The Writer Who Inhabits Your Body: Somatic Practices to Enhance Creativity and Inspiration

A practical, body-oriented program to enliven your creative abilities

• Provides a comprehensive, step-by-step program for writers to use their bodies to expand their creative capacity on the page and in their lives

• Offers hands-on exercises, rooted in the disciplines of aikido and somatics, to help writers center themselves and better access their authentic inner voice

• Helps writers confront obstacles like fear, doubt, and difficult emotions, transforming such subject matter into opportunities for creative exploration

Writing is one of our most fundamental means of spiritual expression, yet the writing process can be challenging and imprecise, and both novice and experienced writers may struggle with accessing their innermost creative selves.

Taking an embodied approach to writing, poet and aikido practitioner Renée Gregorio offers a step-by-step experiential program to help you to center yourself in your body and, in so doing, expand your creative capacity on the page and give voice to the writer within. She shares hands-on exercises rooted in the martial art of aikido and the practice of somatics—body-centered learning—to provide direct and detailed ways to help facilitate personal growth and tap in to innate creative capacities.

Gregorio emphasizes creating your own internal writing dojo to clear the mind and enable you to access the deeper currents of language. Exploring discomfort as a doorway to new writing territory, she reveals how to examine difficult topics, express the full range of emotions, and turn self-doubt, fear, and painful experience into courage. She also explores how to unearth the power and physicality in your own voice, using techniques like “re-visioning” to effectively edit your work.

Through immersive and physically focused experience, this book will help seasoned and aspiring writers alike work with the body as a wise teacher to better access, hone, and express their authentic inner voice.

Renée Gregorio is a poet, longtime aikido practitioner, and master somatic coach. She has published nine books of poetry. Her most recent, Abyss & Bridge, won the New Mexico–Arizona Book Award for Poetry. She has been granted writing residiencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts in New York State and the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, NM. She teaches body-centered writing workshops across the United States. She lives in New Mexico.