The Writer's Soma

Your body and the page + a guided meditation

Maria Popova’s Almanac of Birds

Dearest camerados,

As we close out 2024, I’m finding myself turning inward in that expected wintering way, but I’m also noticing an insistent pull toward tending to and stewarding my body.

In the writing world, we so rarely talk about the body, and yet our bodies are our artistic instruments; much like dancers, our creativity can only find expression in our bodies and, like dancers, our laptops and notebooks act as the stages upon which that creativity is shared with the wider world.

I’m often asking my writers how they might bring their full selves to the page, and that fullness includes the whole organism: your brain and spirit and heart, yes, but also your gut and your right hip and your belly. Much writing instruction focuses on exercising the imagination and our logic - marrying the right and left side of the brain so that our stories (right brain) can get organized (left brain) and distributed (ahem, capitalism).

And yet, the more we learn about trauma and epigenetics and the mind-body connection in neuroscience and other fields, I believe we can no longer deny the body its rightful place in the writer’s toolbox.

The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.

Deb Dana, Polyvagal Theory in Therapy

It’s a paradox: we need to get out of our heads in order to fully inhabit the stories that we’re creating in our imaginations.

To be an embodied storyteller, we must learn to recognize all the places our stories are stored. If you think on your work-in-progress, where might some of that story be living in your body?

Dorothy Lathrop illustrated De la Mare’s Down-Adown-Derry (public library | public domain)

In one of my recent novels (currently on submission), I could only write it while sitting on the ground, my back against a wall. It was about war correspondents and it was almost as if my body could only write as though I were on the front lines myself. The story was in my thighs—ready to run—in my chest, which is bearing witness through the eyes of my characters to life in a war zone. But it was stored in other, more unexpected places, too—places where my own story of love and loss and calling and holy fury intermingle with shame and fear and purpose, intertwining with my two reporters’ experiences until sometimes I wasn’t sure where my narrative ended and theirs began. I felt the war in my jaw—the same place I brace for impact in my daily life.

Next time you’re working, notice what parts of you light up, clench, heat up and cool down. Just noticing our bodies’ responses as we write is important information: it’s the first step in beginning to not only listen to these messages, but mine a much larger territory for story fodder. My ankles have stories to tell. So does my lower back.

Reorienting ourselves to our bodies takes time. It’s a slow journey with many twists and turns. And it asks a lot of us, to pay attention in this new way. We live in a culture that has—to put it mildly—a very complicated relationship with the body. Much of it, at least in the West, is deeply harmful, particularly to women. We come up against all of that when we’re working with our bodies—the judgements, expectations, the ways we feel our bodies have let us down.

I’ve recently begun doing more serious practice in somatic healing, particularly with Staci Haines (her wonderful book, The Politics of Trauma, is a must-read, as is Prentis Hemphill’s newest). I really enjoy the work of getting in my body and considering all the ways in which my soma has been shaped and impacted by my entire life, my ancestors, my culture…With “soma,” I’m not only referring to the body (you’ll hear the word “somatic” thrown around a lot these days): I approach the concept as somatic healers, such as Staci Haines, do in which the soma encompasses our entire organism: sensations, emotions, internal narratives, relational stances, actions and non-actions.

As writers, we so often live in our heads, and, right now, with AI on the rise and an increasingly plugged-in world, it feels especially vital to engage in a practice that reminds me that the brain is only one part of us. In fact, in somatics with Staci, we often talk about working “the muscle of the imagination.”

How can the body imagine? Vision? Create?

In somatics, we look to the physical body alongside the entire environment it is shaped by in order to integrate and metabolize our experience of being on this planet so that we move forward by doing no harm to ourselves our others. We look at the internal body, the spirit, and the entire environment those are shaped by. We look at systems of oppression. We look at cultural narratives that are in our bones. We look at what has been passed down in the blood.

Dorothy Lathrop, illus., public domain, Down-Adown-Derry

When I began studying epigenetics, I learned part of me was in my grandmother’s womb: when she was carrying my mother, my mother had all the eggs she would ever have in her little body, which means I was birthed by my grandmother and my mother: before I was even born, I carried their experience and trauma in my soma. The experience of women in the US, of being in an immigrant lineage, of whiteness, of militarism, of faith and misogyny and good Slavic food and ancestral memories of tending to vineyards in Slovakia, of walking the fields of Ireland and being hungry...All of that is in me. All of that is in the DNA of my stories and every word I write, too.

How do we start getting to know the bodies we have been ignoring for so long while in the writer’s seat?

Let’s do a quick check-in: Where in your body are you feeling tension right now?

My guess it that you have many places where the muscles are contracting, where some kind of clenching is happening. You’re not doing it consciously. It’s just happening. Right?

Now, for a bit of journaling or musing:

When you’re writing, when do you most feel tension?

When you * think * about your writing, where do you most feel tension?

What parts of you are contracting and what parts of you are releasing?

I know that when I’m in flow, I feel like my whole body is open, as though I’m a figurehead on the prow of a ship. My chest is full and warm, but my mind is often racing, my temperature rises, and I may be clenching my lower back or thighs or toes, as though I’m hurtling toward something.

When I’m stuck, I notice my jaw clenches more, and my forehead. I might clench my fists, too.

I feel the least amount of tension when I’m being really curious on the page, no stakes for the project. I’m just playing. Doing research, having fun. What about you?

Softening Practice

One of the first things you explore if you’re on a somatic healing path is being able to scan the body, to be in it and notice what’s going on, internally and externally. For me, this is really hard. I have chronic pain and often try and escape my body and go into my mind, where I can make up stories and live in imaginary lands. This is a WONDERFUL protective, adaptive thing my body does to watch out for me. But this tendency also inhibits me from the full healing I need to do and it keeps me from showing up with my entire, integrated self when I come to the page to write.

As writers, we need relaxed systems to create. We need regulated emotions and somas that are well tended to in order to bring forth the fullness of our creativity.

If we’re only working on our minds, we’re leaving a LOT on the table. I’m often talking to my writers about attending to how they physically feel in the writer’s seat. To let their body be part of the process and to listen to its messages. I love this poem that Staci shares in her book and I wonder what it would be like if we, as writers, had “walking words”:

The Church says: the body is a sin.

Science says: the body is a machine.

Advertising says: the body is a business.

The Body says: I am a fiesta.

- Eduardo Galeano, “Walking Words”

Dorothy Lathrop, Down-Adown-Derry, public domain.

I honestly don’t know what it would be like if I could hear my body say it’s a fiesta.

I have some glimpses: the few times I’ve danced my heart out come to mind. But I have been in pain since I was a child. My body has become accustomed to protecting itself, limiting my actions to avoid a migraine, the unexplained sharp jabs throughout my limbs, the twisting in my abdomen. Now, in my early forties, I want to listen to my body’s deepest desire, which, I am realizing, is to be a fiesta.

What would my writing look like if, when I sat down to work, my body was a fiesta and not a fortress?

One of the meditations I do most often is sweet, simple and makes an enormous impact on my system. I call it the “soften” meditation. It’s something I made up to try and become aware of and release the tension I am always holding in my body. This work came out of years of mindfulness and meditation, and a growing understanding of complex PTSD and how the body keeps the score. This simple practice stands on the shoulders of so many teachers and healers who have shared in their research and practice how imperative it is that women (and all people) listen to our bodies: The Nagasaki sisters, Kristin Neff, Staci Haines, Susan McConnell, Brené Brown. The following men have been deeply impactful on my somatic healing journey, as well: Bessel van der Kolk, Richard Schwartz, Ralph de la Rosa, David Treleaven. Nearly every meditation teacher I have had has invited me to, as Mary Oliver says in her poem Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

My “soften” meditation is about getting to know the soft animal of your body. Relaxing it so that it can tell you what it loves.

You can listen to the meditation by clicking the link above if you’d like to be guided through, but it’s really as stripped down as this:

Find a comfortable position—nothing fancy.

Take a moment to tune into your body. You might close your eyes or soften your gaze, as though you are daydreaming.

Notice where in your body you’re feeling tension. You’re likely feeling it in many places, but what grabs your attention first?

Draw your attention to that place and gently invite it to soften by whispering in your mind, “soften.” Observe your muscles relax, the contraction turning to release, the tension dissolving. You can stay in this place, encouraging further softening or you might move to the next point of tension. These points can be on the surface of your musculature or deep in the body.

Do this until you feel ready to move on with your day.

I like this exercise because we are all so tense, our muscles straining against all the unknowns and uncertainties and fears and stressors and demands. Our bodies are bracing all the time. You might think about where you hold chronic tension - the jaw, clenched fists, tight abdomen or shoulders. Between the eyes. The forehead. Curling toes. Tightening back or thighs.

These are the places within us that are working hard to keep us safe, but they don’t realize that their efforts are resulting in keeping us in a constant state of flight, fight, freeze, or fawn.

We’re not doing anything wrong here. Our bodies are trying to be good to us, to protect us.

But in order to be open, curious, vulnerable, adventurous writers, we have to let go of that tension.

These tensions are static. They want things to stay a certain way. They are afraid of change and pain and intrusion. I totally get it. AND in order to be creative, we must keep flowing and moving. We cannot be static.

I encourage folks to make the soften meditation a regular part of their mindfulness practice throughout the day. You can do this any time - in the car, in a meeting, at the grocery store. And especially in the writer’s seat.

Soften, soften, soften.

Let the soft animal of your body want what it wants. Listen and see if you can put that listening onto the page.

Here’s to a 2025 of embodied writing and living and loving-

P.S.

Do you need support for your writing in 2025? My Breakthrough Calls might be just the thing. Whether it’s to make plans, sketch out ideas, break through being stuck, learning how to work with your process, overcome pesky self-doubt and limiting beliefs…or stop breaking promises to yourself…I’ve got you. Here’s to a year of embodied writing!

Photo by Matt Hoffman on Unsplash