Connecting Sense and Sound: Writing from the Body

I've been up against some interesting challenges the last few months in relation to being in my body and feeling grounded in the relative world. I've been working with my therapist on what she calls "connecting sense and sound", in the simplest sense, connecting my voice, speech and writing with a grounded experience in my body, my feet, my breath. 

I'm very interested in cultivating what I often can touch into when I "write from the body", which requires a lot of extra awareness for me during my writing process. Keeping aware of my feet touching the ground, my body being completely held by my chair, my hands making delicate contact with my keyboard... all of it requires a slowing down, a willingness to feel into my direct experience in the moment and not just pull out references and ideas from my intellectual bank account.

Writing from my body also requires a lot more willingness to be vulnerable. I'm currently working on an article on Shiva and Shakti for a yoga magazine here in Canada and I've really struggled with falling comfortably into the narrative style that they use. I find it much easier in my writing to stay somewhat detached as a third person observer on my experience.

I think this is the result of two main things: one is my immersion in academia at this point in my life where the "I" in writing is encouraged not to make its presence. The other reason results from the remnants of self-restraint that I still carry after coming out of an Andrew Cohen based spiritual community two years ago. The experience was amazing but  I also recognize that living in a community where the impersonal is all that matters and any discussion of personal experiences and feelings is in opposition to the purpose of spiritual life makes a girl gunshy to divulge her personal life with complete freedom.

It seems it is taking me time to really allow myself to write from the personal immediacy of my body while keeping the integrity of the impersonal present. I am working to continually give myself permission to feel into the contours of being in a uniquely female manifestation of the divine and letting my writing be informed by that space, by my own flesh and blood.

Of course, the challenge is to do this kind of intimate writing while always keeping my heart grounded in formless emptiness, where relative distinctions of gender and bodies remain transparent to the all pervasive light of infinity.