“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final ... Nearby is the country they call life.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

Lit Salon on why it feels so damn scary to write through the body, why we're so terrified of what might come up, and five concrete methods to write from the body more safely and vividly

Dear Jeannine,

I’m intrigued by the idea of your Visceral Self embodied writing intensive, but I’m more than a little terrified of what might come up for me.

I know I’m not the only one.

I’ve noticed in the comments that others are also afraid of the idea of embodied writing, while also being deeply drawn to it. I’d love to hear your thoughts on why this feels so damn scary.

Thanks for whatever you can share!

Love,

So Damn Scary

Dear So Damn Scary,

It is no small thing to live in a human body, and to feel things. It’s innately terrifying. We’re so vulnerable!

And did you know the human hand has an astonishing 17,000 touch receptors taking in all kinds of information from the environment—pressure, movement, vibration, warmth, pain, emptiness? Sometimes, when I hear my husband’s footsteps on the stairs at night, when I am just recently tucked into bed ahead of him, I feel the heat from his hands on my body before he reaches the bedroom door. I used to hate it when he touched my stomach, but now I do not. My stepfather’s cruel hands still exist, however. Once, I told my husband that sex, no matter how good, has an element of fear for me. His eyes darkened with love and sadness. Scar tissue lasts, I told him, but it also softens.

When I hold my foster grandson’s hand, his palm and fingers feel like this: small, dry, sturdy, real. My oldest granddaughter’s hands—she is six already—feel silken, light, airy—almost as if she has no bones. I am certain if I were blindfolded with noise-cancelling headphones, I could tell my grandchildren apart in a line-up solely by the touch of their little patty-cakes.

When we speak about embodied writing we are speaking of something both distinct from and related to the memories our bodies store.

The distinction matters as much as the overlap.

Both embodied writing and the process of writing from body memory can enliven our writing in ways that are, quite honestly, difficult to fully understand until you engage with the effort, because the change is so dramatic. And I am not referring solely to the prose we might create. It’s also about the experience of creating that prose, and the potential for expansion, growth, discovery, and even transcendence.

To realize why this is so—as well as where the fear comes from—it helps to pause and look more closely at these separate but related concepts of embodied writing versus writing from body memory.

Embodied writing is writing that comes through the body and is grounded in the physical realities of the body. It is writing that respects and includes the body in a genuine and palpable way. It is not about “throwing in some sensory detail, like a smell or a sound or a texture” because this is what we’ve been told to do. It’s about actually writing through the body in a way that is real to whatever story is trying to be told.

Embodied writing respects the fact that my lips and yours are as unique as our finger prints, with characteristic patterns of grooves, furrows, wrinkles and lines that make you you and me me. The study of  lip print patterns is called as cheiloscopy. Sometimes I kiss my dog Frannie on the mouth. I can’t help it, I love her so much. Frannie’s lips are black. I only just learned that dogs can get chapped lips, just like people. When I kiss Frannie’s nose, I am gentle. Dog noses are up to 100 million times more sensitive than ours. They can even sense weak thermal radiation—meaning, their noses can lead them to the body heat of other mammals. This is how Frannie finds her favorite spot in the crook of my knees at night. I don’t know if I would be able to identify Frannie’s nose in a line-up solely through kissing it, but I think so. I have memorized the soft corn chip smell of her, and the dandelion-fluff of her face.

I have so much to say about the miraculous prisons of our bodies, and how writing through the body can change our prose and our lives. Most of all, I think true embodiment, that is, living more fully enough in our bodies right now to bring the body’s experience onto the page, is a radical leap for most of us. Indeed, I believe this is a more radical leap than the leap of allowing our bodies to remember what they remember, to know what they know.

But no matter the relative size of the leaps, we must speak now of writing from body memory—from the memories our bodies store. Because I gather, from your note, So Damn Scary, and several other comments, as well, that it’s the stored memory idea that ignites the worst fears. Which makes sense to me. Because I know people fear the idea that we might “unleash” or “recover” some painful memory or other stored deep down inside, something bad we’ve never examined or even recognized previously. Or that we’ll dredge up a stored memory we’ve stored for good reason, something we just don’t want to revisit and suffer through again.

All of this is very valid.

However, in my experience, working directly with embodied writing techniques while also befriending our bodies can give us skills and agency in traversing the wilds of memory, so that we have more will and autonomy around how we integrate our experiences, rather than the opposite.

When we have more will and autonomy around how we integrate our experiences, we are better prepared for the unbidden recall of stored body memory.

Let me offer you now:

1.     A clear example of how body memory can work—how our body can store a memory that, although we know it’s there, dwells just outside our field of vision. In the example I’ll offer, a writer who’s working on a memoir discovers a body memory at an unexpected moment, and is able to incorporate it into her manuscript.

2.     Five techniques for safer embodiment in writing (and you can start using these yourself, right now if you like). Of course, it is important to realize that allowing ourselves to feel things is never 100% free of risk. But these techniques help keep us present, which is a good start to staying safe.

The example of how body memory works happened once recently, after I posted a short essay about what it means to love. With the essay, I included a grainy photo of a vintage metal slide, like you’d find at a playground. I chose that photo because the headline of my post was, “When I Think About The End of the World, I Remember that Love is Why We Are Here.” I wanted an image that captured a bit of emptiness and nostalgia, while also pointing toward childhood and risk, because the post alluded to the uncertainty my family faces with Z’s future due to his foster status and the legal procedures that are, even now as I write this, determining his fate. I felt like the photo of the slide caught most of what I was going for—and, besides, I liked the muted vintage colors.

After that post went live, a reader wrote to share how a visceral memory sprang up for her at the sight of that old slide:

The image of the slide brought back a childhood memory. [Those slides] were real butt burners — especially in Texas, where I grew up! The photo was quite a trigger … Sadly, I’d just jumped out of a little wading pool in a neighbor’s yard and my wet swimsuit on the metal in the scorching sun left skin a’hangin’ as I slid down, screaming most of the way. But that day is special for being a time when my big brother, instead of teasing me, treated me sweetly. [The slide photo] took me straightaway to the memoir I’m chasing, where I spent a good chunk of the morning adding the “My Burned Butt” story to the collection! Thank you for all you provide us!

Here, we have a writer who is actively working on a memoir, actively and intentionally sorting through the cupboards and drawers of her past, taking things out, turning them over, making meaning of her experiences. In other words, actively plumbing memory for things that matter. And yet, it took chancing upon this particular photo of a slide to unlock a memory that is clearly important to the story she is writing. Important enough that she spent the morning writing it down before it got away again.

You might say, this writer already knew she’d been burned by a slide. The memory was not hidden. And that’s true. It’s also true that most of our memories aren’t hidden from us. They’re just under the surface, harder to get at, even when we want to.

So while what most people fear about working with body memory is that it will, as you’ve suggested, lead us to “discovering” things we aren’t prepared for, the more realistic fear for most people is that writing from body memory will bring us back through experiences we’d rather not relive.

In light of both of those valid concerns, I use certain guardrails to provide the safest experience for myself when I write and/or others when I teach.

First and foremost, I use methods and exercises that continually draw our attention to the external world. This trauma-informed approach not only keeps us present in our bodies, it produces better writing. I wrote about this in last week’s Lit Salon post, A True Metaphor is A Swift and Violent Twisting of Language, A Renaming of the Already Named (which you can read in full right here if the excerpt below compels you!):

As for interiority and exteriority, sometimes I wonder how I ever wrote anything halfway decent without a crystal clear understanding of that concept. It’s equally true of life as of writing. How can we build the lives we want, the lives we imagine for ourselves, without a clear operational system that discerns between what is inside of us and what is outside of us, and how those two realms reflect one another and, in the end, intersect?

It seems to me this idea of interior and exterior focal points should be taught to every child in the country, and sooner than later. Instead, we wait until people are having literal panic attacks, then teach them to notice five things they can see, four things they can hear, three things they can touch, two things they can smell, one thing they can taste. In other words, we teach them to use their senses to reconnect with the external world, and, in so doing, with themselves, in moments of crisis.

I wonder why are we not teaching people to do this consistently as a part of being a human and an artist living and creating in the world.

Second, I incorporate breath work to facilitate a calm connection between mind and body. A favorite breathing practice of mine is one that activates the parasympathetic nervous system in order to quiet the mind by grounding the body. It’s called 4-3-7 breathing and it’s both easy to learn and profoundly powerful. I can (and very often do) use 4-3-7 breathing on my own, but I like it best when I am being guided in it, which is what Billie will do for us during the embodied writing challenge in the Voice Memos and candlelight meditations.

Third, I use constrained writing methods, which many writers find extraordinarily useful in writing about difficult subject matter, including past trauma, without suffering.

Fourth, I believe we can (learn to) decline to go anywhere—even in the body of memory—that we do not want to go. We can turn away if something comes up that we wish not to engage with fully. We can say, no thank you, or not yet. We can thank our body for holding a memory for us, then keep moving.

Fifth, I believe, and therefore teach, that embodied writing and writing from the body need not be a journey through the worst things that have ever happened to us. We can and should find incredible depth of meaning in very ordinary moments. This is urgently important. I also believe we can and often should make agreements with ourselves about how open we are ready to be as we enter into the body’s wisdoms. I also believe we can usually trust our bodies, and ourselves, to know where and how far to go.

I know it does not always feel this way for us in these complicated lives we lead, but our bodies want us to live—our bodies are on our side.

Love,

Jeannine

PS If you are reading this but haven’t yet heard about our Visceral Self seasonal intensive for embodied writing, you can read about it here. The intensive just started, and it’s definitely still open to all. We go for 12 full weeks, and the posts can be worked in real time as they come each Wednesday, or at your own pace.

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