Finding Spiritual Guidance Through Poetic Medicine
Cyra Sweet Dumitru, one of the four certified poetic medicine practitioners in Texas, has four acclaimed poetry collections and decades of experience guiding others through the transformative power of language. Her work is a lifeline for those navigating trauma, grief, depression, anxiety, and spiritual wounding—and Cyra’s journey is as powerful as her poetry.
At just sixteen, she experienced the devastating loss of her brother David to suicide—a tragedy that reshaped her life and became the heartbeat of her healing. In her new memoir, Words Make a Way Through Fire: Healing After My Brother’s Suicide, Cyra shares how poetry helped her rebuild, reconnect, and reclaim her voice.
She also offers practical ways to break the silence and stigma around suicide, explores the transcendent presence she calls “Voice,” which has guided her through both shadow and light, and, a special gift: During the interview, Cyra reads two profoundly moving poems from her memoir—each a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the redemptive power of creative expression. Whether you’re a writer, a seeker, or someone carrying quiet sorrow, this interview will surely touch your heart, stir your soul, and remind you of the power of language to heal what feels shattered.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
The healing power of words and poetic medicine.
The impact of witnessing a loved one’s suicide and the journey of healing from trauma and grief.
How writing, especially poetry, can be a vital path for processing trauma and loss.
The concept of “Voice” as a source of spiritual guidance and its role in personal transformation.
The importance of therapeutic writing circles for adults facing trauma, grief, depression, and anxiety.
Practical ways to break the stigma around suicide and encourage open dialogue and support for affected families.
The distinction between prose and poetry in their healing capabilities.
The significance of finding joy in life through creative practices, when everything aligns for transformation.
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS CYRA:
You witnessed your eldest brother David’s suicidal act when you were 16 and he was 19. What would you like to share with us about that tragic day?
How can writing be an effective means for processing trauma and loss?
Describe your healing path of recovery, spanning decades of creative expression, spiritual exploration, and the slow, courageous rebuilding of your life through writing poetry.
What does it mean to be a practitioner of poetic medicine?
What does poetry writing offer someone who is recovering from a traumatic experience?
How can a community help families who have experienced a loss through suicide?
How do you work with individuals who are shaping their life journeys and stories through poetry?
How does it work for some people who may like to treat themselves to your therapeutic writing circle?
Why should we heal our wounds? Why is it worth it to us?
How is finding joy in life through a creative practice related to the golden hour of the soul, when everything aligns for transformation?
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GRIEF AND REBIRTH LINKS
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Finding Spiritual Guidance Through Poetic Medicine
Cyra Dumitru’s Journey: From Poet to Healer
I hope this message finds each of you very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing Cyra Sweet Dimitru, a poet whose words don’t just speak. They heal. Cyra is a published poet and instructor of poetry with four acclaimed collections to her name, which are What the Body Knows, Listening to Light, Remains, and Elder Moon. Her poems have graced the walls of city hall, echoed through the halls of museums, and been heard on national public radio.
She is 1 of only 4 certified poetic medicine practitioners in Texas, trained through the Institute for Poetic Medicine. She spent decades guiding others through the healing power of words. For two decades, Cyra taught rhetoric, poetry, and narrative medicine at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. She facilitates therapeutic writing circles for adults facing trauma, grief, depression, anxiety, and religious wounding, creating a sanctuary where words offer refuge, resilience, and renewal.
Cyra’s work is rooted in personal experience. As a teenager, she witnessed the devastating loss of her eldest brother David, who died by suicide, a tragedy that fractured her world. In her powerful new memoir, Words Make a Way through Fire: Healing from My Brother’s Suicide, Cyra Chronicles her long journey toward healing, weaving together threads of creative expression, spiritual exploration, and the slow, courageous reconstruction of a life forever changed.
I’m eager to talk with Cyra, who will be speaking to us from San Antonio, Texas, about her profound journey through grief following her brother David’s tragic Suicide, how writing became a vital path for processing trauma and loss, and what it means to practice the healing art known as poetic medicine. We’ll also discuss her remarkable memoir, Words Make a Way Through Fire, that offers a powerful testament to healing and resilience, and the solace Cyra found in a transcendent presence she calls Voice. As a special gift, Cyra will read two profoundly moving poems from her memoir that will surely touch hearts, stir souls, and remind us of the power of language to heal what feels shattered.
Cyra, a warm, heartfelt welcome to the show.
Thank you. I am most honored and moved to be here. Thank you for that gorgeous introduction.
A Tragic Day: Witnessing a Brother’s Suicide
Thank you. I love telling our readers who you are and what you’ve accomplished, so that they are reading with respect to what you have to teach them and share with them. Your story is amazing. Talk about trauma and heart-stopping. Let’s start there. You witnessed your eldest brother David’s suicidal act when you were 16 and he was 19. What would you like to share with us about such a tragic day?
It was a Friday afternoon in Cincinnati, Ohio. That’s where we were living. We’d been living there for probably ten years or so. It was in February, which is a cold and dreary month in Ohio. I have three brothers. David is the eldest. He had been struggling with depression. This is 1974. There’s so much more understanding now than there was then about depression and resources available. It was clear that he was struggling with something.
It was a Friday night, and I was getting ready to go on a date. I was going to go to a basketball game with my boyfriend. My mother, David, myself, our younger brother, Peter, and a family friend named Charles sat down for dinner. David was very inward, quiet, and brooding. After dinner, a lot of things happened. Mom needed to go to the library and work on some research downtown, and my younger brother went to the movies with Charles. It was David and I.
I was focused on getting ready to go on this date, but I do remember standing in the kitchen with David. Everyone else had left, so it was just the two of us. We were putting dishes there in the kitchen from the dining room table. I remember him stopping and looking at me. The best way I can describe it is if doom had an energy or doom had a scent, that was what I was sensing from David.
I was worried, but I was scared. I felt a whirlpool from that. It was overwhelming to me, but I also was clear in my mind that I had a choice. I could step toward him, try to see what was going on, and be empathetic, or I could step away and get ready to go on the date. I was sixteen years old, and I was overwhelmed, so I stepped away. A few minutes later, I could hear him. He was outside. The methodology that he chose was not instantaneous. It was not painless. He died quite a few hours late.
He lit himself on fire, right?
He did. I was standing in my small bathroom, brushing my teeth. We were in a ranch-style house. There was a window behind me. He was able to walk. As a flaming person, he walked toward the window. I could see it was fire, and I thought, “He is taking his own life.” I had a dream several days before this. It was not that exact situation, but it involved me watching him deliberately put himself in a situation that was going to take his life. I knew that dream was very important, so when I sensed what he was doing, I thought, “That dream. Something’s trying to scare me.”
Before I went outside to do what I could, which wasn’t much, I was spoken to. I know we’ll talk about this more a little bit later, but that was when what I’ve come to call Voice made itself explicitly present. This voice called me by name. This had never happened to me before. It said, “Cyra, this is going to be very hard for you. You’re going to see, hear, and smell things that are going to be hard. Part of you is going to have to hide, but part of you is going to have to go out there, deal with this, and do what you can for your brother. Someday, this is all going to circle back.” I understood at that moment, “Something larger is trying to prepare me. I don’t know what this means, but I have to go out and do what I can.”
I ended up going to the neighbors, calling for an ambulance and a fire truck. They came and took David. He went to the burn unit, but he died some hours later. I was able to speak to David. I was able to tell him I loved him, and that was meaningful. I certainly did not make it to the basketball game. That did not happen. Everything changed for the entire night.
The Healing Pen: Writing Through Trauma and Early Influences
You used writing as a means of processing your trauma and loss. How can writing be an effective means for doing that? Please describe your healing path of recovery over decades of creative expression through writing poetry. You also did spiritual exploration in the slow, courageous rebuilding of your life.
Before we get to that, I want to tell our readers that when I was told by my Voice that Saul had to go and many lessons would be learned from his death, like you, when the accident happened, and I saw that he was indeed gone, it also comforted me. Even though I still had the grieving, the healing, and everything, it was such a blessing. I had that bit of comfort that had come through. I relate to what happened to you.
That’s meaningful as well to hear. There are these larger, mysterious, miraculous, mystical patterns that can make themselves known.
When people think it’s baloney, try having an experience like this. Tell us about writing. Did you always know that you were a writer? Were you seeing the signs of that even as a kid?
Yes. I was fortunate with my parents in that language and stories were very important to them. My earliest memories are twofold. They are of our mother reading aloud Peter Pan and some of these other stories. She had the gift of drama, so she would read the stories of the characters in their character voices. She made it very alive.
Our father worked in New York City. We were living in Connecticut then. He would come home on the train, and then we would often go back to the beach in Connecticut, where we spent so much of our time. We would gather around a campfire, and Dad would tell us invented stories. I was already a listener. I was a listener because of them. My imagination was very alive and stimulated. I knew that words made things real and made them come alive.
Words made things real, made them come alive. Share on X
I started first grade young. We were learning our letters. I found learning to make the letters of the alphabet so interesting because they looked like little animals to me. Some of them have tails. The J has a tail, and the F has a little tail that goes up. They looked like little animals to me. I found myself sick one day, and I was home from school. I was thinking about a bird. It was a bluebird. In my mind was this image, and I thought, “I’m going to write a poem.”
I found some paper and a pencil. It was that wide paper that you use when you’re learning to write. We had some of that at home. There were four small children at home. As I started to write certain words like bird and blue, and I don’t know how I spelled blue at that point, I noticed that as I wrote these words, the bird wasn’t in my mind anymore. It was as if the bird was in the room with me, singing. I knew at that moment that writing was always going to be important to me. It was a way of creating and making what was up here move into the world and be real. It was powerful, beautiful, and magical.
I was fortunate enough in 4th or 5th grade to have a teacher who gave me my first journal. My family was going on this trip to Europe for six weeks. She said, “This is a very special trip. You need to write a lot of your memories down.” That was a very powerful message. That message to me was, “What you’re going to experience is going to be important. You want to leave a record of it. By writing it down, you’re going to notice it even more.” I found that. I still have that. By the time I was in high school, there was a lot happening inside of me. There was a lot of disruption in the family. There were a lot of extended family issues. I began to simply journal to try to find out what my feelings were.
Writing as Refuge: Finding Solace and Self-Discovery
It sounds like that was your refuge, in a way.
It was my refuge. It was my way of trying to sort things out. I noticed that I would often write with line breaks. It was natural to me to express my feelings and the images in my mind and put that on paper. After David’s death and after the trauma of witnessing that death, I was in shock, as trauma survivors are for quite some time.
What I was able to express later was that I had such a tangle of feelings within me. The metaphor that I found for that eventually was that there was this huge octopus, and the huge octopus had moved into me. It was occupying my whole trunk area. Eventually, I could understand that 1 tentacle was grief and 1 tentacle was shock. Another tentacle was confusion. Another tentacle was blame. One was anger, and then one was self-doubt. It was like, “Can I trust myself?” I was the last one to speak to David. I made that choice not to step forward and be concerned.
You must have felt guilty. There was a big tentacle called guilty.
One of the first roles that writing played that was so important to me after David’s death, and I was trying to find a language for my experience, was that the more that I wrote, the more I was beginning that work of trying to rebuild a center from which I could reflect. I was so shattered. I was like a chandelier that had fallen on a marble floor and shattered into a million little pieces.
I also want to volunteer that your parents must have been grieving, so you couldn’t get a lot of solace from them either, right?
Yeah.
Your family was grieving. It was in those days when there wasn’t a lot of help for these situations.
There are all kinds of wonderful bereavement centers now. Thank goodness. I’m a strong supporter of them in many ways. They make a big difference. The writing gave me a way to stop, listen inwardly, and begin to get some language for my feelings. That then began to make me feel like there was something inside of me that was becoming a little solid again.
There was one poem in particular that I wrote in college. This is maybe two years after David’s death. I’m in college. I’m still in shock. I’m still confused by everything, and I am often in a lot of internal pain. Sometimes, what I do, because there’s so much processing I have yet to do, I am self-medicating. I am numbing myself with alcohol and other substances. I don’t like that I’m doing that. I know that I’m doing that to an extent that is not healthy, but I couldn’t quite intervene and stop myself. I couldn’t interrupt that.
Fortunately, I was taking a poetry writing course at the time, so I had some practice writing poems. One day, I wrote a poem called The Faceless Day, which is in the book. This poem told me that I was so disconnected from myself, and part of me didn’t want to be attached to that part of me that was not healthy. It wanted a different way. It gave me the answer in the poem. I was having a conversation in the poem with this disconnected part of me. Looking back on it, I also believe that was Voice speaking to me.
You’re channeling through your poetry and what you’re writing, right?
Yes.
It’s coming through you.
The unconscious mind and the symbolic mind were the ways that Voice knows how to reach me. It was like, “This is the language that I know is available to you.” The poem told me that the creative way forward was to write.
Spiritual Exploration: Love, Gifts, and Self-Care
You also went through spiritual exploration. What was that about?
I believe that creativity in and of itself is a spiritual process. Spirituality, to me, is a highly creative process. I’ve always sensed that I had a spirit and a soul. I’ve always believed in that. That has been part of my instinct. There was a period of time when I was exploring a particular religion in an organized way because I was curious. Up to a point, that was very helpful. It certainly got me in touch with other metaphors for the divine. It got me in touch with what I believe is the fundamental religious idea that can unite all religions, which also transcends any particular religion. It is that the basic idea, truly, is love.
It’s about love for the divine and love for each other. We’re here to be a safe space for one another, help one another, be vulnerable together, be empathic, and collaborate together. We all have gifts. We’re all given gifts that I believe are God-given gifts. If we can each know that they’re there and be in an environment that supports our cultivating them and expressing them, and if most of us are doing them, it will change the world.
The other love that I want to add is love of self. A lot of us grow up people-pleasing and worrying about everybody else. We’re as precious as anyone else in our world. We need to take care of ourselves also.
Thank you. We, too, are sacred. I believe each of us is given a sacred mission. We’re entrusted with that.
The Guiding “Voice”: A Transcendent Presence
Let’s talk about my favorite part of your life called the Voice. Could you describe Voice to us? Share how it helped you meet your feelings and move through the shadows and light. Share anything you want to tell us because it has helped you, like me. One day, I’m minding my business. I wrote my first book, and I heard the word show come into my head. Your Voice was very similar. It must have come from a spirit guide or someone. Tell us about that.
Honestly, I don’t know where it comes from other than when I hear it, I hear it from inside of myself. I also feel like it’s inside of me and outside of me, almost at the same time. The very first time that Voice spoke to me so clearly was the moment I was looking in the mirror before I went out to try to help David. It was calling me by name. There have probably been 3 or 4 times in my life where Voice has called me by name and been very direct. That was one time.
Another time was when I was working in the University of Cincinnati Medical School’s library. The man who would become my husband was in medical school there. He came in one day and sat on my desk. We were chatting. I was even dating someone else and was pretty serious about this other person. Dan and I are chatting, and suddenly, there’s Voice again. Voice called me by name once again and said, “This is a good man here. He has a good soul. Your future is bound up with this person.” I remember thinking, “Did anybody else hear what I heard?”
I love that.
No one else apparently did. I didn’t want to move because I thought that if I moved, I was going to disrupt this beautiful energy field. I know from my experience that this is the veil thinning. This is a sacred and profound moment. Dan walked away, and I sat there and went, “Wow.” That was the second time. There was another time, years later, which was very explicit. I’ll come back to the less explicit.
I had my Master’s degree in English Literature, and I wanted to teach. I thought I was going to teach at a university nearby, but I’m on a different campus, which was St. Mary’s University. I got invited there to talk about my first book of poems. I was very excited about that with my publisher at the time. After class, we stepped outside.
Karen and I are speaking, and there’s Voice again. It was as if it were in the wind, almost blowing past me. In my ear, it said, “Cyra, I need you here.” I thought, “Okay.” I then said, “Karen, are you all hiring in the English department?” She said, “Yes, we are. We’re interviewing right now. This is what you do.” I taught there for twenty years. The students changed my life. It was a magnificent time to be there.
Sometimes, Voice speaks to me very directly, almost hitting me like, “Hello, Cyra.” As you so beautifully put it a few minutes ago, Voice, particularly continuously, is always there in my poetry. It is always there, wanting to be part of my healing. I know Voice shows up in my dreams and is giving me images and dream narratives and connecting me with my brother David’s spirit.
I would not doubt that David is around you and trying to help you in your life, also. I’m curious to ask you. Have you ever communicated with David through a medium or anything like that?
I have not yet, but that is something that I’m very interested in doing soon. I’m curious.
How tragic. There was a reason, in a way, because what he did honed your voice for your poetry and all. One day, when you cross over, you’re going to find out what all that was about.
I believe that, and I look forward to it. It’s curious. I did learn from someone I went to high school with. We had our 50th high school reunion. She was in my graduating class. We were in the same homeroom all four years because of the first letter of our last name. She is very empathic. After David’s death, she could feel what I was feeling inside. She sensed the struggle. She sensed the darkness. She sensed the smoky energy around me. She could feel it was very real for her.
Some years later, maybe 5 or 6 years later, there was a time in her life where she was in a deep, dark place and had some suicidal ideation. She said she remembered me and that feeling around me, and made a different decision. That was a stunning thing for me to hear.
Poetic Medicine: Healing Through the Power of Words
That’s a very healing thing for you to hear. Teach us. People are saying, “What the heck is poetic medicine? What does it mean to be a practitioner? Do you need special training for that?”
Special training is important. I will describe that in a moment. Having said that, poetry was teaching me how to heal myself by simply doing it as a practice. When I learned that there was an organization called the National Association for Poetry Therapy, I started going to some of those meetings. I then learned that someone I admired very much, John Fox, was starting a certification. I think of him as the second generation of establishing poetic medicine as a field. It started before him, but he’s a major contributor to it. He’s based in California, where he lives, but he travels all over the country and internationally. He was starting a certification program. I’m in my early 50s and thinking, “Yes.”
Poetry taught me to heal myself simply by doing it. Share on X
“How you got guided right over to that is amazing. Talk about how it works.
It was my time to do that. First, we are expected to establish that practice with ourselves. I was already doing that. I can always keep doing that and do it with more mindfulness and more understanding as to even why it works. Why it works goes on many levels. Almost all your readers, I imagine, at some point have had an experience where they felt so emotional about something. They wrote all their feelings down and probably noticed afterwards, “I can breathe a little bit better. The energy is a little bit clear. I feel calmer. I got some of that out of my system.” On that first level, there can be an energy shift when it’s a very intense feeling. There’s that.
It can also clear out space inside, which means we can breathe better and relax a little bit better. Our body can let go of some tension, so our body is not holding the tension. That’s part of the healing of it. I have found that I can bring imagery to my feelings, like that octopus image. I had an image along the way of my healing, carrying around the sense of, “Am I responsible for my brother’s death as an earthquake by being involved in that?” That was an important image to have. Being able to bring this complicated inner emotional experience into words also creates a sense of orderliness to internal disorder. I am putting some of the turmoil in here out there, but giving it the order, which also has a beauty to it, which brings pleasure, healing, and breath.
It feels like it also brings completion, in a way, and closure.
It allows closure for me in that moment with that particular feeling. It allows me to move on to what I’m next ready to feel, think about, question, or grow into. It allows room for more seeds to be planted and to explore, and thus to keep growing. The other thing is that when I can articulate difficult experiences internally in a way that can be shared with other people, and I share those insights, feelings, and words, other people who have common feelings but haven’t yet found that language can go, “I recognize that. I identify with that. I’m not so alone.” That might open them up to explore their own world or speak about what they’re holding inside.
Even plant a seed to get them to start to address it and think about it.
That poem I wrote, Faceless Day, ended up being a mirror for me. I was like, “I need to take steps right now and change my life,” and I did.
That’s amazing. Speaking of your poetry, we’ve talked about how you’re going to read through your poems from your remarkable memoir.
Thank you.
Her memoir is aptly titled Words Make a Way Through Fire. I know you felt internal shifts take place within you as you shape the poems in this memoir. Whatever you’d like to tell our readers about it, because it’s an amazing book. If they are inclined to read it and read your beautiful words, the poems are fabulous. I would love you to tell everyone, and I would also love for you to read two of your moving poems in it called My Brother’s Cup and Listening for Owl. You can tell everyone a little bit of the background of each of those poems when you read them.
My Brother’s Cup & Listening for Owl: Poems of Connection and Healing
Words Make a Way Through Fire: Healing After My Brother’s Suicide
Thank you for that invitation. It’s so wonderful to be able to read the poems. It was necessary for me in the memoir to use both poetry and prose because I needed the prose part to express my questions and for the reflection and the narrative. There’s a whole section in there where I’m rebuilding my brother’s life for myself by telling all the stories that I could remember about his life. I’m recreating him there for myself. That was what I needed the prose for.
I needed the poems because the poems come out of my body’s experience. It’s like, “This is what it has felt like to have this experience in my body. This is what it has felt like to have this experience in my soul. This is what it has felt like in my experience to have it in my heart.” Poetry expresses our body’s sensations, our heart’s sensations, our imagination’s sensations, and our soul’s sensations. It’s the most holistic form of language I think there is.
The poem, My Brother’s Cup, captures a moment when I was well into my years of processing my loss of David and my trauma and well into feeling a friendship with my brother through the dreams and him showing up and helping me heal. I was in my mother’s cabinet, and I found my brother’s baby cup. It has his initials on the front, and then his birthdate, which was October 12th, 1954, on the back. It was so wonderful to find that cup because I could find it, hold it, and feel connected to him. I can remember the night of his death, and then have it settle and realize, “I’m holding the fullness of my brother’s life right here and feel joy in it.” That’s what the poem is trying to convey.
My Brother’s Cup. “Amidst chipped porcelain and stained coffee mugs stacked in Mother’s cabinet glints my brother’s silver cup. I reach for it and follow his engraved name and date of his birth with my finger. A memory of his self-inflicted death flares and settles. ‘It is good to find you here after years of reckoning.’ I open the water, rinse away traces of dust, and fill my brother’s cup. The water I drink now is clear and cool.”
It feels like, “The water I drink now,” is that you’re starting to heal.
Thank you for that. I feel that the poem honors both his life and the fullness of his life. Here’s his birth. Here’s his name. Here’s how he was loved in the family. Here is how my mother has carried this cup from home to home. She has made quite a few moves since we were all in that house in Cincinnati, and she carried his cup with her. It’s part of the family. It’s part of our family history. It was powerful for me to hold his life, remember his death, and return to his life. I realized, “I’m not afraid to drink from this either,” and I did. I made a point of doing that. That felt like a reunion with him. It felt good.
That’s so healing. Tell us about Listening for Owl.
Listening for Owl is a new one. In the poem, I referenced a dream. In this dream, David shows up once again. David has physically shown up in my dream multiple times. I always love it when he does because I truly feel I’m with him. He was my big brother. He taught me how to play Frisbee. I will read that poem in a moment, but I feel like this is important.
The photograph on the cover of the book is my brother, David, who was probably four, and me. I may be eighteen months old. My father took the photograph. It was black and white. I’m leaning my head against my brother’s head, and he’s reaching for something else. I feel like this moment says so much about the lovingness of my brother because he is choosing to hold his head steady while his sister leans her head against him. He’s busy and is involved with something, but he wants that connection, and I want that connection with him. I feel like that tenderness between us that was there as young children is here in this poem, too.
I feel like you had a special bond. You’ve returned to the bond now that he’s on the other side.
I do feel that way. Thank you. Listening for Owl. “I can’t explain what happened or why. I don’t know what it signifies or whether it changes anything or not. I only know that I had been missing the great horned owl hunting our neighborhood. It had been months since his rhythmic call had rippled through the dark, pierced my sleep, and winged me to the realm between flesh and shadow, where reunions between the breathing and the buried take place inside of dreams.
I only know that my brother, long dead, filled me with his being. The shoreline of his gaze wove seaweed strands and infinite tides around me. His hand lightly brushed my back as if to prove his presence. My skin still quivers at the surprising touch. All these years, and still, we recognize each other. Memory pulses across thresholds, and in the knowing song of owl vanishing now in this dawn, while the space inside me that held my brother’s form is still warm.”
That is so beautiful.
Thank you.
Poetry vs. Prose: Distinct Paths to Healing
I encourage everyone to get Cyra’s book. If you are all inclined and like poetry, it’s a wonderful book. She has other wonderful books. We’ll be talking about one of those in a little while, also. It’s very powerful.
Thank you.
Now that you’ve read your poems, what does poetry writing offer someone? We’ve talked about what it offers someone recovering from a traumatic experience, but please explain how it’s distinct from prose and its healing power. Can writing in a journal be therapeutic? I believe it does, but what if someone’s writing in a journal that’s more like prose? What’s the difference in the healing of the different formats?
Both are terrific. If one feels drawn toward journaling and that works for them, that’s wonderful. With prose, usually, we’re writing it in sentences, and we’re filling the whole page. With poetry, one of the real pleasures of poetry is that we build in space and pauses. If you have a page and you write several words, and then you leave a space and come down to the next line, you see the words all the more clearly. I’m seeing the images. I’m hearing the music of the words themselves. I am more aware of the silence of breath. It slows me down so that I’m also listening more internally. It’s a different way of seeing, and it’s a different way of playing with language. It brings a level of playfulness into it.
One of the real pleasures of poetry is that we build in space and pauses. Share on X
If someone is reading who does a lot of journaling already and they’re wondering how they might shift into poetry, something that is fun to do is to go to your journal and take a passage from your journal that means a lot to you, whether it be describing something that you love and you think is beautiful or you made a realization there that was meaningful to you.
I would suggest getting a fresh piece of paper and copying out those words from the journal passage, but do it as lines of poems. Maybe 5 or 6 words on one line, and then 5 or 6 words underneath it. Start breaking those sentences down into phrases and see how that looks on the page. You can try typing it up, and then you can start to play with putting in spaces between lines and making stanzas.
What’s a stanza? The word stanza is an Italian word for room. I love that. If you’ve ever seen a poem on the page, you might see where there are these chunks. It looks like a paragraph. We might call it a paragraph in prose. There’s a paragraph, which is a stanza, and then some space, and then a couple of lines in between, and then another little paragraph, which is a stanza.
You can start to organize your lines into these groupings of lines called stanzas. It has the spacing between them. By doing that, you start seeing into your own thoughts and feelings all the more. It gives us more time to hear ourselves, hear our own wisdom, and hear the music of our language. It’s important to read our words out loud to hear the music of the words.
The other part that is healing about poetry is medicine. When I read this aloud to you, and thank you for that invitation, rather than silently on the page, my body is vibrating with those words. I am an instrument. My body is an instrument. Those words are bringing me my own feelings. They’re reconnecting me to that dream where I could feel David’s presence. It’s making it more real. I’m feeling his presence in my body all over again, which means I’m receiving that medicine or that connection to him again one more time. It’s resonating in my body. If I’m reading it on the page quietly to myself, I’m not going to get that vibrational physical experience.
Breaking the Silence: Addressing Suicide Stigma
I am so glad you added that because I’m sure a lot of people don’t realize that. When they read poetry, they’re reading it on the page. Now, they may think that it’s better to verbalize it and let it reach the air. It brings it more depth and meaning for them. Speaking of David and all that you went through with him, let’s talk about the importance of breaking the stigma around suicide and encouraging open dialogue and stronger support. We’ve had many people affected by suicide as interviewees on this show. How does a community help families who have experienced a loss through suicide? This is a new topic that people are beginning to grapple with. It used to be shrouded in shame and all these other things. Teach us about this, please.
The first thing I want to say is that if anyone tuning in has some suicidal ideation, or if you have a loved one that you’re concerned about, there is a 24/7 suicide crisis hotline. All you need to remember is 988. I didn’t know that before. You can call this number anytime, and a counselor will answer. They will be trained to be on the line with an individual and calm them in that situation. The research that has been done on this is that it is incredibly effective. It is saving many lives. That’s 988. If you’re a veteran, you could still call that number. There’s an option for a counselor who can speak to someone who’s a veteran.
That’s wonderful.
There’s also an organization that didn’t exist for my family at that time. It’s called the American Federation for Suicide Prevention. It’s AFSP.org. You can go online there. If you’ve lost a loved one to suicide, you can find out information about support groups in your area. It is so very important that families and friends who are dealing with the loss by suicide of a loved one have long-term and non-judgmental support. It’s such a long process of individuals finding how they’re going to move forward with this experience.
My sense of it is there’s a lot of self-blame about suicide, like, “If I had done something differently, I could have saved him.” Probably, these different hotlines reframe what happened to the person, right?
Yes. The hotlines are both an important way of keeping someone from taking that step and taking their own life, and they can be helpful for individuals who are struggling with the loss of a loved one. Every loved one goes through a period of feeling, “Was I responsible in some way?” Being in a support group normalizes it, first of all. It becomes clear that you’re not alone in how you’re struggling with this. However you’re struggling with this is a normal way to struggle with something that is so difficult and overwhelming. You’re not crazy.
Words Make a Way Through Fire: Healing After My Brother’s Suicide
You can also have the advantage of hearing from people who are further ahead in their journey. They can share with you and other individuals who are newer in this journey what has been helpful for them. It is going to be very individual. You are in a community where you can speak your feelings, whatever they are. I know I felt like I needed to protect other people from my story because there’s violence and scariness there.
I don’t talk about it lightly. I don’t talk about it casually, but there were certainly times when I needed to speak about it directly. It would’ve been great to have had an environment like that where I could. To have a support group is important. If you know a family that’s going through this and you’re not sure how to be there for them, simply be for them as their friend. Keep showing up.
Suspend judgment.
I would suggest that you don’t speak about religious images with them. Listen and tell them you love them and that it’s not their fault. Listen and show up with food. Bring food over.
Nurture them.
Even if you’re not sure what to say and that worries you, or even if you show up and you sit with them, hold their hand, and say nothing, your presence is everything. You don’t need to know what to say. Your presence and your love for them are a lot.
Even if you just show up, sit with them and hold their hand, your presence is everything. You don’t need to know what to say; your presence and your love are enough. Share on X
Therapeutic Writing Circles: Fostering Expression and Healing
Once they feel your presence and your love, you also offer therapeutic writing circles, which you refer to as poetry circles for adults. How do you work with individuals who are dealing with things and shaping their life stories and journeys through poetry through your therapeutic writing circles? Are they online? How does it work for some people in our audience who may like to treat themselves to your therapeutic writing circle?
I don’t do them online, but if you’re interested in doing this online, the Institute for Poetic Medicine, which is the organization I was certified through, offers online courses that you can take through them. I believe it’s PoeticMedicine.org. I do it in person. I did it at St. Mary’s University with students in the counseling center. We had a special room there. I’m doing it at another counseling center here in San Antonio called the Ecumenical Center.
The way that it works is we sit in a circle if we can. We have chairs in a circle. We’re all here together. I will be showing up to do this, and it’s open to any adult who wants to come. There’s a whole group of people who’ve been coming almost every month for several years. They come knowing that they can write about whatever is on their mind or heart, and it will be accepted and affirmed.
My job is to come with some poems to get us started and to set the space as being welcoming and hospitable. I’m like, “I’m so glad you’re here. You bring a sacred part of the circle to our circle that’s uniquely yours to bring. Thank you.” I have some poems that I’ve selected that I believe will speak to those individuals. That’s part of the training, how to choose poems for specific groups of people so they can connect to them.
We read the poems aloud two times so that we’re hearing the images, feeling the feelings, and feeling the music of the words. I call it seeding the air. Suddenly, the images, the feelings, and the music of the words are beginning to create the texture of our energies. People’s memories are being stimulated by what they read in the poem and what they hear in the poem. They’re like, “I connect with this line or this line.”
We don’t analyze the poem. I simply say, “Is there a line or an image in this poem that is speaking to you? If so, would you like to speak that line?” They’ll call it out into the circle after we’ve read the poems aloud. By speaking it, they’re already aligning their heart, their mind, their voice, and their body with some particular feeling and probably some particular situation in their life that they’re working on at that moment. They may not fully be aware of it yet, but it’s all happening. It’s all a catalyst.
You’re providing a vehicle for them to express themselves and explore their stories.
We do that for a bit, and then there’s time to write. Everyone has 15 or 20 minutes. I encourage them to get someplace comfortable, sit for a moment, check in with what’s bubbling inside of them, what inner creative voice is coming forward, and what image is strong in their mind, and trust themselves.
That’s a big part of it, too. I know that you have a special offer for members of our audience. It has to do with this other wonderful book you have called Elder Moon, which is about aging and elder care. Tell us about this lovely offer that you’re making.
Thank you. Elder Moon is a chapbook. It’s a smaller collection of poems that functions like a memoir. It’s the story of walking with my mother-in-law through her final years. It’s literally telling that story. At one point, she had a stroke. There’s a poem there that is moving through the 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 days right after her stroke, and how she’s slowly getting some language back. It’s chronological, bit by bit. It’s very relatable for a lot of people who are walking alongside a loved one as they’re aging. She was a special woman. She was dear to me. I’ve got ten copies set aside that are signed.
Wired for Healing: The Transformative Power of Creativity
Hurry up, everyone. You can get that free copy of that wonderful book, which is so generous and nice of you. I also want to ask you about the importance of healing from profound loss and bearing traumatic witness. I ask everyone about why we should heal our wounds and why it is worth it to us. What would you like to tell everyone?
I believe that we, as human beings, are wired for healing. That is why we have creativity in order to be able to transform our difficult struggles and traumatic experiences. We’re wired that way. It requires being vulnerable and different. There are going to be different modalities for different people. For me, it’s been writing and swimming. For someone else, it might be drumming, music, dancing, and painting. I believe it’s answering the soul’s yearning to be whole. The soul wants to be whole, but it can feel fractured by trauma.
It can also feel blocked.
That could be temporary. We need support. We need creativity. We need to have the courage to enter into that and not feel alone. That’s why support and creativity are important, as well as feeling as if there is a larger something out there that truly wants our healing. I believe, without any doubt from my own life experience, that that is true.
Who would you have been if you hadn’t healed this way? Can you imagine if you were still carrying all that trauma from the past? How is finding joy in life through a creative practice related to the golden hour of the soul when everything aligns for transformation?
I’ve had some of my most joyful moments writing certain poems where I go, “Everything is so right in that poem. I feel expansive. I feel bigger. I feel connected with the natural world, with the divine, with myself. I feel aligned.” Poetry gives me that.
That’s joy. As we come to a close, I am honored to share this deeply moving passage from your extraordinary book, Words Make a Way Through Fire: Healing From My Brother’s Suicide, with our audience. “If not for writing poems, I would be struggling with depression. When writing, I feel such joy, liberation, and expansiveness. I love the absorption of the creative process, one that is immensely spiritual, one that feels as if I am entwined with a generous and breath-filled spirit.
When a poem feels fulfilled and finished, I feel peaceful. I liken poetry to writing a prayer. When writing a poem, I encounter a life force that responds as I seek it. Spirit and I find each other. Perhaps I should say Voice and I find each other.” Your words are a powerful testament to the power of creativity as a path to healing and resilience. Thank you from my heart for this beautiful and courageous conversation. I truly wish you abundant blessings. Thank you.
It has been a blessing to be here with you. Thank you for the blessing of this time, your presence, and your purpose. It’s an honor to be here with you. Bless you all out there.
Thank you.
Guest’s Links:
- Cyra Sweet Dimitru
- Words Make a Way through Fire: Healing from My Brother’s Suicide
- What the Body Knows
- Listening to Light
- Remains
- Elder Moon
- Peter Pan
- American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
- The Institute for Poetic Medicine
About Cyra Dumitru
I am a published poet with four poetry books (What the Body Know, Listening to Light, Remains & Elder Moon) and a forthcoming memoir as well as a practitioner of poetic medicine certified through The Institute for Poetic Medicine (one of four PPMs in Texas). For 20 years I taught rhetoric & composition courses, poetry writing courses, and narrative medicine courses at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, TX. Poetry & journaling have served me as healing, transformative tools for nearly all my life.
