After taking a class focused on the history of writing and technology last semester, my brain grazed towards the effect of our bodies on and with the process but the thoughts failed to formulate or connect. Reading Felt Sense connected those dots for me while making me feel infinitely uncomfortable. Aside from “women’s intuition,” I didn’t grow up with the idea of trusting the body. The body can be sensational and sinful. So, it actually took a lot of squirming on my part to digest the idea of feeling our way, physically, through/with words.
On page 52, Perl writes out my dilemma, “For centuries, however, we have been taught to think otherwise. We have been living within and accepting the false separation between body and mind and between thoughts and feelings.” And as such, I was willing to spend another center wondering why my mind hadn’t worked hard enough to make me the writer that I wanted to be. While reading, I also wondered about an inability to connect to felt sense if we were aware of the big divide between our bodies and our minds? How could one felt sense exercise work? Wouldn’t I need hundreds?
In the nervousness of writing this response, I can feel my body reacting to the possibility of me not being to properly articulate myself. In Chapter One’s divide of positive and negative (my words) experiences of Felt Sense, I routines experience the latter. My arms get tense, sometimes I have trouble breathing and pace which leads me directly to the front of the television where all my writing woes are abandoned. I can’t handle it. Yet, I find myself excited to participate in this exercise. Maybe, for the first time in a long time, I can contextualize my body in my art. Placing my felt self at the center. Maybe.
