Hello all!
This is going to be a fun experiment. I’m sharing my usual non-linear writing accompanied by an audio version sprinkled with somatic practices. I had promised to teach a workshop a couple a weeks ago, but my body wanted to find a new way to share this work. We take in so much information visually, and I find listening is a powerful way to stay in my body while learning. This is embodiment, after all. In the audio, there are a few practices not included in the article, so be sure to tune in there for the full experience.
The Embodied Storytelling Mentorship begins July 3rd, 2023! Sign up here, and don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.
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What is Embodied Storytelling?
Self-expression that is congruent with your body, nervous system, emotions, and desires.
If we don’t know who we are, where are we creating from? Self-expression isn’t just about sharing our stories with an audience. The way we express (or don’t) also teaches us valuable lessons about ourselves.
Embodied Storytelling aligns our creative process with our body’s needs. We learn about our capacity by looking directly at the nervous system and examining our tendencies of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. How do we react when we’re stressed? What patterns arise when we’re in collaboration with others? Somatic practice is at the foundation of this work, giving us tools to intelligently work with our go-to reactions and trauma responses.
Emotional intelligence is an asset to our creative work. You can’t have embodiment without emotions. With greater understanding of our emotional landscape, we can use these powerful forces to help us discern what we want or don’t want, what we like or don’t like. This can be super helpful when making choices within your own work moment to moment, especially when you’re inundated with external voices. Trust me, this will come in handy.
Desire is a generative force.
Have you noticed how it can be easier to complain about what you don’t want rather than expressing what you do what? This is a desire-led space. Our deeper desires are not superficial, they are energy machines. But many of us have never even asked ourselves what they are. Confusion, self-doubt, procrastination, and people pleasing are all parts of the process we must go through to get to the gold. Desire, along with discipline, realigns us with the heart of our work, and helps us feed those inner demons.
The practice of self-sourcing and generating materials from lived experience, inspiration, and imaginative play.
How do we truly create original work in the ouroboro of the internet? A non-place where comparison, judgment, self-criticism, and external validation can be microdosed just by a light scroll through social media. Media is a multi-headed beast that feels impossible to slay. As artists and creatives, it’s vital to know how to parse out our lived experience—what we know and feel—from what we see or hear. We do this by choosing experimentation over theory and getting out of our heads and into our bodies.
Our culture values thinking. I believe one of the roles of artists, mystics, and healers is to break open spaces in our collective rationale. We do this through exploration and getting in touch with our imagination again. The imagination thrives in spaciousness. But how much mental space do we intentionally create? Our imaginal space can become colonized by too much media — social, podcasts, TV, the news. Don’t get me wrong, I love RuPaul’s Drag Race just as much as the next girl. But we need to allow ourselves to get bored. It’s very important.
The root of the word inspiration means “divine guidance”.
Inspiration is nutrition that will fuel your work. Gathering inspiration educates us about artistic movements, genres, and sociopolitical contexts. It could be diving into someone’s oeuvre, hanging with engaging people, pulling Tarot cards, or flipping through The Book of Symbols. Whatever it is — seek it, find it.
A somatic and pleasure-led approach to a sustainable and healing creative practice — one that includes working through shadow, collapse, perfectionism, and anxiety.
It’s said that we teach what we need, and this is blatantly true for me. Studying theater, movement, and cinema in college was very healing for me on a lot of levels, but it didn’t regulate my nervous system. In fact, the way I was approaching my creative work kept me in a perpetual state of disregulation, which by the way, feels normal if you don’t know the difference. I got an enormous spiritual chiropractic adjustment in 2008 that sent me on an irreversible journey of healing and devotion. On this path, I’ve learned how to regulate in healthy ways, and how an art-making practice can become a space for growth and fingers crossed, liberation.
Orienting to pleasure is a necessary part of healing the nervous system.
When we get in touch with desire, we learn that we don’t need to torture ourselves to get shit done or to heal. Somatic pleasure also helps us navigate, prioritize, and recenter in creative work—and to know when to take a break. That doesn’t mean creative work feels good all the time. It just means that pleasure becomes a major part of our compass.
Nature effortlessly holds paradox. The beauty of approaching creative work from the body is that we become more adept at holding paradox, rather than constantly trying to reconcile it. The word healing means “to make whole”, and wholeness includes both light and shadow. The shadow includes all those unsavory parts of ourselves, the parts that we so often want to mask or run away. I think you know what they are. There is a difference between embracing the shadow and exploiting it. In the creative process, embracing the shadow might look like inviting those parts of ourselves to the table with radical honesty, thereby bringing nuance and depth to our work. Oh, and humor helps. I suspect the more we understand ourselves, the better the work gets.
If you want to go deeper in exploring the relationship between somatic work and the creative process, join me in a 1:1 Creative Consultation or Script Session. The Embodied Storytelling Mentorship begins July 3rd, 2023. Follow me on Instagram if you dare.