The Writer Who Inhabits Your Body: Somatic Practices to Enhance Creativity and Inspiration

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, 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 give voice to the writer within. She shares hands-on exercises rooted in the martial art of aikido and the practice of somatics—body-centered learning—to provide direct and detailed ways to help facilitate personal growth and tap in to innate creative capacities.

Gregorio 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 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.

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. Her most recent, Abyss & Bridge, won the New Mexico–Arizona Book Award for Poetry. She has been granted writing residiencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts in New York State and the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, NM. She teaches body-centered writing workshops across the United States. She lives in New Mexico.

ISBN: 9781644119235
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: March 12, 2024

“Renée Gregorio points the way to a self-expression that sparkles, shines, and roars with a truth and beauty that is uniquely your own. I will cherish this book as a beloved companion on all future writing adventures.”“Renée Gregorio offers writers a unique body-centered path into discovery and creativity.”“Gregorio explores the relationship between the human body and creativity in a way that will benefit all writers. In this book you’ll find thoughtful insight, encouragement, and dynamic exercises. Gregorio’s approach can both inspire the beginner and help practicing writers deepen and expand. The Writer Who Inhabits Your Body is both a friend and teacher. Follow along!”“This is a wonderful resource for anyone who writes or has ever wanted to write. Using practices and principles from aikido, Renée offers exercises that awaken the mind/body/spirit connection, activating inspiration and insights from a place ‘rich with untapped knowing.’ She invites readers to open heart and soul and shows how to tap the creativity that emerges from their internal landscape.”“A wonderfully crafted, beautifully written, highly accessible approach that illuminates and takes you through the doorway of writing. Gregorio takes you on a journey into your heart, gut, and embodied soul that sparkles with revelations in how your dreams, images, and longings become language.”“A writing process that is so much more than words on paper with pen or ink. Your words will spill, erupt, fly, and whisper, emergent foremost from who you are yourself. Gregorio will help you bring yourself to the page. Get quiet and listen to your own voice.”“In The Writer Who Inhabits Your Body, Renée speaks powerfully to the benefits of the ongoing process of settling and clearing, which brings about wider and wider rings of listening, until the writer and what’s being written about are in harmonious relationship.”“What an honor to explore writing as path, aikido as path, somatics as path, with someone who has been in practice for decades. This book is an invitation to the interface of what is most internal and the offering of that to the world. Scary and full of awe.”“Provides pathways of understanding and profound practices to guide writers into themselves with all the complexities, challenges, and opportunities writers face. In this way, Gregorio leaves no stone unturned and provides practical hope to being a writer. A masterful work.”“In this exquisite book of heart and feeling, wisdom and practice, Renée Gregorio deftly guides the reader through practices that plumb the depths of that stream. This book is a must-read for anyone who is longing for ‘a place where you know what it means to rest in yourself and let words arise.’”“This book is a gift: a poetic, embodied, and practical guide that lets you spring forth as written word.”