DIALOGUE WITH OURSELVES AS WE READ AND WALK

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As we have already mentioned in post PRESERVING AND AFFIRMING HEALTH, CREATIVITY AND TRANQUILITY, the WALK-RWD system is an integral method where movement is one of its most relevant aspects as it stimulates creative thinking, but It also has other benefits, such as self-knowledge of ourselves. Its practice, including its structural activities such as reading, writing and drawing, allows us to approach both the knowledge of internal reality (our intimate feelings) and of knowledge in general (external reality).

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Regarding self-knowledge, it is generated consciously and unconsciously, and allows us to orient ourselves to an internal, personal and individual healing.

The daily dialogue that we carry out with ourselves provides us with thousands of words and images per day, since it contains a good amount of concepts and questions: How to understand what we feel? How to interpret our feelings? How to capture the best ideas? Of course it is not ignoring what is stored within us. All those images that are generated when reading, writing or drawing, while we walk, are accompanied by great cascades of words and concepts, containing various revelations of our inner being.

We just have to keep waiting for them to appear in our minds, as if we were fishing, we just have to wait for the fish to bite the hook. Keeping us walking, but always at the same time, reading, writing or drawing, our mind will catch that image, concept or idea at any moment that we do not suspect, an identical circumstance to the trapped fish and pulling the line. (Post THE WALK-RWD SYSTEM ENCOURAGES CREATIVE THINKING. PART I).

The prejudices, afflictions, thoughts, norms, precepts, dogmas, worries, fears, are part of the process that sometimes help and sometimes hinder that revelation of the great insights, when we dialogue in this way with ourselves. All thoughts, positive or negative, are necessary to carry out that dialogue with ourselves; We must not cut the negative aspects that come to our mind, nor the negative feelings either, because they also all belong to our inner and outer reality.

In several previous posts we have pointed out the possibilities we have of dialogue with ourselves, through writing and drawing. In the post DRAWING AND THRESHOLDISM, TO KNOW OUR INNER SELF, in the post WHY AND WHAT TO DRAW FOR? THE GREAT BENEFITS WHILE WE WALK, and in the post DRAWING, TO KNOW BETTER OURSELVES, we mention the great ability to achieve this through drawing, pointing out some mechanisms to achieve a creative dialogue with ourselves. In the post WHY AND WHAT TO WRITE FOR? we mention precisely that enormous benefit that we can obtain through writing. Even in the post WALKING AND THE ELECTION OF LONELINESS. PART I, we mention the dialogue with us in solitude while we are walking.

In the post OTHER DEVICES TO READ AND WRITE, WHILE WE WALK, we express: “Many books distract and teach; all enrich our knowledge and improve our ideas and thinking. Each book can be transformed into a dialogue with the author, and the synthesis obtained from it can be transmuted into a compendium of ideas that we can always organize as a new work written by us. This dialogue is carried out with oneself and the author serves as an intermediary and pointer. You talk to yourself, considering that the author may be listening to you in your reinterpretation, and you can address him as if he were present with your thoughts.”

Borges has expressed: “Those who practice this game [the game played in metaphysics or art, as an infinite combination of possibilities] forget that a book is more than a verbal structure, it is the dialogue that it establishes with its reader and the intonation that he imposes on his voice and the changing and durable images that he leaves in his memory. That dialogue is infinite; […] Literature is not exhaustible for the simple and sufficient reason that a single book is not. The book is not an incommunicado entity: it is a relationship, it is an axis of innumerable relationships. One literature differs from another, later or earlier, less by the text than by the way it is read. […] I have said that a book is a dialogue, a form of relationship… ”

Specifically, I can recommend 3 ways of action to start the process of dialogue with ourselves, when we are reading and walking, and which we can later include in our writings and drawings:

1. Carry out the reading of the document or book that we have chosen, and point out some words, phrases, points or parts of the text that we feel are relevant according to our own experiences;

2. Write notes and develop short texts on the topic (or topics) that we are enjoying or investigating;

3. Make drawings –exclusively- of the mental images we are creating, while reading, writing and walking.

As can be seen, these pathways contain the 3 structured activities within the WALK-RWD system, and this is what makes it creative, highly dynamic and motivational.

Let us remember that the unconscious uses various symbolic languages to transmit what we are, what we feel and what we want to be, and these 3 ways are a very important part of them, being very descriptive, truthful and effective to get closer to our interiority and get to know us better. It goes without saying that we must be very careful, reflective and descriptive in carrying out our readings and in the other actions of the process described.

On the second way, the recommendation (assigment) is that, during the reading of a certain document or book, the writing of:

Write notes, ideas, clarifications, doubts, annotations, various notes, records, citations, comments, observations, explanations, plans, general and specific data, references, news, warnings, indications, definitions, concepts, characteristics, evaluations, objections, censures , issues, questions, answers, memories, forgetfulness, considerations, all this while reading, as it helps to better understand the reading (Future Post THE WALK-RWD SYSTEM AND COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE); Likewise, the environment that surrounds us, while we walk, makes us more conscientious, attentive and and conscious.

The process that we have pointed out in post READING-WRITING-DRAWING: VIRTUOUS CIRCLE favors the 2 activities, reading and writing; However, Borges stresses that the deliberate anachronism technique not only enriches the craft of writing but also the skill of reading, since for Borges reading, before anything else, is writing. Recurrently in several of his essay-stories, he argues that writing is actually a rewriting of what we have read.

About the activities of drawing the images, we must be spontaneous and expressive, because as we already mentioned in previous posts (post OTHER DEVICES TO READ AND WRITE, WHILE WE WALK) the binomial read-write, while we walk, causes both to be more pleasant, reading on its side, more dynamic, enriching and deep, and writing more practical, positive and true; undoubtedly achieving a “dynamic reader” and an “authentic writer”, and drawing –as we have already mentioned- involves the 2 activities of reading and writing, graphically; that is, being a “dynamic reader” leads to being an “authentic writer”, but being an “expressive drawer” implies the two previous personalities, graphically.

These 3 ways must lead us to achieve a dialogue with ourselves, a conversation that will be patently shaped in our memory, in our notes and in our drawings that we have elaborated when reading while walking. Information that will contain a draft of our inner reality and that we can organize and systematize according to our particular needs.

Let’s walk with that book that we have relegated for several months, even years, or the one that attracts us the most, and let’s try these 3 ways of action, and we will immediately see the results. We will begin to know ourselves better.

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