The Writer Who Inhabits Your Body

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, a powerful capacity that enables us to shape and share our deepest thoughts, feelings, and experiences. 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 in your life. Rather than provide a guide to writing, she helps you identify and give voice to the writer within. She shares hands-on exercises rooted in the martial art of Aikido and the practice of somatics—or body-centered learning—to provide direct and detailed ways to help facilitate personal growth and tap in to innate creative capacities, enabling you to fully immerse yourself in the creative process and discover immediate benefits.

Drawing on her extensive martial arts training, the author 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 deeper experience and 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, ultimately embodying your writing with complexity and fullness.

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 and has won several writing awards and grants, including the New Mexico Book Award for Poetry and residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. She teaches body-centered writing workshops across the United States. She lives in New Mexico.