What is Embodied Writing?

Entwining in words the human senses with the sensibilities of the world, Embodied Writing relays experience from the perspective of the body. Nature feels close and dear. Writers attune to the movements of water, earth, air, and fire, which ever coax our bodily senses to explore.

Embodied Writing is a skill both a research skill and a spiritual or meditation practice that nourishes an enlivened sense of presence in and of the world.

Seven Qualities of Embodied Writing

1. True-to-life, vivid depictions invite sympathetic resonance. Embodied Writing invites sympathetic resonance in readers. Through resonance, readers feel the writer’s experience as though the experience described were happening to them as they read.
   
2. Inclusive of internal and external sensations. Embodied Writing includes internal (imaginal, perceptual, kinesthetic, and visceral sensations (usually known only by the writer) and external events (observable to others) of information.
   
3. Written specifically from the inside out. Embodied Writing drops the external witnessing perspective customary for the natural sciences but increasing common in the human sciences. The body speaks for itself through the vehicle of words, positioning the author’s writerly voice inside the body. In so doing, the body’s perceptual matrix guide the words, impulse by impulse, sensation by sensation.
   
4. Richly concrete, specific and often slowed down. Embodied writing invites a lively sense of living here and now by attending to minor external and internal details as they arise. Experience is often slowed down in the temporal sense in order to re-live, remember, and describe in detail. Since slowing down is akin to meditation, slowing down is sometimes difficult to do.
   
5. Attuned to the living body (Leib rather than Körper in Husserl’s (1952/1989) sense). Embodiment is more than the physical senses. Embodied Writing used words to express the living body embedded the sensual matrix of the world.
   
6. Narratives embedded in experience, often first-person narratives. Embodied Writing is usually based on personal experience. The first person is used for referential accuracy.
   
7. Literary style and cadence serve embodied depictions. Embodied writing values vivid accounts of lived experience over literary artfulness. Musical cadence is often effective. Good Embodied Writing often requires a lot of editing out “your darlings.”
   

Contact Rosemarie Anderson at rosemarie@wellknowingconsulting.org for information, fees, and appointments.

Directory:

• Body Intelligence Scale (BIS)
• Body Intelligence Defined
• What your BIS scores mean
• Body Wisdom Practices