Embodied Writing: How to Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Story

Where do our stories come from? Not just theoretically or archetypally, but for each of us as individuals? From where do our stories—our romances, mysteries, fantasies, dramas, tragedies, and comedies—actually arise? Even when prompted by outer inspiration, they still come from somewhere deep inside of us, from a deeply human connection. And where does this connection come from? Where is this mysterious “deep inside us” place of inspiration? Perhaps a bit counter-intuitively, it’s in the body—not in some mystical elsewhere or mental abstraction, but in the physical fact of being alive. This is why embodied writing is one of the keys that allows authors to create with greater vision, authenticity, and originality.

Writers are thinkers. As highly mental people, we can sometimes fall under the impression that stories come to us through the mental channel or perhaps more vaguely from the misty “out there” that is our imagination. But, really, all of that is grounded in the body—in the physical brain, in the electric firings of our energy, in the intuitive accuracy of the gut.

It’s true stories take shape through research, memory, or observation. We construct, guide, and understand stories through our intellectual and philosophical capacity. We gain context and learn patterns so we can understand concepts such as plot and character arc and theme—and how to wrest coherence from the meaning and resonance we instinctively feel in the half-formed feelings and images that let us know we’re writing a story instead of just a treatise.

If we pay attention, we may notice that we not only think our stories, we feel them. We feel the spark of excitement when an idea lands. We feel the surge of recognition when a character springs out of our imaginations. We often feel when a scene is “right” even before we can articulate why it works. More than that, we feel a connection to the deeper shape of story. It is a shape that pre-exists us and so permeates us that we instinctively write to its rhythms long before someone tells us about story structure or writing techniques.

Before story comes to us as logic, it moves through us as sensation, intuition, and rhythm. The more we write from the body as well as the mind, the less formulaic our fiction seems and the truer it feels. I like to tweak Socrates’ famous quote about learning to:

All storytelling is remembering.

Embodied writing is the practice of getting out of our heads and back into our bodies so we can access the deeper currents of story itself. If I had to define it simply, embodied writing is the act of letting story arise from lived experience before shaping it with a conscious understanding of craft and technique. It is what Thoreau spoke of when he said:

How vain it is to sit down to write before you have stood up to live.

Structuring Your Novel: Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition (Amazon affiliate link)

Many of us know how to construct a solid Inciting Event, a resonant Midpoint, or a powerful Climax. We understand structure. But understanding structure is not the same as intuiting it. As I wrote about last month, when we write primarily from analysis, commentary, or reaction, our stories may be technically sound and yet still feel existentially thin. If we want fiction that feels alive—fiction that carries archetypal weight—we must learn to write from the body, not just the mind.

What Is Embodied Writing in Fiction?

Embodied writing is the practice of allowing stories to arise from lived, sensory experience before shaping them intellectually through craft and technique. Instead of beginning with analysis alone, embodied writing begins with sensation, intuition, and felt meaning.

Why Is Embodied Writing Important for Fiction?

Because readers respond to what feels true, not merely what is logical. When we are hyper-conscious, hyper-conceptual, and hyper-reactive, we risk living our lives—and therefore writing our stories—while operating almost entirely in abstractions. This creates an environment in which stories are less likely to emerge from embodied lived experience and more from stances of detached commentary, anxiety, moral urgency, didactism, and defensiveness. In turn, this can create a milieu in which stories are intellectually coherent but become increasingly emotionally dissonant. They may be morally loud, but—at least to me—they seem existentially thin.

Story emerges from reality. The more detached we are from reality, the less truthful our stories will feel. I don’t mean less truthful in the sense of “factually wrong” (indeed, the intellect is usually quite good at insisting on accuracy). Rather, I’m talking about a felt sense of depth and meaning. Some of the least factual and most ridiculous story premises resonate powerfully with audiences because they strike a deep chord that says something truer than just the facts. Think of stories such as Frankenstein, It’s a Wonderful Life, Beloved, even Jane Eyre and Lord of the Rings.

Even the most fantastical premises—like Frankenstein’s laboratory creation—resonate when they embody archetypal truths that feel real in the body. (Frankenstein (2025), Netflix)

In fiction, we care far more about what feels true than what is true. This is why we call fiction “the lie that tells the truth.” Embodied writing is an intentional return to that lived reality as the wellspring for fiction.

Over the last month or so, we’ve been taking a high-level perspective on story as an archetypal force in the world—story as cosmology and the cyclical shape of story structure itself. There are many ways to consider the importance of this idea, but perhaps the simplest is recognizing story as a microcosm of the macrocosm. We understand on a literal level that stories are meant to mimic and mirror reality. But more than that, the shape and essence of story intuitively mimics and mirrors the deeper, pre-verbal, “right-brained” understanding that speaks in the language of symbol and archetype.

Colloquially, creativity is an inherently “right-brained” act (although this is not 100% true as creativity has been found to emerge from the interplay of multiple brain networks that bring together memory, emotion, and high-order thinking from both hemispheres). However, perhaps somewhat ironically for writers, the right brain is not the hemisphere most associated with language and logic. It is the hemisphere of symbol, archetype, instinct, intuition, dreams, mysteries, shadows, epiphanies, spiritual experiences, and gut feelings. It speaks in the language before language, and it speaks to us perhaps most familiarly through our bodies and our physical experiences.

Writers often speak of “writing from a place that is beyond us.” I daresay we’ve all experienced the sublimity of being so in the zone, either when daydreaming or when actually writing, that the characters, scenes, and words are coming less from us and more through us. Instead of logically and methodically constructing scene upon scene, it feels as if we are channeling. And often (although certainly not always), these peak writing experiences give us some of our best writing.

Essentially, I believe, when we speak of such experiences, we are speaking of writing from a “place of creativity” more than a “place of logic.” We are “dreamzoning” instead of just brainstorming. If we really hone in on these experiences, what we often find are the body’s rhythms: breath, tension, relaxation, anticipation. When we are dreamzoning instead of merely brainstorming, we are not escaping the body. We are listening to it. Embodied writing, then, is not a rejection of intellect; it is a reintegration of story with the physical, sensory, and instinctual realities through which meaning is actually experienced. Many writers ask how to write more emotionally resonant fiction. Embodied writing is one answer.

The Problem With Writing Only From the Head (and Why Stories Lose Depth)

The head is an important member of the writing committee. We wouldn’t be here doing this work or having this conversation without it. The head gives us both language and the abstract capacity to contextualize patterns and extract meaning. More than that, it gives us the ability to plan ahead—to recognize what makes a good story that can communicate our meaning to others and to troubleshoot what doesn’t work.

The head can make our work as writers so much easier, since it allows us to problem-solve our plots through such sophisticated techniques as story theory, plot structure, character arcs, and more. But I’m going to go so far as to say that the head is only the worker ant. It’s not the queen; it serves the queen. The head is not the locus of inspiration. Even when we may think (pun!) we are intellectualizing our way to story ideas and solutions, this process is always in service to our greater shape and sense of story—that is, life—itself.

The problem is that, as a society and therefore as writers, we have become increasingly disembodied. The more disembodied we become, the more we tend to identify ourselves with the mental function. The results are two-fold.

1. Losing Touch With Embodied, Intuitive Storytelling Wisdom

To begin with, we become less and less in touch with the deep intuitive wisdom of our physical selves (we might say our natural selves—the selves that understand the natural rhythms of the world around us). We live in an increasingly abstract world of technology, in which we work, communicate, love, hate, pay our bills, watch our stories, and buy our groceries in a digital reality. Some of us may go days without setting our feet on ground that isn’t covered in carpet or concrete. If we’re lucky enough to see sunlight all day—instead of fluorescent lighting—then we’re still likely looking at it through windows, and then artificially prolonging our diurnal rhythms via lights and screens far into the dark of night.

The less grounded we are (both metaphorically and literally in the sense of actually having our feet on the ground), the more dissociated we become from our bodies. And the more disassociated we become from our bodies, the more difficult it can be to tune in to our felt sense of the stories trying to come through us.

2. Over-Intellectualising and Drifting Toward Agenda-Driven Storytelling

The second problem is that the less oriented we are in the physical, the more oriented we are in the mental. This lends itself to over-intellectualization and hyper-consciousness. Instead of embodied responsiveness, we are more likely to lean into mind-based reactivity. As artists, we can begin to focus more on message than theme—on agenda instead of archetype. Instead of asking questions, stories are more likely to shout answers. And these answers—whatever their flavor—are inherently limited by their detachment from the rhythms of life and of creativity.

Although we see these patterns in all walks of modern society, as writers, this can particularly show itself in an over-valuing of hyper-realism over allegory and an over-valuing of writing “rules” over a recognition of contextual patterns.

This isn’t to suggest stories can’t and don’t speak to the great moral quandaries of society. Indeed, they are archetypally structured to do just that. But when writing isn’t embodied, the results often lack the originality needed to rise above the yammering noise of society’s monkey mind, not to mention they also lack the kind of paradigm-shifting social inspiration that rarely comes just from “thinking about our problems.”

In short, when artists live more from the mental capacity and the “thinking,” logical brain, rather than a place of embodiment, our creations often lack their most important ingredients:

• Emotional resonance
• Archetypal depth
• Authentic transformation

What Embodied Writing Actually Feels Like in Practice

If story structure is the visible geometry of transformation, then groundedness is its lived experience.

Staying embodied isn’t so easy these days. Speaking as an (egregiously) mental person, I have to fight every single day to return to the grounded cycles of my natural self. All it takes is a notification on my phone or a rage-baity headline or (most likely of all) my own coping mechanisms that seek to intellectualize and contextualize rather than just feel. 

When I think about embodied writing, my thoughts first go back to before I was a writer—to when I was just a child who told herself stories and acted them out in her body—dancing in the dirt or riding horseback in the wilderness or staring with incomprehensible longing into the moon-drenched sky.

It was a feeling of connection to all that was around me—the impossible ecstasy of the summer wind in the cottonwoods or the butterflies of a first crush or the raw power of galloping a horse headlong as the wind ripped tears from my eyes. Before ever I was a writer, I told stories out of the glorious depth of my agony and the ineffable height of my joy. The stories and their images were a daytime dreaming that tapped into something so much vaster than anything I knew or could understand.

Embodied writing is the experience of being surprised by your own writing. It is the channeling of something you know but do not know. It is Socrates’ remembering and Jung’s active imagination. It is dreamzoning and shamanic journeying. It is connection to ancestral memory and the collective unconscious. It is creativity as the remembering of the archetypal self.

Writers across traditions—from ancient mythmakers to modern psychologists such as Carl Jung—have recognized that imagination does not originate in logic alone, but in deeper layers of the psyche that are accessed through image, sensation, and symbol.

That moment when you write a line and feel it in your chest before you understand it in your mind, that is embodied writing.

Story is an archetype. But archetypes are not just ideas. They are lived patterns. To whatever degree a writer is not in contact with the physical experience of life—with fear, hunger, grief, exhaustion, attraction, time, decay—then the archetypes become merely symbolic costumes.

Embodied writing restores archetypal depth by grounding story in lived sensation rather than just abstract thought.

How to Re-Enter the Natural Cycles That Shape Story

Life is a cycle. Story is a cycle. So, too, is embodiment part of many cycles. Although creatives of all stripes are often described in such terms as “thinkers,” “cerebral,” and “head in the clouds,” this emphasis on the mental and the disembodied is, I think, untrue. However important it is for creatives to balance the “left-brained” aspects of craft with the “right-brained” aspects of creativity, the spark that lights this whole fire begins in our embodied intunement with all of life.

This is, I think, becoming ever more important for creatives to actively embrace. If we wish to write stories that are deep and true and can tap into collective resonance (not to mention wisdom), rather than merely contributing to the general noise, our ability to write from our most embodied selves is key.

We can start by remembering the simplest of our cycles:

• Light and dark: Protect sleep. Get enough sunlight. Put boundaries around screentime and evening lighting.
• Work and rest: Inspiration doesn’t always like schedules. Let the well fill. Write when the stories have something to say.
• Solitude and community: Seek human contact—real contact (skin on skin, hand in hand, heart to heart, eye to eye).
• Birth and decay: Be in nature. Watch something die. Grow something.
• Silence and speech: Don’t just talk; don’t just dream. Find the balance.
• Stillness and movement: Make time to be, even to be bored. But make time to move too. Get your feet on some real dirt.

How to Practice Embodied Writing: 4 Ways to Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Body

Embodied writing is easy. It’s just writing.

What’s hard, at least these days, can be the simple act of getting out of your head and into your body in the first place. Not only are we habituated to the addictive and seemingly comforting busyness and even the seductive problem-solving logic of our thinking brains, we all too often find the unfamiliar feelings of our bodies overwhelming.

So often, we think about things so we do not have to feel them. (Somatically, as has been shown in such works as The Body Keeps the Score, this is largely futile, since our bodies can’t stop feeling, even when we choose not to pay attention.) We all have trauma—large and small—that we do not want to feel. More than that, modern life often seems increasingly overwhelming to the point that feeling itself can sometimes seem traumatizing.

And yet, it is precisely in those avoided sensations that transformation resides. The same body that holds overwhelm also holds all our instinct, intuition, and archetypal memory. When we stop outsourcing meaning to our thoughts alone and begin paying attention to our lived experience, our stories grow deeper and more alive—and so do we!

Here are four easy reminders to bring you in touch with your embodied storytelling self.

1. Reclaim the Senses

Go outside. Observe the seasons. Feel the temperature. Listen. Smell. Watch the light change. And then just notice where that all lands in your body. Maybe, like me, you can remember a younger version of yourself who would smell the sharpness of a mountain creek and have nowhere else to put the bigness of that sensation except into a story.

2. Reclaim Rhythm

Protect sleep. Reduce artificial light at night. Step away from constant reaction cycles. Make every online interaction a conscious choice; do whatever you have to do to block non-consensual grabs at your attention and your energy. Turn off all phone notifications that aren’t time sensitive. If you can afford it, buy the ad-free versions of everything. Relentlessly unsubscribe and unfollow anything that is not adding active value to your life.

Then use all that extra time to get outside, eat real food, lie on the ground and do nothing—and just generally slow your nervous system until it no longer feels so vigilant and can actually find space to speak to you in stories and symbols rather than just words and logic.

3. Reclaim Inner Space

Clearing space in your outer life allows space to clear up in your inner life so all the best ideas can flow freely. Make time for your alpha-wave access point of choice—whether it’s meditation, active imagination, or intentional dreamzoning. Schedule huge swathes of phone-free time. 100% screen-free is even better. Take a notebook and a pen with you. Most importantly of all, allow yourself to be bored. If you are bored, count it a great achievement.

What we call “boredom” can actually be a dissociative mechanism to avoid feeling our feelings. If you are bored, take a moment to ask if you can feel what’s underneath that. You don’t have to stay with the feeling for any longer than you want to. Just acknowledge it. Feel it once, and if that feels overwhelming, let it go. Come back to it the next time you realize you’re “bored.”

Here’s the thing our productivity-addicted minds do not like to face: Creativity does not arise from stimulation. It arises from spaciousness.

Which brings us to….

4. Write From Flow Instead of Push

I think of the world as operating from two polarities that I call “flow” and “push.” Push is effortful, strategic, and causal, while flow is receptive, spacious, and responsive. Embodied writing favors flow. Flow creates the conditions in which stories move through us naturally rather than forcing our brains to conjure them into existence. Both are necessary in their place, but in our fast-paced, hyper-mental, workaholic, fear-frenzied world, flow does often tend to get short-changed.

As writers, we are no different. I can speak for myself in admitting that the more I have “pushed” my creativity, the less it flows.

Stories should erupt out of our fullness, rather than being dragged out of our emptiness.

“Emptiness,” however, is a tricky word here, since our wells are most often drained of creativity precisely because we’ve crammed them full of other stuff—whether it’s Internet slop, social obligations, publishing deadlines, or even just anxiety. We speak about “grounding” an electrical current to get rid of it. Grounding ourselves (metaphorically but also literally) is the same. We ground to empty what does not serve us, so the wells can flow once more—so we can arrive at the page waiting to receive rather than “pushing” out what we feel must in order to be productive or to get a message across.

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In the old Grail legends, when the king was wounded, the wells of the kingdom ran dry. The land became sterile because its ruler was cut off from life. Creativity works the same way. When we are severed from our own embodied vitality, our stories can dry up as well. But when the wound is acknowledged and life begins flowing again, the waters return, the plants grow, the rivers rise, and the barren again becomes fertile.

If your creative well feels dry, the answer is not more force, more noise, or more thinking. It is presence. It is a return to the natural rhythms of your own lived experience. If you want to access archetypal depth in your stories, return to your body. That is the heart of embodied writing.

Story is not something we manufacture through effort alone; it is something we participate in. Embodied writing is the choice to participate fully in life so that life can participate fully in our stories. When we ground ourselves in breath, sensation, grief, joy, longing, and wonder—when we allow ourselves to live the cycles we seek to write—we get to tap into a source of inspiration that feels like a gift rather than something we must produce.

Want More?

If the idea of embodied writing resonates with you, but you’re not quite sure how to access that dreamzoning space consistently, that’s exactly why I created my guided dreamzoning sessions.

I wanted to help writers move beyond brainstorming and into the deeper current where stories feel like they are coming through us rather than being forced out of us. These Archetypal Character Guided Meditations are designed to help you quiet mental chatter, reconnect with the rhythms of your body, and open a portal into active imagination. This is one way we can create the kind of inner spaciousness where inspiration arises naturally.

So if you’re stuck on a story or just want to experience your creativity in a luscious, embodied way, these guided sessions are meant to help you return there more intentionally. They’re a practical way to cultivate active imagination and embodied writing in your daily life and creative practice. Find them here (and if you get the bundle of all six, you get one free!).

Go on the journey with your characters! Check out the Archetypal Character Guided Meditations.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What is your personal experience of embodied writing in your own work. What helps you get out of your head and into your story? Tell me in the comments!

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