Welcome to episode six of selflove with sharmila. This is a happy week and the podcast has already completed one hundred plays. It was an interesting week too how I got to accomplish so much over emails, videoconferences, phone calls and Instagram lives. In fact just yesterday, I participated in an online literature festival where I spoke on writing as therapy. There’s a purpose to all kinds of writing – we write to inform, to communicate, to record and to express – but there’s a very important part that writing serves which is as a way to connect with our own selves – with our emotions and feelings, hurts and unresolved questions. Free flowing writing, without censure is a great way to help release a lot of pent up worries and reactions and emotions.  Free flowing writing if you have inner work to do, can be done every night for as long as you want. Just write three pages of whatever is it that you want to release and ideally, never get back to these pages – just forget them and move on. I usually advise people to tear up these pages so you never have to revisit them.  So eventually, over a period of time, such writing lets you release a lot of unaddressed issues that you may have not wanted to confront. Writing out your thoughts and difficult emotions is a very easy way to process them. Regular writing and processing of emotions helps you internalize messages and brings for clarity. It is also the most private way of dealing with your life experience. Some tips while doing this writing therapy is that you should give yourself the freedom to write as you want, freely and easily. Particularly because this writing has no audience but yourself, it will be helpful if you can be candid about it. Once you start doing it, you will soon realise the effect it has on your emotional wellbeing. Here on, we can also work on some specific issues through writing therapy. Dealing with anger is one of them. You could sit down and write down all the people who make you absolutely angry from time to time and them write a note to each of them expressing your anger and why they make you feel that way. If you have some people who may have hurt you in past, you can individually write messages to them by expressing your hurt. But acknowledging the fact how they have hurt you and in a way conveying it – you are freeing yourself up a certain space in your mind. You can do the same exercise to look forward in life. You can write letters to your younger self or to your older self and connect perfectly with your own life story. The more you connect with yourself, the more you will start thriving in every aspect of your life and get back in touch with yourself, 100 percent. That is the value of writing as therapy and I hope this inspires you to start your own free flowing personal writing work, so you can help yourself and maximise your life. That’s all for today, and I shall be back next week with a fresh episode of SelfloveWithSharmila. Stay tuned.