“Sensations in the body are ground zero, the place where we directly experience the entire play of life. ”
Listening to writers describe the actual work of their craft — not the conception of a story in their mind but the daily work of pounding out a novel or essay or poem letter by letter — is akin to being in the audience of a highly experimental piece of modern dance.
Center stage: the writer sits, hands poised over the keyboard. The work may seem cerebral, all of the heavy lifting occurring in the creator’s imagination, but it’s anything but.
Writing as an Embodied Practice
Writing is an embodied practice, where all parts of the physical self align with the mental, which then fuses with the more ephemeral muse/soul/flow that ties the process together.
The language writers use to express the act is only sometimes metaphorical, and often very real, incorporating all five senses:
Butt in chair.
Kill your darlings.
Knock out a draft.
Listen — to your characters, your gut, the whole wide world.
One of my favorite Zen teachers will often say, “Can you taste it?” when she’s dropped a dharma bomb on us, as though truth has a flavor.
One of the most vital parts of my process is to read my work aloud — and trust me when I say this is a highly physical act, requiring copious amounts of tea and Ricollas. (I write long books).
Hook up a heart monitor to a writer when they’re deep in flow and you’ll see a spike in their heart rate. Listen to their breath get shorter, feel their hands cramp and sweat and ache. Watch how their toes curl when they get to an especially tricksy section of the book. Feel their stomach turn into a mess when they realize that, once again, they haven’t found their way through the thicket of their story. Hear the defeated sigh slip past their lips. Watch them get up and stretch their aching back, massage their sore forearms and fingers. Crack their stiff neck.
All of that, however, is just the nuts and bolts of writing, of the body taking up space to do the work.
The best writers are the ones who are fully in their own skins, who recognize that writing is not just something that happens in the head or heart, an alchemical process that is then transferred onto the page. The best writers inhabit their whole selves and bring the totality of their being to the page. What results is writing that is more visceral, deeply present, steeped in specificity.
Here’s the thing: you’ll never be comfortable on the page if you’re not comfortable in your own skin.
And you’ll never be able to breathe life — real, bloody, messy life — into your characters or the subjects of your work if you are not fully awakened to your own life. Read any Mary Oliver poem and tell me I’m wrong.
To get inside the skin of your characters, you have to be inside your own.
And for many writers, that doesn’t feel like a safe place. We’re bogged down by society’s ideas of what our particular makeup of self should be (gender, race, all the things). We’re stymied by what love we did or did not get from the world at large via social media, unsure where the line is between brand and self. Our worst fears are confirmed about how we look or what we’re about when we refresh our feeds, again and again, and — still — no comments. No likes. No love.
We disregard our well being so we can clock in more writing time, giving up much needed forays onto woodsy trails and meditation cushions and yoga mats or bicycles or rough-and-tumble wrestling matches with dogs and kids on magic living room carpets. We drink too much or smoke too much or bitch too much. We can’t be alone. Or we must always be alone. And in all of these spaces, the body is disregarded. Pain ignored — pop a few more pills to make it go away. Stress levels rising — have a glass of whisky instead of a nice long, hot bath.
We wonder why we’re run down, why we’re creatively blocked, why the words don’t sing.
What results from ignoring the body is writers who aren’t awake.
And readers need writers who are awake, writers who can help them wake up too. But when we ignore the body, we imprison ourselves in limbo, a half-life, a dream. This is not fertile ground for compelling work on the page. So how do we wake up to our bodies, to our living, breathing life?
How do we train our wily, wonderfully imaginative minds to value the practice of embodied writing?
Mindfulness For Writers
“Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.”
The first foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of the body. Why? Because, as meditation teacher Tara Brach says, “physical sensations…are intrinsic to feelings and thoughts and are the base of the very process of consciousness.”
Getting in our bodies is chapter one of our whole story.
Without that, the narrative is utterly confused.
“There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one the thing? Is is mindfulness centered on the body. ”
First, like any newborn creature, we open our eyes. We pay attention. We notice that the tree outside our window is flowering — when did that happen? We observe the way the people around us move and talk and sit — ah, there’s that gait you were trying to find for your protagonist. The woman at the drugstore in aisle five does that curious shuffle you couldn’t quite describe in your last writing session.
We feel — everything. We give ourselves permission to sit with difficult emotions, to interrogate what fear and love and sadness and confusion do to our actual physical bodies. This clarity of our own expression of emotion transfers onto the page. Gone are the clichés of clenched fists and flared nostrils. You now know that anger, at least your brand, is experienced as a crinkling in your chest, as though all of you was a rough draft that got crumpled up and thrown in the wastebasket. What does the wind feel like on your face? What does a strawberry actually taste like? What is the particular sensation one experiences directly after orgasm?
Specificity is the watchword for embodied writing.
We listen — to our bodies, to others. We don’t drown out the world, as writers are so often encouraged to do. Instead, we enter into the flow of it all, then rise above the waves with our newfound knowledge and swim to the shores of our pages, explorers with a tale to tell.
An Exercise in Embodied Writing
This comes from my days in Method Acting - we call this “substitution.” You can use any emotion you wish, but I often choose to use fear because it’s easily accessible for most of us.
What do you fear most?
How does this fear manifest in your body? What are the physical sensations?
How does it disrupt your usual thought process? (For example, does your mind go totally blank?)
Now, what does your main character fear most?
Holding lightly to the physical sensation you experience when you are feeling fear, write a scene in which your main character is feeling fear. Hers might manifest differently, and that’s okay: but see if your felt experience of fear can inform putting her felt of experience of fear on the page.
When you’re finished, be sure to do some of 4-8-12 Breathing so you don’t hold that strong emotion in your body. I like to do 10 rounds. (Breathe in through your nose for four counts, hold for 8, exhale through your mouth for 12 counts. Do that ten times).
It isn’t so very difficult to be all in. To dance your book or sing your poem.
The more you wake up to yourself, to the lived and felt experience of your own life and the world around you, the better you’ll be able to help your readers enter into their own blink-of-an-eye existence.
Open your eyes. Blink, and you’ll miss it all.
