somatics workshop overview

Sections

What you write in this workshop

Complete this somatics workshop and you will have seven short pieces of writing.

How short is up to you – they might be a page, they might be ten, but you can do each one in a single sitting. (You can write nonfiction, fiction, plays, poems – but we think through the lens of storytelling in this particular workshop.)

One path through the workshop has you rewriting the same story seven times. You can also write a new piece each time. I suggest you draw on an existing story – a folk tale, a memory or dream, an anecdote, a news article – so you can give your attention to how the story gets told and what is ultimately focalized in it, without spending energy inventing characters or events. The workshop is not cumulative – there’s no reason why you couldn’t just drop in on a few of the installments. But somatics practice is subtle and strange if this kind of thing is new to you, and the analogizing between somatics and writing somewhat abstract, so doing all seven sessions will give enough depth for you to really access the work.

How it works — tl;dr

Each installment begins with getting a feeling for an anatomical fact through guided visualization and visual information. That feeling is then plundered via analogy for writing prompts and practices that grow from the particular mood and mechanical possibilities of the anatomical area of focus. You can do the somatics exercises, or you can just read them and jump directly to writing. Several of the installments have audio guides for practicing the somatics section.

What is Somatics? A Little History

Somatics is an umbrella term for many different techniques of understanding bodily action from within physical experience. Think of it that “within” as in opposition to an external perspective, for example learning anatomy through dissection and observation. Most somatic modalities in practice combine internal and external knowledge, but generally, they give more value to experiential knowledge than other approaches to understanding our bodies and how we move.

The field of somatics—classical exponents of which include Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Body-Mind Centering, and Ideokinesis (which I particularly draw on)—began in the early twentieth century and is intimately tied to nondualist approaches to body and mind. (Mind/body dualism, classically, is the philosophical idea that mind is an utterly separate entity from body — essentially that thinking is noncorporeal; nondualism approaches thought as inextricably embodied, even if extended beyond the single body into long-lasting abstraction via communicative tools of language and writing.) One of the things that really blooms in somatics practice is the experience of physical intelligence – something rich and profound beyond simply the marvel of coordination or the pleasure of strength – more like intelligence as a capacity to navigate and respond to the world. So often you’ll find language about “the thinking body” in somatics talk. Nondualist, pragmatist philosophers of the early twentieth century were profoundly influenced by this work – John Dewey actually credited Alexander Technique with verifying his intution about nondualist approaches to mind, and there is both influence and consonance between somatic thinking and the broad shift in contemporary thinking about the difference (and continuity) between the human and the nonhuman.

Many practitioners of different somatic practices also identify ways the body thinks outside of (or in coordination with) abstract cognitive processes. The exercises this workshop offers are loosely grounded in a tradition called ideokinesis, which means moving through (or by) images. (There are many names for this branch of somatic work—each exponent seems to have made their own—but I’m sticking with ideokinesis because that’s how I came to it.) It grew out of the work of Mabel Todd in the early twentieth century who, devising a means to recover from an accident that had left her unable to walk, with doctors essentially telling her she’d never walk again, articulated a method of using imagery to organize the neuromuscular patterns of the moving body. Todd’s basic insight that the whole thing rests on is that the vastly complex structure that is the human body can be coordinated by images – that we see what we’re trying to do as we do it. On the one hand these images are like functional projections: in my mind’s eye as I reach for a doorhandle, I see myself turning it—I don’t see the thousands of coordinated micro-actions that it takes for my muscular-skeletal system to make the action happen.

Todd practiced a kind of creative intervention on this practical imaging, essentially seeding the feedback loop between image and action with appealing fictional images that would promote the action she desired. She was interested in undoing some of the negative effects on posture that she ascribed to artifices and conditions modernity, from overly erect Victorian posture (ramrod spines as signal of social-moral propriety) to an elevated center of gravity owing to being constantly on the alert from the noise of modern life. For Todd, modern life was artificially unbalanced, and so nature was the source for corrective imagery. She worked a lot with images that come from physics and engineering, and was concerned with returning our bodies to their structural-skeletal inheritance of a system exquisitely in balance, a moving equilibrium, not a frozen perfection. So she tended to concentrate on finding images to promote ease across a dynamic set of lines that combined to create a balanced posture, one capable of meeting the world without ossified habits or excess holdings. Those who continued her work, like Andre Bernard and Lulu Sweigard, further articulated a basic set of “nine lines of movement” that together kept the body balanced and capable of responding to the environment with ease and power.

Entertaining Images

The practice that we’ll use in this workshop involves what Todd called “entertaining images.” In ideokinesis, you practice using your mind’s eye to play an image — to host an image — in the space of your body. Lying with eyes closed in a relaxed, effortless position called constructive rest, you spend time watching the image take place in body as if your body was a little cinema. The images are fanciful and holistic, but they map onto actual physical coordinations.

If this were a movement studio class, we might spend 15 minutes on the ground entertaining these images, and then begin to move our bodies with those images foregrounded, taking the experience into movement exploration. Oriented toward writing in this workshop, we pivot from this period of getting a feeling for the anatomical fact through the entertained image, and draw analogies to take into writing. All these analogies treat the shape of the story and the movement of the telling as analogous to the physical body. Some of them also translate mechanisms that belong to different parts of the anatomy. Additionally, many of the installments offer writing practices that aren’t geared toward producing any particular piece of writing, but instead translate some of the ways of thinking into ways of writing.

Weird Me

One of my favorite aspects of this practice of zooming in on different elements of our shared anatomy is that each internal architecture reveals its own mood, its own energy—some would say its own mind. Spending a session foregrounding that element and allowing it to steer my interest and impulse becomes a way to experience a self that might seem weird or unlike the me I know. It widens my range. I also find that a lot of images bubble up as I’m moving, and I like to use these excursions to weird me to go fishing for new images. 

Body, Mind, and Image

From 2015-16, I co-taught a class for Movement Research with K.J. Holmes that we called Body, Mind, and Image. This workshop really grows from what we experimented with in that class. K.J. brought her grounding in Body Mind Centering, and I brought my background in pragmatist philosophy, and we developed a whimsical experiential anatomy class. We would often start with tracing, learning the anatomical structure with the hand and eye. We would pass through ideokinesis exercises, adding our own images to classical images from Todd, Bernard, Barbara Clark, Irene Dowd, and others. Then we would transition into a long, improvised movement exploration.

SECTIONS

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?