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

The Toddler vs. the Teacher

image: sense writing sequences from workshops in istanbul and tel aviv. used with permission

In this Summer Lab series, I’m offering ways of reacquainting ourselves with our innate learning processes to meet our creative needs. (If you want to experience this kind of learning right away, you can skip to the Sense Writing gift sequence below!)

In the last installment, I wrote to you about how mistakes help us fulfill our creative needs in an organic, textured way.

And today, I want to show you what that looks like in practice in a context most of us have seen and all of us once experienced.

What a Baby Can Teach Us 

As infants and small children, most of us learned how to lift our heads, roll over, crawl, sit and walk through experimentation, reversing, repeating, finding variations, and then choosing the most optimal for that moment. 

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

If I watch a baby learn to walk, however, I might soon notice that many of the movements have little to do with the end result of just putting one foot in front of the other. 

Her learning process, to most bipedal adults, wouldn’t necessarily make sense. It would be full of stumbles, and start-agains, and spittle. If I’m watching her, I might offer her a gentle hand or reassure her with my voice that I’m close (and probably chuckle at her toddling).

This is the way most of us learned to walk, in this textured and implicit process that served us well, allowing us to adapt to infinite situations that we encountered as we grew.

But if I’m trying to be “helpful,” and want to advance things along quickly — I might explain to her through praise or command or hands-on direction exactly how she should be ambulating her pelvis or placing her foot heel to toe. 

She’d resist, maybe even pushing me away — the natural response of her learning nervous system. 

(As she should! Her developing nervous system knows what it needs, even if the helpful grownup doesn’t.)

But if I persisted and managed to interrupt her own way of learning with constant instructions, I could eventually get her to walk quicker… but also a little like the monster in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.

She would be going from Point A to Point B, yes. But she’d be missing all the texture and all the navigation in between.

Even if an Expert in the stages of walking could identify the reflexes, transitions, inhibitions, etc. of an “inexpertly” flailing baby, the best help they could offer is still just the lightest support of what is already there. Otherwise, they could interrupt a very specific, delicate, deceptively efficient process that can’t be neatly categorized from the outside. 

What a Baby Can Teach Us (About Writing)

Luckily, this kind of interruption doesn’t normally happen with walking — but it happens all the time when we’re learning how to write. 

Since we come to school speaking, a pencil goes into our hands and we assume an easy transition to the written word. When teachers or well-meaning mentors focus on writing craft, they often reduce process into a plan:  “Know what the character wants” “Increase the stakes” “Make sure the character changes” “Do A, B, and C...” 

We don’t get a chance to make our own “mistakes” of discovery or to build our own invisible scaffolding for the choices no one could possibly know to tell us about.

So how do we build that scaffolding for a resilient writing practice when we’re no longer toddlers learning to walk? How do we bridge the lessons our bodies already know to the less contained realms of language and story, where it’s so easy to get stuck in our heads?

In this Summer Lab Series, I’m offering ways of reconnecting to our innate learning processes to meet our creative needs. In the writing and movement gift sequence below, you’ll explore one version of this organic learning (but with maybe a little less drooling than a toddler)!

Through processes that shift the way you see mistakes, we create containers in which we can use exploration, insights, and mistakes the way we used to: as the raw material with which we build our inner maps and find our footing.

(For the Sense Writing sequence below, you just need a notebook, pen, and a place to lie down!)

Mistakes as the Keys to the Laboratory

image: sense writing sequences from istanbul and tel aviv. used with permission.

Remember when, in the early days of the pandemic, it felt like everybody and their dog (and me) were talking about all the things they were accomplishing with so much so-called “free time” — their novels, their sourdough starters, their hundred new DIY projects… 

For many of us, that novelty of so much time and space away from our usual lives really did make room for reflection and insight.

But at the same time, it was a tangle of stops and starts, and two and a half years later, it’s easier to see the ways (including so many projects) we tried to contain the feelings we couldn’t yet make sense of. 

And this is normal.

When we’re trying our hardest to contain the uncontainable in survival mode, we do what we have to — but things can end up feeling forced, and we can end up feeling exhausted.

But when we recognize that regular life and creative life have different needs, then we can tend to those needs with clarity and care.

That’s what I’m offering in this Summer Lab series (if you missed the first you can scroll down): some tools to develop your own safe container for your creative needs, a kind of laboratory in which you can stay with these feelings of uncertainty and fear — but also joy, pleasure, connection, and everything in between.

Mistakes and the Inner Map

One of the most powerful tools in this laboratory is how we think about mistakes.

These days, mistakes are often lauded as part of a trendy celebration of “failure” — as a necessary step on people’s success journey. For me, the way that idea gets packaged and shared ends up feeling like hollow inspiration that’s urging us to step out into the unknown without a clue. 

But I want to talk about how important mistakes are on a feeling, experiential, textured, learning level. The process level. 

The nervous system level.

In linear learning (like the scholastic type encouraged in most school systems), mistakes are typically seen as errors: something to avoid or, when they can’t be avoided, to take as guides to consciously (and urgently) change our behavior. 

But in organic learning — like the kind we did as preverbal explorers of a brand-new environment as infants and toddlers — mistakes aren’t errors, but the actual pathway of learning.

That’s the kind of learning that we seek out in the Feldenkrais Method and Sense Writing.

It’s a different way of looking at mistakes than we’re used to. They’re not something we “course correct” from — but the mechanism by which we develop a three-dimensional, grounded and contextualized inner mapof our experience of the outside world.

Mistakes vs. Mastery

That three-dimensional felt map was what I discovered as I started to deduce deeper neuroplastic principles during my Feldenkrais training, which later became the heart of Sense Writing. These principles felt like the missing link to a lot of long-standing questions about the connection — and disconnection — I felt between language and the body. 

They allowed tenderness. Playfulness. Recklessness. Mistakes and rigor in a comfortable but endlessly intriguing dialogue. And then some. 

In my Feldenkrais training, I was often reminded of the “beginner’s mind” concept from my meditation practice, but it felt infinitely more yielding — like a drop of ink on the veins of a leaf, it lit up old and new pathways of inquirythat I’d been immersed (and sometimes tangled) in for years in my creative work.

These new pathways allowed me to pay attention to not just senses and movement, like other Somatic principles did, but also to language and story, and started to point the way towards possibilities of repairing this disconnection between language and the body.

More than anything, this developing skill allowed me to just be with what is, not feign mastery or run away. 

I came to understand that, for me, this is what writing — and the creative process itself — require. The container of the body and the container of process. 

These containers allow us to experience and learn from mistakes in the way our brains do best: as part of a textured understanding and experience of our surroundings and internal landscapes.

So that we don’t feel compelled to rush through uncertainty, but can be with it — and actually use it as fuel. Like the slow ferment necessary for a really good sourdough.

In the next blog, I’ll get deeper into the way that “mistakes” actually shape our experience of the world, and as artists, in irreplaceable ways — and the science that backs up this kind of learning process.
 

Feeling as Fuel

image: sense writing sequences from workshops in istanbul and the west bank. used with permission

Welcome to the Summer Lab series.

In the next month, I'll be sending you a collection of reflections and gift sequences to remind you that regular life and creative practice have different needs.

When we’re forced into a state of nearly constant adaptation (like maybe the last couple of years…), it's easy to forget this. We become attuned to the need to adapt more than to any other need — and we often become great at it. 

We're all now committed to being excellent at surviving, whether we like it or not.

But in this state, when we (and our nervous systems) are so intently focused on survival, it can feel impossible to remember that this approach is the opposite of what our creative lives require. 

And we find ourselves stuck but still yearning for something.

The Urge that Never Goes Away

I often talk about the deeply wired differences between our survival mode patterns and the parasympathetic-dominant learning mode we invite into our creative work. 

When we’re constantly adapting, we strive for mastery, (which you can read more about here.) That urge to create — that urge to express and share that we’ve always felt — gets pushed to the side.

But it doesn’t actually go away.  

I know for me- it feels especially critical now to pay closer attention to when I veer too much into “regular life” survival mode— and to nurture the creative containers where I feel safe to explore and play and delve into this urge, with all its complexity, pleasure, sorrow, and mystery.

In this Summer Lab series, I want to offer some tools for this creative container: to develop your own laboratory in which you can stay with this feeling, the urge to create and share, and not run away from it.

The ache is what we feel before we even start to put pen to paper. It can be an ache of  sadness or joy or just an aching urge for understanding and meaning.

But as profound and beautiful as that feeling can be, if we’re in survival “regular life” mode — and if we don't have the tools to turn that ache into something concrete — it will usually make us feel anxious and overwhelmed. 

That’s why we need a container for it.

If we learn how to let ourselves settle into that feeling, and stay in it, that longing can be a potent fuel for our creative efforts.

Accessing the Ache

A wide variety of meditative and somatic practices might give us a sense of how to regulate our discomfort and be “present.” 

But when it comes to transferring those states into a creative practice, it’s so much harder– especially when language is involved. And we can slip right back into the sticky habits around using words as armor and authority. 

And that means we don’t get the container for safe learning and exploratory adventures and mistakes. 

We need a way to create containers, to channel and use that feeling as fuel: a process for turning the ache into playful curiosity.

Containment is one of the five core principles of Sense Writing. It’s all about creating safe environments to settle into our bodies and our writing landscapes — which in turn allows us to absorb and process more of our experience, sensation, and imagination.

More of the urge that moves us.

Sense Writing was designed to build our creative containers from the floor up and from the inside out. The neurosensory writing and moving sequences create a process that invites you to explore that ache (and all that it encompasses) while also taking you through the elements of craft — without trading technical mastery for intuition. 

Moshe Feldenkrais wrote, in what I think is the most accurate definition of “flow”:

“In those moments when awareness succeeds in being at one with feeling, sense, movement and thought… then you can make discoveries, invent, create, and ‘know.’  You can grasp that your small world and the great world around you are but one.”

• That feeling is what we often want to run away from if we can’t contain it.

But the container of the body and the container of process enable us to be in a kind of laboratory of creativity in which inquiry, exploration, and mistakes allow us to listen to the ache, and to ourselves. 

And that’s the very beauty and aliveness that we yearn to be a part of and share.

The Pitfalls of Mastery

image: sense writing sequences from workshops in berlin and new york. used with permission.

The last time I wrote to you, I shared a 3-part gift series about what it means to be a skilled beginner — and the surprising complexity required to develop skills around something intuitive.

In that series (which you can check out below), we explored how it’s more than just wide-eyed wonder– and also much simpler than what we can load onto certain practices that emphasize “beginner’s mind.”

Maybe because this “beginner” state can feel so elusive, it isn’t usually our go-to mode when hitting a creative wall. 

Grasping for Mastery

In fact, when we encounter a desire to write more — more frequently or more fluidly or simply to begin at all — there’s a go-to tendency in our culture to grasp for expertise and mastery. 

Mastery is alluring. It’s the premise of our educational system. (Otherwise, why would we put ourselves through all that?:) 

It promises to imbue us with authority, in the root sense of authorship; surely, we hope, with authoritative knowledge will come the confidence to wield it — to weigh in, to write our stories, to have a say.

And in a lot of our regular life, it delivers on that promise. Access to mastery allows us to go through our everyday experiences with competence and the social, economic, and practical benefits that come with it. 

In life, we often need that mastery. But it's so easy to forget that "regular life" and creative practice have different needs.

I often talk about the deeply wired differences between our survival mode patterns and the parasympathetic-dominant learning mode we need for a sustainable creative practice.

How many of us have found ourselves applying our “survival expertise mode” in learning and creative environments? It can feel far less vulnerable to seek answers from outside, instead of tuning in to our own inner voices.

It’s all too easy to fall into a bad case of the IF-THENs. As in…

IF I could only master craft…or theory…or avant-garde aesthetics…or parts psychology…or (fill in the blank)...

THEN I’d become an unfettered artist! Opening the vein to truth and emotion whenever I picked up a pen!!

And in writing, it’s easier than most mediums to feign mastery when we don’t really know. We’ve been trained to fake it. Language protects us — we learn in school to use it to communicate how well we’re following directions. Language is how we cash in our mastery for its rewards.

We end up absorbing a language of mastery — while at the same time drifting further and further away from our intuition and source of creativity. We “fake it till we make it,” and though we MAY end up sounding like masters, we often end up feeling like frauds. Underneath the veneer of validation, we’re running on our fearful sympathetic nervous system responses.

Skipping the Process-- and the Ache

The problem with reaching for mastery is it skips over process. 

(And as you’ve probably heard me say before — process is what the five neuroplastic principles of Sense Writing build from the ground up.)

Mastery skips the ache before the IF and the mystery of THEN. While mastery promises to resolve or express that ache (whether it’s an ache of sadness or joy or just an aching urge for understanding and meaning), itactually creates an environment in which we don’t get a chance to hear it.

And the ache is actually kind of important. 

Feeling the ache — having an intimate dialogue with that ache — is the point, not the obstacle. It’s why we pick up a pen in the first place, and sometimes why it’s so hard to use it. When we try to bypass it, we’re left chasing something intangible, stuck in a script of what we think mastery is.

So what if we didn’t bypass it? What if, instead of a script, we could develop our own intimate dialogue with this ache? The 150 neurosensory sequences I’ve developed in more than a decade of Sense Writing rewires the brain away from old scripts and toward a sensitive creative exploration.

And the process of developing this dialogue is the creative process.

The Skilled Beginner Series (Sequence #3)

In the previous post in this series, I wrote about my first Feldenkrais class in Brooklyn in 1996, long before I started my practitioner’s training.

The instructor’s simple instructions quieted the noise in my head, and I was absorbed in the ebb and flow of rest and movement. The movements were so small and slow. I  remember coming out of that darkened storefront feeling pleasantly puzzled, edged with mystery.  

But I had no concept, then, what any of this might have to do with writing and language and story. I’d only discover an answer to this question years later — by accident.

At the time, I was a young playwright into yoga and writing jags; I wasn’t yet aware of some of the ingrained anxiety and competition that I would later come to see as ubiquitous in my community and my classrooms. 

I’ve written before about how, eventually, I came to recognize and wrestle with the dysfunction that plagued the artistic circles I was part of. I was craving a way to access and even resolve the underlying blocks and anxieties that I saw all around me.

I knew I had to go back to the body in a rigorous way.

For years, I had been integrating somatic practices into my writing and teaching practice, and as a playwright and theater artist, I’d explored so many questions around the creative process. I’d already started investigating the overlap between language and the body. 

 So when I came back to Feldenkrais a decade after that first class, the parasympathetic-dominant learning that the practice invoked in my body felt like the missing link to a lot of long-standing questions.

 It reminded me of the “beginner’s mind” concept from my meditation practice, but it felt infinitely more yielding — like a drop of ink on the veins of a leaf, it lit up old and new pathways of inquiry that I’d been immersed, and sometimes tangled, in for years in my creative work.

 One of the most quoted of Feldenkrais’s statements is “I’m not interested in flexible bodies, I’m interested in flexible minds.” He imagined that the parasympathetic learning state could be applied far more broadly than the body — he imagined the limitless potential uses for embodied neuroplastic learning. Complexity, capacity, and maturity.

 Feldenkrais worked with people in all kinds of professions — including performing artists, athletes, and scientists. But because he was so good at helping people with serious movement conditions, his legacy became focused on the physical applications of his work, which were often dramatic. It’s safe to say that it didn’t transfer as much as he would have wanted. 

 After my training, when I came back to New York and was teaching writing again, I started to make practical connections between the exercises I’d been teaching for decades and some of the Feldenkrais lessons I was bringing back with me. I would spontaneously ask students to do a movement lesson (when they were really not expecting one). Almost accidentally, this gave them time — gave their nervous systems time — to make the connections between their bodies and the ways they were expressing themselves in language that I’d always seen as elusive.

 Through these early Brooklyn classes, I was discovering a forum to spontaneously bridge the deeper principles of the Feldenkrais lessons with writing exercises and storytelling in general.

 And that’s what I’m sharing with you now, in the last sequence of this series.

We’ll be exploring this bridge — between the skilled, pre-verbal beginner’s learning state we once inhabited with ease to the complex, mature, authentic access to choice and artistry as writers.

The Skilled Beginner Series (Sequence #2)

Welcome to the second sequence.

In the first sequence, you were invited to focus on the sensitivity of your hands, and discover how this physically tiny — but territorially huge in terms of our brain map — part of our bodies can be used to bring articulated consciousness to other parts of ourselves.

Working with the hands can be a powerful way in… just think of any baby you know, grasping and exploring the whole world with their sticky paws.

It sounds kind of funny, when talking about something that sounds so complex and “sciencey,” that we look to babies for how to do it.

But in fact, infants and toddlers are the MOST skilled beginners.

While exploring the delicate clarity of our hands, I invited you to notice that learning and creativity take place in this sometimes elusive state: not on high alert laced with performance anxiety and striving to do our best, and not simple relaxation. It’s engaged parasympathetic learning.

In this second sequence, we’ll look at how to sustain that state — and bridge it to the process of writing.

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 (see: sticky toddler hands all over everything), when we were teaching ourselves how to roll over, to move, crawl, walk… how to be in the world, both internally and externally. This is how our neural paths branch out and grow.

This sounds like it could be chaotic, just noticing a bunch of differences — an overwhelm of sensory input. But in fact, when our nervous system is in a modulated state, we don’t have to willfully rectify the differences. We don’t have to “overcome” them and aim toward balance and harmony. The nervous system has everything it needs to integrate these differences for exactly what it needs to learn in that moment.

Norman Doidge, the chronicler of neuroplasticity, talks about this in describing his view of the five stages of neuroplastic healing. The last stage is differentiation and integration — and Doidge uses the Feldenkrais Method to illustrate it.

In this Sense Writing sequence, we use similar strategies to access this agile preverbal state and enrich our emotional and imaginative landscapes. You’ll discover how to get into this modulated state, and stay in it, so you can experience this enhanced differentiated sensation and see how much spontaneous choice emerges in your expression.

That desire for that spontaneity can sometimes spur us to try to shortcut the process a little bit… even when stressed, we try the antidote of “being open” and end up getting overwhelmed (as I mentioned last week).Because our nervous system has other plans when it’s focused on surviving. So just showing up with wide eyes and insouciant wonder doesn’t work for long (no matter how much I tried this).

Luckily, the actual answer is easier: give your nervous system something to pay attention to.

By re-experiencing an intuitive learning process we’ve all already been through, we become skilled beginners. And in doing so, our ability to absorb, imagine, and remember grows — and ironically, by starting in such a so-called beginner’s state, we end up maturing our process, our voice, and our writing.

The last sequence of this series is coming next week. For now, you need a place to lie down and a notebook and pen!

The Skilled Beginner Series (Sequence #1)

Hey Everyone!

In the last post, we touched on two main functions of nervous system: keeping us alive, and learning and growing. And how lately we’re getting stuck in the former — all survival mode. (This probably isn’t news to any of us…)

This Skilled Beginner Series (the link to the first sequence is below) will explore how to find our way out of getting stuck in survival mode. The key is to provide the conditions that our nervous system needs to remember about its learning and growing ability. Not just to feel calm and secure, but also to be engaged. 

In other words: both safety and surprise.

I want to tell you about how I discovered this essential combination for myself — what felt like the missing link.

I’ve written before about how I felt a need to go back to the body.

I was working as a playwright and teaching in the theater community, and couldn’t help noticing how widespread the underlying anxiety and blocks were in my peers and students.

For years, I’d also been exploring somatic practices and integrating them into my theater work— but the two worlds I was immersed in, somatics and dance, and writing and theater, felt only barely connected. 

I wanted something dramatically different to address the fundamental problem of disconnection that seemed to persist.

The writing solutions out there were all heady and either traditional, going all the way back to Aristotle, or experimental, which at first might excite novelty but eventually seemed like a bag of tricks. And while many somatic movement practices could imbue a relaxed, creative state, it felt like they would stall there, with no clear next direction.

That made Feldenkrais stand out as unique for me.

I remember coming out of my first Feldenkrais class in Brooklyn in 1996. Even though I wasn’t ready to step fully into the portal yet, I still remember the pleasure and curiosity, combined with rigor, that felt truly different, not just like more of the same.

Ten years later, when I started to intensely train in Feldenkrais, it felt connected to the deepest part of my creativity. 

It reminded me of the “beginner’s mind” concept from my meditation practice, but it felt infinitely more yielding — like it lit up old and new pathways of inquiry that I’d been immersed, and sometimes tangled, in for years in my creative work.

It felt like a bridge between the body and language — like the creative process itself, without having to leave any part of myself out.

Later, I would learn that this experience was called neuroplastic learning, and it could only happen in an essential balance of safety and genuine surprise. It’s engaged parasympathetic learning, which can sometimes be hard to conceptualize before experiencing it. 

But we have all experienced it before, as toddlers.

Feldenkrais understood that the way we learned as infants and toddlers was the most potent and intuitive way to develop new skills. The key is that it’s not just learning on high alert, laced with performance pressure, and it’s not just relaxation

“Relaxed engagement,” as Feldenkrais writes, is essential for deep learning. This is a three-part series, where we'll be slowly building from this "relaxed engagement" to more complex sequences that integrate language and story.

In this sequence, we use the consciousness of our hands, which take up quite a lot of neural territory, to bring articulated consciousness to other parts of ourselves. Building awareness around the hands can also help us connect with a time when our brains expanded and differentiated the most. Grab and hold and touch and taste. 

Working with our hands is not just an efficient way of regulating ourselves, but also of making the invisible more visible, or the unknown a little more known. 

In an annoying bit of irony, this kind of “beginner” learning is a lifelong process.

And thank goodness it is.

Spring Gift: The Skilled Beginner Series

Hi Everyone,

Here we are once again, when I’m thinking about how to start a blog that could possibly encapsulate the rolling uncertainty and crisis that we’re encountering all around us. 

On some level, we think we should already be experts at this part because, after all, it’s not exactly new anymore — so it’s no surprise that many of us feel like we need to meet each day at maximum capacity.

And there are plenty of sources in the outside world that layer solutions on top of this underlying feeling: be more productive, less distracted, more effective in this prolonged time of transition.

But layering solutions on something that’s already unsteady doesn’t help us get closer to ourselves, or to stability — or to the resilient creative urge that doesn’t go away even when things keep changing.

The way to steady that unsteadiness isn’t just to cope with it better (even though that's sometimes all we can do); it’s to unlayer. Go back to the floor. Be a beginner, from the ground up.

And I don’t mean by forcing or faking yourself into a state of permanent wonder and emotional overexposure, but by building the skills to feel supported and vulnerable in the unknown.

And ironically, this skill of being a beginner is essential for deep neuro-plastic learning.

That might be uncomfortable to even think about when we’re all just trying to figure out how to be in the world again.

(Cue Talking Heads lyrics: “And you may ask yourself, well how did I get here? Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down...”)

We can feel both the pull and the hesitation to pick up where we left off. Do we step into the outline of who we were, because we can? And if it doesn’t feel the same, what do we do?

It’s like we’re toggling between the anxiety of the unknown or the numbness of the familiar.

The irony here is that both of these responses are coping strategies of the nervous system that are rooted in survival and stress response.

Because the nervous system is a genius at keeping you alive. It’s been doing it not just for your own lifetime, but adapting to do so for millions of years!

But the truth is, the nervous system is also a genius at learning and growing.

In other words: being a true beginner.

As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that it’s no surprise that I keep coming back to being a beginner, because Sense Writing has always been about building the skills to be a beginner.

In the Skilled Beginner Series coming to you in the next few blogs, you’ll get the opportunity to do just this. 

In these upcoming recorded Sense Writing sequences, you’ll settle into a place before the coping strategies and old habits of survival, before all the stories we tell about ourselves, and learn to hone the skills to be genuinely open to the unknown.

Because the genius of our nervous system is not just in its ability to keep us alive, but in its infinite capacity to learn and grow — to play, explore, make connections, expand and mature, grounded in safety and surprise.  

And what’s more: it LOVES to do that. It just forgets what it loves to do. 

Just like we sometimes do. 

Stay tuned for more!

Madelyn

PS. Even if you're in 12-week program, and may not feel like a beginner, try the upcoming sequences-- they're new! 

Sense Writing Gift: Feeling Whole by Feeling into the Margins

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday I was sitting with a friend and we were talking about the strange contradiction that we feel: that with all the crises … there’s this call for action, but we also don’t want to be reactive. At the same time, there’s also a call to re-engage in the reassuring routine of everyday life, yet things don’t seem to be getting any better, so where exactly is that reassurance?

From the whiff of marijuana from four different directions (we were near Washington Square Park), it seemed like other people had found their own ways of coping.

One important thing to know about the nervous system is that it’s plastic: it adjusts to most anything. If we stay in a tunnel-visioned full-frontal mode, that survival state becomes more and more habitual, and harder to climb out of. But what’s left when all the ways we use to show up vigilantly are exhausting us and all the ways we’ve used to check out stop offering meaningful relief?

New Ways of Being and Doing

Today, I’m thinking more about that contradiction between action and withdrawal and wondering if there’s a way to turn that conflict into a useful paradox instead. If you’ve explored the paradox series of sequences that I’ve been sharing during the pandemic (and another’s right below), you understand how significant that distinction is, and how important a role paradox plays in neuroplastic learning and healing.

Contradiction basically boils down to conflict, something that you have to face and fight, while paradox, in neurosensory approaches like Sense Writing and Feldenkrais, offers a potent and playful way of exploring complexity and inviting fresh insight.

I started remembering what helped a year ago — in the past huge uncertainty of the earlier pandemic — was to stop trying to grasp the whole thing. When you try to skip to the whole picture right away, your attention is pulled by default to the most forward direction. Your effort to gain perspective is often sabotaged by the latest and loudest crisis.

But if we attend to the small details on the margins of where we sit instead — not the state of the world, but the reflection you see in the corner of your eye, or the familiar shapes you see in the piles of leaves you walk by in the street — we get a feeling of the bigger picture and our place in it.

It becomes possible to absorb reality as it is, to stay in it, and remain in one piece. And by doing so, we become quieter still — and find expansion, texture, resiliency, and the ability to imagine new ways of being and doing.

This is a highly creative state often associated with neuroplastc learning, and it’s exactly what we explore in Sense Writing. It’s a kind of “sideways learning” that cajoles the nervous system away from the habitual into the unexpected.

The Paradox: Feeling Whole by Feeling into the Margins

But how do we develop and practice this skill?

The way to access these other antennas is to recognize how we already use them. Noticing how much we actually do see on the periphery already and how often we already act on it. 

For myself, during this time, I’ve taken crucial inventory to bolster my trust that I already do this. Encouraging and building on the foundation of intuition that I already have. It could be as subtle and complex as my years of neuroplastic treatment for my lazy eye, or as simple and overlooked as recounting that I turned just at the moment the racoon came out of the tress in the park.

And as our vision broadens, our voices become more versatile and more our own. Instead of reacting to what we don’t understand or can’t process, we stretch our awareness gradually around the part we CAN touch.

As our awareness grows our capacity does too, and we return to ourselves.

And the way we show up for ourselves is the way we show up for the people in our lives and our communities, how we show up collectively. On some level, we know that only by re-committing to a deeper practice do we cultivate the resiliency and imagination that we need.

In the 40-minute movement and writing sequence below, I invite you to experience this return, in the space you already inhabit.

Warmly,
Madelyn

PS. You’ll need a comfortable place to lie down on the floor, and a notebook and pen.

(If you’re curious to explore more Sense Writing paradoxes, please visit this gift series here.)

“Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” -Lou Reed

Sometimes when there’s a lot going on-- like in the last year—it can feel difficult to say anything at all, and as I mentioned last time, this is why I hadn’t been in touch for a while.

Hi, again.

Today I want to talk about a different response to the intensity we’ve been living through. After a bout of silence, it can feel cathartic to start sharing again. And sometimes that’s all we want after a difficult time--to tell stories around the fire and share camaraderie.

When it comes to reconnecting with our creative work, we can feel that same cathartic pull to share on the fly, especially with the proliferation of instant communication and instant audience.

But also... it’s complicated. Perhaps you’ve had the experience recently of coming away feeling numb or fragmented after eagerly sharing stories, in person or online.  Our plot points tumble around, disconnected from the subtler textures and emotional truths we wanted to convey. 

So between the poles of silence and premature sharing, how do we come back to our writing practice?

Staircase vs. Elevator Shaft

Virtually every other art form offers a container that allows you to be in a process while doing your art. In photography, dance, music, painting, there’s stuff to do. Warm ups, scales, the physicality of deeds.

But besides picking up a pen and sitting and being told to “just do it,” process is bypassed in writing. It’s like the common wisdom is still haunted by that perplexing first-day-of-school exercise where you have to write for twenty minutes about what I did on my summer vacation. I remember being baffled, unsure what to write while everyone else seemed to scribble away somehow knowing what the teacher wanted.  It felt like I was being asked to step into an elevator shaft.

Luckily, I had had plenty of experiences in and out of school that fostered creativity and expression. But in the hard school chair, I’d rifle through the summer days with mounting frustration, all a blur, scavenging for content. I had no idea what counted as an event, a "what."

What was missing, in fact, wasn’t what to write but how. How to find that ease in my body. How to step into something, feel around and follow my curiosity, instead of straining to understand what the teacher wanted.

Don’t just do it

When we expect ourselves to crank it out, the impulses that stirred us to pick up a pen in the first place can suddenly blink off, and “just do it” leads to “I can’t.” Instead of freedom, we get blocks. 

That’s why in Sense Writing we back way up, not just before the finished product, and not just before the story itself, but to the foundational sensory regulation that helps us dissolve stuck together fragments and blocks. 

In the coming weeks, I’ll write more about the connection between sensory regulation and language, and the neuroscience behind it (spoiler alert: it’s about stress response inhibiting choices, and to get a bit reductive, it's about survival mode shutting down our brain’s language centers). 

This is where the work becomes reparative, as well as creative. When we learn to process and absorb more sensation in our different environments (internally and externally), we’re actually learning to work with our stress response.

And ultimately, this sensory regulation allows us to repair the connection between the gut and language, and navigate this space between our deepest yearnings and the words to express them.

And this takes trust. Trust in the process. Trust in our creative instincts and curiosity. Trust that we can work with quiet, tender, or confusing material without getting derailed. And trust that we can find some pleasure on the way. 

Sense Writing provides manual, physical processes that allow us to pause before we launch into our summer vacation story (or dive into tricky content before we have self-regulation skills). We don’t have to seek premature catharsis, or put our pencil to the grindstone until the recess bell rings.

Instead, we calm our nervous systems and perceive more finely the impressions we’ve collected in our bodies. In a regulated state, we bring these impressions to language.

So we can feel the story--and so can our reader. If you want to step into the process now, but skipped past last email's Summer Gift of Re-imagining, you can access this new sequence below.

Summer Gift of Re-imagining

Sometimes when a lot is happening—like in the last year—it seems impossible to say anything at all, hence the inbox silence from me over the last several months. Like many of us, I have felt wary of saying the wrong thing when there’s so much listening to do.

I have also felt something changing, both internally and externally, though I haven’t wanted to rush into this new terrain. Instead, I’ve been stirring into the changes, writing some then stepping back, giving the stories space.

The only thing I’ve come to know is that I want to write more personally, to share more specific, smaller insights and experiences beyond the main origin story I’ve shared about Sense Writing so far. And I feel that the earth has gotten quiet enough to hear, the ground soft enough.

The world has been building towards an understanding that we need to grow capacity for more narratives, ones that we knew but ignored, our own inside of us, and the ones outside.

And this is what Sense Writing has been about all along.

Growing the capacity to change

When the narratives that have shaped our understanding of ourselves and the world no longer hold or are in flux, it’s disorienting. We can react in the moment, with rage or sorrow or bewilderment, but these reflexive reactions can all too quickly dissipate before affecting real change (especially in our screen-saturated world).

When it comes to doing our own creative work, it can seem downright impossible to find the muse again.

In later blogs, I’ll talk about how building complexity and capacity—internally, gently, through foundational approaches—enables a more durable empathy than our first-line, knee jerk responses. I’ll also be writing about how this process involves changing fundamental ways that we experience and interact with the world, and not just crafting narratives in a new way.

Of course Sense Writing affects our writing practice and the stories we tell, but it also affects how we can imagine a meaningfully different world and how we can participate in it.

And we can’t do that without learning to be where we are now.

Re-imaging the future.

Moment-to-moment presence

I originally created this gift sequence for a Sense Writing fiction class I taught years ago, but I’ve modified it to help you be wherever you are now. It’s inspired by a visualization exercise created by Irene Fornes, a Cuban-American playwright who was a luminary of the downtown theater scene and mentor to generations of playwrights.

Though I never studied with her, I spent countless hours with her in the early 2000s, as the middle stages of her dementia were setting in. A friend of mine, Michelle, came in as her caretaker when others in the theater community just disappeared.

Dementia changes the narrative, throws it into flux. Yet we spent hours walking around the Village, eating, going on short adventures—each day a moment-to-moment creation in the presence of the zig-zagging, trickster muse that we can all become for ourselves.

“There are two of you- one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write better keep tricking the one who doesn't.”

- Irene Fornes

Here’s your invitation to welcome that muse. Find a spot to lie down for 25 minutes and press play.

Michelle, me, and Irene (L. to R.), photo by Madeleine George

Rigidity vs. Ritual in Times of Stress

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

The Relationship We Always Return To

Developing generative creative rituals is never easy, even when our day-to-day lives aren’t this deeply rocked by uncertainty.

But at the most essential level, our creativity is the longest, most important long-term relationship we have.

Whether we’re conscious of pursuing an artistic life, whether we make careers out of writing, whether anyone ever gives us the validation or applause we want for our efforts, the urge we have to create is hard to snuff out. It’s what propels our curiosity as pre-verbal exploration machines.

And right now— it can act like a refuge, a place to unclench stress response, which lately is probably in overdrive whether you need it or not.

But like most successful relationships, maintaining a creative practice takes both flexibility and commitment. And of course, like many relationships, it can include frustration, fear, a desire to pick up and run away when it gets too uncomfortable. (The notes that country songs are built on.)

So why do we stay, instead of packing up our dogs and our saddlebags and setting out into the sunset, alone?

Because at the heart of that relationship is a standing invitation, even after we’ve been away: to come back and listen to that deep murmuring, like an underwater stream, constant in both its groundedness and its perpetual motion. We listen, and our own secrets are revealed. We re-engage, and we get to open the portals to surrender, discovery, clarity, and trust.

Unlike two minutes of twangy radio tunes about lost love, our ebb and flow continues. 

Sometimes, continuing that relationship gets distilled into an instruction to “trust the process.” But “the process” can feel random. Our feelings are inconsistent and shaken by circumstance. 

We’re left with the deep grooves of routine, rather than process.

When Routine and Duty Take Over

"I don't trust my inner feelings, inner feelings come and go" -Leonard Cohen

Rituals sometimes save us from the flatness of routine. We all have rituals, whether personal or communal: times when we intentionally allow something "else" to happen. 

At their most profound, rituals can help us let go of will and be carried along by a sequence of action to a more connected place.

Rituals that work — that bring some kind of peace or insight to their adherents — work by repeated DOING, not by alchemy or instant transformation. But leaning on doing alone can turn rituals into empty movements — into the very rigidity we try to circumvent. 

We might sit down dutifully to write, but wrestle with ourselves when the blank page or the pressing idea feels too solid. We might write pages of free writes each morning, but fall deeper each day into the same syntax of emotion and thought.

Instead of rote repetition, the suspended state of discovery between curiosity and commitment is what allows our practice and voice to be both new, exciting, interesting — and recognizable. 

Magic vs. Methodology

Sense Writing is all about honing intuition. But it’s tough to create a methodology that builds enough scaffolding while making sure students can trust the space and softness that are the main goal of a sustainable creative practice.

In the container of Sense Writing’s 12-week course, for example, that experience can feel hard to imagine, if you haven’t felt it yet. 

On the one hand, the course is set up to help you form rituals, to create a safe, sustainable space for your intuition to grow and your curiosity to guide you. There are 12 weeks of sequences (neuro-sensory movement and writing exercises), theory videos, a discussion group, and live calls) to support your learning.

On the other hand, although the 12 weeks have been carefully planned, the goal isn’t a finished product (or even finished process) at the end of those weeks — it’s an inner sense of fluid, available attention. Reliable curiosity, not rigidity — you can always get off the train and get back on. 

Barrelling ahead when you’re learning to listen to yourself is kind of the opposite of what works, so we don’t barrel.

Instead, the learning happens in the ebb and flow between presentness and spacing out. You don’t just experience that sensation as you go through the course — you learn how to invite it and trust it on your own, too. 

After all, like in any other relationship, the details of how you show up, how you communicate, even how you fight — they’re unique. Rituals are not consumed, but created… and that’s the magic that fuels longevity. Even if it doesn’t make for a very good country song.

Tuning In Vs. Turning Away

You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it.
- Leonard Cohen

Years ago, when I thought of the name Sense Writing, I wasn’t really thinking about the five senses. In Sense Writing, we do use the five senses. But that’s not really the “sense” of Sense Writing. Instead of those five familiar senses specifically, this “sense” actually refers to the ability to feel and absorb sensation inside the landscape of your body.

Though we’re constantly using our five senses as we move through the world, the truth is we’re not really feeling everything we’re feeling, and we’re definitely not absorbing all of it. (We’d be oversaturated before leaving the house if we did.) That too-much-ness is a classic problem.

Everybody seems to have too much going on, and then some if you live in a city or have a family or care about hobbies or need more rest than society says is acceptable. (Basically, if you are alive.)

Tuning in Instead of Turning Away

All this too-much-ness is not only overstimulating in practice, but also overwhelming to even consider: you know there’s more richness underneath the busy day-to-day, but you don’t know how to access it. Some days, that gap feels so impassable that it’s easier to turn away than to reach for it and fail.

And when we can tune in, it’s easy to feel that tuning in is too much, too. Paying attention — and allowing ourselves to notice what we find — feels too quiet or too tiring or too uncomfortable.

Sense Writing teaches the strategies to do it anyway: to tune in instead of turning away.

We learn to settle deeper into ourselves, to increase our ability to integrate more sensation and detail in the landscape of our writing word by word and story by story.

These skills are based on our brains’ innate abilities, but they don’t exactly feel comfortable right away.

Time to Learn to Crawl

When I started my own Feldenkrais training in Tel Aviv, it felt at times bizarre to spend hours hanging out on the floor with my nervous system after the bombardment of productivity and accomplishment and output that I had experienced back in New York.

I was living in a new country and learning in a new language. I’d left behind the career I’d been devoted to and a job that looked good on a resume. Rolling around on the floor like a baby felt like a borderline ridiculous farewell to all that I thought I had accomplished as an adult.

But I needed time to unlearn and relearn. I needed to shed the layers of overwhelm that I had absorbed from my previous life. After too many years of running around — or treading water, drowning in the too-much-ness — I needed time to learn to crawl.

Just give me many chances
Far away, I'll see you through it all
Remember, just give me time
To learn to crawl
-Rickie Lee Jones

When you feel more there, more oriented, whether in your inner or outer world, you also feel safer, more contained. This containment helps you then feel more safe and grounded, giving you the strength and curiosity to let your exploration be bolder, braver, more creative. Paying attention to what is already there lets you sidestep the anxiety and blocks that so often interfere with noticing.

Organized Dreaming

That’s part of why Sense Writing isn’t simply about nervous system regulation or relaxation (or about opening to the inspiration of the universe), but rather offers tools for learning how to do it.

Sense Writing sequences are structured to allow you engaged relaxation, this ebb and flow — staring out the window and coming back. Organized dreaming. It’s not a way to step out of the current or to fight it or to give into it, but a way to feel it in a contained, integrated way that gives you room to participate and to process.

And whatever you come back with is your voice as a writer.

A New Year's Gift from Sense Writing: Chasing vs. Conjuring

Waiting for the Weight

We often hear the advice, “If you want to write, just sit down and write.”

And sometimes that’s true; it’s what I’m doing right now. But too often, the sit-and-stay approach increases stress, as we chase meaning with words, and leads pretty quickly to feeling stuck.

When developing Sense Writing, I’ve found this suggestion to be more effective: “If you want to write, wait.”

I don't mean like how we wait for the subway to show up or for an upcoming vacation. Instead, it’s the kind of waiting we do after extending an invitation: somewhere between hope and patience, and if we’re lucky, trust that the invitation will be accepted.

It's a different kind of waiting than the grocery line. Critically different. But physically, it often starts the same way, with what looks at first like an empty space.

A kind of stillness, and then a conjuring.

A waiting for the weight.

In Sense Writing, that space sometimes begins before writing, with the body. To invite something new, we first make room for it.

In the Sense Writing sequence linked below (and never before shared), I prompt you to pay attention to what’s already there at the level of the body. Without trying to relax or correct anything.

During all this, you might be asking: What does this have to do with writing?

Tuning the Senses

Our primary mode of interfacing with the external world is through sensation. And sensation is processed through the body and nervous system.

Sense Writing sequences — like the one below — shift your nervous system away from its habitual stress responses and toward its learning functions.

When we are in this learning mode, we can actually tune our senses to take in more of the world — not just large objects, but details and unexpected discoveries on the periphery.

These are the big and small, moment-to-moment details that bring intricate meaning to our lives and creative work.

The more skillful we become in noticing and processing inner and outer sensations, the more complex the connections we can create.

And as the connections develop, they in turn support and contextualize our ability to perceive. Thought and language are a part of this cycle. So are memory and imagination.  

The Physical Leads to the Metaphysical

In a weird way, when we fully inhabit the physical and the present, the metaphysical — the imaginative leaps, the philosophical musings, the language games, the ideas we remember or invent —  can grow from there.

Letting ourselves be contained creates more clarity and choice.

And isn’t that what we’re really after when we sit down to write?

To allow these choices, we don’t have to muscle our way through the discomfort or wait anxiously for inspiration to strike. We can conjure and invite these choices by turning our attention toward what is already there — in our bodies, our surroundings, and our minds. (Yes, even when they’re anxious or frustrated or already wondering about lunch.)

This is not merely waiting.

This is waiting for the weight.

A New Sequence Gift from Sense Writing

Curious about what “waiting for the weight” feels like?

Just press play below and sit down and... wait.
You'll need 30 minutes, a notebook and pen, and a place to lie down.

Wishing you a new year full of conjuring!

Label vs. Longing

Contending with an Unnameable Itch

We’re used to things being either/or: you’re either successful or not. Committed or not. An artist or not.

But either/or thinking is neither realistic nor (usually) helpful. Especially if you’re contending with an unnameable itch. There’s not a swab test for this type of itch. There's no calamine ointment.

The symptoms vary, but frequently present as a desire for deeper inquiry and a more creative life. Certain sufferers report a baffling but persistent urge to write and tell stories. Outbreaks may be accompanied by embarrassment and either/or thinking, as in: I’m itching… but I’m not a Serious Writer or Artist or Fill-In-the-Blank.

There’s a lot already written about ways to integrate art into regular life (like Julia Cameron’s programs), but in the coming blogs I’m less interested in writing about doing capital-A Art as a capital-P Project and more in how creativity shows up in our lives already, even in ways we may not think of as Serious Creative Work.

I’m here for lowercase creativity.

The ambient buzz

The truth is that we’re not just already creative; we are already WRITERS. We might not label ourselves as such but pause for a moment to consider all the ways that our actions prove us so.

There are the countless acts of writing on screens (and even paper) that saturate our daily lives: texts, emails, social media posts, birthday cards, and so on. Even a grocery list can tell a story — all it takes is finding someone else’s abandoned list in an empty cart to show you how.

We’re swarming with words and stories. We’re the hive and the bees. We contain and encounter so many stories that they form an ambient buzz, a ticklish background noise. No wonder we get itchy.

No wonder it's hard to figure out how, or where, to scratch.

Listen first

With Sense Writing, we aim to recognize that we’re creating stories all the time already and stop TELLING them for a second so that we can HEAR them.

When you slow down and listen, the ambient buzz of all these swarming stories doesn’t necessarily get quieter, but it gets clearer.

Like picking out the violins in a symphony or the particular warble of a bird species you know in a morning cacophony, you might even begin to quietly track the buzz and movement of one particular bee — to zoom in on one particular story.

Sense Writing is not about evolving or succeeding or controlling the buzz. In fact, in my experience as a writer and teacher, the pressure to ACHIEVE too often stifles or overwhelms ideas.

Instead, Sense Writing is about remembering. Remembering the stories that have stacked up inside us and remembering what it’s like to play as we discover them.

“In Sense Writing, you follow the end of your pen, the tips of your fingers, the nerve endings in your body, the place where you end and the world begins is a fuzzy place full of possibility and story.” -Jean Rhode

The power of playing

Playing, as it turns out, is not something we need to be taught. It just happens, like walking and language: an engaged response to all that already exists in the world. And though playing doesn’t require instruction, it’s a rich space for trying and learning and trying again.

In adulthood, we often wall ourselves off from trying stuff out if we’re not already experts (e.g. Serious Writers). When we feel like beginners as adults — while stumbling through exercise classes or getting used to a new job — we often remember the stress, overwhelm, and embarrassment.

But these experiences can also offer discovery. Remember how satisfied you’ve felt after puzzling your way through a new challenge?

That’s what the longing is for. That’s what a label — or the fear of missing the right label — takes from you.

And the truth is that even those who carry those labels get stuck behind them more often than you think. Even for Serious Writers, labels don’t scratch the itch.

In Sense Writing, we learn processes to make the urge to write — that unnameable itch — both nameable and available.

And we don’t have to prove ourselves with labels or accomplishments before we start. We get to start with what’s already there — by playing.

The Pleasure-Skill Connection

Feel good, not guilty

When I first started developing Sense Writing, I understood that there was so much potency and power in pleasure. And of course, I could see how little most of us felt like we could trust where pleasure might lead us.

Even in the beginning, Sense Writing wasn’t just about bypassing anxiety or regulating the nervous system or enhancing creative flow.

Instead, I turned to something simple but elusive: tuning into the pleasure and letting yourself follow your instincts without judgment.

It’s been almost seven years since the first Sense Writing workshops in Brooklyn, and through the years, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of pleasure on a personal level.

This variety of pleasure is not about satisfying existing notions of what pleases you — it's not (for example) about sitting in the sun and eating a croissant — though I do this often. And it’s not about the more familiar kind of pleasure that lets us escape what troubles us, which can be soothing and restful but rarely increases our connection to the moment

Instead, the kind of pleasure that interests me is about inhabiting creativity--sinking into a vivid memory or following a previously unknown path of words-- and noticing the pleasurable sensation of this experience and letting it lead you.

And a strange thing happens when you tune into pleasurable sensations of active, engaged writing: gently, and without pressure or expectation, they begin to spread.

Pleasure sustains practice

We're not in the habit of inviting pleasure to lead us. We tend to trust our finely honed survival instincts much more. After all, we know they’re always waiting, ready to galvanize our body’s systems to keep us alive in response to threat or danger.

But what if we knew our artistic instincts were also always there?

And what if we could sharpen these just as thoroughly, and galvanize them as well?

Not through threat or danger — but through the sensation of pleasure.

Following pleasure doesn't mean we only write about butterflies and rainbows. What we write can be difficult, charged, and complex. But while what you write is important, how you write will determine if your practice is sustainable.

And pleasure plays a key role in that.

The pleasure-skill connection

By now, your inner Protestant work ethic may be thinking, Okay but HOW WILL I GET ANYTHING DONE IF I’M JUST “PAYING ATTENTION TO PLEASURE”? What about hard work, effort, talent, and technique?

What about the grind?

I’ve also heard these voices screaming, but I’ve found it more fruitful to ask these questions instead: How do I step into the process of writing to begin with — and how do I stay engaged?

The art of listening to and following pleasure as it arises helps to connect with the creative process, and it buoys the desire to stay engaged.

Pleasure is an intrinsic motivator.

I like to think about engagement and effort as skills to cultivate the way I cultivated a taste for really ripe, smelly cheese — through pleasure! — and as sensations that spread through the body with increasing richness, depth, and complexity, felt on a molecular level.

It’s not as simple as enjoying ease or instant gratification (like the sugary frosting on a cupcake, which doesn’t take much cultivation to respond to). It’s about layering experience and pleasure together to grow a sophisticated appreciation of the richness and complexity of creative effort — of creative flow.

Pleasure and engagement create flow

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” -Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow

If you’ve ever heard someone describe a time when their performance excelled and they were “in the zone,” they were likely describing an experience of flow.

Flow occurs when your skill level and the challenge at hand are equal.

The more familiar flipside — blocked effort, guilty avoidance, frustrated wrestling — is what happens when the gap between skill and challenge is too big to grasp.

But the answer isn’t to push harder or suffer more.

There’s an easier way to build up those layers and grow your skill through pleasure, not pressure.

Pleasure and effort can have equally important parts in discovery.

When we work with the body and nervous system, our internal motivation deepens. We can begin to shed old patterns of motivation, like guilt or unhealthy competition. As we build self-trust, we can be more moved by our curiosity and pleasure because we can actually feel them as sensations in the body.

Through pleasure, we remember and re-learn how to enjoy the process.

Why Your Comfort Zone is So Uncomfortable

Even if you’ve never paused to think about your comfort zone, you can probably remember being told to abandon it. Maybe in the last piece of writing advice you read. Maybe even in the last week!

Somehow, “comfort zone” has become a code for whatever is holding you back.

But if you can remember that feeling of being stuck in the familiar — the so-called comfort you’re always being told you have to leave — you probably already know the truth:

It just doesn’t feel that comfortable in the first place.

Instead of true comfort, we get stuck with (and in) complacency, rigidity, avoidance… not exactly the heart of a sustainable creative practice.

The paradox of a true comfort zone

Having a comfort zone means, well, that it’s actually comfortable.

And that you actually know what it feels like and how to find it. 

A comfort zone is individual and specific, not an Instagram hashtag or an instant fix. Developing a comfort zone — let alone delineating it from what’s on the other side — requires intimacy with the self. 

And the instruction to leave your comfort zone is something of a paradox.

To leave where you are, you first have to acknowledge where you are. You have to linger there. Only then can you step out a bit. And to step out safely and sustainably, you have to trust that the comfort zone remains where you can find it.

It’s like the early childhood development concept of forming secure attachments so you can venture further and further out into the playground.

First in the sandbox. Then to the ladder and monkey bars. Then to the edge of the woods or right to the bank of the river. Between ventures, there’s the return to safety (i.e. your mother’s flared, polyester pants) before venturing just a little further than before. The comfort zone grows wider as your skills are able to take on more of what’s outside of it.

But how do we get there when we don’t know what a safe home base looks like now?
 

Listening to the nervous system

In Sense Writing, I situate this “home” — this comfort zone — in the body and nervous system.

Through an ebb and flow of writing and movement sequences, we bring the nervous system to a place of relaxed engagement, where it can observe and differentiate sensations and thoughts and then re-integrate them.

Though it’s easy to jump to the outcome — how capable we might end up feeling or how much easier it might feel to write toward our ambitions — the most important part is first giving the nervous system enough ease to function in this way.

When it’s stressed, there is no comfort, and little creativity.

Instead of aiming for that disruption, we learn to relax with our internal sensations and sensory input a little at a time, and our awareness expands. The “comfort zone” of secure curiosity becomes more comfortable. And that comfort and security allow Sense Writers to explore more in any direction.

Rather than running away from the status quo or denying ourselves the nurturing necessity of comfort, creativity becomes about learning how to start and sustain a journey.

You can go home again

Knowing your comfort zone allows you a place to come back to again and again. You can slowly make your way out into further and further realms — fueled by curiosity and sustained writing practice, rather than idea-driven frenzy — and always know you can come home.

You can journey outward without getting completely lost.

Like any approach that works in tandem with the nervous system and the body, this is what we’re developing in Sense Writing. There has to be a place of comfort, of return, of reflection, for the work to accumulate in deep learning rather than straight-ahead achievement.

The American writer Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again.”

In this practice, you can go home again. Always.

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