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.
