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How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice
"When I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait." With that insight, Pat Schneider invites readers to contemplate their lives and deepest questions through writing. In seventeen concise thematic chapters that include meditations on topics such as fear, freedom, tradition in writing and in religions, forgiveness, joy, social justice, and death, How the Light Gets In gracefully guides readers through the artistic and spiritual questions that life offers to everyone.
Praised as a "fuse lighter" by author Julia Cameron and "the wisest teacher of writing I know" by the celebrated writing guru Peter Elbow, Pat Schneider has lived a life of writing and teaching, passion and compassion. With How the Light Gets In , she delves beyond the typical "how-to's" of writing to offer an extended rumination on two inner paths, and how they can run as one. Schneider's book is distinct from the many others in the popular spirituality and creative writing genre by virtue of its approach, using one's lived experience--including the experience of writing--as a springboard for expressing the often ineffable events that define everyday life. Her belief that writing about one's own life leads to greater consciousness, satisfaction, and wisdom energizes the book and carries the reader elegantly through difficult topics.
As Schneider writes, "All of us live in relation to mystery, and becoming conscious of that relationship can be a beginning point for a spiritual practice--whether we experience mystery in nature, in ecstatic love, in the eyes of our children, our friends, the animals we love, or in more strange experiences of intuition, synchronicity, or prescience."
Praised as a "fuse lighter" by author Julia Cameron and "the wisest teacher of writing I know" by the celebrated writing guru Peter Elbow, Pat Schneider has lived a life of writing and teaching, passion and compassion. With How the Light Gets In , she delves beyond the typical "how-to's" of writing to offer an extended rumination on two inner paths, and how they can run as one. Schneider's book is distinct from the many others in the popular spirituality and creative writing genre by virtue of its approach, using one's lived experience--including the experience of writing--as a springboard for expressing the often ineffable events that define everyday life. Her belief that writing about one's own life leads to greater consciousness, satisfaction, and wisdom energizes the book and carries the reader elegantly through difficult topics.
As Schneider writes, "All of us live in relation to mystery, and becoming conscious of that relationship can be a beginning point for a spiritual practice--whether we experience mystery in nature, in ecstatic love, in the eyes of our children, our friends, the animals we love, or in more strange experiences of intuition, synchronicity, or prescience."
320 pages, Hardcover
First published March 13, 2013
112 people are currently reading
905 people want to read
About the author
Pat Schneider
24 books67 followers(Please note that I do not use Goodreads actively: my blog posts here are updated automatically from my website. If you would like to get in touch with me, please visit www.patschneider.com. Thank you.)
I am a writer of poetry, plays, libretti and non-fiction, and I am the founder of Amherst Writers and Artists. For thirty-four years I have taught writing in Massachusetts and around the world.
My two best-known books are about writing, both from Oxford University Press. My new book, HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN: WRITING AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, offers seventeen chapters that engage the connection between writing and spirituality, regardless of one’s religious tradition or one’s level of expertise in writing. Chapter one takes Einstein’s statement, “There is a spirit,” as inspiration, and the book then moves through chapters that explore what to do with one’s own tradition -- tradition in writing and tradition in religions – as well as “The Dark Night of the Soul,” “Forgiving,” “Being Forgiven,” “The Body,” “Freedom,” and ending with “Joy.” The Library Journal review from February, 2013 says this: “Her book will have wide appeal to both amateur and seasoned writers and spiritual seekers whether or not tied to any tradition. The book is also useful as a tool for growth through reflection and writing. Highly recommended.”
My earlier book, WRITING ALONE AND WITH OTHERS, offers guidance and help to the writer working alone, and in the second half details the Amherst Writers & Artists method of creative writing workshops and writing groups. It is used widely and internationally in classrooms and independent workshops as a method that develops the craft of writing without doing harm to one’s original voice. The method it describes is also widely used as a tool for the empowerment of under-served populations, in prisons, shelters, and with youth-at-risk.
I am a writer of poetry, plays, libretti and non-fiction, and I am the founder of Amherst Writers and Artists. For thirty-four years I have taught writing in Massachusetts and around the world.
My two best-known books are about writing, both from Oxford University Press. My new book, HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN: WRITING AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, offers seventeen chapters that engage the connection between writing and spirituality, regardless of one’s religious tradition or one’s level of expertise in writing. Chapter one takes Einstein’s statement, “There is a spirit,” as inspiration, and the book then moves through chapters that explore what to do with one’s own tradition -- tradition in writing and tradition in religions – as well as “The Dark Night of the Soul,” “Forgiving,” “Being Forgiven,” “The Body,” “Freedom,” and ending with “Joy.” The Library Journal review from February, 2013 says this: “Her book will have wide appeal to both amateur and seasoned writers and spiritual seekers whether or not tied to any tradition. The book is also useful as a tool for growth through reflection and writing. Highly recommended.”
My earlier book, WRITING ALONE AND WITH OTHERS, offers guidance and help to the writer working alone, and in the second half details the Amherst Writers & Artists method of creative writing workshops and writing groups. It is used widely and internationally in classrooms and independent workshops as a method that develops the craft of writing without doing harm to one’s original voice. The method it describes is also widely used as a tool for the empowerment of under-served populations, in prisons, shelters, and with youth-at-risk.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
July 29, 2013
I am reasonably obsessed with books about writing, and am almost always reading one; which goes some way toward explaining why I write so little despite "write a book" being at the top of any version of a bucket list I might ever imagine. Nevertheless, if one is going to procrastinate by reading books on writing, then this is a wonderful choice. It is intellectually and spiritually astute, and presents writing as a kind of vitality rather than the almost passive introspection some would like us to believe. Loved.
March 14, 2013
If you're interested in spirituality or self-discovery through writing, go to your favorite bookseller now and get this. Maybe it's just where I am in my life, but this wise woman has comforted me and assured me through her writing in ways she'll never know. Compellingly, wrenchingly honest, Pat Schneider's journey makes me feel as though I have a friend I've never met who will hold the branches out of my way while I look for my own path.
July 26, 2013
Pat Schneider is a pleasure to read, a writer's writer, because she is always saying something tangible. Even when she confronts the infinite, the ineffable Presence that haunts and protects her writing, she is not one to doll up dogma. I've read more than my share of religious and spiritual writing, and she trembles her Merton self on every page, without making a hat out of the abyss, or striking a Marian pose.
She reads deep and wide; her quotes and mentions percolate erudition up through this otherwise lyric, feeling-brain work. I am not a believer and yet I understand the whole arc of her book, and relate to her sensation of Spirit, evoked with hundreds of elegantly crafted details from her writer's life. Every day I feel what she describes: the arduousness of picking up the pen, the transformative, even redemptive power of suddenly finding a Voice. And the otherworldly experience when words and ideas churn up from the aether.
Pure biology or divine spark, the inner experience of hitting your writing stride is ecstatic and sublime. Logic is redefined temporarily, to include the inventive synthesis of ideas, firing off in tens of milliseconds, to produce a human being in words, a rock on a table, or a King James Ecclesiastes.
I can surrender to her uneasy acceptance because of my own uneasy rejection, and with an open mind and heart, godless heathen that I am, because she does not hide the grey peripheries, the empty patches, the snarled yarns of belief and spiritual practice. A lifetime of care-full listening, to thousands of writers, has burnished away her easy answers about the unknown, the mystery.
In "Betraying Spinoza", Rebecca Goldstein says the philosopher thought God was so beautiful and loving and complete that he did not need to exist, and I see this idea peering out from Pat's down-to-earth stories, and in her intimate sense of wonder, her practical uncertainty. She refuses to be tied to ideology, or be led by the nose, and she has too much integrity to deny her own doubts. Instead of parading them as sly proof of something, her Frankness, or Experience, she just tells her truth.
Trusting one's own truth is one of the great gifts of Pat Schneider, to writers now and forever. She has turned it into a practice, informed by her early religious studies, and tempered by harder, sadder truths, told in living rooms and on porches around the world. Her honesty and focus make it a rare experience to read her—and she permits us a close read like few writers do. Not like the Annie Lamotts, nothing like that compulsive over-share. We are not made voyeurs when she describes the privacy of forgiveness, and how too often we beg for it but get "...no response that offers relief". We are being walked through complex and sophisticated ideas, under the guise of tea on the porch.
Framed within writing, her topics, her ideas, have immediacy and applicability to me. She quotes John Gardner that good fiction has strangeness as a quality, in her chapter called Strangeness. This works for me as a pragmatic caution against polishing off too much of my own strangeness in my writing. But the very idea of a chapter about the dissonant, imperfect, and uncanny—in her vivid example, wanting a Jesus again, but the "real" one: Semitic, raveled, struggling, compassionate, faltering—in a book subtitled "writing as a spiritual practice" is strangely natural to me. I understand when she says the Mystery of a ripening blackberry is unseen, and our inattention and ignorance is what is strange. I find it exhilarating to find the last line of that chapter, a last line of one of her own poems is profoundly hopeful: "And what is more generous than a window?" We live with strangeness, with Mystery, and it never quite resolves, but if we listen, look outside ourselves, and write, we see a way to live.
Pat doesn't get urgent and breathless in order to convince, or to breathe life into tired, familiar spiritual ideas. I used to have faith and I understand the way we kid ourselves with pious fraud, convincing ourselves we know more than we do, when we speak of the divine.
But Pat does breathe on these pages. She has a quiet and patient voice, in Kafka's sense: "You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
Pat talks about what we can't let go of, in her chapter about Fear. We can't lose our distrust of others, the cringe of memory, the places and people who fuzz into us when we sleep. She writes with personal candor, but this is a woman who rose—no, there's a better word, it will come to me—from poverty and orphanage, to theology and intellectual achievement, and went on to found a worldwide writing revolution. When she says "writing the truth is a political act...the form doesn't matter", she is simply reporting a fact, and her adamantine sisterhood with all women at risk doth shine.
In her lifetime and mine, too many women have been and are still at risk. Most of us deplore this. Pat, helping to found women's writing groups in refugee camps in Kenya and Somalia, in villages in Malawi, puts her life where her words are, where her spirit and the spirit of mindful writing merge to become a legacy of change.
The word I am looking for does not have her rise from circumstances. I've met Pat, and had the honor of reading with her. I see her before me, her large, kind eyes, the small movements around her mouth as she speaks, her remarkable attentiveness. This is not a woman who outgrew being human, nor suffering, her own or others. Her whole life is present on these pages, in the brilliant cut-gem aspect of her writing, in the canny sidesteps she made and makes around foolishness, and the way she always moves closer and closer to us, to the spark of life in others, in order to lose the fear of strange, to understand and love what is true and human.
She does not transcend her life, she abides. Her redemption, like mine, has come from writing, because writing is the one art that puts us inside ourselves, inside others, and outside looking in, all at once.
Writing is zizzy hair on neck and forearm, rising, when our sentence finds a shape and home. Writing is the one sure way to howl for good effect. Writing is whatever spirit is, allowed to grip our apish hand from within and guide our gracile fingers. It is not an outside force, acting upon us, it is writing itself, the turning inside out, the surrender to story that gives power to the homeless, the striving, the wounded and the lost. I have been all of those, and I testify: the better word for what Pat has done is all her words, and all the words of all who learned from her, were inspired by her.
Pat's book can be read as a master's class on memoir writing. As such it is easy to read, full of ideas, prompts, and insights—shown, not told. But it is her life that you will remember, Pat herself. I know Pat so much better now, and she is resonantly, splendidly herself and no other in this book. She is a strange and beautiful story, and she is just another mensch, making every effort.
She let in the light for seven decades; she shines for us here.
She reads deep and wide; her quotes and mentions percolate erudition up through this otherwise lyric, feeling-brain work. I am not a believer and yet I understand the whole arc of her book, and relate to her sensation of Spirit, evoked with hundreds of elegantly crafted details from her writer's life. Every day I feel what she describes: the arduousness of picking up the pen, the transformative, even redemptive power of suddenly finding a Voice. And the otherworldly experience when words and ideas churn up from the aether.
Pure biology or divine spark, the inner experience of hitting your writing stride is ecstatic and sublime. Logic is redefined temporarily, to include the inventive synthesis of ideas, firing off in tens of milliseconds, to produce a human being in words, a rock on a table, or a King James Ecclesiastes.
I can surrender to her uneasy acceptance because of my own uneasy rejection, and with an open mind and heart, godless heathen that I am, because she does not hide the grey peripheries, the empty patches, the snarled yarns of belief and spiritual practice. A lifetime of care-full listening, to thousands of writers, has burnished away her easy answers about the unknown, the mystery.
In "Betraying Spinoza", Rebecca Goldstein says the philosopher thought God was so beautiful and loving and complete that he did not need to exist, and I see this idea peering out from Pat's down-to-earth stories, and in her intimate sense of wonder, her practical uncertainty. She refuses to be tied to ideology, or be led by the nose, and she has too much integrity to deny her own doubts. Instead of parading them as sly proof of something, her Frankness, or Experience, she just tells her truth.
Trusting one's own truth is one of the great gifts of Pat Schneider, to writers now and forever. She has turned it into a practice, informed by her early religious studies, and tempered by harder, sadder truths, told in living rooms and on porches around the world. Her honesty and focus make it a rare experience to read her—and she permits us a close read like few writers do. Not like the Annie Lamotts, nothing like that compulsive over-share. We are not made voyeurs when she describes the privacy of forgiveness, and how too often we beg for it but get "...no response that offers relief". We are being walked through complex and sophisticated ideas, under the guise of tea on the porch.
Framed within writing, her topics, her ideas, have immediacy and applicability to me. She quotes John Gardner that good fiction has strangeness as a quality, in her chapter called Strangeness. This works for me as a pragmatic caution against polishing off too much of my own strangeness in my writing. But the very idea of a chapter about the dissonant, imperfect, and uncanny—in her vivid example, wanting a Jesus again, but the "real" one: Semitic, raveled, struggling, compassionate, faltering—in a book subtitled "writing as a spiritual practice" is strangely natural to me. I understand when she says the Mystery of a ripening blackberry is unseen, and our inattention and ignorance is what is strange. I find it exhilarating to find the last line of that chapter, a last line of one of her own poems is profoundly hopeful: "And what is more generous than a window?" We live with strangeness, with Mystery, and it never quite resolves, but if we listen, look outside ourselves, and write, we see a way to live.
Pat doesn't get urgent and breathless in order to convince, or to breathe life into tired, familiar spiritual ideas. I used to have faith and I understand the way we kid ourselves with pious fraud, convincing ourselves we know more than we do, when we speak of the divine.
But Pat does breathe on these pages. She has a quiet and patient voice, in Kafka's sense: "You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
Pat talks about what we can't let go of, in her chapter about Fear. We can't lose our distrust of others, the cringe of memory, the places and people who fuzz into us when we sleep. She writes with personal candor, but this is a woman who rose—no, there's a better word, it will come to me—from poverty and orphanage, to theology and intellectual achievement, and went on to found a worldwide writing revolution. When she says "writing the truth is a political act...the form doesn't matter", she is simply reporting a fact, and her adamantine sisterhood with all women at risk doth shine.
In her lifetime and mine, too many women have been and are still at risk. Most of us deplore this. Pat, helping to found women's writing groups in refugee camps in Kenya and Somalia, in villages in Malawi, puts her life where her words are, where her spirit and the spirit of mindful writing merge to become a legacy of change.
The word I am looking for does not have her rise from circumstances. I've met Pat, and had the honor of reading with her. I see her before me, her large, kind eyes, the small movements around her mouth as she speaks, her remarkable attentiveness. This is not a woman who outgrew being human, nor suffering, her own or others. Her whole life is present on these pages, in the brilliant cut-gem aspect of her writing, in the canny sidesteps she made and makes around foolishness, and the way she always moves closer and closer to us, to the spark of life in others, in order to lose the fear of strange, to understand and love what is true and human.
She does not transcend her life, she abides. Her redemption, like mine, has come from writing, because writing is the one art that puts us inside ourselves, inside others, and outside looking in, all at once.
Writing is zizzy hair on neck and forearm, rising, when our sentence finds a shape and home. Writing is the one sure way to howl for good effect. Writing is whatever spirit is, allowed to grip our apish hand from within and guide our gracile fingers. It is not an outside force, acting upon us, it is writing itself, the turning inside out, the surrender to story that gives power to the homeless, the striving, the wounded and the lost. I have been all of those, and I testify: the better word for what Pat has done is all her words, and all the words of all who learned from her, were inspired by her.
Pat's book can be read as a master's class on memoir writing. As such it is easy to read, full of ideas, prompts, and insights—shown, not told. But it is her life that you will remember, Pat herself. I know Pat so much better now, and she is resonantly, splendidly herself and no other in this book. She is a strange and beautiful story, and she is just another mensch, making every effort.
She let in the light for seven decades; she shines for us here.
June 20, 2023
Pat Schneider has been deeply involved in spirituality since college, and she's led writing groups for many years. This book is the culmination of her work with the intersection between writing and spirituality.
Quotes from the book:
Writing is for me the surest way to find out where I am and to open the gate to where I might go next.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 7). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Although my understanding of spirituality has changed throughout my life, the central experience has not changed: There has been for me a deep and a continual sense of presence, and there have been experiences of meeting, or encounter, with that presence.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 10). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Although my understanding of spirituality has changed throughout my life, the central experience has not changed: There has been for me a deep and a continual sense of presence, and there have been experiences of meeting, or encounter, with that presence.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 10). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
When we write deeply—that is, when we write what we know and do not know we know—we encounter mystery. Similarly, when we pray deeply, we encounter mystery.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (pp. 10-11). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 15). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Meister Eckardt says, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which [God] sees me.”
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 16). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
In our writing practice, though, I teach my workshop members that the open sesame into writing is almost always a concrete image, almost never a general idea.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 57). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Quotes from the book:
Writing is for me the surest way to find out where I am and to open the gate to where I might go next.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 7). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Although my understanding of spirituality has changed throughout my life, the central experience has not changed: There has been for me a deep and a continual sense of presence, and there have been experiences of meeting, or encounter, with that presence.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 10). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Although my understanding of spirituality has changed throughout my life, the central experience has not changed: There has been for me a deep and a continual sense of presence, and there have been experiences of meeting, or encounter, with that presence.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 10). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
When we write deeply—that is, when we write what we know and do not know we know—we encounter mystery. Similarly, when we pray deeply, we encounter mystery.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (pp. 10-11). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 15). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Meister Eckardt says, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which [God] sees me.”
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 16). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
In our writing practice, though, I teach my workshop members that the open sesame into writing is almost always a concrete image, almost never a general idea.
Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In (p. 57). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
August 17, 2013
I finished reading How the Light Gets In just a few days ago. It reads effortlessly, but every passage is a poem, so I took my time. I am hardly done with it, nor is it done with me. It will remain a constant companion.
It is an absolutely essential work, and I can well believe that it took seven years to write. I was continually struck by Schneider’s deep introspection, her looking back into memory to apprehend herself in different times and places, and by the clarity with which she describes the texture of her world at any given moment. The writing is so palpable that I can still see and touch those worlds. Her childhood slum apartment inhabits me. And I am with her by the old peach trees where she believed she was "saved."
She explores the immensities in the most personal and understandable way, and without limiting them in the least. Her experience of mystery, of “strangeness,” and her sense of a "presence" remain undefined, as they should, and untrammeled by any hint of dogma. She has put them into words without in any way drying them out. On the contrary, she brings them home and makes them universally acknowledgeable.
There are countless insights, well-earned wisdom offered but never preached. Sometimes they come directly from her, sometimes from others whom she quotes. One of these is Ben Shahn's "Form is the shape of content;" another, her counsel that as writers we should remain true to our original tongue, whatever it might be; another, her concise and all-too-true analysis of racism.
Then there are the poems, old friends and new, each of them carefully woven into the text. Amongst the cleverness and sensationalism so prevalent today, I miss such poetry.
It is an absolutely essential work, and I can well believe that it took seven years to write. I was continually struck by Schneider’s deep introspection, her looking back into memory to apprehend herself in different times and places, and by the clarity with which she describes the texture of her world at any given moment. The writing is so palpable that I can still see and touch those worlds. Her childhood slum apartment inhabits me. And I am with her by the old peach trees where she believed she was "saved."
She explores the immensities in the most personal and understandable way, and without limiting them in the least. Her experience of mystery, of “strangeness,” and her sense of a "presence" remain undefined, as they should, and untrammeled by any hint of dogma. She has put them into words without in any way drying them out. On the contrary, she brings them home and makes them universally acknowledgeable.
There are countless insights, well-earned wisdom offered but never preached. Sometimes they come directly from her, sometimes from others whom she quotes. One of these is Ben Shahn's "Form is the shape of content;" another, her counsel that as writers we should remain true to our original tongue, whatever it might be; another, her concise and all-too-true analysis of racism.
Then there are the poems, old friends and new, each of them carefully woven into the text. Amongst the cleverness and sensationalism so prevalent today, I miss such poetry.
October 11, 2018
This book is many things. It is the personal story of a poor girl in Missouri who grew up to become a writer, mentor, and teacher to people all over the world. It is a very deep spiritual reflection of someone raised in fundamentalism, who married a minister, then later left the church, but who professes a sincere belief in the mystery beyond and within. It is a companion for writers, questioners, and anyone who has searched for a way to let the light in.
August 12, 2013
Ms. Schneider appears to be one who embodies Robert Bly's phrase "Eating the Honey of Words". And this work reveals much of what's hidden in all of us. She does so by revealing what was previously hidden in herself.
April 21, 2013
Pat Schneider pioneered the Amherst Writers and Artists method for leading writing workshops, often with traditionally silenced communities. With the AWA method, writing is generated in community, read aloud, and comments always focus on what is strong and memorable in the writing. Pat used this method as a spiritual practice to explore hidden aspects of her past and her spiritual journey, which has lead her through and out of Christianity, but doesn't exclude Christian readers from appreciating her book and the importance of brave and truthful writing.
April 5, 2014
This is a special book. Some of the chapters are among the most moving words I have read anywhere. It spoke to me so deeply that I had to occasionally put the book down for a while to allow the words to go to the "bottom of the night" I am not a big fan of poetry but I found her poems accessible and very helpful.
I will read this book many more times.
I will read this book many more times.
June 7, 2013
Awesome book, technique, and author. Every writer, and that's everyone who writes anything, should read this book.
July 3, 2013
Rarely has a book moved me like this one did, but I need to go to bed and finish this review in the morning.
April 5, 2019
I appreciated her honesty as she reflected on her own journey of faith, faith lost, and mystery embraced.
December 15, 2022
It took me 9 months to read this incredible memoir of a writing teacher because I savored it in small doses before my morning meditations. But if the joy has somehow been suspended in your writing, I highly recommend Pat Schneider as a guide to get you back on that road. Because writing is hard work but it is born out of joy, or should be:
Elizabeth O'Connor has written that we are not called to our soul work by 'ought' or 'should.' Rather, we are called by joy. She says that if we are working out of ought or should, we are not only in the wrong place ourselves; we are blocking someone else whose joy it might be to be where we are. She taught me to judge my work by its quality of joy.
Joy is not pleasure. It is not fun. Pleasure and fun pale in the light of joy. (264)
Schneider, who ran workshops for poor and troubled women much of her life, cautions that if you leave a workshop and don't feel like writing, don't go back. If that should ever happen, I would urge you to pick up How the Light Gets in: Writing as a Spiritual Practice. And before you do that, take a listen to Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem":
There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wRYjtvIYK0
Elizabeth O'Connor has written that we are not called to our soul work by 'ought' or 'should.' Rather, we are called by joy. She says that if we are working out of ought or should, we are not only in the wrong place ourselves; we are blocking someone else whose joy it might be to be where we are. She taught me to judge my work by its quality of joy.
Joy is not pleasure. It is not fun. Pleasure and fun pale in the light of joy. (264)
Schneider, who ran workshops for poor and troubled women much of her life, cautions that if you leave a workshop and don't feel like writing, don't go back. If that should ever happen, I would urge you to pick up How the Light Gets in: Writing as a Spiritual Practice. And before you do that, take a listen to Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem":
There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wRYjtvIYK0
April 12, 2020
Excellent! The best book on writing I have ever read! Inspiring!
May 14, 2016
This was an interesting book that was very much a memoir of an influential author who began the Amherst Writers Method. This method has helped many people in different kinds of workshops to deal with their trauma. I have used this method in the setting of a Women's Prison and am impressed with how well it works. So I valued this book as Pat sharing much of her life, trauma and thoughts about writing and spirituality with all of us. It was a bit of a mixed bag, but a very enjoyable mixed bag. It was also great to read her poems interspersed throughout.
Here are some great quotes from the work:
"Any parent of more than one child knows the anxiety that precedes that second birth. How can I possibly love this new child as much as I love the first. My heart is utterly full of love- there’s no more room! And the second baby arrived, and instantly, the heart stretches. Our capacity doubles, then perhaps triples, and for me, by the time our fourth child was on the way, I understood. The more we open ourselves to love, the larger our capacity for love becomes."
"To write like this- to write concretely what our inner eye sees, our inner ear hears- is to break silence. If we read it to others, or allow them to read, it fully breaks the silence. If we write and never show it, even perhaps destroy the written words, we have nevertheless broken an inner silence, and in the very act of writing will have let some light in to the inner space that needed light. That act can be a kind of ransom- a kind of redemption. It allows me, the writer, to see more fully, more explicitly , and to name, perhaps even to bless, what before was hidden."
Daring to be seen, daring to let the truth of the human condition be made visible by our telling, whether that telling be in words or in some other form of witness, splits open the world. Cracks it. And that’s how the light gets in.
Here are some great quotes from the work:
"Any parent of more than one child knows the anxiety that precedes that second birth. How can I possibly love this new child as much as I love the first. My heart is utterly full of love- there’s no more room! And the second baby arrived, and instantly, the heart stretches. Our capacity doubles, then perhaps triples, and for me, by the time our fourth child was on the way, I understood. The more we open ourselves to love, the larger our capacity for love becomes."
"To write like this- to write concretely what our inner eye sees, our inner ear hears- is to break silence. If we read it to others, or allow them to read, it fully breaks the silence. If we write and never show it, even perhaps destroy the written words, we have nevertheless broken an inner silence, and in the very act of writing will have let some light in to the inner space that needed light. That act can be a kind of ransom- a kind of redemption. It allows me, the writer, to see more fully, more explicitly , and to name, perhaps even to bless, what before was hidden."
Daring to be seen, daring to let the truth of the human condition be made visible by our telling, whether that telling be in words or in some other form of witness, splits open the world. Cracks it. And that’s how the light gets in.
March 12, 2014
This is THE BEST book on writing that I have ever read. Usually, books about writing are either too dry and technical, or they swing really far in the opposite direction and go too deep into personal stories without explaining how the stories apply to the practice of writing. Pat Schneider walks the line between these two approaches beautifully, taking us deep into stories of her past but always partnering them with wonderful advice and teachings on how the act of writing has accompanied her journey through life and through her spiritual practice. And please don't get thrown by the word "spiritual." While Schneider does speak to her spiritual life (and how it has transformed) she is really using the term in a more meditative, spiritual PRACTICE way. Writing, for Schneider, is a way to grow and transform, as well as way to create community and heal both ourselves and the people we share it with. This book is staying on my shelf for regular dips back in - it is so ripe, powerful, and inspirational. I can't wait to read her other books. Many thanks for the friend who knew I would love this book and gifted it to me.
March 24, 2015
I did not do this book justice because I read it over a six-plus-month period of time. I might have rated it higher if I had allowed myself to be absorbed by it, but then isn't it the author's job to write an irresistibly absorbing book? Pat Schneider put so much heart and effort into the book, perhaps too much. I found it a little dense.
The book is three-quarters memoir, which I generally enjoy, but I think that this one felt a teensy bit too much like a loooooooong therapy session. She's working out her family stuff and her relationship with spirituality and God, and although that's interesting to a point, I think she may have passed the point. Her poetry, interspersed throughout the book, is quite nice.
The book is three-quarters memoir, which I generally enjoy, but I think that this one felt a teensy bit too much like a loooooooong therapy session. She's working out her family stuff and her relationship with spirituality and God, and although that's interesting to a point, I think she may have passed the point. Her poetry, interspersed throughout the book, is quite nice.
August 29, 2019
I have a deep respect for the contribution of Pat Schneider to the world of reflective writing. In this book, seasoned by the wisdom of her more than 8 decades of life, she takes us into her own inner life while inviting us to enter into our own private reflections. She leaves us with powerful questions, useful suggestions, and insight into the value of embracing writing as a form of exploration. My one disappointment was the publisher's choice of a small font which, for me, felt it not only crowded the visual page, but it seemed to metaphorically allow less light in by reducing the white space.
December 30, 2013
I am always looking for ways to draw nearer to God(mystery)and this book has taken me another step closer.
At seventy something years old Pat offers the insight of a woman who has been there done that. (I mean this in a respectful way).
It never occurred to me to write (well not seriously anyway)let alone to write as a spiritual practice. Maybe I'll start a journal. Pat offers tools to begin your writing journey.
This is definitely a book worth reading. I plan to read it again...within the next 6-12 months.
At seventy something years old Pat offers the insight of a woman who has been there done that. (I mean this in a respectful way).
It never occurred to me to write (well not seriously anyway)let alone to write as a spiritual practice. Maybe I'll start a journal. Pat offers tools to begin your writing journey.
This is definitely a book worth reading. I plan to read it again...within the next 6-12 months.
March 12, 2018
This book isn’t instructional like Julia Cameron although there is at least one writing exercise I want to try. It’s more of a memoir about her personal relationship to writing and spirituality. It’s also a biography but the biographical details are given when relevant to the theme of the chapter. There are many references to writers that have inspired her which are thoroughly cited at the end of the book so it’s also something of a bibliographical autobiography. This book is a rich resource for anyone looking to develop writing as a spiritual practice.
October 4, 2013
This book took me by the ears and pulled me through every page. I did not want it to end. Hard to describe. It is a spiritual autobiography that lets us see how it was written. A memoir along with information about how to write a memoir. I particularly loved the honesty and the questions posed to writers. A must read for anyone wanting to write memoir. I am VERY greatful this book fell into my hands. I read it after reading her other memoirs and poetry.
April 29, 2016
This is the first thing I've read by Pat Schneider. How in the world have I missed her books/writing before? Her honesty is authentic and her style is beautiful. I'm not a poetry writer or reader (it is usually way over my head) but her poetry? Oh, my. Reading her words touched my heart and many times brought me to tears. Her words are beautifully crafted and the book is absolute art.
Take the time to read this book.
Take the time to read this book.
September 13, 2015
I was very taken by Schneider's way of exploring and teaching writing as a path to spiritual growth and discovery. She writes with wonderful honesty and insight about the wounds in her life and how writing and prayer have helped her better understand her relationship to mystery, to the beloved, perhaps to God or the eternal. There's both a rejection and embrace of religion that I found so honest, as I said. It gave me a lot to consider in my own writing and spiritual path.
September 18, 2013
A beautiful, compassionate, deeply wise and heartfelt book. This quiet little book: part memoir, part writing manual, part poetry collection; really gave me a lot to consider on my own spiritual journey.
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December 17, 2015Enlightning
I chose this book aa I am a writer and I believe my connection to the world lies in my words. It moved me deeply, made me fall back in love with poetry, and provided me with the inner silence needed to create deeper more powerful stories. Thank you, Pat.
I chose this book aa I am a writer and I believe my connection to the world lies in my words. It moved me deeply, made me fall back in love with poetry, and provided me with the inner silence needed to create deeper more powerful stories. Thank you, Pat.
February 26, 2014
It's always inspiring to be in the company of Pat Schneider, who is an inspiring teacher and writer.
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November 5, 2022Please read my review at:
http://kvhovey.com/how-the-light-gets...
http://kvhovey.com/how-the-light-gets...
March 24, 2016
A beautiful and inspiring book. Thank you, Pat!
June 23, 2016
This book was amazing. I'm still processing her lessons about writing and how it is influenced by (and can influence) our lives. Absolutely loved it.
July 12, 2019
If you write and you have a soul . . . But I repeat myself. . . Read this book.
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