Finding My Voice as a Writer

Cornelius Vahle, Jr.

I took my first Progoff Intensive Journal workshop in 1982. At the time I was trying to find my voice as a writer. I had taken a variety of writing workshops, including personal essay, creative writing and fiction, but had not yet moved forward in getting my material published.

My career as a writer began to take shape after I attended an Intensive Journal workshop. I found the process to be an excellent way of connecting with myself and working through various issues. The Intensive Journal method contains many useful techniques; one of the more valuable exercises is a dialogue process to deepen my understanding of specific areas of life, including my writing projects.

As a result, things began to click for me; I gained greater clarity on what I wanted to write. Soon, I was producing profiles of leading figures in the Consciousness Movement for a spiritual magazine.

Using the Intensive Journal method was then instrumental in leading me to write biographies of leaders of spiritual movements. Since the early 1990s, I have written three books dealing with these subjects: Open at the Top: The Life of Ernest Holmes; Torch-bearer to Light the Way: The Life of Myrtle Fillmore; and The Unity Movement: Its Evolution and Spiritual Teaching.

Then, in 2001, I moved into a totally different area, sports, and wrote Smart Baseball: How Professionals Play the Mental Game. This book was co-authored with Buddy Bell, the manager of the Kansas City Royals, and was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2003. Yes, the switch to writing about sports also came out of an Intensive Journal workshop. I had no idea that I wanted to move in this direction until a baseball book demanded to be written during a dialogue exercise that I did at a workshop in 2001.

I am convinced that aspiring writers can get new direction and inspiration from attending a Progoff Intensive Journal workshop. You can learn some helpful techniques such as the dialogue process for which Progoff is a leading authority. The method spurs your creativity as you access ideas and thoughts inside yourself as well listen to your intuition. The Intensive Journal method can be used in an ongoing way to help you clarify how best to proceed as your writing project evolves. Helping you realize your creative potential as a writer is a great gift of the Intensive Journal method.