(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
