Writing from the Body
How we write can change our experiences
Welcome to Yoga Culture’s Yoga & Writing! Here, we look at the intersection of yoga and writing practices and explore new ideas together. Anyone is welcome. Thanks for joining us.
Writing and the body
When we take the body away from our writing practice, we are in trouble. The ideas and language that end up on a page or a screen come from within us. They may feel at times like they come from nowhere, from outer space. But since they originate in our minds, they also originate in our bodies.
Even when we type or use speech-to-text technology, we use our bodies to write. Our breath and heartbeats change as ideas come to us. We may calm our brains through releasing energy in our words. Our eyes change as we zoom in on the way language transforms a blank page or screen into truths and pieces of ourselves.
I like to think the body moves through writing or writing is of the body. It is inherently, but maybe tapping into this reality with intention can help us to move deeper in reaching our audience or, conversely, to allow the writing to affect ourselves more.
Trauma in the body can be released through writing. Writing “strengthens immune systems as well as the mind” (Bridget Murray, American Psychological Association) It also “helps you to process the painful experience, and gives you the life skills to overcome it,” according to Uddipana Goswami for Psyche.
In a review of more than 200 research studies about this topic, Harvard Business Review discusses the importance of writing about experiences in the wake of the pandemic as a collective response to trauma we hold as society:
No matter what boat we’ve oared on this uneven sea, to avoid processing what we’ve been through is to minimize the impact of one of the most profound global crises of our lives. Healing is essential to our collective wellness, and expressive writing has already proven to be a tool for enhancing well-being in teachers and other full-time workers.
It goes on to discuss that beyond voicing pain and anxieties, actions of creativity expressed in writing allow both healing and hope. You don’t have to have trauma to benefit from writing, but we all have emotions to process and human ideas to share. If we recognize that writing is of the body then AI cannot take over. It would be impossible to duplicate when we value the process.
And in that how is the question of the physical form that our writing takes: handwritten, typed (on computer or typewriter), spoken to a human or technological scribe? I’m not here to tell you what’s better. Instead, I’d like to just explore each method a little and allow us to think about why we do what we do.
Handwriting
Handwriting slows it down and makes it visceral. It’s an intimate experience. Me - my journal - and my pen. I choose the notebook pages and ink carefully, but at the same time — any piece of paper or writing implement will do in a pickle.
I spend time every now and then only writing by hand. It keeps me offline while I’m writing (no crutch of researched ideas!) and slows down the whole process. It makes writing into a sketching process. I can see my thinking. I can feel my ideas in my fingers.
I also like to see the mistakes I cross out. It makes my writing process visual, and failures are part of any process. There’s no hiding. And rather than flipping between open documents and tabs as I think of ideas or words, my writing comes together in these pages. Pieces of novels meet notes about article ideas; personal observations follow character sketches; philosophy joins diary entries. Sometimes there are even drawings and mind-maps.
I do have a labeling system. Anything possibly worth entering my more finished and sometimes published writing gets a little symbol. A circled M for The Matterhorn, N3/N4/N5 for various novels I’m working on in different stages, big stars for life changing ideas (?/!!). A journal of mine is an entry into my brain, but a more coherent and considered one.
Perhaps handwriting is a special privilege once paper is too expensive. I hope it never has to fade out. I’ve tried those digital tools designed to mimic paper notebooks, including the Moleskin one which someone gifted to my husband, and they just don’t work for me.
Handwriting is good for us; it helps us learn and remember things. [Some sources — Ted Talks; psychological benefits; compiled scientific studies; for students] I am also very aware as a teacher of many years that some people cannot write for various physiological reasons or have neurological reasons that make computer based writing much more accessible, which I’ll talk about in a moment.
Taking notes specifically can be very beneficial by hand — to think for yourself, pay attention, remember, and more. It is an art. It is a form of creativity all itself. A discussion on this topic began in the comments in one of my articles with
and .Typing
Typing, for me, is like a state of flow.
Yes, sometimes I use it to rewrite and reorganize what I have written in a notebook. Then, it is an editing process. I copy job, then a careful look at structures and diction.
But even at times like this I may break into flow. Yes, you may have guessed, it has a lot to do with yoga flow (Vinyasa style yoga), where movements connect with the breath in continuous motion, uninterrupted. Flow is an idea or a way of writing, a rhythm, taking shape even before I’m always aware what’s going to erupt on the page. It’s so fast that it feels more impulsive or authentic I guess.
I have my sixth grade typing teacher to thank for this. In schools I’ve worked in since, I haven’t seen a typing class. All of us had to take a semester of typing. It was basically several months of learning the keys with a paper tapes over our hands and game-like competitions to get faster and more accurate over time. Maybe it worked because I love friendly competition. Or maybe it worked because I already loved writing and thought the idea of getting words down faster was a dream.
Learning to type blind is a gift (as is the sometimes forgotten cursive writing, much faster, although I think most of us make our own hybrid writing form). Here are a few resources if you didn’t learn to touch type or have a child/student who needs help.
I had a typewriter for a short while in the eighties before my family got a Mac for us all to share and we would fight over it for Carmen Sandiego. As eldest child, I asserted my need for the computer for ‘important homework’ whenever possible.
Although one of my favorite authors, Paul Auster, swears by a typewriter (still!), I could just never get into it. The ‘correction key’ never worked quite right and I was not the best at loading paper correctly. Still, the look and feel of the keys and letter stamps, as well as the sound, was really magical. It has stayed with me though only a short stint in my writing life. Did you know there’s an app that lets you type on your computer with the sound of a typewriter? My colleagues loved it when I downloaded it for a day and carried on typing away in our tiny office of nine teachers. (Ok, it probably only lasted ten minutes, but I carried on with headphones.)
Speech-to-text
By hand or voice – speaking aloud is a reflection of ourselves through our bodies. The voice adds a different kind of personal touch. It’s also one that helps many people with various types of learning disabilities or issues with fine motor skills. Thanks to computers, one doesn’t have to hire a scribe like Milton and memorize their epic poetry overnight until the scribe arrives to take it down. Or so the story goes.
As a teacher, several times I took down assessments as a scribe. Depending on the assessment and the student’s needs, sometimes a person is used in place of computer. As the technology gets better, the use of this technology leaves less inhibition for the student-writer and gives them an even playing field.
The best professor during my teaching degree at Boston College back in 2003 introduced me to this software. He was blind. (He always knew and noted if students left during the break of our three hour evening seminar though!) Twenty years ago…he was on the cutting edge of these technologies to help students with accommodations at a time when those were seen by many educators still as crutches or unfair advantages. It was by far the most useful class during that degree. Even though the technology changed rapidly, his approach to inclusion and accessibility is one that opened my eyes to possibilities for my students, allowing them to not only succeed in the classroom but become independent and optimistic looking forward beyond school years. (This is extremely important for yoga as well, but more on that later!) I also learned that many students without ‘disabilities’ could benefit from these variations and opportunities.
I don’t use speech to text myself, but have been experimenting with ‘voice writing’ through podcasting and voice messages to friends in lieu of emails or letters. Do you use it? What’s your experience?
And so, I write through my fingers and from an expression of my voice.
Movement initiated in my brain often comes incomplete. As I write with my body, I am at times unaware what thought initiated the movement, as if the fingers are thinking themselves.
How do you write? How does it make your body feel?
If you alternate forms of writing, handwriting and typing for example, do you change with purpose? What is the difference between them for you?
What a great article, Kathleen. I've used all the methods you mention. The Smart Notebook was wonderful because I have literally dozens, probably scores, of notebooks but it's impossible to find anything specific. The Smart Notebook made even my handwritten notes searchable. I'm using the past tense because they "improved" the app, thereby making it unusable. They may have worked on that (I heard they were doing so) but I've gone back to relying on handwritten analogue notetaking and memory. Perhaps I'll move on to one of those Leuchterm (?) notebooks that have a table of contents section.
The most appropriate method for me is the one that accords with either my mood or circumstances. For example, if I'm waiting in the car, where it's too cramped to write, I might dictate into my phone. The marvellous thing about the age we live in is surely that there's so much choice.
I write mostly - including this comment - with a stylus on a tablet using the handwriting to text feature. My handwriting is illegible, even to me, but the tablet somehow figures it out. Al you can use! And it's the best of both worlds - handwriting for me, text for you!