Full Description
A practical, body-oriented program to enliven your creative abilities.
Writing is one of our most fundamental means of spiritual expression, a powerful capacity that enables us to shape and share our deepest thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Yet the writing process can be challenging and imprecise, and both novice and experienced writers may struggle with accessing their innermost creative selves.
Taking an embodied approach to writing, poet and Aikido practitioner Renée Gregorio offers a step-by-step experiential program to help you to centre yourself in your body and, in so doing, expand your creative capacity on the page and in your life. Rather than provide a guide to writing, she helps you identify and give voice to the writer within. She shares hands-on exercises rooted in the martial art of Aikido and the practice of somatics—or body-centered learning—to provide direct and detailed ways to help facilitate personal growth and tap in to innate creative capacities, enabling you to fully immerse yourself in the creative process and discover immediate benefits.
Drawing on her extensive martial arts training, the author emphasises creating your own internal writing "dojo" to clear the mind and enable you to access the deeper currents of language. Exploring discomfort as a doorway to deeper experience and new writing territory, she reveals how to examine difficult topics, express the full range of emotions, and turn self-doubt, fear, and painful experience into courage. She also explores how to unearth the power and physicality in your own voice, using techniques like "re-visioning" to effectively edit your work, ultimately embodying your writing with complexity and fullness.
Through immersive and physically focused experience, this book will help seasoned and aspiring writers alike work with the body as a wise teacher to better access, hone, and express their authentic inner voice.
Contents
PREFACE Words That Become You
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION Please Remove Your Shoes
Part One
Center Is Everything
1 A Source of Knowing
2 Working through the Body—What Body?
3 Postures of Authenticity
4 Aligning Head, Heart, and Hara:
The Column
5 Centering in Intention and Care
6 Following Center's Intelligence into Your Work
7 What's Revealed through Practice
Part Two
Opening the Body to Language
8 Your Dojo of Solitude
9 Creating Space and Spaciousness
10 The Writing Body's Emergence
11 Writing, a Surrender
12 Ways of Naming
13 The Dance of Listening
14 Bringing Your Body to the Page
15 The Companion Energy of Support
Part Three
Turning Obstacles into Doorways
16 The Doorway of Our Histories
17 The Doorway of Doubt
18 The Doorway of Fear
19 The Doorway of Our Darkness
20 The Doorway of the Gap
21 The Doorway of Hiding
22 The Doorway of Difficult Emotions
23 The Doorway of Disorder
Part Four
The Roar of Your Writing
24 Finding What's Central to Your Work
25 Becoming Direct
26 The Power of Your Distinct Voice
27 Gathering
28 Exploring Your Roar
29 Honing What's True:
The Act of Re-visioning
30 Tending the Fire
31 Delivering Your Words
CONCLUSION Claiming the Voice You Have
THE PRACTICES Committing to Your Embodied Writing Life
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
