Calling Forth Clarity: The Transformative Power of Writing - Abhisshek Om Chakravarty | Holistic Life Coach & Mindfulness Mentor

I've found that the most fundamental moments hold the greatest truths. One such truth was revealed to me not in a boisterous realisation, but softly—like the dawn opening behind shut eyes. It was in a coaching session with client Aarav, a young man dealing with the intangible burden of expectations. We had talked for weeks—emotional, open-ended conversations—but still, something remained jammed. Then, I assigned him an easy task: write.

I asked him to grab a pen, not a computer, and sit somewhere quiet. Not to write well. Not to impress. Just to write. A few days afterward, he texted me a picture of five pages, front and back, covered in all that he had not been able to speak out loud. His note simply stated: "I didn't know this was inside me."

That, to me, is what I mean by calling forth clarity.

There is one particular kind of knowing that occurs only when we write. It doesn't arrive in the fervor of argument or even in the closeness of sharing. It comes gradually, like air from the bottom of the lungs. Writing sidesteps our performative nature. It slides beneath the masks we wear, the voices we've borrowed from others. In my coaching work, that type of clarity isn't an extra—it's the basis of transformation.

You know, clarity is not necessarily about intellectually grasping something. Clarity is about experiencing the click of a deeper truth. In sessions, we struggle to put into words the unnamable. Folks arrive with cloudy feelings, patterns they can't put their finger on, hurt that they've not dared to go near. And yet, when they write—even just a paragraph—it's like the clouds clear and a shape appears.

I recall one client, Komal, who visited me following her second heartbreak. She was calm during our sessions, smart, perceptive. But she was going around her pain, not being able to land in it. I told her to write a letter she would never send—to her ex, to herself, even to love itself. She returned telling me she'd cried while writing. Not because it was sad, but because something old had finally exited her body.

That's the miracle of writing—it doesn't just tell us; it lets go.

For several years now, I've been combining breathwork and reflective writing with quiet sitting in my practice. It's not always about the answers. Sometimes it's about putting form to the questions. A client once said to me, "When I wrote it down, I saw how frightened I really was. I believed I was angry. But it was fear masquerading as that." These are the gold moments. Not because they're shiny, but because they're true.

When one is speaking, they self-censor. They hesitate, they rephrase things, they unconsciously attempt to appear strong. Writing, however—particularly when it's personal—does not require any of that. The pen is an extension of the soul rather than the ego.

You do not need to be a writer to gain benefit from this. Actually, the less you approach it as if you are writing, the truer the words tend to be. There's no acting out, no inner grammar police. Just breath and ink.

I remember working with Manas, who was a businessperson and self-defined as logical and straightforward. He was fighting over choices on what to do in his business career. In conversation, he was packed with analysis, advantages and disadvantages, market perspectives. But when I asked him to write spontaneously, without regard for it, something different surfaced. "I'm sick of proving myself," he wrote. "I've been running from my father's disappointment for twenty years." One sentence changed all our work with him. It wasn't career; it was worth and legacy.

The subconscious mind doesn't communicate in bullet form. It communicates in symbols, in memories, in whispers, and in abandoned phrases. Writing is a bridge between that dark underbelly and the light of conscious comprehension. And when that bridge is constructed, healing flows.

In my own life, this reality unfolded gradually. Years earlier, in a time of darkness when I'd lost my parents, I couldn't find words to pray or to meditate. But I discovered an old notebook and started writing letters to my mother or father as if they could hear them. Day by day, it made room within me. I didn't discover answers, but I discovered relief. And then I discovered guidance.

I recall sitting on my flat floor, amidst scrunched-up tissues, writing tearfully. "I don't know how to do this without you," I wrote. And then, seemingly without my thinking about it: "But you taught me everything I need to know." It wasn't theatric or deeper in the instant. But it was true. And truth, even hurtful truth, clears the way for movement.

Nowadays, when clients come to me feeling lost, bewildered, or stuck, I don't necessarily leap to provide them with tools or models. Sometimes, I simply ask them to write. To allow the writing to summon forth clarity. Not the clarity of ideal choices, but of authentic self-knowledge. That's where transformation gets underway.

I've coached Priya, a young physician who had come to me burned out and doubting her choice of profession. "I adore medicine," she maintained. "I simply need healthier boundaries." But when she started writing morning pages—three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing every day—something changed. "I went into medicine because it was expected," she wrote one day. "I've never really asked myself what I want." She hadn't hated being a doctor; she'd just never really chosen it for herself. That realization didn't convince her to give up medicine, but to redefine her relationship with it, to discover the pieces that truly spoke to her.

I've witnessed individuals reveal decades-old memories through one question scribbled on paper. I've seen trauma shift, not because it had been resolved, but because it had been named at last. Writing provides voice to the voiceless pieces within us—the shamed, the forgotten, the resilient, the divine.

This isn't about journaling. It's about believing that what you don't know you know. might just be right behind your fingertips.

Sometimes, my clients are surprised by what flows out. A mother who had felt guilt for years wrote, "I did my best, and that is enough." A man who had been carrying shame over a past decision wrote, "I forgive the version of me who didn't know better." These aren't just sentences—they are turning points.

I work with many different writing approaches, depending on what might serve each person best. Certain clients maintain a daily stream-of-consciousness journal, where they simply vomit out whatever's there—muddled, unedited, straight-up. Others compose letters, dialogues, or respond to questions I offer them in order to bring into focus aspects of themselves they've been avoiding. I may inquire: "If your anxiety could talk, what would it tell you?" or "What did the seven-year-old version of you wish somebody had told the seven-year-old you?" These are not exercises. They are portals.

Raj visited me with chronic anxiety. In talk, he could explain his symptoms, but not their origin. When I invited him to write as if his anxiety were an entity, a person, he was resistant. "This is stupid," he said. But he attempted it. What we got shocked us both. "I'm trying to protect you," his anxiety 'spoke' on paper. "I'm afraid if I let you rest, something awful will occur, and it will be my responsibility." That personification allowed him to connect with his anxiety in a different way—not as a foe to conquer, but as a misguided guardian to be thanked and redirected in a gentle way.

I gently remind clients that regardless of whether you never open it again, writing changes you. It is like the soul breathing out. And that breath is sacred.

One of my preferred methods is which I term "dialogue writing." I invite clients to have written dialogues with aspects of themselves, with feelings, with individuals (if present or not), even with abstractions such as success or failure. It may sound otherworldly, but the payoff is surprisingly concrete.

Kanvika had been trapped in a perfectionist cycle that was immobilizing her creative work. I asked her to write a dialogue between her and perfectionism. "Hello, perfectionism," she started, feeling self-conscious. But then, to her surprise, the words flowed. "Why do you push me so hard?" she wrote. And perfectionism 'answered': "Because I'm afraid you'll be ordinary. That you'll fade away." That realization—that her perfectionism was rooted in fear of being insignificant—shifted everything. She could now look at it as vulnerability, not tyranny.

In an era of instant replies and surface-solution manias, writing plods us back. It returns us to the cadence of the self. To sit and write is to sit and think without filters. It's an act of refusal against noise. A gentle one, but ferocious.

I've observed one interesting thing in my practice: the most opposed to writing tend to be the most in need of it. Those who exclaim, "I'm terrible with words" or "I don't have a clue what to write" tend to have the most unwritten truths on their minds. I tell them: that is exactly why it is important. It's not about being competent with words. It's about being honest with yourself.

My client Nishant, a successful architect, scoffed at the prospect at first. "I'm visual, not verbal," he said to me. "I think in buildings, not sentences." But after he was suffering through a hurtful divorce and feeling completely lost, he did it finally. He called me after his initial writing session, his voice changed. "I wrote about the building I'm living in now," he told me. "I told how barren and cold it feels. And then I understood—that's how I feel. I've been structuring my life like I structure my buildings—all form, no heat." That metaphor was our entry point, a bridge of language to areas of himself he'd abandoned.

Writing can also uncover patterns we've been unaware of. Chitra, a fortyish woman who'd had a series of disappointing relationships, saw no similarity among them. "They're all so different," she maintained. But when she wrote about each of them, detailing what'd attracted her to him and what'd gone awry, the pattern was clear. "I keep picking men who need fixing," she said to me, looking up from her notebook. "I make myself necessary to them so they won't leave." That succinctness did not fix everything at once, but it provided her with a compass for change.

The gift of writing is that it does meet you where you are. You may be angry, or perplexed, or ecstatic, or numb—the page does not judge. It receives. And with being received without judgment, something within us relaxes enough to look at truth.

I remember Raj, who visited me wrestling with grief at his mother's passing. He was a stoic individual himself, even when speaking of the most sorrowful parts. I asked him to pen a letter to his mum daily for a week—brief or lengthy, whatever he felt like. "I can't," he replied. "It hurts too much to consider that she won't read it." We made a compromise: he would write one sentence a day. One.

On the seventh day, he sent me a picture of seven pages. "I couldn't stop at one sentence," he said. "It was like she was listening." The writing hadn't returned his mother to him, but it had restored his relationship with her, a means of sustaining their relationship after death.

This is why I am so convinced of the magic of writing to summon clarity. It's not magic; it's access. Access to areas of ourselves that get silenced in the din of daily life and talk. Access to wisdom we already have but can't always hear.

There's research behind it, naturally—studies demonstrating how expressive writing diminishes stress, enhances immune functioning, and enables the processing of trauma. But I don't require studies to be certain of what I've seen again and again: the shift that occurs when a person encounters themselves on paper.

I need to make clear that this isn't about elegant writing or smart observation. Some of the strongest writing moments I've witnessed have been splattered with repetition, awkward phrases, even the appearance of banality. A client wrote three pages of permutations of "I don't know what to say." And then, on the fourth page: "I'm afraid of being alone." It was not poetry. It was breakthrough.

Writing also gives us space that can be redemptive. As we set something down on paper, we can look at it. It's ours, yet not us. This slight distance can make all the difference for working through tough feelings or experiences.

Young woman Sundari was recovering from childhood trauma and just could not talk about some things. Words got stuck in the back of her throat. But she could write about them—not directly at first, but through metaphor. She wrote about a house with rooms that couldn't be entered. About doors that were locked for good reason. About windows that let in light even when the doors were closed. Those metaphors gave us a way to discuss what was previously unspeakable. The writing created a bridge.

I tend to think that writing is effective because it involves different areas of our brain than talking does. It's slower, more self-conscious. It makes us articulate what may otherwise be indefinite impressions. And in articulating those things, we define our understanding.

Occasionally I'll ask clients to write with their non-dominant hand. It's clunky, clumsy, frequently childlike in its appearance. But that very clumsiness can bypass our customary defenses. The internal critic becomes flummoxed, steps aside. And something more primitive, more authentic, comes through.

Biswarup, a scholar who was accustomed to elegant writing and measured argumentation, was trying to reach into his feelings. He wrote this way with his left hand: in a clumsy, barely legible sentence, "I am not my father." It was a fact that he had cognitively acknowledged but not sensed in his body. The childish handwriting somehow touched a child's truth—easy, straightforward, forceful.

So if you're feeling confused at the moment—about your way, your emotions, what to do next—I request you to do this: don't attempt to get it all sorted in your head. Write. Don't wait to feel clear. Bring it forth.

Sit. Breathe. Start with, "Right now, I feel…" and see what else happens next.

There's no doing it wrong. You can write for two minutes or two hours. You can write pages or three sentences. You can burn it afterward or put it away to read years from now. It's not about the product; it's about the process.

What matters is the willingness to be present with yourself on paper. To let the pen move even when—especially when—you're not sure what comes next. Because certainty isn't the goal; clarity is. And clarity often arrives not in a thunderclap but in a whisper: "Oh, I see now."

I recall sitting with a group of coaching clients at a writing workshop in Goa. We were seaside, the waves crashing a steady accompaniment to our writing. One woman had been quiet all day, unable to connect with the exercises. As the afternoon sun grew golden, she finally started to write. Tears streamed down her face, but she continued, pen moving steadily across the page.

Afterwards, she shared just one line from what she'd written: "The sea doesn't apologise for its depth, so why should I?" In that moment, I witnessed clarity being called forth—not manufactured or forced, but invited and welcomed.

That's what writing can do. It can help us hear the quiet voice beneath the noise, the knowing beneath the confusion. It can help us remember what we've always known but somehow forgotten.

So I encourage you to give it a go. Not as a task or self-improvement exercise, but as an act of listening to you. As a dialogue with the wisdom you already possess.

You may just get to know yourself on the page.

And in getting to know yourself, discover the clarity you've been looking for all along.

In the end, every journey has just one purpose — to return to yourself, without shame, without fear, without pretense.

With this as my closing words, I’m ending today’s blog here. If you have any questions, reflections, or feel called to explore your own inner alignment, feel free to reach out to my team or me at info@abhisshekomchakravarty.com. I’d be honoured to hear from you.

Om poornamadah Poornamidam |

Poornaat Poornamudachyate |

Poornasya Poornamaadaya |

Poornamevaavashishyate |

Om shanti, shanti, shanti hi ||

Hari Om Tatsat!

Warm regards,

Abhisshek Om Chakravarty, (Coach Abhisshek)

Holistic Life Coach | Mindfulness Mentor | Family Mindset Coach 

"Within each soul lies infinite wisdom; I simply help others uncover their light."

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