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A few years ago, I had the chance to take a workshop where a teacher guided me and other students through simple visualization exercises where we focused on specific parts of our bodies like our shoulders or our necks and explored different ways to turn or lift them more easefully. Afterwards, we dove immediately into the more familiar portion of a typical writing workshop, where we were given a prompt to write about and time to free write. I chose to revisit a memory that I had tried to jot down a year or two beforehand while attending a flash fiction workshop series. To my surprise, during this second attempt, I found myself remembering the emotions of that memory in vivid detail, along with the sensations that those emotions produced in my body, as if I had been transported directly back into that memory. As my pen started to move, I also realized that I was writing about those emotions, including those I had intentionally omitted out of pride and vanity the last time that I penned jottings about this experience.
Whenever writing about personal experiences, whether for the purposes of writing nonfiction or to undertake research with a method like autoethnography where we’re examining our own experiences through a critical cultural lens, it’s not just a matter of remembering details, but a matter of how honestly we can excavate an experience. When I first experienced the technique of sense writing where Madelyn Kent combined the somatic practice Feldenkrais with creative writing, I found that I was able to plumb new depths of honesty in my writing, admitting qualities and feelings that I had once been too proud to unveil to strangers. After engaging in the seemingly unrelated physical exploration of Feldenkrais, I was no longer hesitant about penning those truths on paper. I was able to simply let the fullness of the experience flow out of me, unhindered by my own ego.
I wanted to see if this was an experience that might be replicated or shared by others. Our new article in Teaching in Higher Education details the results of sharing such an experience with undergraduate students taking a performance studies course within a Communication Studies department, where students were asked to use the body as a site of creation for works that they shared with each other throughout the semester.
The writing assignment that I paired with somatic exploration asked students to reflect on a time when they felt different from those around them, were marked as different, or when they were the reason that someone else experienced a marked difference between themselves and others. They were encouraged to reflect on how they saw themselves via specific norms or identities and/or to consider acts of resistance that they witnessed others undertaking. Not exactly a fluff topic.
I initially hoped that students would write more richly and descriptively after experiencing embodied opportunities to move more efficiently, and when comparing their first and second drafts, I was blown away by the reflexivity and brave admittance of uncertainty that surfaced in their second drafts. It seemed as if a physical exploration of new connections allowed multiple students to recognize their own agency in crafting their performances and in living their lives. Most excitingly, they chose to use that agency to exercise an ethic of care toward others.
It’s so easy to forget about our bodies until they cry out in pain from hunger or disuse, especially when more and more of our tasks are condensed into inanimate screens that only ask us to move our fingers. The possibility that we can use embodied learning not only to alleviate pain, which was Moshe Feldenkrais’s main agenda when developing this practice, but to help us open outwardly toward others and step into our full capacity is terrain that we are excited to begin treading.
Lauren Mark (SUNY New Paltz) and Shannon McManimon (Viterbo University)
Teaching in Higher Education 