I am lying on the cold stone floor in the study of my Jerusalem
apartment, cushioned by a royal-blue wool blanket. My arms and legs flop to the
sides, my head lolls to the left. Closing my eyes, I shut out the light.
From my laptop, balanced across my bent knees, I listen to Madelyn
Kent's soothing voice guide me via Skype to notice the contact points where my
body touches the floor: pelvis, shoulders, spine, and neck.
This is no spiritual, new-age yoga class cool-down or meditation-by-remote
taught by a fitness guru in Manhattan.
This is my weekly Sense Writing class.
Today's goal: to re-inhabit how it felt to nurse my baby for the very
last time before I was wheeled into surgery to cut a malignant tumor out of my
left breast.
Madelyn’s solution: Quiet down my optic nerve. Relax, and let my other
senses take over.
I’m game.
I cover my closed eyes with my palms. Then I move my eyeballs left and
right, catching flashes of shapes and light in the darkness. It feels weird at
first, eyeballing from the inside, but I trust her. I know that these exercises, rooted in the
principles of Feldenkrais, will immerse me in the landscape of my breast-cancer
story. Slowly, my eyes settle down.
Two-plus years ago, after surgery and treatment, I decided to pen a
memoir about what I went through. With a bachelor's degree in journalism and
twenty-five years of experience in writing and editing, I imagined this task
doable. Writing had always helped me
untangle my feelings. Words were the cane that I leaned on.
But when I sat down at the computer to unload my story, I stumbled. How
did it really feel to fight an illness? What terror struck my heart when
I considered leaving behind three boys under five? How does one make sense of
and navigate life and living after fighting a disease at 42 that will always
threaten to recur?
My descriptions were pretty, even witty. But the raw-and-real, from the
depths, was absent from the page.
If only I could get inside, I could yield much more than a decent
memoir.
I could gain greater understanding, peace and quiescence.
About cancer. About life. About me.
But how could I get there?
The most compelling writing I had ever done emerged from a composition
class Madelyn had taught at a yoga studio in south Tel Aviv a year and a half
ago when she was living in Israel. Alternating between stretching at the bar
and scribbling in my notebook, I found my creative muscles extending in
unconventional directions. Could that unorthodox method dislodge the rock slab
covering my creative well?
Two months ago, I called her in New York. She talked about Feldenkrais
and how much her pioneering method had evolved since she had returned to
Manhattan. Almost as soon as we started one-on-one coaching across the
Atlantic, my emotional writer's block lifted. Through exercises drawing from
techniques of somatic education that allowed me to investigate the link between
movement, senses and creativity, I have started to unpack my own story. The
specific movement and writing sequences of Sense Writing calm down my nervous
system, transporting me back to some primary consciousness where my imagination
runs free.
Though I am piecing together a memoir about illness, I have found
liberation and light.
After three minutes of scanning the darkness under my eyelids,
decreasing the stimulation to my optic nerve, I slowly open my eyes. Back at my
laptop, the words and moments that I had not consciously known begin to flow. Nestled
in a crack in the wall of sorrow about suddenly ending a singular intimate
relationship with my son, I find hope.
HOPE!
I realize that the same gift of life I had given to my baby I could now
give myself.
Because what I had to take from my baby—mother’s milk, though divine and
magical—was not life.
It was just milk.
And writing? Well, writing is divine.
Writing is the prism with which I make sense of life.
And cancer?
Well, that’s just more material… for writing and for life.
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