This is an ongoing free series that started in July, 2020.
Each recorded sequence follows its accompanying blog below.
Bigger than the Sum of its Parts
Choosing Process
Constraints Lead to Freedom
Not Writing into Blocks (Custom-made for this year, 2020!)
Sequence #1: Bigger than the Sum of its Parts
“Arrive at a difficult place, and stay like that for a moment. In this difficult situation, stop acting, or ‘doing,’ and breathe freely. Stay like this." -Moshe Feldenkrais
In the quote above, Feldenkrais says to “stop acting, or doing” and just breathe freely.
But as many of us know, it’s often hard to breathe when under pressure or in a feeling of crisis.
There are many things that can interfere with our breath.
Individually, our old patterns or injuries.
Systemically, historical patterns of oppression and exploitation.
Neurologically, fear, hypervigilance, shutting down (and other deregulating nervous system responses).
Right now, globally, it’s not one cataclysm that arrives and then ends, but an ongoing crisis. On the ground level for most of us, it’s fast enough that we have, collectively, some agitation in response — but much slower than hurricanes or wildfires, so there may be enough time to pause and to respond and adapt.
Many people are writing about not going back to “normal.” That this drawn-out moment is a chance to redraw the outlines of possibility, both societally and individually.
But how do we stay in these moments of possibilities that include the chaotic? How do we stay in these suspended states of creativity without rushing to what Feldenkrais calls “premature interpretations”?
You might guess the answer: paradox.
In this series, we’re recognizing the potency of not rushing through embodied exploration of paradoxes. Not rushing to make things orderly.
Paradox: Awareness of Differences Leads to Integration
When the nervous system is in an activated survival state, there can be learning and creating. But this learning is often about survival, narrowness, tunnel vision — not building a sustainable vision or practice.
The sequence below explores the chance to stay in a parasympathetic-dominant state. (A sustainable, not survival-oriented, creative state.)
The nervous system likes to look for differences. When it’s in a parasympathetic-dominant state of growing and learning, this is what it does. This is where we were when we did the most learning and growing during our first few years alive, when we were teaching ourselves how to roll over, to move, crawl, walk… how to be in the world, both internally and externally.
The nervous system learns by sensing smaller and smaller differences.
And when you give your nervous system the chance to refine its ability to differentiate, you’re also honing its ability to integrate these differences.
To become whole.
You can’t really rush to integration and harmony (or as Shelly Duvall’s character in Annie Hall puts it, to “transplendent” states). It might feel good to jump to the “end,” but it will contract us back into habitual patterns and won’t really give us the tools to redraw the lines of what is “normal.”
Slow, slow, slow,
quick.
Because the deep process of integration and wholeness calls for there first being distinct, clarified parts. (Paradox!) The more clarified these parts are, the smoother the process of integration. (The more we let ourselves explore chaos, the more harmony will emerge.)
The nervous system learns and grows through differentiation and integration. We don’t have to willfully rectify the differences. We don’t have to “overcome” them and aim toward balance and harmony.
We just notice.
And just by lowering the noise of our usual distraction and noticing, the nervous system is invited in to do what it likes to do: integrate these differences into larger, more complex maps.
And the skill that we develop is not to have perfectly balanced bodies through dint of will and alignment. The skill that we build is the ability to gently work with the nervous system and notice finer and more subtle differences.
So that these too can be integrated. Sometimes immediately, sometimes in time.
The following basic sequence is a way of giving the nervous system a chance to do what it loves to do: look for differences.
And find wholeness.
“Nothing is disposable, the cycle of life makes use of everything. Humans have created a hierarchy of value-- we have made certain people disposable. How do we shift into a culture where conflict and difference are generative?”-Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy
For this sequence, you’ll need a stable chair without wheels. Notebook and pen are optional.
Sequence #2: Choosing Process
We’ve touched on what paradox is and how it can offer our nervous systems a new way to process and grow, especially during an experience like we're having now.
One that challenges our existing understanding of how the world works — or how it could work.
In the short term, that necessary new imagination of how we live, work, find intimacy, find solitude, build community, build society (etc.) feels like a matter of survival in many ways.
Finding ways to connect without touching, or even get ice cream without standing in a crowded shop, is an immediate need (or, okay, after sorting out medical care and groceries).
But in the long term, this newly utilized imagination — and the power of paradox to help us expand and enrich it — is not just about immediate survival but about growing a sustainable life and creative practice.
Of course, crisis isn’t the only way to discover an alternate path, even though for many of us it’s hard to imagine an alternative until we have to. I was lucky: I found a mentor pretty early on who showed me, both in his work and by his own example, what it could look like to learn differently.
Nature is a series of processes.
World-renowned plant morphologist Rolf Sattler was born in Germany right before WWII, had a strict botanical education, and later became a biology professor at McGill. By the time I took his courses in philosophy and history of biology, he was years away from his education in Germany, and he laid out, in very precise ways, the distorting reductionism of modern plant morphology.
In his classes, he showed us alternative ways of investigating natural phenomena, influenced not by an expected, rigid order, but by process philosophy, fuzzy logic, and non-dualism...to name a few.
All of these ideas would later influence my art and, eventually, the development of Sense Writing.
Especially process philosophy.
By applying process philosophy, Sattler revolutionized plant morphology, envisioning nature as a series of processes, always changing, rather than static entities to be dissected and labeled. Sattler saw the familiar mechanistic, reductionist mode as not just destructive to nature, but also unsustainable to himself as a scientist.
He didn’t just talk about an alternate way, like so many do, but developed tools that allow for an investigation of phenomena in non-mechanistic, more holistic ways, where human and nature are no longer separated into subject and object.
Foundational changes that process can bring.
That’s a big part of why we don’t just talk about theory and neuroplasticity in Sense Writing, but offer ways of experiencing them, through the sequences and exercises — bone deep.
Traditional writing classes focus on structural elements like character arc, plot, etc.-- as if art could immediately be reduced to having the right parts.
Sense Writing, however, starts with embodied processes that connect us with deeper states of experience. Paradoxically, by not focusing on traditional aspects of craft, these start to emerge organically from a connected, generative process.
The workshop is another central feature of traditional writing classes far and wide. This means we spend most of our time giving and getting feedback. And worrying about whether our writing is good enough can cause our inner fingers to seriously cramp up.
In Sense Writing, we invert this in the way we write and create, focusing instead on the foundational changes that process can bring.
Returning to body-based sequences gives our writer’s fingers something to do moment to moment instead of worry and clutch.
It's what artists do.
Through the years I’ve stayed in touch with Rolf. And because he’s 84 and it’s the pandemic, we’ve been in touch more.
He just sent me a chapter of the book he’s working on, and as he references William James and Goethe, I’m realizing that being an artist is what Rolf was on about all this time. You can see it in his idea of biology, which allows things to be messy, to be “both and,” to feel chaotic rather than rushed into answers to satisfy a craving for categorical purity and order.
In the writing sequence below, experience how, when you put process before product, the process often leads to easier, richer writing. You’ll need a notebook and pen, a comfortable place to write, and a place on the floor to lie down.
Sequence #3: Constraints Leads to Freedom
I dug for a long time
in the same place
not to find a thing
a trace, a chair, or even bones
All I wanted was
that with persistence
my hands would change
“This Waiting” by Nazem El Sayed
Hi Everyone,
In this series of introductory Sense Writing sequences, we’ve been exploring how paradox can help support suspended states of exploration, how it can be part of building a sustainable creative practice.
From the beginning of my Feldenkrais training, the paradox that struck me the most was the relationship between constraints and freedom.
Decades before developing Sense Writing, I used constraints to explore freedom in all parts of my creative practice, not just in teaching writing but also in directing, devising scripts, and investigations with actors and non-actors... In fact, many of the Sense Writing sequences that incorporate constraints come from this period, long before I trained in Feldenkrais.
Constraints help the nervous system form new pathways
Perhaps one of the reasons the relationship between constraints and freedom has been so powerful in my work as an artist is that I had been experiencing it for years, even before I understood it.
When I was about four, I was diagnosed with a condition called “amblyopia,” which was known back in the 1970s as “lazy eye.” And back then “lazy eye” was considered an eye issue. But really, though we didn’t know it at the time, it was a neurological condition.
One of the treatments was to wear a patch, and this treatment was one of the first widespread treatments of a neurological condition through neuroplasticity.
You hear a lot about the word “neuroplasticity” these days (including from me!), but it’s a relatively new term. Only in the last 20 years has neuroscience really accepted it as the way the brain works. In the 1970s, without even knowing why it was really working, mainstream ophthalmology was tapping into neuroplasticity using strategies of constraint-induced therapy.
Constraining my stronger eye by wearing an eye patch encouraged my brain and nervous system to find new ways to orient and see in the world.
And my brain, slowly but surely, re-wired, making gradual, small improvements that my nervous system could actually process and absorb.
Paradox is an experience.
Moshe Feldenkrais is considered a pioneer of neuroplasticity. Though secular as an adult, he grew up in a Ukrainian shtetl steeped in paradox, a culture of Hasidic tales and the dialectical debates of the Talmud.
He was also a physicist and a Judo master. In a personal encounter with Feldenkrais, practitioner Russell Delman recalls his teacher recommending a book by a Japanese Zen master living in Jerusalem:
As he would often do, Moshe asked me to read the book as I sat across from him at his desk. He had met with this master and was curious about my impression. When I finished, I expressed my gratitude for the emphasis placed on authentic, personal experience that Zen masters including this man express. He looked up and said, “If I did not have my own teaching, I would study Zen because they are the only ones who really understand and appreciate paradox.”
Feldenkrais, resonant with the Zen writing here, taps into a fundamental aspect of neuroplasticity: that the experience of paradox--in our bodies, our breathing patterns, our nervous systems—can lead to change.
Bridging from the body to the page.
The field of neuroplasticity is catching up with these insights, including in the study of creativity. And many of us have probably experienced the way that formal constraints open up new possibilities in both movement and writing by nudging us out of familiar patterns into something new.
In Sense Writing, the sequences allow us to experience the paradox of constraints and freedom not just as a concept or formal element but, first and foremost, as sensation.
Whether in writing or movement, the sensation may continue in our bones and neural pathways, subtle and resonant, engendering a new ease or insights.
For this sequence, you’ll need a comfortable, stable chair, and a notebook and pen.
Sequence #4: Not Writing into Blocks
It seems like a lot of correspondences lately have settled into a wry, resigned acknowledgment of the deep weirdness of the past year.
Somehow, even though life these days is still far from whatever we called “normal,” circumstances can’t help but become familiar.
Our brains adapt.
Ironically, you could say that’s partly the brain’s superpower at work: learning, integrating, re-aligning. But for most of us, this adaptation has been more survival instinct than creative curiosity, and it’s hard to imagine either remaining indefinitely in this no-longer-new rhythm of life in a pandemic or seamlessly returning to life before it.
So what’s left for us as we round our way into the new year?
How do we find a way into the space between an interminable stuckness and a far-off glimmer of life on the other side?
To solve an an unsolvable puzzle, look to an unsolvable puzzle. Of course, I’m talking about paradox – one of the most playful and profound tools in Sense Writing.
The Paradox Series
In the summer, I sent out a series of Sense Writing sequences that explored paradox. Recently I've been thinking about one paradox in particular that can help us step into this space between: not writing into blocks.
Paradoxes are often associated with self-contradictory statements or puzzles meant to provoke new insight. When studying the Feldenkrais Method, I noticed they were a particularly generative tool for learning.
By activating open yet contained explorations, paradox can be essential not only for deep learning and neuroplasticity, but also for individual creativity.
There will always be resistance towards directives that tell our nervous systems to "take it easy" or "relax" — but even more so when our collective safety is being actively threatened while a global health crisis drags on into its second year.
This resistance is natural.
We can’t force ourselves to go slow when our nervous system feels a need to rush. After all, it’s activated for a reason, and it’s doing the best job it can at keeping us alive.
But we can respect what our nervous system thinks it needs to be doing and still access the potency of slow motion.
And that’s through a practice that works with paradox.
Meeting Ourselves Where We Are
Many people who come to a Sense Writing workshop are new writers, never having written before, hesitant to even begin. But many are experienced writers who feel stuck in a particular project and are eager to crack that part open, like a localized therapy to massage and soften a tight shoulder.
But as students have discovered over the years, it’s usually not a crack that softens the stuckness, but a slow, patient, indirect approach – which eventually dissolves the very obstacle in the way of their voice and their creative freedom.
In other words, instead of trying so hard to come up with every detail of what we want to say and pin it down with meaning, what if we created an opportunity to observe it freely from inside it?
By meeting ourselves where we are, making room for the vagueness — the feeling that things can feel both urgent and remote at the same time — we allow our voices to flow around and through the block, no abruptness required.
In Sense Writing, participants are encouraged to take their time. Hardened terrain is hard for a reason. By going into other stories, other times, other landscapes, they end up discovering how movement, thought, emotion, and the senses connect in any story. By inviting a suspended state of uncertainty when memories are hard to access, they discover easier pathways to the stories trying to get through.
Wherever you are, whatever your nervous system is doing, it thinks it needs to be there. And the paradox is that you have to listen to it freaking out for it to be able to re-imagine itself into a different future waiting ahead.
For this sequence, you’ll need a comfortable place to write, a stable chair, a notebook, and pen.
