the five senses
weekly story work exercise
Paid subscribers receive Story Work exercises every Sunday night at 8 pm et. This week the weekly exercise is open to all subscribers.
If you’re new here, Story Work is the name of my current book-in-progress. It describes a process of reflection, reclaiming, and reimagining the stories of our lives. It involves looking at your life experiences as creative material that you have the power to shape.
The weekly Story Work topics cover universal life themes with references from literature, philosophy, science, and spirituality; offering perspectives that spark ideas for personal growth and creative expression.
Hi friends,
Years ago I asked myself what I really wanted and who I was outside of the image I’d created and the expectations that others had of me. What did I need to do that I wasn’t doing? What did I need to say that I wasn’t saying? Where was my real voice and what did it sound like?
It wasn’t until I stopped looking for answers in other people that I began to let my questions lead me to fuller expression and a more aligned life. This journey has been so transformative that I built a career creating tools and resources that center writing as a tool for self-discovery and creative courage.
The weekly Story Work exercises and my forthcoming book are extensions of this effort. Every four weeks, I introduce a new theme for our weekly exercises. Each theme provides a nuanced lens for us to explore the creative material of our lives.
If you’re new here, whether your calling is to write privately or publicly, these exercises are based on the idea that writing about our lives is its own reward. Too often we get in our own way when we worry too much about craft and technique before we find the courage to say what we need to say. I offer questions that spark curiosity and introduce new angles and entry points to the stories that live inside of you.
The Five Senses
We just finished the Time Travel theme, and now we’re moving into The Five Senses.
Writing from the five senses offers numerous healing and craft benefits.
Writing from the five senses gets us out of our heads and into our bodies so we can capture the moment we’re describing from a raw and unbiased perspective. Focusing on each of your senses is an effective way to quiet your inner critic and become a non-judgmental observer, which is healthy for your nervous system and expansive for your creativity. Over the next few weeks, we’ll use the five senses to practice mindful writing, a creative practice that nurtures attention and well-being.
As storytellers, the more mindful we are in our lifestyle, the more we can bring that perspective into our writing. A mindful approach helps us slow down and notice in detail how we experience the world around us. By practicing presence through the five senses, we can add more of our own signature perspective to our writing. There could be a million people in the world writing about grief, but only you can write about grief through your personal senses and circumstances. There could be a million people writing about a boring rainy day, but what you notice, and how you experience it is specific to you.
Writing from the five senses, particularly as a pre-writing technique, also supports your ability to find new meaning in your experiences. In a few weeks, I’m offering a workshop, Writing to Heal: An Expressive Writing Workshop, and writing from the five senses is part of how we examine memories so we can access them without the bias of emotion.
For today’s exercise, we’re going to work with a mindfulness technique called grounding, which can benefit writers in creating distance from anxiety, self-consciousness, emotional pain, and creative blocks.
Exercise:
Use the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique below to witness your environment. Instead of labeling in terms you would usually use, describe the qualities of what you’re noticing. Once you have those observations down, start writing a story or reflection to expand on these observations, what they mean to you or what they say about you. Don’t question it or overthink it, just see where it leads you. It doesn’t matter if you notice the most mundane things, the point is to use your five senses to see what truths exist beyond what you’re observing.
Look around and describe:
5 things you see
4 things you feel
3 things you hear
2 things you smell
1 thing you taste
I like this exercise, GG! I might use it for my journaling later tonight.