Writing Through Your Body
How to translate states of being into words
On the 17th of October Headwaters 6-week long writing course begins! We will work through creative blocks and dive into authentic writing. You can find all the information about the course here. If you have any questions, just respond to this email. 𖦹
How does she feel today? My body.
How does she feel? Tired, soft, easeful, tender. Doesn’t want to look at the screen. Can’t buy into a ‘writing strategy’ or structure that asks to introduce a brash energy that she cannot handle. Not today. Not today.
Softness, stillness, one storyline, one myth, a singular focus that nourishes the mind, and body — that’s what she wants.
Discipline bends into flexibility, not force.
When you write from your body, you translate states of being into words.
What feels true? Which words find resonance between your tissues?
It’s not what is popular, it’s not what you saw someone else write and ascend to stardom.
It’s what’s true to you, while knowing it most probably will be true for someone else.
This way we articulate and materialize states of being into a written form, translating and mirroring these unspoken ideas for those who need that articulation.
Let your body help articulate what mind cannot.
How does truth feel in the body?
Good writing will reflect in your nervous system. While reading, you will be able to focus, and ultimately, calm down. Some parts of you will be soothed, some—activated. And that particular sensation of soothing will come from reading some kind of truth.
Why does truth soothe? Ultimately, truth soothes because it is safe. And it is safe because it liberates. It liberates parts of us that seek reflection. We can finally know that someone else is there: experiencing what we are, feeling what we are, perceiving what we are. Truth heals isolation within parts of ourselves. It braids bridges in the interior of the psyche-body. Truth can be found in a fictional story, as much as in a fact. And many times, a story has a far more nuanced and better delivery track.
But rarely do we feel safe while telling the truth that comes from our bodies. Especially, when truth is not allowed in our families, households, work, schools, societies. Today, people get arrested, sentenced, and killed for telling, writing, and publishing truth. And with them, dies a larger body of humanity. There is no future without people who can tell truth.
To write is to acclimatize your body to a continuous sensation of truth and move deeper into it. It strengthens, it supports, it gusts flexibility. Something turns in your stomach. Your heart opens to a potential new stream of thought. A valve decalcifies.
Writing truth will open valves of new energy. It will liberate parts of you from being captive for many years. It takes a lot of psychic and physical energy to resist truth. It chronically exhausts the body. It wears off your tissues and bones. When we move against truth of the body and truth of the soul, it brings illness.
Writing that is not yours will feel flat. Sometimes you must write something that will not feel truthful in your body, just to know the different quality of landing it has on you. Perhaps, you will make your arguments in a linear and logically deduced way: proving the worth of your reasoning and clear for everyone’s understanding. Perhaps, your mind will be licking its mouth in gladness and vigorous word equations. But your body will feel that your words have not reached the pinnacle of what you really wanted to say.
Your readers will also sense the same flatness when you write something that does not stir a bone in your own home.
All of this is a practice and act of fine-tuning the feeling instrument. Re-sensitizing the body, giving permission to feel and discern.
Permission to feel and discern.
(We will dive much deeper into this in the Headwaters writing course.)
Red Thread
To write is to walk a labyrinth. To make art is to walk a labyrinth. The further you move into it, the closer you get to truth, something that is real. Let’s wander in together.
꩜꩜꩜
In your hands, you hold a heavy stone that once was a part of a great sculpture. You can’t exactly tell what body part it is, nor how you got it. And so, you tie a red thread around this stone and place it at the entrance of the labyrinth. You enter.
The red thread is coiled on a spindle. It marks your way through the corridors—your way back. Stone walls collect moisture of mineral-rich water. Slow drops echo and glimmer in a dim light. Breath reverberates and transforms into a rhythm of your walking. Turn after turn, sounds of the outside world peel off layers of coherence until you can no longer hear them.
You reach the final turn and end up at the central point—the eye of the labyrinth. Here runs a basin of an underground stream. No one has ever found out where this water comes from. The sound of this stream pierces through your heart. Your palm penetrates the current and you pull up your hand to your mouth to taste the spring water. Another time your hand reaches the stream, you fill a disk-shaped clay vessel to take back with you.
On your right lurks an engraved sculpture of the Minotaur, the beast that would feed on the aliveness of new ideas, raw connections of thoughts that in their due time turn into art. Once alive, this creature is now shaped out of the same stone that the labyrinth was cast from. You pick up a sharp stone, lying beside your feet, and chip off a part of the sculpture.
Holding onto spring water and the piece of the sculpture, you’re ready to return. And so, you follow the red thread back.
꩜꩜꩜
A few months back I learned about a myth of Ariadne’s thread.
Ariadne was a princess and a daughter of king Minos. In secret, she gave a thread to Theseus, who was about to venture into the Labyrinth. Theseus wanted to kill the minotaur and free his fellow Athenians from capture. She told him that conquering the beast was just half of the work. Another, perhaps even greater challenge was to find his way back. The labyrinth had only one entrance and one exit. Ariadne’s thread helped Theseus navigate the labyrinth and return alive. (You can listen to the whole myth here.)
Body is a Labyrinth. Body is the red thread. Through it you go to find what feels truthful, real. You bring back the lifewater and a calcified memory of what kills truths and ideas. The red thread is the map: for each time you enter the labyrinth—the path will be rearranged.
Much love,
Rūta
The truths you have come to discover in your own explorations, in your body, in your writing; are the truths I’ve been yearning for. I’m feeling nourished after reading your words, hopeful and excited to walk into the labyrinth with you soon x
Your writing expands my Love, the heart within my Heart. May I continue to know the liberation of expressing it in all ways within my reach. 💗🤲🏽🪷