Sustaining Creativity: A Review of Madelyn Kent’s Sense Writing (Originally published in The Elephant Journal)

by Coriel O’Shea Gaffney

“Compose it in your body, and bring it in your mouth.” ~ Marie Howe

Before our final class of “Sense Writing I: Memory, Life Stories and Fiction,” Madelyn Kent, playwright, director, teacher and developer of the approach, asked us to watch a Tedx talk.

The presenter was a Quantum Computer Scientist by the name of Dorit Aharonov. (“Those are the computers that don’t exist yet,” she explains at the start of the lecture.) Like Kent, the Professor had studied the Feldenkrais method of Somatic Education. Ms. Kent employs the principles of Feldenkrais to foster ease and creativity in Sense Writing classes.

Listening to Aharonov’s talk was like being handed a key to a lock I’d been picking for six weeks.

In the following, illuminating excerpt, she explains what she views as the consequences of muscling toward a goal:

“We lose lot from [a] forceful approach. I strongly believe that all scientific discoveries, great or small, can be boiled down to a very small step of maybe a twist or a rotation around what you thought before; or looking at things from a different angle; or making an unexpected connection…Maybe you’re putting too much energy in the direction that you expect things to move.”

I registered for Sense Writing at an especially challenging time in my life. I was trying to get through each day without bursting into tears or quitting my job or getting completely trapped in a self-loathing mental loop. I felt like a victim of what Yogis call Samskara, stuck in the deep grooves of habit.

So I would walk in every Tuesday evening straight from work, leave my boots by the door and lie down on the carpeted floor of the space Kent rents only to feel my heart thrumming wildly, my jaw seized, and my head racing with a thousand “should haves” and “to dos.”

As a practitioner of Yoga and Creative Writing I am no stranger to mindfulness, body-mapping or meditation. But I, like most humans, have my own struggles with these disciplines. And Feldenkrais, new to me, coupled with the challenges I was facing, coaxed some old monsters to rear their heads.

Kent would say, “Feel your sitting bones. Which one feels heavier?” and I’d mentally respond “the left.” She’d say, “Don’t do anything, just notice.” But I would have already shifted around to demand symmetry of my hyper and exhausted form.

She’d say, “Notice your breath but don’t change anything” and I’d let out a long, rattling sigh. Then I’d try to correct my correction, return to the erroneous and natural way things were. Each generous instruction to simply become more aware of various aspects of my physicality resulted in a panicked struggle to become better.

And so it is with writing.

I hold a Masters in Fine Arts and have taught college level writing classes for years. I have put a lot of pressure on myself to write prolifically and well and I’ve never felt I was as accomplished as I should be.

In my pursuit to be better, I tend to freeze up and do less.

Writing can feel like a cycle of guilt and shame.

How easily I forget what compelled me on this path: the love of it; the sheer pleasure of rubbing words against words and watching them spark. When I signed up for Sense Writing, I suspected that these workshops might invite me to return to that love.

I don’t know if Madelyn Kent would call herself a minimalist but I would. From the get-go, she offered very few explanations or justifications. And yet I felt in extremely capable hands. Kent lets the process do the talking. She says nothing extraneous and nothing disingenuous. Her voice is self-possessed and soothing.

When she does offer commentary, it is astute and pithy. Borrowing from Feldenkrais, she says, “This work is about finding our comfort zone and making it more comfortable.”In a society that reinforces, over and over, “No pain, no gain” this sounded like a radical idea. Kent’s workshop challenged struggle’s worth and reminded me of the original impulse that led me to make my life about writing.

Every other class, we generated new material using the surrealist’s simple and evocative automatic writing prompt (“I remember”) or wrote from our senses in the moment (“I see, I hear, I smell, I taste, I feel”).

Sometimes the prompts embraced the arbitrary—write about a hotel, write about bike-riding. It was all meant to stimulate memory and uncomplicated creativity and to silence the knee-jerk critic in our heads.

In between generating new material, we would edit. Of the revision process, Kent had this to say: “Rewriting is re-experiencing” and “Content is important but process is more important.” To drain it of its grave undertones, Kent even substituted the word revisit for revise. Revisit this experience. Let it unfold further. Describe its new shape.

I was surprised and pleased by what I wrote, both its quality and its content.

I wrote about my first New York apartment, a canvassing job I’d held. I wrote about poverty, the taste of Gingerale, my mother’s illness, my uncle’s death. I wrote about playing make-believe with my sister in a swimming pool as a child. I wrote to my husband, to the kids with whom I was working, to strangers.

Sense Writing offers a fresh approach to writing.

It becomes less about risk than ease. Rather than trying to write about the big stuff, we were advised to linger in the moments before the moment. Rather than trying to invent characters, we were invited to let setting yield them. We were instructed to hover over a place, to imagine being in that moment, lying on our backs, eyes closed and see it from various angles. To allow for unconscious connections. To let the story emerge.

A writer is never finished, only dead-lined or blocked or between projects.

There may be a certain inevitable “sadness” that accompanies this occupation. But that doesn’t mean you can’t delight in the process; get lost in the flow; learn to be less self-serious; or, at the very least, find glimpses of joy and ease as you create.

“If you practice struggle,” Kent warned one evening, “the only practice is struggle.” That comment, triple-underlined in my notes, really resonated with me. Her closing advice was equally profound: “Make space for the smarter part of yourselves.”

What did I find during those six weeks? It is there, that smarter self. Fellow humans, fellow writers, I suggest you meet your own.

Coriel O’Shea Gaffney is a Poet and Teacher.

How Sense Writing Helped Me Overcome Writer’s Block (Originally published in the Curious Reader)

by Avni Doshi

There’s always an impediment to writing something new. A block of sorts. I’ve realised that I am that block. Too many edges, too many corners. Sitting down to write is not the problem – I recently finished writing a book over the course of seven years during which time my body had taken on the shape of a chair. But now I’m faced with the question of what comes next. How does one begin again, faced with a blank page? The truth is, I don’t remember. I contemplate the last seven years. What did I do with so much time? Am I ready to spend the next seven in that same state of uncertainty? I’m no longer sure.

Friends ask me if I have an idea for my next book. I tell them an idea is coming together, even though, in truth, my mind is a total blank. I fear my brain is degenerating. My stomach churns endlessly. People say second novels are hard. But, the same people also say first novels are hard.

There are always reasons to not write. Errands demand my attention, and general admin work creeps in. My phone buzzes, apps are insistent. I try decorating my little study and then redecorating it. Feng shui says that one’s back should always be supported by something solid like a wall, so I move my desk to face one direction, but another website tells me this is inauspicious according to Vaastu. I call my husband to tell him we have to rebuild part of the house. He says he’s in a meeting and can’t talk, even though I know he’s on his lunch break. I take down some art from the walls – maybe this clutter is the reason I can’t focus. Maybe the clutter is human. I call my husband to announce that I can no longer go out socially. This time, he doesn’t take my call.

At night, I set my alarm for 4 am, hoping to come to my laptop straight from my dream state. I imagine this time to be ripe with possibility, a doorway into the juicy unconscious. I am ready, I tell myself, as I place my head upon the pillow, to capture any strange image or turn of phrase that may come up. I lie in bed, looking at the ceiling for what feels like an eternity, contemplating all the hidden material that awaits me. When I wake up, I realise I have slept through my alarm, and it’s almost 9 am.

I stay in bed, unable to face the day, and watch old episodes of reality television, marvelling at how their production value has improved over the last decade. I eat food out of bags and forget to brush my teeth. I cry a little, wondering at my lack of purpose. Afterwards, I open up a book about psychoanalyst Carl Jung and find comfort in his mapping of the psyche. He posits that a feeling of emptiness can be creative energy retreating from conscious awareness into the landscape of the unconscious. There, creativity gathers itself before returning to where it can be grasped. I look around at my bed, at the landscape of garbage I have accumulated – and for a moment it all looks utterly romantic. According to Jung, I’m not dried up. I’m just waiting.

I wonder how long I will have to wait.

I consult the tarot for when this might end. I check the annual profection in my birth chart. I pull runes out of a velvet pouch in search of answers. I consult the oracle, Zadie Smith, who, through her essay on craft, asks me whether I work at a macro or micro level. In other words, do I plot the book and then fill in the blanks, or do I set down one sentence at a time? I do the second, I say to her text in front of me. Then I pause. Well, that’s not entirely true. Some of my writing has required plotting and planning. I begin to write an essay in response to hers, describing the scaffolding that will hold my next book together. It is several hours before I realise that this is a pointless exercise – I cannot predict how my next book will emerge. I begin to sweat. I put Zadie away, I’m not ready to face her yet.

I have been here before. The vertiginous drop into doubt and anxiety feels familiar, as does the terrifying distance I have to travel. I begin to remember my first novel, and how overwhelmed I was at the thought of conjuring an entire world. How would I choose what to include and what to leave out? How would I manage to find a shape in this baggy mess?

I was lucky at that time to find a teacher to guide me. Her name is Madelyn and her technique is called sense writing. By bringing together her knowledge of movement, neuroscience and healing, she offered me a way around the blocks. In her workshop, we started on the floor, mapping the body, and allowing the brain to do what came naturally. Sometimes my mind would wander, sometimes I would yawn. Everything was permitted. We observed how we felt in our bodies, what was alive to us at the moment.

Later, she would explain that this sequence was about calming the nervous system, allowing it to rest, and entering a parasympathetic state, where we could eliminate the noise, the anxiety and the looming deadlines. Writing exercises followed. I started with small memories, images, sensations, and, sentence by sentence, I collected an entire narrative without counting words and pages. I felt in control only after I allowed myself that kind of release.

Editing used similar principles – I observed how rereading my writing made me feel, where the energy dipped or where I longed for more white space. The technique brought me back to my senses in a way that felt powerful and direct. I used it to rewrite sections from my narrator’s childhood that felt flat or overexplained. The immediacy of the writing that came through matched the immediacy of a young girl’s experiences. In other sections of the book, I used the sense writing sequences to get to the heart of the character’s trauma. By drifting away from the central locus of pain, I discovered, through various writing exercises, that my narrator’s anger resided elsewhere. The path of her anguish was not linear, and through this technique, I uncovered alternate routes into her story.

—

I begin to remember that the only way I can write a novel is by forgetting I am writing a novel – by getting out of my head and settling into my body. I start to do things that quiet my nervous system, imagining the inkblot that I would make on the floor, or how much space I am taking up in the room. Slowly, as I focus on the exploration rather than the product, words begin to accumulate.

Avni Doshi is the author of Burnt Sugar.

Full-Bodied Prose (Originally published in Entropy)

by Ruth Ebenstein

Picture this.

A Jewish mom in Jerusalem gets breast cancer and joins an Israeli-Palestinian breast cancer support group. She meets a Muslim breast cancer survivor who lives on the other side of an eight-foot concrete barrier in the West Bank. Compatibility strikes, then deep friendship. Hollywood-inspired hope, right?

I’m that Jewish mom.

Already at that first meeting in 2011, Ibtisam Erekat and I discovered that we had incredibly similar personal biographies. We were both religiously observant. We had both married in our thirties, late in our respective traditional communities. Each of our husbands was a divorcé who was several years our senior and had brought children into the marriage. We both had birthed three children in three years. And the two of us were nursing our babies when we were diagnosed with breast cancer, which was rather uncommon.  I had never met anyone who shared so many critical elements of my life story. “Same here,” said Ibtisam, in impressive English she had gleaned off the television. Even more astounding was the match in personality: Ibtisam, like me, was funny, outgoing, fearless. The conversation flowed, and we couldn’t stop laughing.

In 2012, we traveled together to Bosnia as part of an Israeli-Palestinian delegation of breast cancer survivors. There, miles away from the turmoil of our region, our friendship blossomed. In time, we grew to be kin; our children, spouses, and extended families grew close, too.

This was a story begging to be told. So I did. I crafted an essay about our trip to Bosnia and another about our friendship. Penning a memoir was a natural next step.

I rented a charming writing room atop a plant nursery, propped my laptop on a table covered with a flowered tablecloth, and poured a cup of Bengal Spice tea.

And that’s when my fingers got stuck.

Lightly grazing the keys on the keyboard, I couldn’t write a word.

The page on my computer screen stayed blank. Or was that my mind?

Why couldn’t I get down the story? I was a journalist with years of writing experience and I knew what I wanted to say. I envisioned a trajectory of three plot points: illness-friendship–reassessment. But when I tried to actually render the scenes in which friendship and cancer had changed me, I froze.

The essays I had written contained the scaffolding of my experience.  As such, they had been composed with relative ease. But my memoir demanded diving right into the heart of the matter—the rawness of disease, the fears and complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, embracing “other”, whatever that meant. I had to paint the pictures and settings in which those had happened, and I could not retrieve them with sufficient detail. Some I couldn’t retrieve at all.

There was no question that developing that kind of tell-your-secrets kinship with someone from across the Israeli-Palestinian divide had cracked me open. My knee-jerk inclination to see “other” as psychically miles away from me disappeared. Not only Muslims or Palestinians, but others of all kinds grew to feel familiar.  The outer shells of people of different races, religions, nationalities, those with some sort of disability—were, I could now see, just shells. The deep understanding that bonded me to my fellow travelers had prompted me to question the arbitrary divides between us and challenge the utility and logic of conflict. But, somehow, I was unable to put this in writing.

Trying to crack it, I remembered that the most creative and stirring prose I had ever composed emerged from a writing class I had taken with a playwright/director in a yoga studio in Tel Aviv in 2011. We had alternated between stretching at the bar and stretching our minds. Or did those happen at the same time?

So after fumbling for a few weeks, I called Madelyn Kent, who had gone back to New York. She told me about her method, Sense Writing, which drew from the principles of Feldenkrais, a somatic educational system intended to improve quality of movement and general wellbeing. Was I game to try one-on-one coaching across the Atlantic?

I was.

Our weekly Thursday night Skype sessions began with body mapping. Lying on my back, sprawled across a turquoise-and-lavender yoga mat in my study in Jerusalem, I listened to Madelyn’s sonorous voice encourage me to notice the contact points where my body touched the cold stone floor: pelvis, shoulder blades, spine, ankles, neck.  She explained that these specific movements were intended to quiet down my nervous system.

I was encouraged to float inside a scene I wanted to explore. Notice the source and quality of light. Are the sounds close by or faraway? Distinguish the smells. What’s the taste in my mouth?

In reaching for sensory detail, my shoulders settled. My breathing slowed. The focus on process took away the pressure to “say something deep.” I was too busy trying to listen to the timbre of people’s voices and notice the quality of their skin to worry about being profound. Had they dressed for the weather? Had the light changed since I had first entered that setting?

Crisp, real and textured were the sentences that I wrote.  Critical elements of events, pains and hurts, character, desire and plot percolated to the surface. I plucked details like daisies, pieces of my story that I didn’t know were there. Every writing session was a thrill, an adventure. An opportunity to run, and be, naked, footloose, carefree. I could do this! I could write that!

But my confidence faltered when I was alone. Though I dutifully recited the sequences on my own and practiced the writing exercises that emphasized the senses, I failed to replicate the magic.

Serendipitously, Madelyn wanted to encourage sustainable independent practice. One spring afternoon, she called. “I’ve recorded tailored sequences of Sense Writing to be used at home. Would you like to give it a shot?”

The format appeared straightforward: weekly meetings with Madelyn would now be followed by taped sequences of body mapping and writing, like we’d done on Skype.  The best part: I could play the recordings whenever I wanted.

The following Thursday, I lugged my yoga mat and furry lime-green blanket to my writing room. I plugged in my laptop, selected a writing sequence and stretched my arms and legs on the mat.

And… there she was!

“When we lie down on the floor, all the habits we’ve accumulated from standing up and dealing with evolution and gravity disappear. What’s left when you lie down?”

Air filled and stretched my lungs. Inhaled through my mouth, exhaled through my nose. The worries of the day washed away.

I placed my palms on my eyes to block out the light and quiet down my optic nerve. Then I cupped my chin in my hand and moved it ever so gently from left to right, left to right.

Break these events down sense by sense, advised Madelyn. Later on, you’ll weave it together.

On that particular morning, I wanted to write about my visit to a Muslim girls’ school in Mostar, Herzegovina, in 2012 with our Israeli-Palestinian delegation. I remembered little from that afternoon; we were not allowed to photograph the students.

I pressed play on a 22-minute recording called “Specificity leads to Vastness.”

The scene started to fill out in my mind like a painting on a canvas. I saw teeth marks in chewed bubble gum stuck under a student’s desk. I heard two giggly hijabi teenagers whisper in incomprehensible Bosnian. I smelled bits of leftover chocolate stashed in a backpack in the back row. I felt, and heard, flip-flops slapping and thwacking-thwacking the floor as I entered the bathroom with the special bidet hose. The students sang me a rousing ‘Happy Birthday’ in accented English. Here was a sensory detail. And another. Where were my Palestinian friends? Oh, they were lined up on the bench to my right. And behind them, rows of green square tiles and a framed Muslim prayer icon.

Wait! There I am! On my legs, pressing creases out of my blue jeans and a royal-blue cowl-neck shirt. I turn to address the Bosnian teenagers from the back of the room.

“When you see me walking down the street, you don’t say, ‘there goes the breast cancer survivor.'”

My words are translated into incomprehensible Bosnian. Forty sets of female eyes framed in head scarves are on me.

“That’s because there’s nothing outwardly that shows that I survived cancer.” Now those eyes stare at me with great intent. Some narrow their eyes on my chest. “Look around the room. The same can be said about all of my friends.”

My words are again translated into Bosnian.

“So don’t be afraid! Let your fingers check your breast for lumps in bed or in the shower.”

Feel your body, I advise them. Get in touch with your senses. Trust them.

Just like my writing!

Somehow, I had forgotten that on my 44th birthday, which I had spent in a Muslim girls’ school in Mostar, I had given my first public speech as a breast cancer survivor—my debut as a health activist.

With the slightest cracking open of a door, that scene just slid right out.

Yes.  I could do this.

I could write this memoir.

Ruth Ebenstein is an American-Israeli writer, historian and peace activist.

A Surprising Connection That Changed My Writing Life
My Journey in Sense Writing

by Jenna Marin

“Is this a children’s story?” my college professor asked me in front of the class.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” I answered, mortified. We were workshopping my story that day. It wasn’t nearly ready to be edited; it was the forced product of a school assignment.

I was an English and Creative Writing major in a reputable writing program. When we weren’t workshopping our pieces, we were discussing other authors’ work as an inspiration for our own. Before each assignment was due, I would sit at my laptop for hours, struggling to produce something decent before it would be subject to public criticism. I found that the whole product-oriented “process” bred nothing but anxiety and insecurity.

I went to law school at the University of Pennsylvania and reluctantly buried my passion for creative writing for three years. Though law school did make me a better writer, I felt that a part of me was dead. I found the law to be dry and technical. As graduation inched closer, every job opportunity presented did not seem appealing. Finally, I decided to meet with a career counselor.

“So you’re not interested in private practice,” she said, “What about public interest work?” I had had several public interest law jobs. The legal work was basically the same with half the salary.  I grew more and more frustrated. None of the jobs she was presenting felt like a good fit for me, but I couldn't fully articulate why. She didn't know much about me, either. Finally she looked at me, and in what could have been one of the most honest moments of my life, she said: "Jenna, when I have these sort of conversations with students, it is usually because they are too scared to say what they really want: either they don't want to practice law and want to be a businessman, they want to be a politician, or they want to be a writer. Jenna, it sounds like you just want to be a writer."

And there it was.

I tried to hold back the tears. A woman who hardly knew me was telling me something that I couldn't even admit to myself. I never intended to write professionally, but being a writer was just who I was. I couldn’t avoid it any longer. Yet how could I graduate an Ivy League law school and not practice law?

After taking the bar, I went to Israel for the year to take a break and reconnect with myself. One night, I was scrolling through my news feed on Facebook, when an ad for a creative writing workshop in Jerusalem called Sense Writing caught my eye. I clicked on the website and read about a writing method developed by former NYU professor Madelyn Kent. The website explained how Sense Writing, largely influenced by Somatic Education (a form of mind-body training) focused on the process of writing by working with your nervous system. I was intrigued and terrified at the same time.

You see, when I was in college, a peculiar thing happened. During a routine visit to the eye doctor, I was given eye drops, and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the examining table with the doctor holding my legs up into the air to increase blood flow to my brain. I had fainted. A few months later at another doctor’s office after getting my blood taken, I fainted again. I was told that I had “vasovagal syncope:” a condition where certain anxiety “triggers” cause the body to faint. After these first episodes, my triggers became anything medical. I found that with each doctor visit, I was anxious and lightheaded at the dreaded prospect of my next fainting spell.

When I read about Sense Writing, I felt almost as if I was walking into one of my triggers. I did not like the idea of messing with my neurological framework. But I was determined to reclaim my identity as a writer.

In the dark room where the Sense Writing workshop took place, we laid on mats on the floor. In a deliberate, calm voice, Madelyn asked us to just notice different parts of our bodies and how they related to each other and made contact with the floor. I felt my heart pounding. “Notice your breath,” Madelyn said. “Don’t change it. Just notice. No need to correct anything.”

When we sat up to write, I felt that this “bodymapping” noticing sensation inside, little by little, took my fear away. My body was extremely calm and grounded and my voice was able to come through much more easily than I was used to. I was enjoying writing in this mode so much that I wished the exercise wouldn't end.

I left the two-day workshop knowing I needed to deepen this practice, so I began working with Madelyn one-on-one via Skype when I returned to the U.S and delved deeper into the Sense Writing training. Through the training, we immediately started to make connections between the way the nervous system works and my creative process.

One of the influences of Sense Writing is Moshe Feldenkrais, the creator of Feldenkrais and one of the granddaddies of neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself. During the Sense Writing training I read Feldenkrais’s "Learning to Learn” and was taken by his idea that one can actually achieve more without trying, by simply doing the work. Throughout my years of school, the motto was always "try harder." I wanted to see if I could achieve more by trying less. In posting my reflections to Madelyn on my private webpage (these self-reflections are a major part of the training) I wrote, I am not here to achieve a specific result, but to experience a process. That’s when I realized what was missing in my undergrad program- it was all product and no process.

The training included recorded sequences, all of which were designed to engage my nervous system in the creative process. With each recording, I focused on different aspects of my body. The equilibrium I achieved through the exercises was far superior to my normal equilibrium, which opened me up to the physical sequences even more. The writing and movement sequences enabled me to reduce my cognitive noise and then trick myself into new creative habits. Instead of struggling and working against my nervous system while writing, my nervous system was now working for me.

I had been scared of interfering with my physiological makeup, but as the weeks went on, I began to understand that I was simply afraid of the unfamiliar. Once I began to explore and learn the landscape of my nervous system, I grew comfortable in its intricacies. This intimacy actually carried over and allowed me to settle in and become more detailed in the landscape of my writing.

By focusing on process rather than product, I found that my writing was the best it had ever been and that I was enjoying writing more than I had in a long time. The physical and creative sequences in Sense Writing worked hand in hand to get me out of old physical and writing habits and develop new ones in a sustainable practice.

Sense Writing gave me the tools and the confidence I needed to begin writing again, both personally and professionally. I recently launched a website, Modernjewishgirl.com, and have been working as a freelance writer. The work continues, but at least I feel I am finally on the right path—one that doesn't have an end—and for that I am eternally grateful.

Jenna Marin, former creative writing major who later trained as an Environmental Lawyer, writes of her circuitous journey to trusting her nervous system again and rediscovering her first love.