Sense Writing

Sense Writing I and II are coming to Berlin!

"a revolutionary approach to the process of writing."- Yoga City NYC

24 and 25/1, Sense Writing I
30, 31/1 and 1/2, Sense Writing II

www.sensewrting.org/berlin

🌿Resistance vs. Relief🌿

In this Potent Summer Series, we’re looking at how our ability to grow our capacity in the landscapes of our body, sensation, memory and imagination can help us not only to get to “the richness underneath it all” but also access potency in our creative practice.

We’ve been looking at what stops us from accessing that richness—and the toll it takes to avoid it.

While it might feel “right” in the moment, the anxiety of avoiding discomfort often creates the numbing static noise of separation, which pushes away the very thing we need to be in touch with as writers.

Many of us feel this on some level, even if we’re not totally aware of it—and so often, we try to remedy this pattern by pushing through and just jumping in.

By “just doing it."

This is likely thanks to our culture, which sees being an artist as being encouraged (or required) to mine the most highly charged emotional parts of ourselves, no matter what toll it takes on us— holding our entrails as jewels, covered in dirt and exhausted. (Convenient framing, given how much distress exists in our world).

Yet if the goal is to build a long-term sustainable creative practice, mining like that is just not going to work.

🌿The Solace of Sustainability

Many people come to Sense Writing because they have an urge to write, even if they don’t know what.

And many, new or experienced, come with a particular project that they’re stuck in, whether they’ve started it or not.

They can often feel that there’s a part of their inner landscape that’s hard to reach that they want to crack open. It’s like they’ve been looking for a massage to soften a tight muscle.

They are looking for relief— even if it’s just short-term.

The “contracted” stories that we carry around can be similar to the distress we feel with a tight muscle. The fragments, the images, the places in ourselves that are hard to reach with language— these become like a knot in a cramped muscle that we try to push on. Yet when we try to force it to yield, we often find resistance.

Perhaps the real relief comes when you start to understand there’s another way in.

Working with Your Nervous System and Not Against It

By working on a foundational level of the body and nervous system, Sense Writing allows people to explore and strengthen the connections between movement, thoughts, emotions and senses in sustainable ways—even with the “hardened” parts of our inner landscape.

Even in those places where there’s discomfort, pain, or heartbreak.

We can see this more clearly when we think of the ways our bodies respond to and hold physical pain, too. Our nervous systems jump in to protect us by contracting our muscles— and because the nervous system has contracted that area for a reason, it needs to be supported out of its resistance with respect and tenderness, not force. Otherwise, there’s either more resistance and tightening, or the softening will be shallow and temporary.

When we learn to work on this neuroplastic level, we discover how movement, thought, emotion, and the senses connect in all our stories.

We realize that internal resistance is not something to be pushed against but a part of that expanding landscape.

And when it’s time to spiral back into those contracted stories that feel hard to reach, the connection between our gut and language has strengthened. Not only do these stories yield more easily, but they have shifted and changed.

And our voice as a writer has clarified and deepened in this expanded landscape.

In the next post, we’ll delve into what happens when we grow this capacity to soften into the resistance and even pain— and how it opens up new portals to the potency we were craving all along.

all my best,
Madelyn K., Founder

Sense Writing Sense Writing around the world and online developed and taught by Madelyn Kent