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 :)
