Sense Writing

🌿New Year's Gift: Becoming Your Own Muse🌿

“We thought it was crazy when there was a pandemic, and then we thought it was crazy when…” My friend was wide-eyed as he threw the recycling into the bin after a holiday meal.

I knew how politically passionate he’d been since we were roommates in Berlin 20 years ago, so the politics talk was normal— but the amused incredulousness was not. I detected a bewildered smile on his face as he expressed fascination at the different levels of normal we seem to be able to tolerate.

Though I’ve had this conversation with friends countless times in the last few years, I’m still amazed at the ways that we adjust. Somehow, we cope. And some of us do it with the occasional cockeyed smile. Me included.

But as we go along with revised versions of our regular lives, kicking the can of normalcy down the road, other things — essential things — often get kicked away.

🌿Bewilderment vs. Becoming

Now there are even more interruptions and distractions from the “luxury” of creative time — and certainly more awareness of global troubles.

The intensity can feel immersive and even enlivening, but we often end up confused and disoriented, still craving something meaningful but struggling to grasp it.

The whirlwind of words around us is a stand-in for the connection and emotion we’re still craving.

So even though we can feel more engaged than ever, our own connection to our creativity can get hijacked by channels that don’t fulfill us in the ways we expected or need.

I know for me, even as I’m adjusting to an ever-receding sense of stability (and joking with my friend at the recycling bin), it’s all the more essential to have a foundational creative practice that meets me where I am.

It’s through grounding ourselves in a practice — through our body and nervous system — that we can start to sharpen our ability to develop an intimate dialogue with ourselves.

And develop a creative practice of our own that meets our needs wherever we are.

In the next email, you'll receive a free video training that gives you a glimpse into the neuroplastic principles that can help you do this:

"The Four Steps of Becoming Your Own Muse"

🌿The Clarity of Creativity

The Four Steps of Becoming Your Own Muse uses science to clarify a process that often seems opaque. These steps can allow you to better regulate, bypass anxiety, and find your voice as a writer — and reconnect with your own creative practice.

Sense Writing has always been about developing a sustainable creative practice. But it’s not just about writing and making art.

Giving you both the theory and the practice empowers you to develop a deep dialogue with your body and nervous system — no matter what else is happening outside.

It’s a reusable resource to plug into yourself, so that we can engage with the world, with ourselves, and with our voices.

I hope it gives you a sense of grounded discovery for the new year!

🌿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

Welcome to the Potent Summer Series #2

🌿The Static of Separation🌿

In this blog series, we’re exploring how our capacity to be with our discomfort, heartbreak and pain, helps us access a more potent writing practice through our sensation, memory and imagination.

In the welcome post below, I spoke a little about how the potency that drives our creative practice gets stifled by all kinds of noise, both external and internal. We also talked about the static noise that is created when we try to distance from the intensity inside ourselves.

And how this effort to insulate ourselves from discomfort and heartache also keeps us from the potency and richness of what we’re trying to express as writers. It creates a kind of “static of separation”, alienating ourselves from… ourselves.

🌿Tired of Being Tired

In my own life and creative practice, creating separation from the discomfort or pain might have been an initial strategy that worked to protect myself in the moment.

But maintaining the separation often consumes more energy than the thing itself.

In a recent conversation with my Feldenkrais teacher, our conversation about physical pain wandered (as it usually does) to other kinds of pain, and he asked: “How much is the energy consumption from the painful event, and how much is from maintaining separation from the pain?”

It got me thinking about Sense Writing and how we often separate ourselves from the most powerful things we really want to write about.

Seeing our pain as something separate from ourselves—to fix, to heal, to manage, to explain, to expel— is so energy-consuming. We fixate on a painful event or “the one story” as something outside of us, and trying to maintain that manufactured distance creates more stress and anxiety.

So when we sit down and write, we feel like we have either too much to say or nothing at all. The more we try to write, the further away our story gets.

The anxiety and stress from the effort to keep ourselves separated from parts of ourselves might prevent us from starting, or finishing, anything. Because at least then, we never have to get really into it.

It’s like when we’re tired and we lie down for a nap and can’t fall asleep. We may not allow ourselves to fully let go into our tiredness. We can’t settle into it. This creates more tiredness, anxiety, stress.

🌿Stuck in Overdrive

In a way, this makes sense.

More than other forms of expression, writing relies on cognitive processes of thought and language. Other arts can bypass certain traps of over-thinking— think of the instincts that it takes to feel the shape of objects as you draw or sculpt or the physicality of learning a piece of choreography — but writing feels like a brain activity, and sometimes it gets stuck in overdrive.

So, we writers are particularly susceptible to that kind of static noise getting in the way.

The kind of static that can feel numbing and even comforting. Because the truth is, it’s scary to meet ourselves where we are– we just might not want to.

In the next post, we’ll look at how we can get better at meeting ourselves where we are, between or beyond the static, even if we don’t really want to.

And explore how we access the more painful parts of ourselves in a way that is not only sustainable, but actually awakens our passion - despite the static.

~ Madelyn K., Founder

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

🌿Welcome to the Potent Summer Series.🌿

Most of us are familiar with that feeling: there’s a build-up, there’s a desire to write, but the words don’t come.

It may feel like the landscape is barren or the ground is unyielding, with nothing to till. You might know there’s richness underneath, but you can’t seem to get to it.

Whether we write or aspire to, when we feel an urge to connect through words and stories—but can't—we're susceptible to feelings of overwhelm or frustration.

Even though creativity is a natural expression of being alive, for some reason, when it comes to writing, we often feel stuck.

In this Potent Summer Series, we’ll explore how our ability to grow capacity in the landscape of the body and sensation can not only help us access “the richness underneath it all,” but invite potency into our creative practice, and how our discomfort or heartbreak can act as our most potent creative tool.

After all, what we avoid is often what beckons us to write in the first place.

And we’ll be doing this the “Sense Writing way”: by exploring the edges of our inner world with pleasure and curiosity.

🌿Inside the Echo

This is a particularly noisy time in the world. Many of us are meeting that reality with internal noise to match it.

And when we’re in the middle of all that noise, it becomes hard to tell where it’s coming from. And if we don’t know where it’s coming from, how do we know how to quiet it? Before we get to that (and we will), it’s helpful to look more closely at the noise itself: the racket that obscures the potency of our practice and the clarity of our own voice.

~Internal Noise

Internal noise is familiar to anyone who’s ever had a grocery list or a doubt. In our creative practice, you know the type: Instead of writing, you think of every errand waiting for you, questioning the value of your work, daydreaming of the circumstances that will change everything. When you finally pick up a pen, there’s a squirrelly feeling of not being able to get the words or tone or ideas just right. It adds up to a cacophony of anxiety, and it’s coming from inside the house.

~External Noise

External noise is familiar to anyone with an internet connection—or ears. You can’t help but listen to other people’s words so much that you’ve forgotten what your own voice can sound like. You get excited about your ideas, but then a notification or email pops up to distract and you’re out of the zone.

And then there’s a third noise that I’ve been noticing a lot lately

~Soothing Static of Separation

At first, it seems like the sound of soothing should be silent—but when there’s so much noise to drown out, we tend to turn up the volume on whatever makes it go away, and what we get is not quiet at all, but static noise.

An almost numbing and comforting static that allows us to separate from the heartbreak and pain that’s a part of us. We may think the drone of static keeps us protected from the intensity of life—but in insulating us, it also keeps us from the potency and richness of our full expression as writers.

What would it be like, instead, to meet ourselves where we are— without the static of interference?

In the next post (coming soon!), we’ll take a closer look at how this separation develops, why it gets so sticky, and how we use the body and nervous system to cut through the distance it creates.

Warmly,
Madelyn K., Founder

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

Welcome to the final post of the The Ecology of Curiosity series, where we’ve been exploring how to become more curious and playful in the darkness, and even enjoy it. The unknown that we tend to run from becomes a path to grow capacity— which is both the seed and the canopy of creative process.

🌿Sometimes, in the darkest season and a distressing cyclone of world events, it can be hard to see past our immediate discomfort— let alone remember how expanding our capacity to sense the unknown is a crucial part of the creative process.

In hindsight, of course, we can recognize that the unknown can be the most potent time to create, when the vulnerable inner world is stirred and gives us the chance to express something less filtered and more real.

After all, the comfort zone is not the growth zone. We know that, even when we don’t act on it. In order to meet the unknown, we have to step out into the muddy, moonless shadows where it lives.

But to meet the unknown without being overwhelmed by it, we need to have a terrain to step into.

🌿A Widening Terrain

Without a place to land, throwing ourselves into the unfamiliar or darkness can become exhausting, depleting. Without a practice, without rituals to come back to, wading into the unknown of our experiences and stories similarly shrinks our capacity for exploration or growth.

So how do we honor and support the way our nervous systems work long-term to develop the ability to sense more in the unknown, instead of shrinking from it or shrinking in the face of its intensity?

When we develop our skills of perception, even in the unfamiliar, we expand our capacity. We learn to find the balance of safety and surprise— that’s how our nervous system learns best, and that’s where creativity grows.

That idea is also the foundation of the Sense Writing 12-week course.

With the next session of the course coming up, I’m excited to share a peek with you. This is the framework— or field guide— that has supported hundreds of students in showing up for their stories and for the world around them and fostering a resilient creative practice.

To take a peak into all 4 parts: the Ground, Shoots and Roots, the Tree, and the Ecosystem, along with some images from the course’s animation, click here:

www.sensewriting.org/sensewritings/2024/2/8/a-field-guild-to-a-writing-practice

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

“I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart.” –Leonard Cohen

🌿Earlier in this Ecology of Curiosity series, I shared a bit about a creative project that emerged during a time of great uncertainty, both personal and communal. What eventually became Shufu theater— collaborative, spontaneous, and full of buoyant discovery— was born from a dark moment.

Looking back, it’s clear that that experience never would have happened without the ability to tolerate, even embrace, that disorienting sense of loss, and of feeling lost.

I often felt like I was wading through hip-deep water at the time, like many after September 11th— but even while I felt overwhelmed, my intuition was sharpening as I learned to discern more detail and texture of what was around me (not only its intensity).

And, even in the uncertainty, the creative experience was often full of surprising joy.

We don’t have to conjure darkness or beckon it into our doorways to be creative— but we do have to learn to understand this instinct of running from it when it shows up if we want to discover the creative richness that lives within it.

And in Sense Writing, we develop the neurosensory skills to dissolve the habits that hold us back in the unknown (and if you're extra curious to feel them in action you can skip ahead to the Sense Writing gift below).

🌿Clinging to the Circle of Visibility

When we first encounter the unknown, it’s a reasonable habit to try to stay close to the flashlight beam of what we know. After all, if we’re in danger (or think we are), grasping for the familiar is beyond sensible.

Yet in the context of creative practice, the flashlight’s beam is limiting.

As writers, we don’t want mere visibility— we want to see beyond the obvious. We want to explore the landscapes of memory and imagination we know are waiting for us.

When we cling to what we know, our capacity shrinks.

Biologically, that means we stay in an activated state, on alert for danger instead of engaged in curiosity or creative exploration. Our sense of ourselves (and the world we can imagine) shrinks too.

And shrinking means we tend to stay on the surface of our stories. As writers, shrinking means we grab for the easily visible, the habitual—the cliche—instead of reaching to express the “deeper convictions of the heart.”

Instead of seeking comfort (and ending up full of frustration), how can we embrace our curiosity about the unknown— especially when the world can feel so uncertain?

🌿Finding Pleasure at the Edges

When we go for a walk in the dark, we know that if we just keep looking around, our eyes eventually adjust. Our senses widen, the boundary of our awareness softens, and we notice—and enjoy—more of what’s around us.

The same is true when we write in the (figurative) dark. In Sense Writing, the neurosensory sequences we use shift us away from activated states towards states of learning. We expand our capacity to absorb sensation, and in doing so enhance our creative process.

When we work on this foundational level with the body and the nervous system, we build the skill of remaining in the unknown. Our perspective broadens, and our voices begin to emerge. (It’s also a lot more fun than feeling afraid and stuck.)

Through tailored moving and writing sequences, we develop the skills to regulate into a parasympathetic state of learning and growing.

As we perceive and process more, our awareness grows in complexity—and we can integrate more details and specificity of our stories (instead of staying stuck in habits and cliches).
We gain access to the whole of ourselves—the ecology of our own system.

And (though we often forget it) when we widen our awareness, we also increase our pleasure.

In the gift Sense Writing sequence at the link below, you’re invited to experience it for yourself. To take a few moments to keep the flashlight off, let your eyes adjust, and wade into the unknown.

www.sensewriting.org/sensewritings

Enjoy,
Madelyn

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

“Everything matters; slow down and pay attention and let the universe come to you like a shy, wild animal sniffing its way in circles towards you.” -Jean Rhode on Sense Writing

🌿Welcome to The Ecology of Curiosity #2

Many of us, when we were little, were afraid of the dark. A night light somehow kept us safe—protected in its circle of brightness from whatever unrecognizable wonders might be lurking on the periphery.

We might have gotten less scared as we’ve grown older, or maybe even embraced the idea that there might be something we want to know out there in the borders of our awareness.

But whether the dark is literal—cold and quiet winter months—or figurative—the world’s scary turbulence or the depths of our own worries or imaginations—it’s often too easy to stay in our bubble and avoid the rest.

It’s harder to imagine that darkness is necessary, that it could even be inviting and creative. Intriguing and mysterious rather than imposing or menacing.

In the last post I mentioned the relationship between nature and creative process (which makes up the botanical framework of the 12-week course).

We spoke about how we still tend to forget about the darker parts—and how, if we look at our creative process as an ecology that includes all parts of ourselves, one that’s truly sustainable, we can’t leave out the murky, unknown, and mysterious ones.

🌿What Gets Lost in the Light

Today, I want to talk about darkness as a bigger picture: not how to endure it, but why it’s a crucial part of the ecology of creativity itself.

When we’re so quick to grab a flashlight to dispel the darkness (and our fear), we can only see what's lit up. Anything beyond that lit-up circle becomes darker, more impenetrable.

In staving off the unfamiliar or unknown at the edges, we lose the mystery of what might show itself from the periphery—the same mysterious unknown that nourishes our creative power.

What if, instead, we sat still in the midst of what we don’t know, instead of lighting it up? If we’re patient and trusting, we know: our eyes will naturally adjust. The darkness becomes more sensed, a multifaceted part of the ecosystem: the soil, the night, the waiting inside of an acorn—all of it part of a dynamic whole. Our capacity grows.

And what we so often forget is that this expansion is actually pleasurable, not frightening. As our capacity grows, our words and our actions emerge.

🌿Collaborating in the Dark

Thinking about sitting with the unknown in this way makes me think of my time as a young theater artist after September 11, when New York City was brewing with raw emotion, colossal grief, and disconnection.

In that landscape, I found myself teaching English to a group of Japanese women (living in New York because of their businessman husbands) who were shy about speaking a new language.

They had studied English, but in moving from worksheets to words, they got stuck. They were so afraid of making mistakes that they couldn’t speak up at all.

In between grammar lessons, to help them feel more comfortable speaking, I did theater exercises with them, and eventually long-form improvisations where they felt freer to speak English—as characters—without the fear of messing up.

These improvisations eventually evolved and the characters developed, and I was struck by the charged, broken language and the deep silences of the women. A new syntax was emerging, and I was mesmerized. I began to write down the scenes that eventually became plays, performed in theaters in the shadow of the former World Trade Center.

During that particular moment in history, what we created evolved so organically, word by word, scene by scene, with each other and the limitations that we couldn’t name.

The ”failures,” the mistakes—ultimately letting things be what they were—created a new world.

When the actors stepped into them, the performances had a rawness and vulnerability that captured the feeling we were all wading in at the time. Full of silence and rupture, this theater communicated a specific experience that felt universal to audiences whose own language felt out of reach.

The complex ecology of that moment—the griefs, my own and others, the joys of discovery, the community—was inseparable from what came out of it.

The form would never have emerged out of something “lighter.” If I had immediately corrected my students instead of collaborating with them, it would have stayed buried. If I had rushed the process instead of slowing down to sense it, I never would have grown the capacity to recognize what I had never seen before.

Our capacity is both the seed and the canopy of our creative process. And expanding it doesn’t happen in a moment.

In the next post, you’ll learn more about the science of how that capacity works on a foundational level— the body and nervous system— and you’ll get to experience how it feels when you tap into that level of the body and nervous system and let the edges of what we can truly see expand.

More soon,

Madelyn

In this winter series, we’ll be exploring the generative— and essential— power of connecting to the lesser known parts of ourselves.

And in a few weeks, I'll be posting a Sense Writing gift exploring our capacity to be with these parts— to expand the edges of our curiosity and discover the ecosystem it’s part of.

Wishing you a fulfilling and nurturing new year!

🌿 Since the beginning of Sense Writing, I’ve often used botany and gardening metaphors. For me, they accurately convey both the simplicity and complexity of the creative process.

When I created the 12-week Sense Writing course, I organized it around four parts: the Ground, Shoots + Roots, The Tree, and The Ecosystem, a framework or terrain— an ecology— that can support people’s growing writing practice.

But even when we talk about ecology— about the idea of wholeness, of complementary processes and parts— many of us tend to overlook the darker or more difficult parts, both within ourselves and outside of us.

Forgetting that the darker parts of an ecosystem, winter and nighttime, decay and the layers of earth, are an equal foundation of everything that grows out of them.

Instead, we want to skip to the end.

In our creative lives, we want to be in the whole picture, the big story, enjoying the fruits of completion, not feeling around in the dark. We picture ourselves frolicking in meadows, in entire worlds that we’ve imagined and created. Not lying down on dried leaves on the forest floor.

But when we get curious— even in the dark— we discover an entire supportive creative ecosystem awaiting us.

🌿Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

When we talk about darkness, it’s easy to fall into the habitual interpretation of the word as something grim, bad, opaque.

But when I talk about the dark parts of the creative landscape, I mean something less defined: the unknown, the periphery, the invisible. Not the opposite of light or good, but what’s hidden, less obvious.

From a cursory glance, it seems like nothing, but get closer and meet the creatures of soil, the piles of silt, the endless decay. Darkness as in layers of earth, darkness inside the bark of a tree full of microbes and fungi.

The darkness of wading in the expanse of a calm sea under the night sky.

In darkness is where the richness of the unknown lives— not just our fear of it. What we’re yearning for as writers often lives there too, not in the obvious surface of things but in the understories we might hesitate to venture into.

The question is: how do we connect to that unknown instead of avoiding it?

How do we enrich and embolden our curiosity when the world can feel so uncertain?

To see what lives in the unknown, we must know how to listen— and grow capacity for what we find.

🌿Invisible Worlds Emerge

As we expand our skills of awareness, we see more. An invisible world emerges bit by bit, full of seeds sprouting, roots entwining, insects molting. More profoundly, our sense of ourselves grows more dimensional. We feel ourselves to be part of what we perceive, able to hold it and even describe it.

As writers, we discover access to worlds we never could have imagined.

In this winter series of posts, we’ll delve into curiosity that doesn’t just exist during daylight.

And the best part is that, just like lying in the grass listening to unfamiliar birds or walking through the mud after the sun has set, there’s nothing you need to fix or try to remedy. Everything you need is already here.

Warmly,
Madelyn

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