"Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard." ~Helene Cixous

Visceral Self: Writing Through the Body | Week Three | Sacral: It Is Clear Everything I Look At Is Real

Visceral Self: Writing Through the Body founding member dates below (manage/upgrade your membership here). Our Live Salons are wonderful—and during this intensive, we’re using them for candlelight yoga nidra. We hope you’ll join us. And for all paid members, we’ll also be hosting impromptu silent group writes on Zoom (times announced starting the week of April 22).

🗓️ 🕯️Wednesday May 1, 8 PM CT, Live Candlelight Yoga Nidra Meditation for Founding Members on Zoom (Zoom link emailed an hour ahead)

🗓️ 🕯️Wednesday June 12, 8 PM CT, Candlelight Yoga Nidra Meditation for Founding Members on Zoom (Zoom link emailed an hour ahead)

🗓️ 🕯️Friday June 21, 1 PM CT, Celebratory Live Solstice Salon for Founding Members on Zoom (Zoom link emailed an hour ahead)

Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it. —Ursula K. Le Guin

Words have power.

Big power. Words shape our thoughts, our perceptions, our relationships, and our lives. Words build things, words break things. Words heal wounds and cause them.

Words have power.

And that power comes in part through the way that words reside and resound in our bodies.

Ursula K. Le Guin wisely recognized and named the power of words, of language, of story. She saw and named the power of writing and reading. How it changes the world, and us.

Of writers, Ursula K. Le Guin said this:

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

With fear! Ah, back to a favorite topic of mine, the marriage of writing and fear in a good way. Because that’s how powerful words truly are, and can be.

But, also, we use words with delight! Because language holds pleasure and joy.

I love that Le Guin tells us how words make our souls and the souls of others “stronger, brighter, and deeper.”

How gorgeous. How true.

Stronger, brighter, deeper. Listen to the sturdiness of those three words, their simple generosity, their clarity, their humility.

This kind of simple, plain, concrete language—these clear, sturdy images that show us the world as it is, as our bodies experience it, which is through the senses, not the intellect—is a cornerstone of embodied writing, as I approach and teach it, including in this intensive (and by the way, it is not too late to join us if you have not yet—you might want to start with Week One and Week Two before hopping in with Week Three, but it’s also okay to work the posts in any order).

I believe to effectively capture embodiment in language means being open to, being willing to surrender to, the profound power of what I call “worker words” (plain, easy language) and images that are literal instead of metaphorical. It means, I suppose, letting our intellect, and, therefore, our egos, move out of the way in order to let real images speak for themselves, as themselves.

This is not to say that embodied writing will never veer into the metaphorical, or that it will never indulge language that is complex. Neither of those things are true! Not at all. Indeed, the Sharon Olds poem we’ll be looking at this week uses several stunning metaphors (in addition to many very clear, literal images) to express a bodily experience.

What I’m saying is not that embodied writing is only literal, but that it benefits us immeasurably—as writers and as humans—when we earn our metaphors by first sensing and then precisely and literally and plainly naming what we sense. That is, we benefit when we can acknowledge the elements of the sensory experience as it actually is, naming what I (and many others) call “the thing itself.” Naming the thing itself, practicing this simple task of sensing (seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting) the world as it actually is, and articulating it that way, too, builds an embodied base for our writing in a way nothing else quite can.

Before we go on, though: I don’t want anyone to get stymied by or hung up on this “thing itself” idea. My job is to remove obstacles in your creative process, not create them. Creativity demands safety—that is, we can’t let ourselves take creative risks if we don’t feel safe enough to do so. Therefore, we must not waste too much time or energy wondering about doing this “right” or “wrong.”

This whole intensive is nothing but practice! It’s experiential. It’s process, not product. We’re just playing around, trying new things. If you are very interested in what I am describing around sensing and then precisely and literally and plainly naming what we sense, the thing itself, you’ll find an exercise on exactly that, something I call collecting shimmers and shards, in this post (scroll down to the shimmers/shards part, and also to the giant comments section, and you’ll find many clear examples of what I mean and don’t mean).

Also, in next Monday’s Lit Salon post, I will talk more about this concept of the literal—the sensing and naming of “the thing itself”—and its relation to embodied writing, thanks to an illuminating conversation that unfolded in the comments last week, so stay tuned!

For now, though, for today, for this week, we’ll immerse ourselves tenderly and slowly into the words and images we hold in our bodies—and we’ll see if we can harness some of the power of these words and the images through a gentle body-based memory exercise enhanced by activation of the sacral chakra, and we’ll be relaxed and kind to ourselves and not pressure ourselves about right or wrong ways to do this. We’ll try to be at ease and exploratory and experimental and open. I know that’s not always super easy, but that’s the goal!

The sacral chakra is associated with many characteristics: sensuality, sexual intimacy, giving and receiving pleasure, creativity and unstructured expression, birthing environments, things that wax and wane, the principle of non-permanence, healthy emotions and the inner child, the divine feminine, synchronicity, and joy,

The pelvis and hips are also the site of stored emotion and memory.

This week’s work offers a powerful portal to embodied writing that comes through “breath and speech,” a portal through which the body can speak and be heard.

Here’s what we’ll do together:

First, we’ll read a deeply embodied Sharon Olds poem that magnificently (as so much of Olds’s work does) invites us into our own bodies, and we’ll talk about that poem in the comments, just like we did last week with “Question” by May Swenson. I am thrilled by the close reading acuity you all are showing, by the way. That alone will advance our writing immeasurably in the direction Le Guin describes above.

Second, we will (for those who wish) practice a yin yoga poses that supports and activates the sacral chakra, guided by Billie with narrative and photographic help in this post, or audio and video guidance in the Founding Member Meditation Guide.

Third, we’ll write to a structured exercise that’s integrated with both the Olds poem and the yin yoga.

Fourth, we’ll share our reflections on the reading as well as our overall experience with the exercise and, finally, our writing in the comments as we continue to inspire, encourage, support, and learn from each other on this path of embodied writing.

One last thing note before we jump in, just in case you missed it last week (and feel free to skip ahead if you already saw this): Billie Ohhas created an ever-expanding catalogue of Visceral Self audio and video offerings, now collated as a stand-alone post for founding members and provided as an easy button on every Visceral Self post, like this:

Resources in the Founding Member Meditation Guide include the whole set for the intensive so far (so for now, resources for Week One, Two, and Three, in order; next week we’ll add Week Four, and so on).

Each week varies, but usually Billie offers a recorded reading of the week’s poem or excerpt, video instructions on pose options, and a reading of the poem/excerpt and the writing exercise, so that you can listen to both while you are in your yin yoga pose. They’re also creating playlists to accompany the week’s writing activities.

If you’re not using Billie’s audio, you can read the writing exercise/prompt a couple of times to yourself (out loud) before you settle yourself into the pose (if you are doing the pose), so that you can write immediately when you come out of the pose.

Straight from pose to page—that’s how we teach this curriculum in person, and how we recommend you approach it at home, if possible. However, we don’t ever want to let perfect be the enemy of good. There are a million right ways to do this, and you can choose the one that works best for you each week.

[Ed. note: if you missed last week’s clarifications on the rest of the nuts & bolts and general mechanics of this intensive, you can find it here, otherwise, let’s jump right in.]

Week Three Writing Exercise | It Is Clear Everything I Look At Is Real

Below, you will find the link to the reading and my work to begin our close reading (including questions), this week’s sacral chakra meditation, the accompanying yin yoga pose, our structured embodied writing exercise, plus Billie’s supporting materials, which now include a short playlist to support your writing.

We can’t wait to see you in the comments. This is beautiful work and we’re honored to be doing it together with you.