false belief that you could be objective in any way. And this will help to accept your life as it was or as you have seen it through your glasses and touched it with the gloves you are wearing and that shield you from perceiving reality directly. This method is not coined for natives. They do perceive reality without gloves. But we other civilization-perverted humans have lost that ability. That’s why I do not come along telling you to do some shamanic rituals to find yourself. I think you will have similar problems as I myself experience with applying techniques that are coined for another vintage of human beings. We do not have these senses any more that natives have preserved, and to develop them, if you wish to, will require you decades, not just years, of assiduous and sometimes painful work and devotion.
So now ... what? You think you are back in school, have to write a memoir. Well, yes and no. That school that I am teaching is a different one, for sure. It’s not the school of learning facts but the school of learning imagination. You are going to learn how to put soul in your life by learning to put soul in your words! Sounds strange, right? I agree.
Now, what is more to life authoring? Writing your life story is only one of many different things you are going to do when authoring your life. The next thing you are going to do is Creative Prayer, and the rounding off is spontaneous art, which will activate your Inner Child. So there are three concise elements in life authoring that I summarize below. None of them was invented by myself, but I have developed them into my own personal kind of thing that you may like or dislike. It has worked for me. That’s all I say.
You write not only your life story, but you write also shorter stories about certain themes, answering key questions or describing symbols. You write not in a normal writing style but in what is called flow-of-consciousness writing, which is writing without thinking, letting your unconscious directly express itself through your fingers. It's a technique that you can learn. My audio book Creative Prayer says it all, and you may read the reviews of the books by Dr. Joseph Murphy who was the main propagator of this technique that originally was invented in 1927 by Ernest Holmes, author of The Science of Mind.
My audio book Child Play says it all and you may in addition read my page about Inner Selves and the book review of the book Embracing our Selves written by professionals, Hal & Sidra Stone, who are licensed dialogue facilitators practicing in the United States. It’s an excellent book.
The Life Authoring Manual, Monograph (2010) Whilst every effort has been made to ensure
that the details contained herein are correct and up-to-date, it does
not constitute legal, psychological, psychiatric or other professional
advice. I do not accept any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for any
error or omission. |
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Pierre F. Walter
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Life Authoring
See:
People generally know what authoring
is, as for example authoring a book. Can one author one’s life? Sounds
queer, right? And yet, I have done it and can say it works. It works not
just as a pastime activity, but as a serious self-coaching method that
facilitates overcoming child trauma and sexual frustrations, resolving a
’reject complex’ or liquidating an
The
reason why most people do not create is because they have lost their
childlike spirit. This man, this author, is like a child. He is
sixty years old, looks like forty, a beautiful face, a beautiful soul, a
dreamer, a wonderful adolescent, a charming man who has many girlfriends
everywhere in the world - and you understand why. Because he
dreams, because he’s fully alive, because he’s fully united with his
I told this story as an
example. Now to extrapolate from it. I do not ask people to become
fiction authors. I ask them to author their lives. When you
author your life, you do not write fiction, and in a way you write
fiction. You write your life story, which is fiction. You may say it’s
nonfiction but in reality it’s fiction. Because we filter reality and
what we perceive is transformed into something like a
Why
not applying a technique that is born in our own culture? Writing,
literature, expressing oneself with words is something very intrinsic,
very common in our Western culture and tradition. Nothing esoteric.
Agreed? And it’s something good. Perhaps you have realized that I am
quite outspoken against our Western science and medical tradition. But
you also realize that I am writing in English, in German, in French -
and not in Chinese. So very clearly so I am conditioned to this literary
tradition that is called the Western. And I do not reject that.
I am rejecting a lot, but not the basics. I am well living in Asia, but
that does not mean I shun our great Western literary and musical
traditions. It means that I have integrated this tradition into a greater vision.
When
you write the first draft of your life story, you may find that very
hard. But that’s not because writing life stories is hard per se, it's
hard for you because you have lost the childish Way of doing this with
what in 
