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

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!

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.

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.

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.

From my experience at Proprioceptive Writing workshops over the years, I know that Linda Metcalf and Toby Simon are inspired teachers. When I heard of the publication of their book, Writing the Mind Alive, I was intrigued but at the same time wondered: Would the voices I knew from the workshop come through in book form? Would Linda and Toby be able to describe Proprioceptive Writing in such a way that readers would be able to start their own practice on the basis of the book? "There's no such thing as 'the greatest'," Linda said at my first Proprioceptive Writing workshop in 1988. This isn't performance, she was saying. For me, at that moment, her words were liberating, because as a would-be fiction writer I was intimately and painfully aware of "the greatest." It was out there somewhere. I heard Linda; I listened. "Write what you hear," they said. "Listen to what you write, and always be ready to ask the Proprioceptive Question." The Proprioceptive Question is what sets Proprioceptive Writing apart from other forms of "free" writing. When you come to a word that resonates (e.g., "the greatest"), you write, "What do I mean by the greatest?" And you listen, and you write. It's a simple move, but its effects are dramatic: you slow down, you move inward, you access the concrete details of experience and memory that lie behind the intersection between the word and the often unrecognized emotions that are attached to it. Writing the Mind Alive, I was happy to discover, delivers. The book succeeds in making the practice of Proprioceptive Writing accessible; you don't have to attend a workshop in order to get started (although you might well be motivated to attend one, after reading the book). Metcalf and Simon describe the nuts-and-bolts of practicing Proprioceptive Writing (the Proprioceptive Question is, to me, at the heart of it, but there are other elements), and they also share with their readers the stories of many students--vignettes that convey the tentativeness of beginnings and the development of trust in these writers' own voices. Not just as "writers" in the usual sense, but as listeners who are slowly but surely learning to tune in to what lies beneath the nattering that we so often take for our thinking. Slowing down, asking the Proprioceptive Question--not with the attitude of a critic but with the attitude of a curious listener--the writer learns that every thought--even the most prosaic--may turn out to be the road to somewhere interesting in the internal landscape, the intérieur non moi. The vignettes give a sense of the texture of the practice, beyond the concrete details, the "how-to." For me, the book also offered deeper insight into the dual potential of Proprioceptive Writing. It is helpful as a means of improving writing (as the authors discuss in chapter 3), but it is also valuable as a therapeutic/spiritual discipline. Because of my own personal focus on writing as a form of self-expression, as opposed to self-exploration, I