A Need to Go Back to the Body
When I was working as a playwright and director in New York, I was somewhat obsessed with finding new ways of bringing people to creative states.
Whether writing by myself or working in the rehearsal room, I was always searching for ways of refreshing — of surprising myself out of my own patterns. I looked far and wide for answers, working with artists from different genres and cultures and experiments and embarking on long collaborations with non-actors. Separate as these endeavors seemed, they all seemed to connect and inform my search for that key to creativity.
As a professor, I couldn’t help but notice the pandemic of writer’s block (and anxiety) plaguing my students. I couldn’t stop wondering why we find it so hard to express ourselves creatively, and what I could do to help. The standard approaches seemed to overlook deeper issues of anxiety and resistance, and in some cases, to reinforce them. And though I had integrated many tools into my teaching over the years, I knew that I could go deeper. I wanted to address these issues on a systemic and foundational level.
The Mystery of Switching on Your Creativity
This desire became an obsession. It made me leave my teaching job and literary agent, sent me to Israel and back, and inspired me to create an entirely new way of tapping into creative flow.
What if we were able to just “switch on” our creativity?
I left New York in 2008 to become a practitioner in Feldenkrais and Somatic Education. Already deeply immersed in movement analysis, I knew the source of creative power wasn’t in the mind, but in the body. I just needed the science to back it up.
Sense Writing is the culmination of all of my experience and professional education. The neurosensory and writing techniques I developed have helped over a thousand writers and artists build sustainable creative practices. It has been described as “a revolutionary approach to writing” and one of the best creative writing workshops in New York City (as ranked by Yelp).
Word by Word, Rock by Rock
One of my students, Jean Rhode, described it best when she said:
Sense Writing is like running along a river from rock to rock and the rocks just appear below your feet, and you've gotten to where you want to go.
I’ve helped award-winning filmmakers and journalists, students, experienced writers, aspiring writers, and even people with an urge to create but no idea where to begin.Whether you are experienced or aspiring (or both!), you can feel what it's like to switch on your creativity.
One of the first overlaps I noticed was the use of constraints supporting a sense of freedom in both movement and creativity.
This recorded sequence for you to take a break from your to-do list and take a small but solid step into new place of discovery in your writing and creative practice.
