第229期：用诗歌疗愈自己

想成为我们的主播，欢迎加微信 xdfbook 投稿。 一段美文，一首英文歌，或是一点生活感想，全由你做主。 《用诗歌疗愈自己》 The Healing Power of Poetry “I never could connect with poetry,” Jan said. “I’m a math teacher!” She was sitting on my living room couch surrounded by piles of poetry books. On the coffee table was a stack of cards, each with a different poem on it. Even some of the art on the wall had hand-calligraphed2) verses among the colors. I could relate to3) Jan’s words. For many years, I was actually afraid of poetry. I felt as though it was the secret language of an elitist club that I had not been invited to join. Though I loved poetry as a child, the harsh and overly analytical way it was taught in my high school had intimidated me. Suddenly my magical world of words and feeling had turned into “iambic4) pentameters5),” “dactylic6) tetrameters7),” “rhyme schemes” and “lineation.” I decided then that poetry was not for me after all. Jan’s glance fell on a stack of Mary Oliver8)’s books, and tears came to her eyes. “A few years ago, when I started teaching at my current job, the first friend I made was Rita, an English teacher and a poet. I confessed to her my inability to understand poetry. With a knowing look in her eye, she said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of that!’” “A few months later,” Jan continued, “Rita presented me with a beautifully decorated box for my 46th birthday. Inside were dozens of envelopes, each holding a handwritten poem. And there was an instruction sheet: Each morning, as soon as you wake, take one of these envelopes to a quiet place with a window onto nature, or a beautiful plant, or a candle. Sit comfortably and read the poem aloud to yourself, preferably more than once. That was a dark time in Jan’s life: For more than a year, she had been struggling with a chronic illness. Her unlimited energy seemed to have drained away, leaving her perpetually pale and tired. Once, she loved to ride her mountain bike every day on the trails near her house; now she could barely make it home from teaching to collapse into bed. Though she had turned to doctors, therapists, and alternative9) health practitioners, no one seemed to be able to provide her with answers or relief. “I figured I might as well follow Rita’s advice,” Jan told me with a shrug. “Nothing else seemed to be helping.” The morning after her birthday she awoke with the same relentless exhaustion in her chest. Where would she find the energy to face this day? As she dragged herself out of bed, she saw the box of poems on the bedside table. Reluctantly she pulled the first poem out of its envelope and sat by the window. She felt a bit silly reading out loud, but she followed Rita’s directions. It was a poem called “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. Much of the first stanza10) was about a grasshopper. The description of the creature’s “complicated eyes” and “pale forearms” was lovely, but Jan didn’t see what it had to do with her. A few lines later, though, she caught her breath11). “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,” she heard her own voice say. Suddenly she was awake, listening. The next lines of the poem spoke directly to12) her—addressing a conversation that ran constantly below the surface of her life, but which she had never spoken out loud: How do I pray when I am not religious? How did my life become so meaningless? What do I hold sacred anyway? The final lines left her heart pounding: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” Every morning after that, without fail, the poem of the day connected her with herself in a way she’d never experienced. Often Jan was brought to tears by a phrase from Mary Oliver, or Naomi Shihab Nye13), or Hafiz14). “You will love again the stranger who was yourself,” Derek Walcott15) assured her. Or, “The hurt you embrace/becomes joy,” Rumi16) would advise. With the opening of each envelope, Jan fell deeper in love with poetry. I found myself nodding as she spoke. I, too, had inadvertently rediscovered the healing power of poetry during a difficult passage in my life. In 1994 I was in the midst of a suicidal depression. At the time I was a therapist and teacher of self-transformation, but none of the wisdom I’d learned could touch the place within me that felt so broken. When I’m depressed, I clean. One day I was scrubbing under a radiator and found an unmarked cassette tape covered with cat hair and dust. I wiped it off, put it in the player, and started in on the dishes. A man’s voice speaking poetry filled my house. These were poems unlike any I had encountered in high school or college; they were what I now call “poems of the inner life.” The sound of the speaker’s voice and the words of the poems reached into a place inside me that had felt utterly untouchable. I put down my sponge and wept. A bit of sleuthing17) revealed that the tape had fallen out of a client’s purse. She told me the speaker was David Whyte, a poet who recited by heart to inspire creativity and insight in groups in all manner of settings, from boardrooms to monasteries. I began to take poems into my life—not simply reading them and turning the page, but developing rich relationships with the ones I loved most. I learned many by heart, I carried some with me in my purse, I taped some to my computer screen and refrigerator. I rarely left the house without a poem in my pocket. I printed some of my favorites on small cards and used them like a divination deck. They became my poetry therapy, my medicine, my prayers. Those poems not only infused me with their wisdom, but actually brought vibrancy18) to my body. How, you might ask, can a poem have a physical effect? As the poet Emily Dickinson says, “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head has been taken off, I know that is poetry!” Like a shaman19)’s drum or a Sanskrit20) chant, the rhythm of a poem entrains your heartbeat, the phrasing changes your breathing, and the sounds resonate within the crystalline structures in your bones and fascia21). Many years later I came to understand this as the poem’s “shamanic anatomy:” Current scientific research shows that your brainwaves, breathing and pulse literally change when you give voice to a poem, opening your mind beyond ordinary thinking. The physical elements of the poem literally create the biochemical circumstances for healing and insight. Poetry is a doorway to passion, peace, and wholeness that is right in our midst. It is free and available to everyone all the time. I invite you to step over the threshold of a poem into the wonder of your own self. “我永远不会和诗歌有关系，”简说道，“我是一位数学老师啊！”她坐在我家客厅沙发上，沙发周围到处堆放着诗集。咖啡桌上放着一沓卡片，每张卡片上都有一首不同的诗歌。就连墙上挂的一些艺术画里，都有手写的题画诗。 我对简的话感同身受。其实很多年里，对于诗歌，我都充满了畏惧。我觉得诗歌似乎只是精英俱乐部内部的密语，而我从未受邀加入其中。尽管我从小就喜欢诗歌，但是中学时代老师教授诗歌态度严厉，条分缕析，让我对诗歌望而却步。突然之间，我那文字和感情的魔幻世界变成了“五步抑扬格”“抑扬格四音步”“韵律”和“长短句”。于是我觉得诗歌终究不适合我。 简的目光落在了一摞玛丽·奥利弗的诗集上，眼眶变得湿润起来。“几年前，那时我刚开始在现在的岗位执教，我结交的第一个朋友叫瑞塔，她既是一名英语老师，也是一名诗人。我坦白告诉她我无法理解诗歌。”她理解地看着我，说道，“别担心，我有方法！” “几个月后，”简接着说道，“瑞塔送了我一个装饰得很漂亮的盒子，作为我46岁的生日礼物。里面放着许多信封，每个信封里装着一首手写的诗歌。盒子中还附了一张使用说明书：每天清晨你一醒来，就从中拿出一个信封，到一处静谧之地，那里有扇可以欣赏风景的窗，或有一株美丽的植物，或燃着一支蜡烛。舒舒服服地坐下，大声地给自己读诗，最好反复朗读。” 那段日子是简的人生低谷：一年多的时间里，她一直在与慢性病做抗争。她那使不完的精力似乎已逐渐枯竭，使她终日面色苍白，疲惫不堪。过去，她喜欢每天在自己家附近的小路上骑山地车；而现在，她几乎下班一到家就瘫倒在床上。尽管她咨询过医生、治疗师和非传统保健医师，但似乎没有人能给她提供解决办法或缓解措施。 “我想我不妨听取瑞塔的建议，”她耸耸肩对我说道：“似乎也没有其他有用的办法了。” 生日过后的第二天清晨，她醒来时一如既往地觉得心力交瘁。她从哪里能找到面对今天的能量呢？她挣扎着起床，看到床头柜上装着诗歌的盒子。她不情愿地从信封里抽出第一首诗，然后坐到窗边。她觉得大声朗读有点傻，但她还是照着瑞塔的话做了。 那是一首玛丽·奥利弗的诗，名为《夏日》。第一节的大部分诗行写的是一只蚂蚱。诗中说蚂蚱有“复杂的眼睛”和“柔弱的前臂”，写得很有趣，但简没觉得这跟自己有什么关系。但是，又读了几行之后，简屏住了呼吸。“我不能确定什么是祷告。”她听到自己的声音这样说道。突然间，她清醒了，就那样听着。接下来的诗句直接激发起她的兴趣——那针对一直在她的生活表象之下进行的一个对话，但她却从未将其大声说出来过：不信教的时候我怎么祷告？我的生活怎么变得如此没有意义？到底什么对于我才是神圣的？最后几句诗使她怦然心动：“告诉我，你用你疯狂而宝贵的一生/打算去做什么？” ………… 文章摘自：《新东方英语》杂志2017年6月号