A Field Guild to a Writing Practice

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

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

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

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

A Widening Terrain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope you enjoyed this Ecology of Curiosity Winter Series.

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

Winter Gift: Visibility vs. Vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clinging to the Circle of Visibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Pleasure at the Edges 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growing My Capacity in the Dark

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

Welcome to The Ecology of Curiosity #2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Gets Lost in the Light

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

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

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

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

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

Collaborating in the Dark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winter Series: The Ecology of Curiosity

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

Wishing you a fulfilling and nurturing new year!

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

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

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

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

Instead, we want to skip to the end. 

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

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

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invisible Worlds Emerge

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

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

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

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

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

The Many Layers of My Story

Just give me many chances

I'll see you through it all

Just give me time to learn to crawl.

-Rickie Lee Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Many Layers of Sense Writing

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

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

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

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

And of course there are many more layers…

Digging into Your Own Radical Wholeness

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

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

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

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

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

And to decide how you want to dig in.

The Radical Wholeness of Sense Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sense Writing is about returning that wholeness.

The Joy of Engaged Relaxation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sense Writing helps us rediscover that process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Grind vs. the Ground: Gift Sequence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coping vs. Creating

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

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

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

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

Rest as Subversive

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

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

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

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

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

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

All you need is the floor. 


Pushing vs. Portal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Art and Science of Tuning in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In answer, we notice. 

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

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

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

The Floor as a Portal

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Stillness that isn't Still

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the same goes for our own internal terrain. 

Portal to Possibility

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

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

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

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

Stilling vs Distilling

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remedy vs. Resource: The Grounding Summer Series

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

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

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

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

Beyond the limits of remedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that lives below

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

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

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

Repairing vs. Despairing: A Sense Writing Gift

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Potent Place Before Language

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

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

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

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

Restoring Our Subjectivies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Profound shifts can happen in just 15 minutes.

No need to leave home :)

Faking it vs. Making it (Art)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rolf started: 

“Ommmm….”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faking it vs. Making Art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of Story

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

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

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

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

He was teaching us how to learn.

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

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

The Gap vs. The Opening Gate

(New Year’s Series #2)

jenny holzer at times square, nyc, 1993

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

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

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

“Act natural,” she instructed.

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

cape code, massachusetts, 1970s

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

The Gap Between

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

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

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

I wish something beautiful were just pouring forth…

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

This would be easier if I were more disciplined…

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

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

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

Freeing Yourself from the Gap

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

That’s exactly what we do in Sense Writing. 

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

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

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

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

No posing necessary.

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

Revealing vs.Resolving

(New Year’s Series #1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe this feels familiar?

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

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

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

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

The Gap Between 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small Revelations vs. Resolutions  

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

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

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

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

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

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


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!


“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.