Hi Everyone!

Welcome to Sense Writing’s Skilled Beginner’s series.

I wanted to share some Sense Writing moving and writing sequences with you during this time.

It’s a time of rolling uncertainty and crisis— and on some level, we think we should already be experts at this part because, after all, all this uncertainty is not exactly new anymore! 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 below, you get the opportunity to do just this. 

In these 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. 

Enjoy!

Madelyn

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

#1 Safety and Surprise

Welcome to the first sequence of this series! (Just scroll down and press play.)

In the introduction above, 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 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.

#2 The Wholeness of the Parts

Welcome to the second sequence of this series.

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.

For this sequence, you’ll need a place to lie down and a notebook and pen!

#3 The Bridge and the Body

In the above sequence’s introduction, 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.