expression | The Embodied Creative

Postures of Authenticity

In the Strozzi Somatics™ centering practice, we experience the dimensions of length, width and depth. Each dimension has a physical component, but also a psychological one. For instance, when we center in our length, we are working with how to feel more of the vertical space we occupy. We can also sense how to allow ourselves to be held by the earth beneath us while also feeling literally uplifted. We notice what we feel in this new “shape”. The quality that goes along with feeling our length is dignity. When we can more fully occupy the physical dimension of length within and without ourselves, our perception of both begins to shift.

Centering can shift our state of consciousness before we sit down to write. This reminds me of a writing workshop I led in Telluride. We had completed the centering practice then moved into a writing practice. The room was alive with the sound

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Working With the Habit of Comparing

what's the point of comparing? we're all different sized eggs!

The ways in which we compare ourselves to others often stops us from entering into our own joy. And when we compare ourselves to others, it’s often a signal of an area of growth that we want for ourselves. Comparing isn’t very generative, is it? And yet we do this.

Recently this came up with a client who was moving into some new territory for herself and her business by taking a business development course. Before the course began we had a session, and she was distinctly in that territory of comparing herself to everyone else on the course. As it happens when we get into this territory, we often come up short. Everyone else had more experience in business than her. Everyone else had a current website. Everyone else knew just what they wanted and she was still searching. And she hadn’t even met these others yet!

I utterly understood her struggle, as I’d

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The Embodied Creative: Voice & Body

As a poet I have always been interested in language’s energetic components, how we can get in the way of the energy of a poem and how when we step aside the poem can sometimes write itself. OK, so that’s rare. But it happens. So what is present in us and in language when grace happens?

In 2006 I began a course of study in somatics at Strozzi Institute that was a natural outgrowth of my many years of training in the martial art aikido and my many years of expressing myself through the language-medium of poetry. I’m fascinated with the relationship between how we live in our bodies and what we bring forward in our voices and our expression in the world. I wanted to understand in a more conscious way that remarkable relationship between body-knowing and intellectual knowing.

I will never forget the day I felt in my own body that my writing

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