The Writer Who Inhabits Your Body: Somatic Practices to Enhance Creativity and Inspiration

The Writer Who Inhabits Your Body: Somatic Practices to Enhance Creativity and Inspiration

by Renée Gregorio
The Writer Who Inhabits Your Body: Somatic Practices to Enhance Creativity and Inspiration

The Writer Who Inhabits Your Body: Somatic Practices to Enhance Creativity and Inspiration

by Renée Gregorio

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Overview

• Provides a comprehensive, step-by-step program for writers to use their bodies to expand their creative capacity on the page and in their lives

• Offers hands-on exercises, rooted in the disciplines of aikido and somatics, to help writers center themselves and better access their authentic inner voice

• Helps writers confront obstacles like fear, doubt, and difficult emotions, transforming such subject matter into opportunities for creative exploration

Writing is one of our most fundamental means of spiritual expression, 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 center yourself in your body and, in so doing, expand your creative capacity on the page and give voice to the writer within. She shares hands-on exercises rooted in the martial art of aikido and the practice of somatics—body-centered learning—to provide direct and detailed ways to help facilitate personal growth and tap in to innate creative capacities.

Gregorio emphasizes 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 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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781644119242
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Publication date: 03/12/2024
Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format: eBook
Pages: 192
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Renée Gregorio is a poet, longtime aikido practitioner, and master somatic coach. She has published nine books of poetry. Her most recent, Abyss&Bridge, won the New Mexico–Arizona Book Award for Poetry. She has been granted writing residiencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts in New York State and the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, NM. She teaches body-centered writing workshops across the United States. She lives in New Mexico.

Table of 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
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