purpose | The Embodied Creative

Coming Home: Finding Ourselves Where We Are

I haven’t posted in some time! I’ve been away for nearly a month. As I return I am reminded of something Jim Harrison once wrote: “Finding myself where I already am is a daily chore.” This feels particularly true right now, as I’m finding my way back home. What is “where I already am”, anyway? And what’s the path to getting there?

Something I’ve been considering this week is that part of the the return path is remembering and dreaming, and the other part is placing yourself firmly where you are (at the desk, in the garden, in a difficult conversation, advocating for yourself, etc.). What’s required is that we show up over and over in our commitments so that we can see and remember who we are. Sometimes our commitments can serve as ballast, sometimes as a path forward. They help us to navigate.

Photo by John Salzarulo on Unsplash

Part of my

Continue reading Coming Home: Finding Ourselves Where We Are

Somatic Learning in Action: Centering, Declaring, Entering

Through practice, we build our capacity to move toward what we deeply care about. Richard Strozzi-Heckler says: “We are what we practice, and we’re always practicing something.” So, why not have conscious practices that create change in us? Building awareness about what we are practicing and how this affects how we live our lives helps us to make choices that are more generative. We practice to become more alive to what pulses in us as the heart of what matters.

When we practice with others, in community, the learning takes place in what I have often called a cauldron. There’s a bubbling to the surface that can occur when practicing in the presence of others — a way into seeing ourselves that is otherwise invisible. By learning in community and taking the time to tease apart the practices, participants can deepen in their understanding of the practices themselves and, more importantly, the relevance of practice

Continue reading Somatic Learning in Action: Centering, Declaring, Entering

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

Continue reading The Embodied Creative: Voice & Body