This blog post along with the others in this series are a preamble to the recorded lessons of the same name. The images in each post are hot linked to the relevant lesson. Just click on them to go there.

Art of Writing 9 considered the freedom of our head, neck and shoulders by sensing the tubular nature of our body and the way we could use length, width and depth to support movement in any direction ..

‘The Gondola’ Frederick Walker - Birmingham Museums Trust - Via UnSplash

We also spoke of humanity’s need for a new story and that examining our interests is one way that new story may arise.

The challenge has always been that our sense of life and its possibilities grow within a cultural framework that filters our perceptions of self and world.

‘Memorial Portrait of Moses ter Borch’ Gerard & Gersina Ter Borch - Europeana - Via UnSplash

This lesson considers the way you see your world. What are your filters?

and what is the relationship between the eyes, the other senses and the hands?

To observe and to allow things to be as they are is to be open to our world speaking to us.

It’s a beginning of a new collaborative process. To look at things anew ..

To sense the filters of perception .. the habits of structural limitation .. is to give space to our limitations and time to sense those filters from the perspective of the other senses

Through touch we understand & through action we expand our horizons.

The practice of writing is an interesting way to reflect on our experience. Thought and feeling are so fleeting. To commit them to paper is to bring them into a form of existence.

During the first two years of my training we watched the videos of Moshe running the Amhearst Training programme. We were doing about four lessons a day and he wouldn’t let us take notes. He wanted us to wait till we got home and do it from memory.

At first it seemed impossible. How could I remember everything he said and all the processes we explored? As time passed I remembered more and more. Details of what he said and what I felt began to flow more easily.

He said that if we persisted with this process we would become writers and that has been my experience. It’s a process that begins with recreating your experience and evolves into a process of actually creating experience.

Within our culture there is a tendency to confuse creativity with productivity - To mix up ends and means. It divides the world into experts and consumers. It cheapens the creative process and robs people of their confidence. As my first-born said to me recently, ‘That’s just capitalism’.

It’s time to reinstate creativity to its central place in all of our lives.

The art of writing as we’ve been exploring it in this course is really the art of living - of reflecting on experience in a way that shapes the narrative and connects us to the world in ever more beautiful ways.

If we co-operate and work together there will be harmony.

Who knows what is possible for each of us if we all work together? If we listen to our world with all of our senses .. and converse with our whole being ..

With love

David

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The Art of Writing 10 - The story of where you are