Each day, I write the poem of my body. The more I’m able to befriend movement as a means to learn what knowledge lives within, the more interesting my experience becomes. What poem might my body write today?

Poems are distillations into presence wherein now exists in blood flowing through veins, in muscles contracting and releasing, in joints flexing and extending, in this inhale, in this foot strike against the pavement, in this sigh. “To be alive with this tremendous energy,” Joel Kramer states in The Passionate Mind, “is to be alive now…It’s all happening now, which is a moment to moment thing.” All the ways we might choose to move: practicing yoga asana, lifting heavy weights, strength training, endurance running—these are all places of breath and attention, where the mind is compelled to show up and feel, to build intimacy with what’s here, down on a tissue level, down deep in the wellspring of intuition, a place from which poetic acuity materializes.

Every Sunday, at my sweet sangha, Yogasource, in Santa Fe, I teach a class called, My Body is a Poem . I teach movement through the lens of poems and poems through the lens of movement. Poetic expression is deeply yoked for me with the continued practice of moving. Being in movement-based meditation-in-action allows us to learn to feel our bodies. This process of interoception is an ongoing discernment—a distillation of our awareness—towards the signals coming from within our bodies.

Each day, I write the poem of my body. The more I’m able to befriend movement as a means to learn what knowledge lives within, the more interesting my experience becomes.

The poem is alive in the body, and we get to tune toward how that poem wants to come forth onto the page. There’s so much to consider. What thoughts connect to what movements? And why? What types of movement patterns help me wake up awareness? What’s tangled in this connective tissue tug? What actions help me shift energy to places that need it more? How might actions that stimulate blood flow and reinforce postural length create the conditions for creative awareness, too, to flow more easily through these elongated, clearer channels? What movements help me settle my nervous system so that I might arrive at my writing desk more ready to meet craft?

I’ve had this embodied experience many times wherein movement created the conditions for poetic awareness. In a recent practice of self-guided exploratory movement, my big toe kept wanting to lead a kick. I was lying on the floor poking the air with the toe; my muscles of extension continued to flex and extend from the hip and knee towards where it insisted I point. I kept repeating the pattern, my toe curious, my toe in the lead, and after some time, it brought me to feel as if I was in utero, poking for my mother’s attention, for more food.

I’ve been writing poems about my history of disordered eating and hadn’t yet traced awareness back to pre-birth. Once I took the energy into my notebook, the writing activated memories of being told family narratives of how I stripped Mom’s teeth of their calcium and that being pregnant with me caused her a mouthful of cavities. My physical study, on the floor, poking at what was there in the open field of the air, led to newfound levels of learning to process, in poems on the page, where my initial feelings of hunger came from.

Wild, the embodied realm is eager for inquiry, if one is willing and interested to walk the paths of fascial fibers into latent awes waiting to be discovered.