Stilling the mind was begun to help me get a good night's sleep, but results went much further. When I actually accomplished this feat, it put me in a totally different frame of mind, a wonderfully calm place where ideas seemed to arrive without effort. It taught me that I can change the way I use my mind—a powerful idea that took my thinking full circle to childhood and back to the present.

Again, the results carry over to work with students and tutors. One result is that I'm healthier. Some long-standing health problems have improved, and I have more energy. And energy is so important to literacy work: not just physical energy, but mental, emotional and spiritual energy.

With that energy, I began to take on more community work as part of the literacy program, doing presentations on emergent literacy and plain-language writing while continuing with exercise, crafts and music. I believe that the program profile in the community has increased because of those efforts. This has brought new students, many with special needs, to our office.

Free to Listen: Change in Empathy

It's easier to listen now because this learning has left me more relaxed and I no longer take responsibility for student problems. Making time for relaxation and renewal—basic self-care—has paid big dividends. Because I'm no longer carrying my own bundle of intense memories, I'm less easily disturbed by student stories of violence in their past or present—I am able to listen, to really hear, without taking on the speaker's emotions. I believe that my increased ability to listen came about through the combination of reading about abuse and its effects on learning, feeling the pain, fear, or anger of the writer, and doing something to express that feeling, whether it was journal writing, guitar-strumming, or exercising.

So often, students have never expressed their feelings. As much as I needed to get my feelings out when the reading for the course triggered uncomfortable memories or emotions, students may also need to express thoughts and feelings before they are able to concentrate on literacy work. Steven Covey (1989), in The 7 habits of highly effective people, has a whole chapter on empathic communication, or listening to understand: