Daily Nourishment for March 15: What the Body Knows
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 35 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 10-15 minutes
Your body has been taking notes this whole time. It remembers what your mind has filed away.
Pause.
Sit or stand and take three slow breaths. On each exhale, scan for where you are holding tension — jaw, shoulders, chest, hands. Don't try to fix it. Just say hello to it. Ask the tension: What are you trying to tell me?
Prompt.
Begin a piece of writing from the body's perspective—not your perspective, but your body's. Let your body narrate one scene from your week: "This morning she sat at the desk and I felt…" Stay in that voice for ten minutes.
Practice.
This week, before each writing session, allow for two minutes in physical stillness with your eyes closed. Notice where in your body the desire to write lives. Give that place a name—just between you and the page.
Want More?
Read this quote by Melissa Febos: It’s often been taboo to talk about craft in terms of the personal—our psychology, our wounds, our politics, and perhaps most of all, our bodies. Of course, we bring all of these to our work, it is all in the work, but it’s considered sort of gauche to talk about in terms of craft, as if craft can and should exist in this intellectual vacuum that isn’t subject to the lower concerns of our beings. Referring to the body seemed to me the most direct way of signaling that I wanted to do an opposite kind of work. I almost titled the book after the first essay in it: “In Praise of Navel Gazing,” but I thought, why just the navel?, let’s step all the way into this exploration of process, let me bring the whole body right onto the cover of it.
Read more from the interview here. And I highly recommend her book Body Work.
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Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon.
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