Writing the Mind Alive: The Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice

By Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon

Book Overview

Discover the revolutionary writing practice that can transform your life! In 1976, Linda Trichter Metcalf, then a university English professor, sat down with pen and paper and intuitively started a self-guided writing practice that helped to bring herself into focus and clarify her life as never before. She and a colleague, Tobin Simon, introduced this original method into their classrooms. They experienced such solid response from their students that, for the last twenty-five years, they have devoted themselves to teaching what has now become the respected practice of Proprioceptive Writing®-in workshops, secondary and elementary schools, and college psychology and writing classes around the country, among them the New School University. "Proprioception" comes from the Latin proprius , meaning "one's own," and this writing method helps synthesize emotion and imagination, generating authentic insight and catharsis. Proprioceptive Writing® is not formal writing, nor is it automatic or stream-of-consciousness writing. Requiring a regular, disciplined practice in a quiet environment, the method uses several aids to deepen attention and free the writer within: Baroque music, a candle, a pad, and a pen. Presenting Proprioceptive Writing® in book form for the first time, Writing the Mind Alive shows how you, too, can use it to * Focus awareness, dissolve inhibitions, and build self-trust * Unburden your mind and resolve emotional conflicts * Connect more deeply with your spiritual self * Write and speak with strength and clarity * Enhance the benefits of psychotherapy * Awaken your senses and emotions * Liberate your creative energies Featuring actual "writes" by students of all ages, Writing the Mind Alive is a catalyst for mental and emotional aliveness that can truly enrich the rest of your life.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345438582
• ISBN13: 9780345438584
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Read this book! Attend a Workshp!

I recommend supplementing this wonderful book with a weekend workshop (as I did).Linda Metcalf and Toby Simon have developed a simple, kind practice that is absolutely transformative. I feel newly armed with a practice that will help me develop my connection to the meaning inherent in my creative work, my professional life, and my personal life. I cannot recommend Proprioceptive Writing enough!

Getting in touch with your subconscious

I just finished a writing class where the teacher spoke about our character's early childhood wounds and how those wounds lead our characters to see the world through a flawed perspective. Epiphanies in stories occur when the character recognizes that this flaw prevents him or her from attaining the goal. The character still lives with the wound but is able to recognize the flawed thinking as a detriment to personal growth, and, in the dramatic situation, a hinderance to attaining the external goal. This, I think, is all our stories, and I think this book, by way of the proprioceptive method, allows one to get in touch with the wounds that hold one back. Does it work? Who knows. We are talking art and science here and proof is not easy to come by. For under twenty dollars it is enormously more simple than numerous visits to the therapist.

Important, Original, Practical Life-Enhancement

Writing the Mind Alive: the Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice is an important, original book. It delivers what its title promises. Proprioceptive writing is an utterly simple, practical method for gaining "insight into and power over the way we live and think," as the authors say. It has developed through twenty-five years of experience based on Linda Metcalf's re-discovery, during a long writing retreat, of the natural, innate, unceasing energy of human thinking. It is an obvious but often unrecognized truth and the ground of the ancient admonition: "Know yourself." Everyone can think, so no extra or special skills are needed to apply this method of knowing yourself. There are no tricks or gimmicks or foggy spirituality to it. Anyone who can read and hold a pen can apply it. In it one writes down one's thoughts as "heard" in the mind and interrogates them through the Proprioceptive Question "What do I mean by ________ ?" Unpacking the word that fills the blank brings revelatory results. I write this review as the testimonial of an ordinary person, like (and unlike) everyone else, a job-holder, spouse, parent, colleague, friend, self-questioner and juggler of all those roles, sometimes quite unsuccessfully. Though I'd been acquainted with the method for some time, I hadn't practiced it. Since this book brought it clearly into print, underlining its relevant history and well-tested principles, I've been doing a daily "Write." It helped immediately. It brought more professional focus, less interior Sturm und Drang-- certainly a mind more alive and a life more enjoyed hour by hour. Whatever your age, sex, occupation or pre-occupation, you should buy this book and try the method for yourself. It's a practical life-enhancement.

An Elegant Practice

As I finished `Writing the Mind Alive', I was drawn to put on Baroque music, light a candle, and sit down with my unlined white paper, eager to write what I heard, listen to what I wrote, and be ready to ask the proprioceptive question. These are the basic elements of Proprioceptive Writing, an elegant practice that provides a liberating framework in which to become attuned to ourselves through attentive listening to our thoughts and feelings.I attended a PW Workshop at Esalen many years ago, and through the practice of PW, have had opportunities over the years to `know the delight of discovering new meaning in an old story after realizing something about themselves that they didn't know before, then telling the story differently.' While many of us have experienced this delight, PW provides an ongoing practice for the discernment of the stories in which our lives are embedded, and to hold them up to the light for reflection.The book provides a brief background on how PW was developed, clearly presents the practice, then speaks to different dimensions of the practice: as a path to better writing, a path to emotional health, and as a secular spiritual practice. Along the way, passages from a number of PW `writes' are cited to illustrate and clarify. I strongly recommend this book and this practice.