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.
