Writing From The Body: Four Streams of Embodied Imagination

How writing, movement, and imagination helped me listen to the body and learn to improvise with life.

Please enjoy the audio voice-over, read in Maija’s own voice, as this article flows through through cycles of creativity and personal ritual, evoking the forest, the moon and the seasons of creativity.

Improvisation in the arts has been an entry point to explore being in the world with presence, creativity and embodied consciousness. For me, improvising has been an attempt to learn how to live and respond to life as it is happening. A slow processor due to the depth of information I am processing, I once preferred to go away and write or think before presenting something but now I am more comfortable with being a work in progress. In 2016 I spent a year in Contact Improvisation dance classes, it changed my life and my art.

This month I am reading Embodied Inquiry: Writing, Living and Being through the Body by Celeste Snowber.

I began contemplating the significance of improvisation and asked myself: How does improvisation relate to embodied inquiry?

In improvised movement we listen to our bodies for inspiration on how to translate sensations, thoughts and emotions into movements. The impulses are expressed with a certain direction, speed, and emotional quality.

First I must attune to my body, or in other words, I tune my attention to notice what is happening in my body. I start inhabiting my body with my attention so that my listening notices sensations, emotions and thoughts that come from my body. A response is expressed as an impulse to move.

These days I often like to go slow (imagine a luxurious stretch) so that I can feel every shift of the muscle, every change in energy resulting from a gesture. From my body there are gestures, actions, repetitions, pauses and flows. Contact points. Departures.

When I look back at all the ways I have listened to my physical body and entered into a dialogue with its layers of sensory perception, I have a new perspective.

Writing has always been there as part of my embodied dialogue but it is not the source of the stream of consciousness that I thought it was. It is perhaps a common first experience of consciously connecting the body to imagination. The act of writing, traditionally happens with a pen in hand, connecting the mind to the paper. In stream of consciousness writing, we practice getting out of our own way and let the mind and hand write without any internal editor. You could regard this to be a kind of improvisation. Word improvisation.

The first chapter of Snowber's book is written from the perspective of her body. In first person she writes to us from the perspective of her body. On page 3 her body says: "I live through a sensuous knowledge. I am all about those many kinds of intelligences you speak of, that have been well theorized. I am the lifeblood of inspiration; it is I who puts the breath into these intelligences. I am found not only in kinaesthetic or visual intelligence, but how you viscerally feel the waves of movement within your flesh... I reside in the subtle sensations flowing through you. I am your trusted inner voice."

When did I first start writing from the body?

There was a time of poetry, followed by a time of womb writing. Some time after, I discovered mythological imagination: a kind of internal image writing accessed through the body. Let's start by looking at these three streams of embodied improvisation.

To improvise is to respond spontaneously and creatively.

When encouraging unplanned improvisation I invite people to "follow the impulse." In the case of writing this means 'first thought, best thought'. It means stream of consciousness writing. It means start somewhere and follow your impulse at each moment of listening pause.

The Poetry of the Body: Writing from Emotion, Memory and Sensation

As a teenager I wrote from felt emotions in the body. I called it poetry because it did not follow formal writing rules, but arranged itself on the page with attention to the texture, rhythm and sensation of words. Emotions are not traditionally associated with the body. We still talk as if they are split into separate categories, as if there is no connection between feeling emotion and embodied reality. I posit that a reliable way of finding words is to attune to your body.

Here’s one poem I wrote at eighteen, long before I knew I was practicing embodied inquiry:

Like a time and place dreamt 
in the fuggy realm of sleep 
where the no sense is sensical. 
It’s unattainable in this time and in this place 
For this moment. It’s 
Like I crave an exotic fruit out of season 
or a moment already passed,
enshrined in the tomb of memory. 
I long for the shady peace 
amongst the trees of my dearest yesterdays 
And to make the music mine 
so I’m able to share my own sounds. 
I crave the company of those I haven’t found yet 
and the life that wasn’t born mine. 
I cannot leave the half-lived 
swimming in a swamp of sleep. 
For I cannot live the sleep or write the swamp 
or let myself be half-living. 
And so I fix the image in my mind 
of my desired fantasy fruit 
for when it might come to ripen. 
I let go of the peace of my childhood days 
and piece together fragments of dream, of new peace. 
And I try not to be discouraged by the now 
which screams out the unattainability 
of the fug obscured but sensible dream 
Of real living...

I wonder if poetry is where embodied inquiry began for me. A practice of reflection, response, contemplation and sensing emerged there, translating sensations and impressions into written imagery. At that point, my impulses flowed through my writing-hand only, onto the page in a flurry of marks and registers, expressing the felt experience. An embodied thought-inquiry-response.

I write poetry when a feeling or thought makes a strong impression on me. I focus in on the quality that has captured my attention and my words come from embodied memory: The connections I make are metaphors and similes for what it's like to feel and be in a body. When you read them, those images are described in words, and the body re-animates them in your memory. You feel them in the body because that is where the feelings live and are expressed.

At thirty I wrote:

The hags breath said unto me 
“your knickers are in a twist”
and I, strung up by my own machinations 
could only dare to surrender 
for the time to weep, to rage, to freeze, 
to hide had passed.
It hasn’t worked anyway
sinking in humiliation
fighting in indignation
drowning in pity
dying in false bindings.
No, the girl wriggled on the hook no more.
She dropped into her new life
with a breath
gentle as anything
and it fit her like a glove as
welcome as a soul quenching gulp.

... My poems are a way of translating my embodied experience into language. They are a mental, physical and emotional integration. I might even acknowledge the spiritual because there is a mystical quality to The One Who Writes. That one often feels as though they are beyond my mental concept of " I am", and beyond its sense of "I am thinking". I am aware that it is still me, but at a different level or quality of consciousness.

Womb Writing and The Seasons

Then there was a time of womb writing. This was a stream of consciousness that gave moon phases a voice. As you may know, a woman's moon phases are a bit like the seasons. Winter is the bleeding time, Spring is the time of energy, peaking in the Summer of ovulation. Autumn is a time of turning inward and harvest. Womb writing expresses the seasons of creativity and like the moon phases can be used to reflect upon your relationship with creativity or the things that you have brought into the world through your imagination. It starts with writing a stream of consciousness from the following prompts:

Spring womb says...

Summer womb says...

Conceptually, I visualise my womb space as circle, a contained space the size of my belly. That is were I attune to when I start writing. Feeling from my belly and placing my attention deep within my pelvis where my womb sits. Over time I developed an evolving relationship with these archetypes. An excerpt from 2018:

(Spring)

Maiden body says...

“I burst my banks and express openly, passionately, innocently, the truth of my heart... I am the body of the land and I tend to the well. I have a purpose and my will be done. I am love, whole unto myself.”

(Summer)

Mother body says...

“I bear the bones, the book, the memory and the name. I taste the emotions of your living, and I nurture your fire with devotion. I am presence, sacred in my practice, sensitive to the seasons and fluctuations of you, of me, of our creations.”

(Autumn)

Source-ress body says...

“Bloom in the boudoir of your dreams. Evoke delight. Plant kisses in your secret places for the gifts borne and treasure harvested. Swim and spiral deeper into the heart of cosmic darkness… This is not a game. This is not a test run. Dare to fulfil your living in fulsomeness.”

(Winter)

Crone womb says...

“I am like rocks. I am the blade and the needle… I speak with the ravens and the fates. The spaces between and the places you’ve been. Open now. The Call has been made. Taste life in a whole new way.”

🌙 These excerpts come from “The Heart, The Womb and The Wild” which paid subscribers can enjoy as a companion piece to this article.

Womb Writing was my first experience of writing from the body as an ongoing practice. It assumes a connection to nature’s cycles and a personal–collective relationship to archetypal imagery, while grounding that relationship in the present moment and place of writing.

Mythological Imagination

After poetry and womb writing I sent my attention into my body, where I found the cosmic womb. Where black space contains all the colours within its shade. A place of imagination. There in the dark I was able to listen to my psyche and develop images beyond words. Moving dynamic images, personal mythology, active dream consciousness. Experimental filmmaker Rouzbeh Rashidi might call these visions my own personal cinema, the moving images the product of my own cinematic vision. I wrote it all down for record keeping as faithfully as I could.

Faithfulness wasn't hard because details appeared by where I placed my attention and focus. I was building a visual awareness of my environment moment to moment, detail by detail. This practice is akin to Jungian Active Imagination and takes its name from the book Women Who Run With Wolves where Jungian psychologist and best selling author Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes:

“Being real doesn't mean being reckless, it means allowing La Voz Mitologica, The Mythological Voice, to speak. One does that by shutting off the ego for a while and letting that which wishes to speak, speak.”

In my practice of Mythological Imagination I was extending the structure of Womb Writing. Womb Writing followed the structure of the moon cycle through four distinct phases. First established in the dreaming, these phases were robed women named: White Red and Black. Cloaked in these colours the women symbolised phases of creative process and development.

Then, my mythological imagination personified four phases of the creative cycle as women named for the seasons: spring summer autumn winter. When personified as seasons the women had discernible features and clothing representing my current state or internal ecology. By revisiting the writing structure throughout the year I was able to record changes in my psyche, creative health and development.

In one vision, I was cradled by the Witch of Spring—her cheeks full with laughter, her broomstick slicing the sky. I had become tiny, a seed in her palm. The gift of perspective, she offered. These are the kinds of imaginal encounters that arise through my practice of Mythological Imagination.

🌙 Read the full dream-journey, “Four Seasons, Summer is Pregnant,” available to paid subscribers

Exploring The Forest: Improvised Dialogue

I once believed that poetry was my first doorway into flow—that stream of consciousness I would later extended into movement and imagination. But it turns out there was an earlier embodied inquiry that set the tone for everything that followed: exploring the forest as a child.

Every weekend my family and I would go to my grandparents holiday house in the bush. Surrounded by 25 acres of fenced eucalyptus forest, I could wander, even at age six, without fear of getting lost. The forest taught me to explore. To follow my impulses. To pick a direction.

To respond to what I found. To listen and use all my senses. To delight in the adventure.

Held by nature. My first dream tender.

In 2023 I returned for the first time in 10 years and I wrote this shortly after:

So close, so far, so delicate.
I want to feel you on my skin again
To walk inside your wild dimensions
Quietly sun silvered
and raucously sky screeched wide.
Memory of being so wrapped up in you:
As well fitted as a glove, me inside you, and you in me.
Continuity like this is paradoxical
You are so mine, you are so estranged, 
I am so yours, I am so absent.
Every part of you a remembered shape, surface and dimension.
They say they talk about Country like a person: sing to it, listen to it, long for it. 
Is this is the wild dimension? (Of relations)
You taught me to be an artist explorer. That will always be.

I had drawn links to the forest before. During my four years of dream writing I called my website The Dream Forest: a place of poetry, creativity and transformation.

Echoing my practice of writing, dreaming, filming and embodied art-thinking, I began to think of The Dream as my material. The Dream Forest as a very real imaginal underworld in which our psyche can enter, commune, and remake it's personal relationship to well known archetypes.

The forest was the first place I learned to follow the impulse—and it is still where I go, within or without, to remember how to move with awareness and trust in what unfolds.

The Ground of an Embodied Dialogic Practice

In conclusion, these ways of listening—with the body, with memory, with myth—form the ground of my embodied dialogic practice. They are: Stream of Consciousness Writing, Improvised Movement, Stream of Consciousness Mythology and Improvised Dialogue.

Improvisation, for me, is not only an artistic method but a way of being in relation: to sensation, to creativity, to the world. Writing from the body is how I continue to trace those threads, to stay responsive to the dreaming.

On the one hand, embodied inquiry is an act of attuning to the body—observing, sensing, and reflecting. On the other, embodied improvisation is an act of trusting the body's intelligence in motion—responding spontaneously to the moment.

Together, they form a creative dialogue: inquiry listens, improvisation responds. One seeks to understand, the other to become. This relationship—between sensing and expressing, attuning and acting—bridges inner awareness with outer expression, grounding presence in practice.

Like the forest, these practices teach me to listen deeply, respond to what I encounter, and trust my winding path through the unknown.

---

I wrap my conclusion with a poem that arose from my practice of embodied dialogue:

I am willing to be moved

I let the colours in.
I let the sounds in.

I let my body move,
my attention move,
in response to what is.

I am getting to know you,
and you me,
through my eyes and words.

Nature seduces me,
takes me on a sensory adventure,
stimulates my mind,
woos my body,
guides me through her lands and surfaces.

I am ready to let go
of what I thought it was supposed to look like—

any of this:
making,
sharing,
sensing,
living.

I let myself become part of nature’s love letter—
lived in the breath and body,
received by the breath and body.

🌙 If you enjoyed reading this article you may also be interested in my performance to camera titled Red as Blood, White as Snow, Black as Crow, recorded in 2024.