Summer Gift Series: What is Art for?

Hi Everyone!

Welcome to the Summer Gift Series: What is Art for? In this 4-part series, we'll be asking that question and exploring some answers, which include a free Sense Writing sequence.

And what better place to start than midtown Manhattan, 1990s?

I remember coming back to NY on a break from university and walking down 42nd Street near the Port Authority.

I had become familiar with the notorious neighborhood as a teenager, sometimes cutting high school to wander around. I was young, but I felt safe walking around outside, sometimes taking photographs and developing them. I felt I knew where to walk, and where not to, and doing this let me hone my intuition. 

The streets felt particularly forlorn that day I was visiting. It was deserted. It was the early 90s — I was in college by then — and the cleanup of Times Square had begun.

The whole area felt like an empty space; there was no longer the notorious economy of the neighborhood, the peep shows and porno shops, but there wasn’t anything yet to replace it. It was now full of abandoned ex-XXX rated theaters and not much else.

Mysterious Messages on 42nd Street

But walking down the street, I kept noticing that the theater marquees normally promoting adult movies now had these mysterious messages— what felt like personal messages just to me.

Years later, I learned that artist Jenny Holzer had taken over all the marquees during this transitional period, but at the time, they felt like whispers just for my visit. It was transfixing and dreamlike, like seeing the northern lights but having no one to tell.

How did this happen? Who let this happen?

These days, though they can feel a lifetime away from the sanguine 1990s, I find myself thinking about that landscape, that no-man’s land, when something is changing and no one knows what to make of it yet. 

And though the potential for ruin is high in these neglected spaces, this is also where surprises can happen.

Tuning into Texture

But in order to notice or invite these surprises, we have to actually be where we are, in that space of the seedy neighborhood that doesn’t know what it’s turning into yet.

Be there, even though you’re a little scared, intentionally putting yourself out of your familiar context, still safe but maybe a little on the edge. Instead of accepting the stories of how it is (thanks, mom and dad), you go looking for the texture of how a place actually feels.

That’s what being a teenager is— going to an edge and coming back home, and then going back out again. 

And it’s also what creativity is.

As we grow out of our growing-up years, we can lose touch with that process and instead end up with more familiar responses to profound uncertainty, like:

• Despair!

• Trying to hold it together, clinging to the illusion of normalcy

• Or seeking to “rise above it all” and taking the high road

These responses are effective coping mechanisms— but they’re all choices that keep us away from the texture of our experience.

The Paths Back

In this summer series, we’ll be exploring paths back to the texture through the power of our body and nervous system.

This is what art and art making can do— even these days, when we might be asking what art is even for. (I know that I’ve been asking this question, along with many of my friends.)

Like Jenny Holzer changing the marquee signs — and the municipal office who granted her the permit to do so — art: 

• Gives us a way out of despair!

• Loosens our grip on always trying to cope 

• Lets us not always take the high road

In the next few weeks, we’ll be looking for some answers andseeing what emerges in practice in a free Sense Writing sequence. And in doing so, I’m hoping to find my own way there too.

New Year's Gift: Becoming Your Own Muse

“We thought it was crazy when there was a pandemic, and then we thought it was crazy when…” My friend was wide-eyed as he threw the recycling into the bin after a holiday meal.

I knew how politically passionate he’d been since we were roommates in Berlin 20 years ago, so the politics talk was normal— but the amused incredulousness was not. I detected a bewildered smile on his face as he expressed fascination at the different levels of normal we seem to be able to tolerate.

Though I’ve had this conversation with friends countless times in the last few years, I’m still amazed at the ways that we adjust. Somehow, we cope. And some of us do it with the occasional cockeyed smile. Me included.

But as we go along with revised versions of our regular lives, kicking the can of normalcy down the road, other things — essential things — often get kicked away.

Bewilderment vs. Becoming

Now there are even more interruptions and distractions from the “luxury” of creative time — and certainly more awareness of global troubles.  

The intensity can feel immersive and even enlivening, but we often end up confused and disoriented, still craving something meaningful but struggling to grasp it. 

The whirlwind of words around us is a stand-in for the connection and emotion we’re still craving.

So even though we can feel more engaged than ever, our own connection to our creativity can get hijacked by channels that don’t fulfill us in the ways we expected or need. 

I know for me, even as I’m adjusting to an ever-receding sense of stability (and joking with my friend at the recycling bin), it’s all the more essential to have a foundational creative practice that meets me where I am. 

It’s through grounding ourselves in a practice — through our body and nervous system — that we can start to sharpen our ability to develop an intimate dialogue with ourselves.

And develop a creative practice of our own that meets our needs wherever we are.

In the next email, you'll receive a free video training that gives you a glimpse into the neuroplastic principles that can help you do this:

 The Four Steps of Becoming Your Own Muse

animation detail from the The Four Steps’ animation

The Clarity of Creativity

The Four Steps of Becoming Your Own Muse uses science to clarify a process that often seems opaque. These steps can allow you to better regulate, bypass anxiety, and find your voice as a writer — and reconnect with your own creative practice.

Sense Writing has always been about developing a sustainable creative practice. But it’s not just about writing and making art. 

Giving you both the theory and the practice empowers you to develop a deep dialogue with your body and nervous system — no matter what else is happening outside. 

It’s a reusable resource to plug into yourself, so that we can engage with the world, with ourselves, and with our voices.

I hope it gives you a sense of grounded discovery for the new year!

More soon.

Calmness vs. The Calling

This Potent Summer Series started with a lot of noise. 

We looked at how the potency that drives our creative practice can get stifled by all kinds of noise, both external and internal.

We also talked about the static noise that’s created when we try to distance from the intensity inside ourselves — and often end up pushing away the stories we want to tell in the process.

In the last blog, I talked about “the radio within,” a metaphor that can help people understand what it means to work on a foundational level of the body and nervous system.

It’s not just about turning down the noise that obscures what we’re listening for.

It’s also about enhancing the music.

Pleasing vs. Potent

Learning to work on this neuroplastic level isn’t about being relaxed all time and listening to beautiful, calm music. As we know, the music under all the noise isn’t all Enya!

Instead, when we learn to tune in to “the richness underneath it all,” we discover the landscapes and stories we’ve been waiting to tap into.

The music inside of us, the stories we yearn to tell, can also be like the complex, discordant notes of Stravinsky or the punk music wafting from a back room in London in the 1970s or (my inner music) a plaintive ballad sung on a karaoke machine at 2 in the morning. 

Hearing what’s there is all about meeting ourselves exactly where we are — all of ourselves, including the fragments, the fuzziness, the chaos and the silences. 

By working on this foundational level of the body and nervous system, we learn to bring our whole selves to this tuning of the radio.  

And we learn that working deeply with neuroplastic principles in creative practice is different than “just relaxing” to write.

But how do we learn to tune this inner radio?

Approaches that work on this neuroplastic level, like Sense Writing and the Feldenkrais Method, grow capacity in the landscape of the body and sensation — so we can learn to be present with all of what we encounter or experience, be engaged and whole in it, rather than racing to fix it or heal it or expel it or explain it away.

So that when we feel a calling, we can actually hear it.

A Gift Sequence: Tuning Our Radio

As artists, discomfort and intensity can often be a guide, even a gift. It’s often what calls us to want to write or create in the first place. 

For this series’ gift (at the link below), I wanted to share a Sense Writing sequence that can help you explore different ways of being actively engaged with all your sensation, the wondering and curiosity, yes, but also your discomfort and uncertainty. Because growing your capacity is the key to a potent creative practice.

This movement and writing sequence is probably the most advanced that I’ve ever shared as a gift. You might feel the trial and effort as you explore the non-habitual, and as you notice the different tones, notes, and colors that may emerge.

But in practicing, in this gentle but engaged way, you may also uncover something new — not just in your story but in your ability to be present with it. 

And I hope it will also act as a reminder the next time you notice the thoughts or fragments or images floating inside you, maybe disconnected, or a sticky feeling you can’t put into words yet, that you can allow yourself to exist with what’s there.

To feel all the fragments and fuzziness and discordant notes. And perhaps whole worlds will start to compose themselves.  

All you need is a notebook, pen, and the floor.

Enjoy,

Madelyn

The Static of Separation

Welcome to the Potent Summer Series #2

In this blog series, we’re exploring how our capacity to be with our discomfort, heartbreak and pain, helps us access a more potent writing practice through our sensation, memory and imagination. 

In the welcome email, I spoke a little about how the potency that drives our creative practice gets stifled by all kinds of noise, both external and internal. We also talked about the static noise that is created when we try to distance from the intensity inside ourselves. 

And how this effort to insulate ourselves from discomfort and heartache also keeps us from the potency and richness of what we’re trying to express as writers. It creates a kind of “static of separation”, alienating ourselves from… ourselves.

Tired of Being Tired

In my own life and creative practice, creating separation from the discomfort or pain might have been an initial strategy that worked to protect myself in the moment.

But maintaining the separation often consumes more energy than the thing itself.

In a recent conversation with my Feldenkrais teacher, our conversation about physical pain wandered (as it usually does) to other kinds of pain, and he asked: “How much is the energy consumption from the painful event, and how much is from maintaining separation from the pain?”

It got me thinking about Sense Writing and how we often separate ourselves from the most powerful things we really want to write about. 

Seeing our pain as something separate from ourselves—to fix, to heal, to manage, to explain, to expel— is so energy-consuming. We fixate on a painful event or “the one story” as something outside of us, and trying to maintain that manufactured distance creates more stress and anxiety.

So when we sit down and write, we feel like we have either too much to say or nothing at all. The more we try to write, the further away our story gets.

The anxiety and stress from the effort to keep ourselves separated from parts of ourselves might prevent us from starting, or finishing, anything. Because at least then, we never have to get really into it. 

It’s like when we’re tired and we lie down for a nap and can’t fall asleep. We may not allow ourselves to fully let go into our tiredness. We can’t settle into it. This creates more tiredness, anxiety, stress. 

Stuck in Overdrive

In a way, this makes sense.

More than other forms of expression, writing relies on cognitive processes of thought and language. Other arts can bypass certain traps of over-thinking— think of the instincts that it takes to feel the shape of objects as you draw or sculpt or the physicality of learning a piece of choreography — but writing feels like a brain activity, and sometimes it gets stuck in overdrive.

So, we writers are particularly susceptible to that kind of static noise getting in the way. 

The kind of static that can feel numbing and even comforting. Because the truth is, it’s scary to meet ourselves where we are– we just might not want to.

In the next blog, we’ll look at how we can get better at meeting ourselves where we are, between or beyond the static, even if we don’t really want to. 

And explore how we access the more painful parts of ourselves in a way that is not only sustainable, but actually awakens our passion - despite the static. 

Welcome to the Potent Summer Series

Welcome to the Potent Summer Series!

Most of us are familiar with that feeling: there’s a build-up, there’s a desire to write, but the words don’t come. It may feel like the landscape is barren or the ground is unyielding, with nothing to till. You might know there’s richness underneath, but you can’t seem to get to it.

Whether we write or aspire to, when we feel an urge to connect through words and stories—but can't—we're susceptible to feelings of overwhelm or frustration. 

Even though creativity is a natural expression of being alive, for some reason, when it comes to writing, we often feel stuck.

In this Potent Summer Series, we’ll explore how our ability to grow capacity in the landscape of the body and sensation can not only help us access “the richness underneath it all,” but invite potency into our creative practice, and how our discomfort or heartbreak can act as our most potent creative tool.

After all, what we avoid is often what beckons us to write in the first place.

And we’ll be doing this the “Sense Writing way”: by exploring the edges of our inner world with pleasure and curiosity. 

Inside the Echo

This is a particularly noisy time in the world. Many of us are meeting that reality with internal noise to match it. 

And when we’re in the middle of all that noise, it becomes hard to tell where it’s coming from. And if we don’t know where it’s coming from, how do we know how to quiet it? Before we get to that (and we will), it’s helpful to look more closely at the noise itself: the racket that obscures the potency of our practice and the clarity of our own voice.

Internal Noise

Internal noise is familiar to anyone who’s ever had a grocery list or a doubt. In our creative practice, you know the type: Instead of writing, you think of every errand waiting for you, questioning the value of your work, daydreaming of the circumstances that will change everything. When you finally pick up a pen, there’s a squirrelly feeling of not being able to get the words or tone or ideas just right. It adds up to a cacophony of anxiety, and it’s coming from inside the house.

External Noise

External noise is familiar to anyone with an internet connection—or ears. You can’t help but listen to other people’s words so much that you’ve forgotten what your own voice can sound like. You get excited about your ideas, but then a notification or email pops up to distract and you’re out of the zone.

And then there’s a third noise that I’ve been noticing a lot lately.

Soothing Static

At first, it seems like the sound of soothing should be silent—but when there’s so much noise to drown out, we tend to turn up the volume on whatever makes it go away, and what we get is not quiet at all, but static noise.

An almost numbing and comforting static that allows us to separate from the heartbreak and pain that’s a part of us. We may think the drone of static keeps us protected from the intensity of life—but in insulating us, it also keeps us from the potency and richness of our full expression as writers.

What would it be like, instead, to meet ourselves where we are—without the static of interference?

In the next blog, we’ll take a closer look at how this separation develops, why it gets so sticky, and how we use the body and nervous system to cut through the distance it create

A Field Guild to a Writing Practice

Welcome to the final blog of the The Ecology of Curiosity series, where we’ve been exploring how to become more curious and playful in the darkness, and even enjoy it. The unknown that we tend to run from becomes a path to grow capacity— which is both the seed and the canopy of creative process.

Sometimes, in the darkest season and a distressing cyclone of world events, it can be hard to see past our immediate discomfort— let alone remember how expanding our capacity to sense the unknown is a crucial part of the creative process.

In hindsight, of course, we can recognize that the unknown can be the most potent time to create, when the vulnerable inner world is stirred and gives us the chance to express something less filtered and more real. After all, the comfort zone is not the growth zone. We know that, even when we don’t act on it.

In order to meet the unknown, we have to step out into the muddy, moonless shadows where it lives.  But to meet the unknown without being overwhelmed by it, we need to have a terrain to step into. 

A Widening Terrain

Without a place to land, throwing ourselves into the unfamiliar or darkness can become exhausting, depleting. Without a practice, without rituals to come back to, wading into the unknown of our experiences and stories similarly shrinks our capacity for exploration or growth.

So how do we honor and support the way our nervous systems work long-term to develop the ability to sense more in the unknown, instead of shrinking from it or shrinking in the face of its intensity?

When we develop our skills of perception, even in the unfamiliar, we expand our capacity. We learn to find the balance of safety and surprise— that’s how our nervous system learns best, and that’s where creativity grows. 

That idea is also the foundation of the Sense Writing 12-week course.  With the next session of the course coming up, I’m excited to share a peek with you. 

This is the framework— or field guide— that has supported hundreds of students in showing up for their stories and for the world around them and fostering a resilient creative practice.

These are the 4 parts (along with some images from the course’s animation):

Here, we start to form a relationship with the terrain of our body and external environment. We see that the terrain is there to explore, the spaces we may have been avoiding out of habit or fear, and establish a safe, fertile place from which to work.

Till the soil and soften the terrain, so that the ground becomes not just a refuge but a place from which a story can grow.

As we build awareness of our internal body, our capacity to absorb and process sensation grows— and we begin to connect to language, allowing the stories that are in us to root and surface and gradually see a path to the outside. We get the reassurance that there is something to step into, something waiting for us to discover.

Like the inside of a seed reaching out from its shell toward sunlight, the story sprouts, somehow instinctively knowing it is there.

Just like light, soil, water, and time work together to create a tree, many neuroplastic processes are organically working together in this phase. Without pushing, we encounter our voice and the intrinsic structures of the stories we’re telling.

Just like a tree grows with both steadiness and ease, you’ll get to feel how powerful processes can support your writing without having to push or pull to reach anything.

As you experience the processes we practice and learn how they work, you trust them, and by extension, yourself. Here, in a deep state of learning and creativity, we integrate specific methods to find the connections between stories, strengthening your craft from the inside out.

Held in this environment, you understand that you don’t need to hold on or grab too tightly to develop a resilient writing practice all your own.  

I hope you enjoyed this Ecology of Curiosity Winter Series.

And that you began to get a glimpse (or reminder) of how it feels when you can step into your creative landscape, and develop an interconnected, self-generating artistic awareness that you can access with trust and curiosity.

Winter Gift: Visibility vs. Vision

“I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart.” –Leonard Cohen

Earlier in this exploration of darkness and curiosity, I shared a bit about a creative project that emerged during a time of great uncertainty, both personal and communal. What eventually became Shufu theater— collaborative, spontaneous, and full of buoyant discovery— was born from a dark moment. 

Looking back, it’s clear that that experience never would have happened without the ability to tolerate, even embrace, that disorienting sense of loss, and of feeling lost. 

I often felt like I was wading through hip-deep water at the time, like many after September 11th— but even while I felt overwhelmed, my intuition was sharpening as I learned to discern more detail and texture of what was around me (not only its intensity). 

And, even in the uncertainty, the creative experience was often full of surprising joy.

We don’t have to conjure darkness or beckon it into our doorways to be creative— but we do have to learn to understand this instinct of running from it when it shows up if we want to discover the creative richness that lives within it. 

And in Sense Writing, we develop the neurosensory skills to dissolve the habits that hold us back in the unknown (and if you're extra curious to feel them in action you can skip ahead to the Sense Writing gift below).

Clinging to the Circle of Visibility

When we first encounter the unknown, it’s a reasonable habit to try to stay close to the flashlight beam of what we know. After all, if we’re in danger (or think we are), grasping for the familiar is beyond sensible. 

Yet in the context of creative practice, the flashlight’s beam is limiting. 

As writers, we don’t want mere visibility— we want to see beyond the obvious. We want to explore the landscapes of memory and imagination we know are waiting for us.

When we cling to what we know, our capacity shrinks.

Biologically, that means we stay in an activated state, on alert for danger instead of engaged in curiosity or creative exploration. Our sense of ourselves (and the world we can imagine) shrinks too.

And shrinking means we tend to stay on the surface of our stories. As writers, shrinking means we grab for the easily visible, the habitual—the cliche—instead of reaching to express the “deeper convictions of the heart.”

Instead of seeking comfort (and ending up full of frustration), how can we embrace our curiosity about the unknown— especially when the world can feel so uncertain?

Finding Pleasure at the Edges 

When we go for a walk in the dark, we know that if we just keep looking around, our eyes eventually adjust. Our senses widen, the boundary of our awareness softens, and we notice—and enjoy—more of what’s around us.  

The same is true when we write in the (figurative) dark. In Sense Writing, the neurosensory sequences we use shift us away from activated states towards states of learning. We expand our capacity to absorb sensation, and in doing so enhance our creative process. 

When we work on this foundational level with the body and the nervous system, we build the skill of remaining in the unknown. Our perspective broadens, and our voices begin to emerge. (It’s also a lot more fun than feeling afraid and stuck.)

Through tailored moving and writing sequences, we develop the skills to regulate into a parasympathetic state of learning and growing. 

As we perceive and process more, our awareness grows in complexity—and we can integrate more details and specificity of our stories (instead of staying stuck in habits and cliches).  

We gain access to the whole of ourselves—the ecology of our own system.

And (though we often forget it) when we widen our awareness, we also increase our pleasure. 

In the gift Sense Writing sequence below, you’re invited to experience it for yourself. To take a few moments to keep the flashlight off, let your eyes adjust, and wade into the unknown.  

Growing My Capacity in the Dark

“Everything matters; slow down and pay attention and let the universe come to you like a shy, wild animal sniffing its way in circles towards you.” -Jean Rhode on Sense Writing

Welcome to The Ecology of Curiosity #2.

Many of us, when we were little, were afraid of the dark. A night light somehow kept us safe—protected in its circle of brightness from whatever unrecognizable wonders might be lurking on the periphery. 

We might have gotten less scared as we’ve grown older, or maybe even embraced the idea that there might be something we want to know out there in the borders of our awareness. 

But whether the dark is literal—cold and quiet winter months—or figurative—the world’s scary turbulence or the depths of our own worries or imaginations—it’s often too easy to stay in our bubble and avoid the rest. 

It’s harder to imagine that darkness is necessary, that it could even be inviting and creative. Intriguing and mysterious rather than imposing or menacing.

In the last blog, I mentioned the relationship between nature and creative process (which makes up the botanical framework of the 12-week course). 

We spoke about how we still tend to forget about the darker parts—and how, if we look at our creative process as an ecology that includes all parts of ourselves, one that’s truly sustainable, we can’t leave out the murky, unknown, and mysterious ones.

What Gets Lost in the Light

Today, I want to talk about darkness as a bigger picture: not how to endure it, but why it’s a crucial part of the ecology of creativity itself.

When we’re so quick to grab a flashlight to dispel the darkness (and our fear), we can only see what's lit up. Anything beyond that lit-up circle becomes darker, more impenetrable. 

In staving off the unfamiliar or unknown at the edges, we lose the mystery of what might show itself from the periphery—the same mysterious unknown that nourishes our creative power.

What if, instead, we sat still in the midst of what we don’t know, instead of lighting it up? If we’re patient and trusting, we know: our eyes will naturally adjust. The darkness becomes more sensed, a multifaceted part of the ecosystem: the soil, the night, the waiting inside of an acorn—all of it part of a dynamic whole. Our capacity grows.

And what we so often forget is that this expansion is actually pleasurable, not frightening. As our capacity grows, our words and our actions emerge. 

Collaborating in the Dark

Thinking about sitting with the unknown in this way makes me think of my time as a young theater artist after September 11, when New York City was brewing with raw emotion, colossal grief, and disconnection. 

In that landscape, I found myself teaching English to a group of Japanese women (living in New York because of their businessman husbands) who were shy about speaking a new language. 

They had studied English, but in moving from worksheets to words, they got stuck. They were so afraid of making mistakes that they couldn’t speak up at all. 

In between grammar lessons, to help them feel more comfortable speaking, I did theater exercises with them, and eventually long-form improvisations where they felt freer to speak English—as characters—without the fear of messing up.

These improvisations eventually evolved and the characters developed, and I was struck by the charged, broken language and the deep silences of the women. A new syntax was emerging, and I was mesmerized. I began to write down the scenes that eventually became plays, performed in theaters in the shadow of the former World Trade Center. 

During that particular moment in history, what we created evolved so organically, word by word, scene by scene, with each other and the limitations that we couldn’t name. 

The ”failures,” the mistakes—ultimately letting things be what they were—created a new world. 

When the actors stepped into them, the performances had a rawness and vulnerability that captured the feeling we were all wading in at the time. Full of silence and rupture, this theater communicated a specific experience that felt universal to audiences whose own language felt out of reach.

The complex ecology of that moment—the griefs, my own and others, the joys of discovery, the community—was inseparable from what came out of it. 

The form would never have emerged out of something “lighter.” If I had immediately corrected my students instead of collaborating with them, it would have stayed buried. If I had rushed the process instead of slowing down to sense it, I never would have grown the capacity to recognize what I had never seen before.

Our capacity is both the seed and the canopy of our creative process. And expanding it doesn’t happen in a moment.

In the next blog, you’ll learn more about the science of how that capacity works on a foundational level— the body and nervous system— and you’ll get to experience how it feels when you tap into that level of the body and nervous system and let the edges of what we can truly see expand.

Winter Series: The Ecology of Curiosity

Welcome to The Ecology of Curiosity series. In the next month, we’ll be exploring the generative— and essential— power of staying connected to all parts of ourselves. Even in the dark of winter.

Wishing you a fulfilling and nurturing new year!

Since the beginning of Sense Writing, I’ve often used botany and gardening metaphors. For me, they accurately convey both the simplicity and complexity of the creative process.

When I created the 12-week Sense Writing course, I organized it around four parts: the Ground, Shoots + Roots, The Tree, and The Ecosystem—a framework or terrain— an ecology— that can support people’s growing writing practice.

But even when we talk about ecology— about the idea of wholeness, of complementary processes and parts— many of us tend to overlook the darker or more difficult parts, both within ourselves and outside of us. 

Forgetting that the darker parts of an ecosystem, winter and nighttime, decay and the layers of earth, are an equal foundation of everything that grows out of them.

Instead, we want to skip to the end. 

In our creative lives, we want to be in the whole picture, the big story, enjoying the fruits of completion, not feeling around in the dark. We picture ourselves frolicking in meadows, in entire worlds that we’ve imagined and created. Not lying down on dried leaves on the forest floor.

But when we get curious— even in the dark— we discover an entire supportive creative ecosystem awaiting us.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend 

When we talk about darkness, it’s easy to fall into the habitual interpretation of the word as something grim, bad, opaque. 

But when I talk about the dark parts of the creative landscape, I mean something less defined: the unknown, the periphery, the invisible. Not the opposite of light or good, but what’s hidden, less obvious. 

From a cursory glance, it seems like nothing, but get closer and meet the creatures of soil, the piles of silt, the endless decay. Darkness as in layers of earth, darkness inside the bark of a tree full of microbes and fungi.

The darkness of wading in the expanse of a calm sea under the night sky.

In darkness is where the richness of the unknown lives— not just our fear of it. What we’re yearning for as writers often lives there too, not in the obvious surface of things but in the understories we might hesitate to venture into.

The question is: how do we connect to that unknown instead of avoiding it?

How do we enrich and embolden our curiosity when the world can feel so uncertain? 

To see what lives in the unknown, we must know how to listen— and grow capacity for what we find. 

Invisible Worlds Emerge

As we expand our skills of awareness, we see more. An invisible world emerges bit by bit, full of seeds sprouting, roots entwining, insects molting. More profoundly, our sense of ourselves grows more dimensional. We feel ourselves to be part of what we perceive, able to hold it and even describe it.

As writers, we discover access to worlds we never could have imagined.

In this series of blogs, we’ll delve into curiosity that doesn’t just exist during daylight. 

And in a few weeks, you’ll receive a Sense Writing gift sequence that will explore our capacity to be with the dark and unknown, to expand the edges of our curiosity on a foundational level and discover the ecosystem it’s part of.

And the best part is that, just like lying in the grass listening to unfamiliar birds or walking through the mud after the sun has set, there’s nothing you need to fix or try to remedy. Everything you need is already here. 

The Many Layers of My Story

Just give me many chances

I'll see you through it all

Just give me time to learn to crawl.

-Rickie Lee Jones

In this Grounding Summer series, I’ve been talking about the radical wholeness of Sense Writing and how it differs from practices where grounding is merely a solution to a problem.

And after several years of feeling compelled to respond to the external challenges of the pandemic, it may seem like I’m advocating turning away or avoiding the outside world in favor of internal focus.

In fact, no matter how grounded we are, we are always responding to context. The skills taught in Sense Writing build our ability to do that, both internally and externally.

And Sense Writing—like most things—emerged in response to its context. It’s never been solely about an internal world. It’s never been about cutting yourself off from the outside.

The contexts that led to Sense Writing weren’t flat, singular problems to be solved, but a connected network of layers. To me, it feels like many root systems, intertwined: a complex ecology that can’t be reduced to one origin story.

And maybe you can relate: there are many stories that make up your life and interests and obsessions. In a sense, every origin story is a distortion of the whole picture—yet when they’re seen all together, they end up showing something true.

The Many Layers of Sense Writing

~There’s the story of me as an artist, steeped in theater and storytelling on one hand, and somatics and dance on the other. It was a wildly adventurous time in post-9/11 NYC, where we were creating just blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood. In this shadow grew an experimental artistic landscape, where we were rebuilding our world word by word, and where I dove into rigorous experimentation, exploring the connection between language and the body.

~And there’s the story of me as a teacher, working at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. I found myself teaching traditional theater and storytelling forms (“the well-written play”), touching briefly on more experimental forms. The aesthetic divide between structure and experimentation felt constricting, and I felt my students and peers ping-ponging between the two, unsure of their voices. I knew I needed to go back to the body and uncover a more expansive approach that didn't leave any part of me out.

~Oh, and then there’s the story of me, feeling obligated to define myself as a capital-A “Artist.” In an environment filled with anxiety and competition, I wanted to deepen my process and move away from the struggling artist story to something more sustainable.

This last need led me to leave New York to study Feldenkrais. Though I had studied other forms of somatic education before, when I started to practice Feldenkrais, it felt like a drop of ink on the veins of a leaf, lighting up old and new pathways of inquiry that I’d been immersed, and sometimes tangled, in for years in my creative work—from writing and dance to process philosophy, systems theory, and botany.

And of course there are many more layers…

Digging into Your Own Radical Wholeness

After my Feldenkrais training, I returned to Brooklyn. Gradually, every layer became a foundational seed that grew a kind of ecosystem of Sense Writing, with more than 100 writing and movement sequences organized around five main principles.

Investigating the overlaps between the way the nervous system learns and heals and the creative process is a lifelong practice. That’s why the 12-week course is a lifetime membership, where students can repeat, hone, and spiral back as their needs evolve.

Today, embodied wholeness is not about isolation, sensory deprivation, or being internally self-obsessed; it's how you build your capacity to notice, absorb, and attend to your internal world, right alongside the external one.

The radical part is the agility you gain by building this capacity and the choices that come with that—which include the ability to bypass a creative block or solve a problem, but are not limited to that.

Sense Writing is a way to clarify and integrate your layers—your own grounded root system—full of complexity, insights, experiences. Stories.

And to decide how you want to dig in.

The Radical Wholeness of Sense Writing

In this series, I’ve been talking a lot about subversiveness.

And when we're talking about subversiveness, it naturally raises the question: what are we subverting?

In the last email, you had the chance to experience, in a Sense Writing sequence, how lying down on the floor subverts expectations of how we engage in our creative practice.

Lying down on the floor—the literal act of becoming horizontal—pauses the forward momentum of our everyday narratives. Our body state changes. Patterns that normally keep us stuck are interrupted.

Grounding and lying down on the floor can open pathways to create new, surprising stories, and ultimately invites us to deepen and expand the way we tell our stories.

And sometimes, when we talk about subversiveness it can slide into talking about “opposition.”

Though that's where the idea of subversiveness might start, where we settle in is not about opposing or objecting at all—but a radical sense of wholeness.

That’s because in Sense Writing, grounding is not an answer to something outside of ourselves. It’s not a reaction to the outside world or another person. It’s not external at all.

In fact, it’s so innate that it’s what we did as babies and toddlers—teaching ourselves to roll over, crawl, walk, fall—in a highly exploratory, non-linear process of organic learning.

As we grew out of this more exploratory state, we learned to identify sensations, emotions, discomfort as problems to be “fixed.”

If our head hurts, pop an aspirin. If we feel blocked creatively, sit down and will power through (even though we might feel that with every word, we’re writing away from ourselves).

What is presented to us as a linear problem/solution binary often leads us to feeling like there is a need to fix, improve, or change. This cycle creates separation within us and keeps us cut off from feeling whole.

Sense Writing is about returning that wholeness.

The Joy of Engaged Relaxation

Embodied approaches that work with deep principles of neuroplastic learning—including Feldenkrais and Sense Writing—are about returning to wholeness. Neuroplastic techniques utilize the whole system, without the need to problematize any part of it.

Returning to wholeness is about embodiment itself, and how embodiment connects us, not just to memory, imagination, and emotion, but also to thought and language.

Embodiment gives us access to a complex web of perception and understanding that we can refine—and that we can use as an ever-yielding resource and foundation for our creative practice.

Rather than pushing through blocks and striving to express our deepest selves, this path to deep neuroplastic learning helps us build skills to access a relaxed parasympathetic state.

But it’s more than just about being “relaxed.”

When we’re in an engaged parasympathetic state, our neural pathways branch out and connect, learning how to be in the world, internally, externally, and organically.

Sense Writing helps us rediscover that process.

A process that we’ve already experienced as infants and toddlers, as most of us learned through experimentation, reversing, repeating, finding variations, and then choosing the most optimal for that moment.

Our motivation was often curiosity and pleasure— and play. And we did it with all the time in the world.

When we're more whole and embodied, we’re better able to notice, integrate what's around, discover existing narratives, and feel into new ones. In this state, we connect deeply to our creative core, without reacting to the external up-and-down of everyday life.

Sense Writing uses the power of working on the deep foundational levels of the body and nervous system, not just to repair and remedy, but to connect to creative practice, expression, and craft.

If you’d like the chance to experience this, try the gift sequence from our last Facebook post (#4).

This leads us to create from a place of organic curiosity and pleasure, rather than instilled fear or competition.

And when we do, we discover something radical inside ourselves—not opposing anything, but wide open.

The Grind vs. the Ground: Gift Sequence

In this Grounding Summer series (welcome to #4), we explore grounding as an invaluable and subversive skill that helps us expand and deepen, both our senses and our stories. You can scroll to the gift sequence at the bottom to experience it for yourself. 

In the last email, we went a little bit into the science of lying down. How getting on the floor and noticing how we’re making contact allows the parts of our body that are often associated with the fight and flight responses to release. 

When they do, our body comes into a more regulated relationship with the ground beneath it, and we can soften into both our bodies and our stories. The terrain of our writing naturally expands. 

Ultimately, grounding increases our sensitivity and enhances our sensation—and these are key, invaluable skills that invite us on a journey of artistic discovery.

And as you may have experienced before, this journey isn’t just in one direction on a well worn path.

In this state, we develop the capacity to notice the smallest details: the flash of a bird in the brush, the crunch of a fallen leaf, a small side path that leads to the unknown. 

New paths beckon us and terrains open up, not as a distraction or mere diversion, but as whole worlds we never could have imagined before.

We may find ourselves in surprising places, and a multiplicity of stories may emerge.

We step out with new stories and find new ways to tell old ones. And we discover that we have all kinds of stories—not just the ones that have helped us cope, but also the ones that we can create.

Coping vs. Creating

During pandemic days, grounding was often positioned as a coping mechanism to get through the day. And it is indeed a great tool to help us be present with the tasks of everyday life, better perform and up our productivity. But our intention with grounding is different when it comes to writing.

For our creative terrain, grounding is used as an infinitely renewable resource to connect to our inner world, regardless of what’s happening outside of us.

In the creative process (just as in our regular lives), we can feel stuck in the demands and the doing. We may hardly stop to pay attention to what we’re doing or why. We simply keep going.

And when we do, our stories can get stuck too. Our narratives become patterned, numb, fragmented. We get trapped in the old ways of creating, trying to push through, determined to create anew. 

Rest as Subversive

When the narratives that have shaped our understanding of ourselves no longer hold, it can feel disorienting. 

We can react in the moment with bewilderment and frustration. But what if, instead, we were actually trying to tell ourselves to stop? What if our frustration and overwhelm were telling us that we needed to turn things upside down?

Lying down on the floor—the literal act of becoming horizontal—pauses the forward momentum of our everyday narratives. It allows us to step out of the stoires we’re stuck in, the old habits that no longer serve us, in movement, thought, and language.

Lying down opens the pathways to create new, surprising stories, and ultimately invites us to deepen and expand the way we tell our stories, away from all the “shoulds” we’re carrying around.

And in this way, lying down can be not just be part of a pleasurable creative practice, but a little subversive.

So here’s an invitation to experience this for yourself. To soften into the landscape of your body, explore new terrain, and take the next step along your creative path. 

All you need is the floor. 

Pushing vs. Portal

In the last blog, we discussed grounding as a journey. 

But for this journey, you don’t need to pack or prepare at all. 

Often, when we travel, we take on the role of tourist. We arrive with suitcases and expectations. Our surroundings feel unfamiliar and fresh. Some things become more vivid, and some get lost in the rush.

And we often feel excited—more alive to the novel sensations around us and the thrill of learning and exploring. 

The same goes with writing. In trying to connect with our creative landscape, we might feel buoyed by inspiration or momentum or the full steam of a new idea—and we can feel like tourists. In the rush of forging ahead, we absorb a fragment of what we sense is actually there. We can feel lost in the unknown.

Even as we might revel in the glow of a new place or a new idea, we long to “fit in” and feel at ease with our surroundings. To feel the flow of being a local, spontaneously invited to a stranger’s wedding or drinking rakia with the neighbors. We feel connected in these moments. And we long to feel that connected—that at home—in our own creative landscapes, too. To see more, to feel more, to trust more. 

So how do we find this connectedness in our own unknown? 

We find the ground—in both body and environment—and feel the relationship between the two. 

While you can find ground in any position, lying down offers special access. You don’t need anything but the floor.

The Art and Science of Tuning in

Lying down is often associated with feeling tired or “turning in” for the night. In Sense Writing, lying down becomes a tool to “tune in” instead.

When we lie down, our muscles release. Habits triggered by standing, walking, sitting, and “fighting gravity”—and just generally coping in the world—can recede.

Often, though, “receding” doesn’t happen as expected, and this is key.

When we lie down on the floor, the differences between the right and left sides of your body might feel more pronounced. 

The right side of your back might feel like it’s making more contact than the left. Or your shoulders might be the only part of your back that you can feel making contact with the floor. It might take time for these other parts of you to meet the ground. 

Our body accumulates patterns of holding and resistance that add up to an internal map of ourselves.

When we lie down, sometimes these habits “melt away,” but many times they don’t. Many of these patterns are associated with survival, which has become tenaciously our “second-nature”. 

And “second-nature” becomes a call to tune in. 

In answer, we notice. 

The floor, unlike a soft bed, provides feedback and dialogue. Our sensations become more known, as does the world around us. What feels hard and uneven, softens. 

We don't try to let go or release where it might feel tight; we don't force ourselves to relax. We just notice. And in noticing, we give our nervous system and body the refined information they work so well with.

Lying on the floor becomes a mirror. What feels heavier or lighter? What’s making contact and what isn’t? Your nervous system uses this information to create intimate relationship with your surroundings—to offer choices and optimize. 

The Floor as a Portal

That’s why body mapping on the floor is foundational.

In Sense Writing, it shifts us away from activated states towards states of learning. We expand our capacity to absorb sensation, and in doing so enhance our creative process. 

We connect deeply to our creative core, without reacting to the external ups and downs of everyday life.

We find the ground of our writing practice, soften into our stories and connect to our true voice. Our sensitivity increases, and worlds open up.

We no longer feel like a tourist—whether in the landscape of our body, memory, or imagination.

In the next post you’ll receive a gift sequence and have a chance to find the ground in your own writing practice. You’ll experience what happens when you let go—and become a local in your own body.

The Stillness that isn't Still

We often think of the ground beneath our feet as fixed, while the world around us is loud and mobile: the clouds move, leaves rustle, cars and bikes and people swish past us.

The practice of “grounding ourselves” is often similarly perceived as still—as an antidote to the chaotic flux in and all around us.

Yet when we look a little closer, grounding is anything but still. 

Imagine standing on the ground now, the soil under your feet. From your view, it might look like nothing is happening (which can frankly feel like a relief). 

Now, imagine bending down and leaning in for a closer look. As your eyes focus, you begin to observe a world of activity. Insects crawling. Sprouts blooming. 

Now imagine if you could sink one layer deeper. You would discover even more life: microbes in movement, fungi sporing, roots reaching for other roots, creatures decaying to dust.

You can only notice all that movement in the ground when you pause, get closer, and observe the patch of ground beneath your feet—when you get to know it just as it is in its most natural state.

And the same goes for our own internal terrain. 

Portal to Possibility

Our inner terrain is made up of subtle internal sensations, often unnoticed until we slow down and turn away from the bustle that normally distracts us. And when we do attend to those sensations—when we build the skills to notice and map them—we can find whole worlds of images, memories, and emotions. 

But how do we slow down when we’re racing along with the world around us?

We do this by learning to work with the body and nervous system. When we tap into this foundational level of perception, we can tune into the sensations of our inner terrain instead of ignoring them. Our capacity expands, our sensations deepen, and we can feel and absorb our most raw and natural states. 

And in this way, grounding becomes a portal to the underground, where a multiplicity of stories live and move and breathe beyond what we first perceive.

Stilling vs Distilling

Grounding as a creative practice isn’t about coping with the chaotic flux around us, searching for some stillness, and planting stakes. Instead, when working with deep principles of neuroplastic learning, grounding gives us space to discover what lies beneath our own surface and to listen to our deep urge to create.

Because we know enough to know that a patch of trampled dirt beneath our feet is actually a living, breathing mosaic of activity. We just have to lean closer to notice and make sense of it.

Our attention to these deceptively still or remote landscapes isn’t a departure from our creative process—it is the creative process itself. 

Grounding is not only a way to be present with what is (including our restlessness, overwhelm, even illness), but a portal to what is possible. 

In the next blog in this series, we’ll get a little bit into the science of all this. We’ll learn about how we can work with the body and nervous system to shift away from more activated states to organic states of learning and growing. 

And the best part is that, just like lying in a field listening to the grass grow, there’s nothing you need to fix or try to remedy. Everything you need is already right here.

Remedy vs. Resource: The Grounding Summer Series

In the early years of the pandemic, I felt compelled when writing to respond to the times, to reference the destabilization and overwhelm we were all living through. It felt like we were all looking for answers—and the idea of “grounding” became the response we reached for, a panacea in a rolling crisis. 

Often referring to basic body regulation, the skill of grounding can indeed help us connect to ourselves and our environments to manage stress, tension and overwhelm. 

But especially since the pandemic, the ubiquitous notion of grounding has become synonymous with an antidote to the overwhelm. Not a rich resource for creative exploration, but a simple remedy for times of trouble.

In this blog series, I want to show you a different take on what grounding can offer—complete with a gift sequence that will let you try it for yourself. (More on that soon.)

Beyond the limits of remedy

Even now, in post(ish)-pandemic times, I notice that when grounding is framed as simply a solution to a problem, its seed is burdened with the anxiety, tension, and overwhelm it’s trying to fight. This approach barely touches the surface of a practice that begs for depth (and pleasure).

Because grounding is much more than a simple coping strategy. As a creative practice, this skill is fundamental to our growth. It’s the seed of a resilient creative practice.

Finding “the ground” in both our bodies and environment, and feeling the relationship between the two, has always been a foundation of Sense Writing. Grounding helps us to regulate, enhancing our capacity to absorb sensation, access worlds of memory, imagination, and story.

Grounding is fundamental to our nature—and fundamental to building a pleasurable creative practice. And through specific neuro-sensory writing and movement Sense Writing sequences, grounding as creative exploration is a skill that we can develop and hone. 

What I'd like to explore in this Summer Series on Grounding is an invitation into the vastness—into an answer to the question that drives so many of us: 

How do we connect more deeply to our creative core, without reacting to the external ups and downs of everyday life?

All that lives below

Grounding is the work of nourishing our foundation, laying roots inside our own internal landscape that are often invisible to ourselves and others. Like the soil, nourished with minerals and nutrients we can’t see, our urge to create is fed by these subtle, invisible processes. And just as we trust that seeds in the soil will sprout eventually, we build trust in the processes and invisible connections that feed our creative exploration. 

Instead of a reaction to stress, our grounding practice becomes a creative resource, a home for deep connection, pleasure and curiosity—not as a response to something, but as the foundation of our creative practice. 

In this summer series on grounding, we’ll be exploring this depth. We’ll discover how grounding as a resource for our writing practice can be not just interesting and generative, but surprisingly subversive. Stay tuned for more soon.

Repairing vs. Despairing: A Sense Writing Gift

In the last few weeks, I’ve talked about the “what if” gap that can stifle us.

How in our urge to create, we find ourselves widening the gap between what we wish for and what is. How feelings of frustration, judgment, and inadequacy — or even hysterical laughter at the most embarrassing moments — can come rushing in to fill it.

I’ve also shared a Sense Writing sequence inviting you to experience for yourself the worlds that can open up when you create from a place without that gap.

But sometimes, it feels totally out of reach to change our default setting and focus on what’s already there, instead of all the things we’re lacking.

At those times, one way in is to ditch words altogether. 

So today I want to share another sequence with you, one that doesn’t include writing at all. After all, Sense Writing started with a series of “a-ha” moments on the floor, with no paper or pen, just moving and resting.

The Potent Place Before Language

When I left New York after years of working and teaching in the theater community, I was craving a way to address the underlying anxiety and blocks that I saw all around me, in my peers and my students.

Something had told me to go back to the body in a rigorous way — so I left my teaching and creative community, and my home city, to study the Feldenkrais Method.

Though other somatic practices had felt potentially “creative” to me, Feldenkrais felt like the creative process itself. It was this place before language where I could not only feel a sense of connection and flow, but also identify patterns and strategies that I could transmit to other parts of my life.

It was in this place of just moving and rolling and resting in hours of training, this place before language — before any pressure to be smart or use words, before all the stories I told myself about myself — that the most profound shifts occurred.

Restoring Our Subjectivies

Moving on the floor in the way that infants and toddlers do, I found that new physical choices, connected to the deepest parts of myself, started to emerge spontaneously.

The more I studied Feldenkrais and neuroplasticity, the less imposing that gap between objective ideas of “what should be” and the subjective experiences of “what’s already there” became. 

The subjective experience was being restored as a portal to rich landscapes of memory, imagination, and language.

I felt like I’d found “the missing link” to my creative practice — and when I returned to New York in 2012, Sense Writing classes were born.

We all have an urge to tell stories, to connect to those deep subjective landscapes that beckon us and share them. And when we allow ourselves to exist with what’s there — with all the fragments and fuzziness — whole worlds start to appear that we could never have imposed or invented.

Today, there are over 100 neuro-sensory movement and writing sequences that make up Sense Writing. But what a strange, paradoxical place to start to develop an approach to creative writing: on the floor without a pen or paper in sight.

This movement sequence at the link below illustrates what happens when you tap into what is already there (including tightened fists, clenched jaws, or uncontrollable laughter).

Profound shifts can happen in just 15 minutes.

No need to leave home :)

Faking it vs. Making it (Art)

When I was twenty, I experienced a class would changing my thinking about learning.

It was the last day of the semester in the philosophy of biology course, and the professor stood in front of the class, extolling the benefits of meditation.

To the casual observer, meditation might not seem remotely related to plant morphology, but to Rolf Sattler, there was a connection. 

A world-renowned botanist, he had focused for the last couple of decades of his career on the relationship between western science and nature and ecology, and on how alternative lenses like process philosophy, systems theory, and taoism affected our experience and relationship with the natural world.

That day, Rolf walked back and forth at the front of the room, swinging a string of small wooden balls against his back. “They help me to relax before I meditate,” he explained.

It was the early 90s at McGill University in Montreal. Though I had had a little experience with yoga, meditating in a classroom of mostly science students facing an overhead projector was, I think, new to all of us.

He explained that we would soon close our eyes and start the meditation by chanting “om.” We didn’t have to start all at once, just when we felt like joining in. 

Rolf started: 

“Ommmm….”

Then a couple of others joined. Soon a cacophony of oms.

Oh no, I thought, my eyes closed, people are actually doing this.

I was off to the side near the door, next to Jennifer. I didn’t know her, but I remember her name because of what happened next.

One of us started to chant, and the other soon followed: our own little choir section off to the side. 

At first our “oms” were about 5 seconds apart, but as we continued they slowly grew closer together, until it happened. We ommed in perfect unison — and immediately burst into uncontrollable laughter.

“Why?!” a voice in my head pleaded operatically. “In front of him of all people?!” (Rolf really was one of my favorite professors.) 

Faking it vs. Making Art

As I lost control, I could feel the gap between who I wished to be (a respectful student, a Canadian) and who I really was (neither of those things) widening by the second. And of course, the more I tried to bridge the gap, the worse it became.

We may not always go into conspicuous giggle fits in front of our mentors, but most of us have encountered that gap between how we think we’re supposed to act and how we really feel. 

And when it happens, we’re often forced to pretend the gap isn’t there — that we are what we’re pretending to be. To fake it. 

Sometimes, to show up and get things done, the only way to push through really is to “fake it till we make it.” 

But in the last few posts, I’ve been talking about how in our creative process, that gap between what is actually happening and what we wish for often leads to anxiety and blocks, getting in the way of what we really wanted to say in the first place.

“Faking it till you make it” just doesn’t work when we’re making art. 

And it doesn’t really work in deep neuroplastic approaches to learning and creativity.

In Sense Writing, we learn how to meet ourselves exactly where we are, not where we’re pretending to be. And in this state of parasympathetic-dominant engagement, we build a practice that’s able to sustain us through the beginnings, middles and ends of whatever we want to write.

End of Story

Rolf stopped chanting. Still doubled over trying to stifle my laughter, I slowly peeked up and saw one of his arms swinging up towards the ceiling.

“Laugh! LAUGH!,” he invited, a big smile on his face.

And we did. All forty of us erupting, spontaneously, some in tears, sliding off our chairs onto the floor, until it slowly subsided and we were silent. Later, he spoke about the benefits of laughter meditation.

That day, Rolf met us exactly where we were and let us learn from there. 

He was teaching us how to learn.

In the next post, I’ll share a remarkable Feldenkrais sequence that allows you to find freedom, ease, and grace from wherever you are. Look for it in your inbox.

And in the meantime, I invite you to think of ways you can meet yourself where you are at this moment. 

The Gap vs. The Opening Gate

(New Year’s Series #2)

jenny holzer at times square, nyc, 1993

When I was a kid, my older sister would take a lot of pictures of me. 

There are stacks of snapshots, full of the orange and brown tones of the era, with me posing in wigs or dancing around the den. She always seemed to have a camera in her hand. 

On a vacation in Massachusetts, I remember smiling for a picture.

“Act natural,” she instructed.

“What do you mean?”

“Like you’re just sitting there and I’m not taking a picture of you.”

In both our lives and our creative practice, we seek a state of flow, that natural feeling that my sister tried so hard to elicit in my modeling. And to get there, we’re often advised in those familiar words: to let go, act natural, be more relaxed.

But when we’re told to act natural, or told “not to try” or “to let go,” we often end up feeling… well, a little bit like this photo:

cape code, massachusetts, 1970s

The impulse is understandable — but trying not to try can create its own riddle of frustration.

The Gap Between

In my last post, I wrote about how many of us find our creative practice implicitly tied up in the gap between what actually is and what we think “should be” — whether in what we’re making or how we’re creating. 

In this gap between what we wish were true and what we actually encounter, feelings of overwhelm and inadequacy can come rushing in. 

And it’s about more than uneasiness or disappointment. In this state, our nervous system is on alert that something is wrong and needs to change. We actually end up in a higher state of tonus and stress response — and even more distant from the flow state we’re craving.

I wish something beautiful were just pouring forth…

I wish I felt  more connected to what I’m writing…

This would be easier if I were more disciplined…

When what we’re trying to conjure doesn’t come out the way we expected, it’s easy for impatience to take hold (and discouragement too).  

The gap between what we think “should be,” in both our writing and our process, and what we can feel really happening — or not happening — can feel overwhelming. Almost unbridgeable. 

No wonder it’s difficult to develop a sustainable creative practice.

Freeing Yourself from the Gap

What if, instead of leaping immediately to what we wish were true, we learned how to work with the body and nervous system to engage with what is actually there?

That’s exactly what we do in Sense Writing. 

Through targeted  neurosensory writing and movement sequences, we learn to guide the nervous system into a parasympathetic dominant state — a state of engaged and relaxed learning and discovery. 

In this state, our rich, subjective landscapes of memory or imagination can gradually start to fill in, revealing themselves to us in sensation, detail, and language, without needing to invent anything.

The gap we work so hard to avoid becomes irrelevant, and we experience a taste of the freedom we were wishing for all along.

In this New Year’s gift, you’ll get to experience how this “freedom from the gap” feels in your own landscapes of body, memory, and imagination.

No posing necessary.

Just click below. All you need is a chair, a notebook, and pen.

Revealing vs.Resolving

(New Year’s Series #1)

Artist Jenny Holzer taking over the marquees in Times Square, NYC, 1993.

It’s easy as the new year comes to want to ditch all the old habits we’ve determined we don’t need anymore, to decide to impose “healthier,” “better” ones on our lives and our creative practices.

And it’s so natural! Of course we want to feel, and be, better than before.

But this perfectly understandable impulse can often fuel judgment or impatience that, ironically, make change more difficult.

For me, this is especially true when I reflect on the days and years of the pandemic and its aftermath. This season ends up feeling burdened not just with the promise of a new year, but a whole new era.

What starts as a hopeful endeavor can end up fizzling into frustration when things don’t happen as I wish.

Maybe this feels familiar?

This year, I wanted to get ahead of this unwelcome pattern, and I’m excited to share where that effort is leading.

I’ve been working closely with my Feldenkrais teacher, Raz Ori, whom I’ve known since I was training to be a practitioner, on what it truly means to be with “what is.”

As many of us might be looking for a sense of renewal in our creative lives in the new year, for the next few months I’ll be sharing some of what I discover while delving deeper into the Somatic work that forms the foundation of Sense Writing, and what these discoveries mean for our writing and the creative process more broadly.

I’ll also be posting new Sense Writing movement and writing sequences inspired by what Raz and I have been investigating together. (The first one comes in about a week!)

The Gap Between 

In Sense Writing, I often say that to build a sustainable writing practice, it’s essential to work on a foundational level with the body and nervous system.

But we can only do this — we can only fully meet our creative desires — by meeting ourselves exactly where we are in the moment.  

Even (especially) when that feels fragmented or remote or different from what was there before.

If we bypass where we are and instead try to impose an ideal onto what we're making (or how we’re going about it), we’re immediately distanced from ourselves, and in this state, more susceptible to blocks and anxiety.

In our urge to create, we’ve actually created a gap between what we wish or think “should be” and what is actually. 

And it’s in this gap that feelings of frustration, judgment, and inadequacy — and a thousand New Year resolutions — often come rushing in.

Small Revelations vs. Resolutions  

By working in a layered process through the Sense Writing sequences — a process that includes our nervous system and body — we can start to learn to notice and be with “what’s there,” not what we wish were there.

Rather than alerting our body and nervous system that something needs to change, that whatever is already there is not good enough, we attend to what’s there.

Through the Sense Writing sequences we learn to meet ourselves where we are. And as we do, rather than creating an unbridgeable gap, our internal landscape softens, and portals of memory and imagination begin to open up. 

This is what I have been returning to lately. I’m learning and re-learning that by bringing my attention to what is there, rather than what I think should be there — what I lack, or how I failed or faltered — creative potency starts to build, and a renewed feeling of creative possibility emerges. 

Rather than big resolutions, we can start 2023 with such small revelations.

Stay tuned for the Sense Writing gift sequence posted here soon so you can feel this renewal for yourself.

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Madelyn’s Sense Writing process does its work invisibly: I can’t pinpoint when a shift happened. I know only that I experience more freedom and less self-judgment when drafting (and revising) my writing. The content is more fluid and voluminous because my inner critical voice has surrendered to not knowing, to not efforting.

I’ve become kinder to my evolving writer self, recognizing and respecting the whole-body nature of creativity, trusting my nonverbal wisdom to collaborate with, even lead, my verbal sense.

-Marj Hahne, poet and editor

Pleasure as a Catalyst

image: sense writing sequence from a workshop in the west bank. used by permission.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing with you a realization that feels essential, but which often becomes easy to overlook, especially when we get overwhelmed:

Regular life and creative life have different needs.

Once we’re actually able to make this distinction, it becomes possible to identify the needs of a creative life — and to develop tools to tend to those needs with clarity and care. 

To develop those tools, we need a container for them. We need a kind of laboratory in which inquiry, exploration, and mistakes allow us to listen to our ache to create, and to ourselves, and to respond freely.

In this Summer Lab series, I’ve talked about some of the creative tools we cultivate in the laboratory: urges, textured exploration, insight, playfulness, mistakes. It’s an organic, layered discovery based on curiosity and pleasure.

But there’s something else that connects pleasure and the creative tools we use to engage with it. A missing link.

For pleasure to be meaningful — to be motivating, rather than simply distractingly pleasant — there has to be something concrete to show up to. A practice.

That missing piece is rigor. 

The Infinite Loop of Rigor and Pleasure

I love rigor. Maybe it’s my background in dance — which known for requiring a rigorous practice before almost anything else — or maybe it’s all the science experiments (bought with my babysitting money) I carried out on the ping-pong table in the basement— but rigor has often felt welcoming to me.

I've had experiences where rigor could feel punishing and sharp and imposed, but mostly it's felt like a safety net rather than a confinement.

It was that experience of rigor that helped me identify my creative needs, and to leave my artistic communities in New York in search of tools to better address them. As a writer, it led me back to the body.

This longing for rigor led me to spend hundreds of hours on the floor in a Feldenkrais training exploring neurosensory exercises, and years making the connections between the way the nervous system learns and heals and the way we write and create.

The way I experience it, rigor doesn’t entail rigid “intestinal fortitude,” as my dad used to say, or tight-lipped discipline or virtue. Instead, rigor motivated by pleasure and curiosity, in the container of a creative laboratory, becomes self-sustaining. It opens up the pathway to true freedom and discovery.

Because at the heart of creative exploration is risk, and it can be scary. So we need a lab, a container for tat process, to be supported and safe as we venture into it. 

Motivating that process is pleasure, and supporting it is rigor. We need both to sustain it.

And when those pieces of curious, playful exploration and contained practice come together, we get a creative process that we don’t have to fight or force — we just get to use it. For whatever we want, forever.

If you're curious to read some reflections on what happens when this relationship between pleasure and rigor is nurtured in creative practice, you can read hear from participants in the Sense Writing Course below.

And to explore this relationship yourself, you can try the recorded gift sequence below (What a Baby Can Teach Us about Writing). All you need is a notebook and a place to lie down!

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“Madelyn’s Sense Writing process does its work invisibly: I can’t pinpoint when a shift happened. I know only that I experience more freedom and less self-judgment when drafting (and revising) my writing. The content is more fluid and voluminous because my inner critical voice has surrendered to not knowing, to not efforting. I’ve become kinder to my evolving writer self, recognizing and respecting the whole-body nature of creativity, trusting my nonverbal wisdom to collaborate with, even lead, my verbal sense.”
-Marj Hahne, writer and editor

“It’s hard for me to think of Sense Writing as “a course”, in any traditional sense. I experienced it more as a gentle but firm suggestion to fully inhabit our own selves, instead; our own bodies, our own felt knowledge and hard-earned authority, and therefore our own stories, as well. A most needed reminder, and reassurance, that the best stuff comes from the most basic and authentic place of self-occupancy. And rather than learning the material in any way that we’ve usually been taught, the exercises seep slowly into your subconscious, kindly re-arrange neuronal circuits, and then settle in as a constant vote of confidence that, at our core, we each already have with us everything that we need. (To write, yes, but also just to be; to do life, in exactly the way that each individual organism does best, anyway.)

Since working through the course, every time I feel the familiar daunt of the writing project that I am hoping to complete, I also hear the usual opposing whisper, but now lifted into a full clear voice: ‘Just do yourself. Be in your true self, observe from your most authentic place, and it will come.’ And whenever I lose hold of that most important place, I now have a specific set of tools to get back there.”
-Marti Maree, designer