01.15.10
The Felt Mind & Entranced Writing
In a 2006 issue of TIFERET, I came across an association with massage to writing that resonated. In an interview with writer Brenda Miller, Miller (also a massseuse) says that in massage a masseuse must be intuitive and listen intently to what is going on. Writing, she says, is similar: You have to get into that intuitive state.
She’s spot on. I’ve been writing about this very thing lately. A few weeks ago, I was refining some material for an e-mail Yoga and Writing course I’m teaching this month on Yoga, Writing, and Writing Into the True Self, and I thought this group might appreciate some of it:
A character’s body, its infinite parts and endless history, grounds my writer’s “processor mind.” My processor mind is the mind that strives to explain away, to over-think and analyze, to complete the story or poem long before my imagination and hands have even reached the tenth sentence or line. It is all sky and meaning and figuring out; it is little earth.
If I can imagine how a character’s hands finesse a hammer and even what the fingers look like – sausages or drum sticks or budding hickory branches in summer – then my processor mind gives way to the felt mind. The felt mind strokes textures, senses what only Doris’s skin on her spotted forearms feels like on this one icy blue January morning. The felt mind hears the sounds of syllables and lets words wash over the inner ear and insides of my own fingers even as I write. If the processor mind is made of air and steel, then the felt mind is made of silk and sinew, of felt and grit. It is mostly earth.
I access the felt mind at key moments when writing, moments that are difficult, I admit, to distinguish. When I hear language lag or clunk, when I feel it grow cumbersome and stale like some scholar’s stack of moldy books, then I pause and listen for the words behind the words, the textures beneath the phrases. When I hear the writing voice strain to explain to the reader some point – Do you get it? Are you following me? – then I close my eyes and let the sound of breath lead my imagination to an image. A bulbous nose the shape of a large garlic clove appears on the face of Doris’s date. A pang arises in an uncle’s generous belly. The image brings my language back to earth, so to speak, and gives my imagination – and that of my readers – something to hold on to.
To arouse my felt mind, I regularly bring a character’s body to the mat. The mat has helped me sense, paradoxically, what it must have felt like to be that 26-year-old lonely workaholic who shares my name with no notion of his body below his neck. The mat has helped me explore the body of Doris, an imagined 58-year-old woman who, I think for now at least, is a not-too-bitter widow and who, while trying to revive her dating life, grieves her southward-bound breasts. My existing emotional body – with its own creaky crevices and layers of sensations – is my grounding point. The emotional body mixed with embodied imagination and intuition lure me into these character’s body-scapes that I might do justice to their experience.
Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Robert Olen Butler actually uses the word “trance” to describe to his undergrads in Florida what they need to get into in order to write. “Do whatever you need to,” he says in essence, “to get into that waking dream state.”
This subtle yoga and meditation practice entrances me and gives me entrance to 
the felt mind. Studies on Yoga Nidra and other yogic practices have shown that even beginning practitioners demonstrate increased emotional intelligence - and their brain stimulation corroborates that the brain’s limbic system (what we might call the brain’s emotional zone) communicates with the brain’s somatosensory region (where stimulation for touch and body orientation arise).
Thanks for your comments on previous posts, by the way. I’d love to hear more about your experiences with yoga & writing.
- Jeffrey
CENTER TO PAGE
MOVING WRITERS FROM
THE CENTER TO THE PAGE
C E N T E R T O P A G E . C O M
The Journey from the Center to the Page (Monkfish 2008; Penguin 2004)