Kinesthetic Realism is back!

If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to write emotion so that your reader feels it inside their body, come take this workshop, and learn the method I created to get you there.

Drawing on clinical psychology, analytic philosophy, somatic-experiential practices, and method-acting techniques—and informed by my lifetime navigating panic disorder—I’ve developed a method that helps writers track how emotion registers physiologically: through shifts in temperature, pressure, contraction and release, rhythm, and tremor.

From there, we learn how to translate these signals into prose that transmits feeling rather than merely labeling it.

Writers often begin with the word for an emotion: grief, anger, fear and write out from there. In this workshop, I teach you to reverse that order, and go farther, past the words and begin inside the body.

This is a two-day, five-hour intensive limited to 12 participants.

By the end of this workshop, you’ll have a new understanding of what runs us, how to surface and capture it onto the page using the exact right words. You’ll see the world just a bit differently, and realize that emotions are a language we can all learn to speak.

Most importantly, you’ll begin to open the senses we’ve been trained to mistrust, tamp down, turn off, avoid, ignore and close.

People have been fighting about emotion for as long as we’ve been able to communicate. Some of the oldest written arguments are from ancient Greece. The Stoics said passions were errors of judgment that needed to be stamped out. Aristotle said to feel emotions in the right amount, at the right time, about the right things. (Sure, okay dude.)

In the second century, the physician Galen spent pages of a long treatise attacking the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, who had been dead for nearly four hundred years. In 1677, Spinoza mocked Descartes, dead since 1650, for claiming that the soul and body meet in the pineal gland in the middle of the brain. (I mean…can you blame him?)

In 1872, Charles Darwin published a book arguing that your facial expressions are inherited, shared with animals, and older than you are. Much of it was a takedown of the anatomist Sir Charles Bell, who believed God had given humans special face muscles for showing feelings. Bell’s theory had been written partly to refute Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, so Darwin was settling a family score.

Boys. They’re so emotional.

As I work on a longer piece about the long history of men fighting about emotion (and women are called hysterical??!!), and prep for Intro to Kinesthetic Realism, I’m offering you Darwin’s book, for free. Because sometimes I’m just like that.

Happy Wednesday to all who celebrate, and I do hope you’ll sign up for the workshop.

Until next week I remain…