Every morning, I set my alarm of 15 min before the time I actually have to get up.

I sit up in bed, take

my notebook and pencil, which I always leave on my bedside table the night before, and start writing
in that zone of being half awake and half asleep. I write for 15 min before I get up, before I've had a
chance to talk to anyone, before I've had a chance to wash my face. Most of the time, I don't even
know what I'm writing about. It doesn't really matter. What does matter is not the content of what I
write, but the very fact of putting pen to paper. I'm involved in two disciplines that have fancy
names, Ethnomusicology and life writing. As an ethnomusicologist, I study people playing music. I
meet musicians, I interview them, I learn about their music, and then I write about them. As a life
writer, I write about people's lives. Sometimes they're musicians, sometimes they're not. Sometimes
I write about other people's lives, sometimes I write about my own. The thing that binds my two
seemingly non agreeing disciplines together. Writing. Before turning to writing, I studied music in
Thessaloniki, Vienna, and London. As part of my PHD in ethnomusicology, I had to come to Cyprus
for a year of fieldwork. I spent a year here interviewing musicians, talking to them about their lives,
playing and singing with them, and learning how they thought about the music that they played and
sang. After that year was over, I went back to London to write up the results of my research. There
were all these stories that I wanted to share, all these experiences that I wanted to write about. I
didn't know how the problem was, not that I couldn't write. The problem was that I didn't really
know what my own voice sounded like. That's when I first came across the idea that I'd like to share
with you today. The idea of writing that teaches you to hear and trust your own voice. Reflecting on
the theme of this conference, What I'd like to talk about today is whether writing can make us look
deeper. Can writing make us reach feelings, thoughts, and desires that perhaps we didn't even know
we had? Can it connect with what it is that we've always wanted to do in life? But we're somehow
too scared to admit when I ask people these questions, the answer I very often get is I find writing
scary. But what is it about writing that people find scary? On the face of it, writing is just a simple
act. You take a piece of paper, you take a pen or a pencil, or you switch your computer on, and you
write. Yet, most of us here today have experienced the fear of the blank page. The fear of not
knowing to write what exactly is so scary. It's not the simple act of writing that's scary of course, but
what lies behind it? Expectation, and hearing, and I mean really hearing your own voice. Expectation
is a great vice when I ask people whether they think that writing could change their lives. Another
version of the answer I get is I don't write when I ask back. Okay, so what do you mean you don't
write? The answer I get then is, I'm not a writer. But remember the question here wasn't whether
you could write the next great European novel nor whether you could win the Nobel Prize in
literature. The question here was whether the simple, though I admit, not easy act of writing can
make us look deeper. There's a feeling of expectation lurking about when we talk about writing in
ways that it doesn't exist when we talk about other things. If I ask you for example, do you cook, you
won't necessarily think that what I'm implying is whether you've won a Michelin star for your
cooking. By contrast, though, in my question about writing. What people seem to assume is that I
want to know whether they want the equivalent of the Michelin staff of their writing. Most of us
think of writing as something formal, something done only when we apply a certain number of rules
and regulations And something that should bring about very concrete results. A book, a poem, a
piece of research. But here we're talking about writing that will connect you with nothing other than
yourself. Something that you do in order to come closer to who you really are when you write with
any degree of regularity. And again, I don't mean when you write in order to become a novelist, but
simply when you write something wondrous begins to happen. After training yourself to write
without thinking for 12 or three weeks, then you suddenly begin to hear your own voice much more
clearly than before. Our mind is normally cluttered by a variety of thoughts and voices which we
don't actually hear, which luckily we don't actually lead, but they're always there in the background.
If any of you have ever tried yoga or meditation before, and you were asked to keep your mind still
for as little as 2 min. You know how difficult this really is. According to data provided by the Institute
of Neuro Research in the US, an average person has approximately 70,000 thoughts per day. Other
research shows this number to be a bit smaller or a bit bigger, but this is more or less the average.
The Buddhists call this incessant movement of thoughts in our head. Monkey mind, just as a monkey
constantly jumps from one branch or from one tree to the other. So it does a monkey mind
constantly jump from one thought to the other, seemingly without ever being able to stop? All right,
this is not exactly a scientific metaphor, but our mind resembles a big noisy highway with hundreds
of cars passing through it every day. What the practice of writing does is that it slowly gets rid of all
the extra noise in our head, making it resemble a rural street. Instead, that's when it gets really scary
for many people. Why? Because in all that peacefulness, when you're finally able to hear your own
voice, you might suddenly discover that you don't actually like the job that you do. Or that you don't
really want to live in that huge house that you've just bought, or that you'd rather get a parrot rather
than the dog that you already have. The feeling of being scared comes from our being too close to
ourselves. In fact, this closeness to ourselves, this opening up to see things that we didn't even know
where there is. Why there's a therapeutic side to writing as well. To the extent that it now forms
part of psychology, there's a form of therapy called writing therapy. This is not of concern to us here
today, but it goes to show that writing does something to our way of looking at ourselves and other
people that's truly transformative. Something more familiar to us perhaps than writing therapy,
might be the figure of a person who keeps a journal or a diary where his or her innermost thoughts
and feelings are recorded. These diaries are more often than not, not meant to be seen, but they
serve the purpose of connecting their author to their feelings, thoughts, and desires. Okay, How
could we use writing in our own lives in order to look deeper and come closer to ourselves? How
could anyone of us here in this audience today use writing in order to listen to our own voice? You
might think that this doesn't really concern you. That your life or job has absolutely nothing to do
with writing Yet, even if what you have to do is write a professional email or compose a legal
document, you'll be surprised at how much more convincing and efficient you'll sound, if you know
what your own voice actually sounds like. The practice is very simple and very cheap. Too many
people have already written about this. All you need is a notebook and a pen, or a pencil. You may
wonder whether you could do all this on a computer. Well, you could, but it won't be the same
experience. Recent studies have shown that children's brain develops differently when writing by
hand as opposed to writing on the keyboard. And there's evidence to suggest that there are
cognitive benefits in adults writing by hand too. What's more, writing is not only an intellectual
activity. If you write by hand, your whole body gets involved in the process. Your hand becomes an
extension of your mind. And so the whole process of writing becomes a mind and body activity.
Okay, back to the practice. You go and sit somewhere, quiet, somewhere. You're less likely to have
Andy Interruptions. You start writing without thinking. Now, this is the difficult part. You do not
think about writing. You do not think about anything while you're writing. You're thinking, I wonder
what I'm going to cook tomorrow for lunch. Nor are you thinking, well, I wish I'd bought the black
code instead of the red one. Not thinking. You keep your hand moving. That is the key. Do not stop
to check. You do not stop to correct. You do not care about your spelling. You do not care about the
lines on the paper you write in whatever language, dialect, or idiom that you like or in a combination
of languages or idioms. You keep your hand moving. You write without thinking for 15 min. That is
the key. When you're done, you do not go back to check what you've written. You simply close your
notebook until your next writing session. What do you write about? Anything You try to catch your
thoughts and put them on paper as quickly as you can. After all the clutter in your mind is gone, you
might suddenly discover that there were things that you wanted to write. After all those stories your
grandfather used to tell you. Those letters that your parents gave you, or love, or loss, or the feeling
of traum happiness in your life. If you write with any degree of regularity, the question of discipline
becomes crucial. Remember that you're not writing for an audience here, but for yourselves. Yet, the
repetition is vital for cutting out any resistance that you may have to writing. Tolstoy once wrote in
his diary, must write each day without fail. Not so much for the success of the work as in order not
to get out of my routine. I understand that perhaps not all of us might be able to keep up with such a
demand. But even if we don't write each day without fail, the important thing is to keep the practice
of writing despite all the difficulties that may and that will arise in the process. I can almost hear
some of you saying this is hard. Yes, of course it is. No one ever said this is going to be easy, but it's
also all about practice. If you decide to run the marathon, you won't simply show up on the day of
the race. You'll start training yourself little by little until finally you're able to run the whole thing. It's
exactly the same with writing. We don't expect to run the marathon on the first day, but we practice
each day, each day taking it a little bit further. For those of you who may wonder what the point of
all this is or why you should devote any of your precious little time to writing, I can tell you is
because this will transform your lives. So if you would really like to look deeper both within
yourselves and within other people, if you would really like to get to know what your own voice
sounds like. If you would really like to get to know what it is that you truly want to do in life, then
give writing a chance. Write with no expectations and no demands. Write simply with the curiosity
to see what will happen and with the conviction that something will happen, look deeper and keep
writing. Mm.