As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. ~Valerie Kaur

From the Archive |The Visceral Self: Writing in the Dark’s Next 12-Week Seasonal Intensive for Embodied Writing Starts April 3. It Is Going To Be Beautiful.

Georgia O’Keeffe, by Alfred Stieglitz (public domain)

It’s not always easy to write through body rather than simply about it (or not at all). I talk about that in this post: Let Everything Happen to You. But when we do write through our bodies, the prose wakes up—its pulse quickens. It comes alive.

My own body was long a stranger to me. But when I learned to engage my body in my writing process, my writing became three-dimensional. It began to move on the page and even sometimes leap from it.

I love the quote below about acting, and could easily substitute the word writing in place of acting throughout it:

“Acting activates every cell, never, neuron, and everything that happened to your DNA a million years ago as well as everything that will happen a million years from now. If we didn’t believe that, we wouldn’t be interested in acting. If acting didn’t include something more than we could ever comprehend, we don’t think we would want to pursue it. Acting is so incredible that it gives …