I read your post and could empathise entirely - I have spent most of my life wanting to write and yet blocking myself in some capacity - and this is despite having spent 5 (lo-o-ong) years doing a PhD. However (and please disregard any or all of the below if it is not helpful for you) the thing that has (recently) helped for the first time has in fact been my horse-riding.
All my life I have wanted to write, and yet I have always felt powerfully anxious about the process of writing - I would dance around my desk (not literally!) using every excuse to avoid _actually_ sitting down and writing, and then I would goad myself mentally and emotionally with harsher and harsher words/tactics until the pain of those were worse than the anxiety of writing and then I would fall on the page and hurl out words in a kind of blur, until I riccocheted away from the page afterwards, emotionally reeling. This was particularly the case during my thesis write-up, which took a year and was deeply scarring. The side-effect of this approach was that I found it almost impossible to stick with any project long enough to finish it - which then became a family joke and another stick that I could use to beat myself up with.
And then, about three years ago I started learning to ride.
I started off in a typical BHS (Britsh Horse Society) riding school, and had the same experiences that most adult learners have with horses that expertly detected our weakness and instructors who told us not to let the horses get away with ignoring us, telling us to use the crop if necessary to back up our (inept) instructions, and making it clear that the only criterion for success was if the horse did what you had told it to do. (And all these things are riding koans (like writing koans) and they are teachings that have their place and have a relevance in certain situations, but they are not the whole story.)
So, about a year in, I came across Mary Wanless's Ride With Your Mind approach, and ever since then I have been learning with her and one of her instructors, and the focus of their teaching is very different. The salient point about the RWYM approach is that this is all about riding in a state of non-judgmental noticing - you notice yourself (where are my legs, what is my core doing, where does my breath go, where does my awareness NOT reach, etc) and you notice your horse (what do his long back muscles feel like, do I have more horse on one side than the other, where does the reach in his neck start, etc, etc) and you try to separate out any judgment or emotion from that noticing state - you are not a bad rider (or a bad person) for having your legs too far forward, but if you aren't able to notice where your legs are, you cannot correct them, and your horse is not nasty or stubborn or lazy for not transitioning into canter when you ask, but he is telling you that something about the way that you're asking for canter is making it difficult for him to do it (for eg). The instructors guide you to the point where you can take responsibility for your own noticing and to begin to experiment with finding things that will work as a solution (what does my horse do if I release this feeling of tension from my shoulder, what does he do if I exhale when I ask for a transition, etc). This was a revelation for me and it transformed my enjoyment of my riding - and my horse's enjoyment of my riding, which is also key!
And then, when I was in the middle of my most recent round of excruciating writers block, I happened to watch a programme on selective mutism in children and I had a moment of blinding inspiration - THAT was what my writing self was doing - it was sitting there refusing to communicate with me and when I looked at it like that, I could see that WHY it was refusing to communicate with me was because it didn't like the WAY that I was trying to communicate with it. (cont in next comment!)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 11:27 am (UTC)All my life I have wanted to write, and yet I have always felt powerfully anxious about the process of writing - I would dance around my desk (not literally!) using every excuse to avoid _actually_ sitting down and writing, and then I would goad myself mentally and emotionally with harsher and harsher words/tactics until the pain of those were worse than the anxiety of writing and then I would fall on the page and hurl out words in a kind of blur, until I riccocheted away from the page afterwards, emotionally reeling. This was particularly the case during my thesis write-up, which took a year and was deeply scarring. The side-effect of this approach was that I found it almost impossible to stick with any project long enough to finish it - which then became a family joke and another stick that I could use to beat myself up with.
And then, about three years ago I started learning to ride.
I started off in a typical BHS (Britsh Horse Society) riding school, and had the same experiences that most adult learners have with horses that expertly detected our weakness and instructors who told us not to let the horses get away with ignoring us, telling us to use the crop if necessary to back up our (inept) instructions, and making it clear that the only criterion for success was if the horse did what you had told it to do. (And all these things are riding koans (like writing koans) and they are teachings that have their place and have a relevance in certain situations, but they are not the whole story.)
So, about a year in, I came across Mary Wanless's Ride With Your Mind approach, and ever since then I have been learning with her and one of her instructors, and the focus of their teaching is very different. The salient point about the RWYM approach is that this is all about riding in a state of non-judgmental noticing - you notice yourself (where are my legs, what is my core doing, where does my breath go, where does my awareness NOT reach, etc) and you notice your horse (what do his long back muscles feel like, do I have more horse on one side than the other, where does the reach in his neck start, etc, etc) and you try to separate out any judgment or emotion from that noticing state - you are not a bad rider (or a bad person) for having your legs too far forward, but if you aren't able to notice where your legs are, you cannot correct them, and your horse is not nasty or stubborn or lazy for not transitioning into canter when you ask, but he is telling you that something about the way that you're asking for canter is making it difficult for him to do it (for eg). The instructors guide you to the point where you can take responsibility for your own noticing and to begin to experiment with finding things that will work as a solution (what does my horse do if I release this feeling of tension from my shoulder, what does he do if I exhale when I ask for a transition, etc). This was a revelation for me and it transformed my enjoyment of my riding - and my horse's enjoyment of my riding, which is also key!
And then, when I was in the middle of my most recent round of excruciating writers block, I happened to watch a programme on selective mutism in children and I had a moment of blinding inspiration - THAT was what my writing self was doing - it was sitting there refusing to communicate with me and when I looked at it like that, I could see that WHY it was refusing to communicate with me was because it didn't like the WAY that I was trying to communicate with it. (cont in next comment!)