My Foot Is Bored, or What I Learned from Embodied Writing

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Interdependence Project, a great meditation center in NYC that also offers a ton of arts workshops. I went to check out the class on Embodied Writing, taught by Catherine McNider.

(photo from the ID Project website)

(As a quick side note, ID Project founder and head of Buddhist Studies, Ethan Nichtern, just published his second book, Your Emoticons Won’t Save You. I’m really looking forward to reading it. His first book, One City, is great for anyone interested in how meditation can be useful in the 21st century.)

I wasn’t sure what to expect at the workshop on Sunday, or what was meant by embodied writing. But I would soon find out, and let’s just say it was not my usual writing process.

My usual writing process, these days, for the book I’m working on:

• make tea (preferably Irish breakfast, but sometimes something herbal and fruity)
• put on comfortable clothes
• meditate briefly (sometimes, depending on what I’m working on)
• light a candle (the scent helps me concentrate)
• arrange books/research materials I need at my desk
• open window
• close facebook/twitter/etc windows
• open up document, reread some/all of it, tinker with words
• continue writing
• reread
• tinker
• repeat
• print out, hole-punch, put in binder, read and edit with blue or black pen (not red, too traumatizing)

I’ve created these rituals for myself to help me get “in the zone,” and over time have developed my own strategies for editing that seem to work well for me. But everyone’s process is different.

And as I was reminded yesterday, there are MANY ways in to your subject.

The Embodied Writing class at the ID Project isn’t really about the same sort of writing process I’ve been working with for the past few years, and I think that it may be a good way to help me expand my process, my awareness, and my perception, and find inspiration in places I didn’t expect.

Each session of the Embodied Writing class will focus on getting familiar with a different part of the body. Sunday’s session was about the foot. Cool, I thought. I like my feet. I don’t have any body image issues about my feet, so nothing too emotionally charged there.

Ha ha. I was so wrong.

First we started by looking at anatomical drawings of all the bones in our feet. Then Catherine produced a bone model of the foot, and we examined it closely, touched the bones (there are so many bones in the foot! It’s so complicated!) We played with the range of motion of the foot model to see how the bones worked together. Then we spent a long time, each of us poking, prodding, massaging our feet to figure out where the bones were, where the joints met, which bones were called what. We traded stories about memories of foot injuries, about our flat feet.

Looking at the many bones in the foot and how they fit together reminded me of the dry stone walls on Aran…they way they fit together so perfectly even though their shapes are so irregular, totally unrefined.

And then of course I thought about the pampooties that the Aran Islanders used to wear a hundred years ago. The animal-skin shoes that needed to be wet to be worn, and that were ideal for clinging to rocky surfaces and maneuvering quickly over the Aran terrain.

(photo from NUI Galway website)

And I recalled J.M. Synge’s thoughts on re-learning to walk on Aran:

At first I threw my weight upon my heels, as one does naturally in a boot, and was a good deal bruised, but after a few hours I learned the natural walk of man, and could follow my guide in any portion of the island.

In one district below the cliffs, towards the north, one goes for nearly a mile jumping from one rock to another without a single ordinary step; and here I realized that toes have a natural use, for I found myself jumping towards any tiny crevice in the rock before me, and clinging with an eager grip in which all the muscles of my feet ached from their exertion.

Then we had 10 silent minutes to explore, walk around the room, dance, move, look, whatever we wanted to do to get more familiar with our feet.

It felt strange at first, of course, since this is not something I usually do (spend an hour thinking closely about my feet) but it was an incredibly fascinating exercise. I walked on different surfaces and paid attention to the feeling. I did some old dance moves I remembered, watching my feet to see the precise role they played in the moves. I watched my toes cling to different surfaces, observed how strong they were.

Really, what we were doing was meditating. Meditation is, after all, deliberately placing the attention on an object for a period of time. Usually we meditate using the breath as an object, to become familiar with the present moment. Here, we were placing our attention on our feet, to become familiar with a particular part of the body.

Then we sat back down. Catherine said we’d have 15 minutes to write. “Let the sensation of the foot write,” she instructed.

Huh?

My foot doesn’t write, I thought. I can’t do this. I don’t know what you mean.

But I had to write something, so I just started writing anything, and stopped trying to write something good, like a free-writing exercise where you just let the words flow.

Here’s some of what came up:

I’m flexible. I’m adaptable. I’ll put you in the right place, but you should treat me well. I’m the transporter but I wasn’t consulted on the matter. You demand without demanding. I’m a circle, as close to a circle as anything on you. I have to be, for what I’m put through, what you ask me for. I’m just there so I’m your slave. But I’m smarter than you. I’m a genius. I’ll do anything I need to keep you us me up down forward….And oh, I’m so bored! There’s so much more I can do. I can cling to rocks, walls, cliffs. I can push water down. I can crush berries, bugs, grass, I can be part of a dance. I am so bored. You give me nothing interesting to do. You involve me in so little. You wrap me up and hide me. You give me a cursory wash in the shower. Don’t you love me as much as your hands? Stop boring me. Please stop. I’m so bored with you. I’m so much more exciting than you are.

So while I was still writing with a kind of storyline that I’m familiar with, clearly my foot had something to say. Clearly I had some emotion tied to my feet that I wasn’t aware of. So not only did I find inspiration and emotion there, I found out something about myself in the process.

Probably that my feet want to do more stuff like this:

I wonder what my femur has to say.

1. odonnellui781 liked this
2. emilyherzlin posted this