Welcome to Immersion, the daily program designed to reignite your creative passion and
bring you back to yourself. My hope for you is that the Immersion deep dive will restore you
to your creative flow.
 
Every morning, you’ll receive an email like this one, with a reflection or strategy and at the
bottom of the email, there will be a unique writing prompt.
 
Immersion: Deep is a circuit-breaker, a gentle nudge back to what you already know how to
do: be creative. These daily emails, and your daily response, form the heart of the program
and I promise you that if you set aside twenty to thirty minutes each day to attend to the
practice, you will find your creative depth and ease by the end of seven weeks.
 
When you arrive at the end of each day’s message, you’ll find a sentence or image, a prompt
to use in your own writing. It might be an instruction (‘write about…’) or a sentence to jump
from (‘The flowers bloomed early…’) or perhaps an image (‘green leaves’).
Whatever it is, try to let yourself leap in.
 
Take a breath before you begin (we’ll be talking a lot about breath in this program) and, if
you have a novel or memoir in mind, let it bubble gently to the surface. If you don’t have a
clear project, just breathe. Then read the prompt for the day, and as soon as a thought or
image or sentence arrives (even if that sentence is: this prompt means nothing to me) – begin.
Try to keep writing, and ideally – if you’re able to – write longhand. If no image arrives,
that’s fine. Begin by writing the starting prompt and then rewrite it. Change a word, then
another. Eventually, something will awake.
So you might have a prompt which is “The flowers bloomed early’ – but no image arrives.
You could simply write the sentence again. Then, the second or third time, you might write,
the flowers bloomed late. Try it again. Perhaps the next line is the flowers didn’t bloom. Keep
writing until your timer sounds, or you hit the end of the page. It’s fine if what you write is
not ‘useful’. What we’re trying to do here is connect you to your instinct, and your instinct is
connected to your body.
 
Try to show up for your daily prompt at a similar time each day, if it’s possible. So much of
the creative life is simply about honouring your intention to do the work. That said, this
program is about being kind to yourself, so if you find it works for you to mix it up,
sometimes morning and sometimes lunchtime or evening – mix away.
Each week of this Immersion program has a guiding theme and we begin, this week, with
contemplation. That word, contemplation, is often associated with silent traditions, but its
original meaning (from the Latin word contemplori) is simply ‘the act of looking at.’ That’s
it. To contemplate is to look. Implicitly, that action suggests that we observe without
judgement.
 

Before we embark on any program of change, we need to contemplate, to consider where we
are. So today, I invite you to enter into the state of contemplation, the state of simply
observing, without judgement.
 
Take a few moments now to do this one simple thing: write down your thoughts. All of them.
Follow the thread. Keep your hand moving as you begin to listen to your own thoughts. Take
five to ten minutes (set a timer if you like) and keep writing. You may notice that the act of
listening to your thoughts slows them a little. Write on scrap paper so that you avoid the need
to be precious.
 
The important thing in that five or ten minutes is that you write without judgement or
opinion. Today, you are simply observing. This spirit of quiet observation without judgement,
of following the thread of your thoughts, will lead you to your own curiosity and to your own
creative instincts. It will lead you to immersion.

Your prompt for today:

Write about walking through an open door