By Thea Pueschel
The screen is blank, your fingers perch on the keyboard, the cursor is blinking at you, and your deadline is looming. Every writer experiences writer’s block at some point in their career. Perhaps, the blinking cursor and the blank screen even pervade your sleeping hours. When you are in a writing rut, and it feels as if there isn’t an exit it’s time to break free and find the flow again.
Body journal and breathe
You’re experiencing writer’s block with that comes a specific sensation or feeling. It’s time to step away from the computer. Take out a pen and paper and begin to write down the sensations you are feeling in your body. Give yourself 5-10 minutes for this exercise. Is your jaw tight? Can you associate the feeling with something else? Write it down. Are your shoulders shrugged up to your ears? When has that happened before? Write it down.
Go through as much of your body as you can in this time frame, write down the feelings and sensations as well as when you have experienced them before. Once, you’ve journaled, inhale deeply and exhale until your lungs feel empty. Take three breaths like this, stand up and stretch. You are ready to conquer the blank screen.
Stichomancy or bibliomancy
You’re stuck. Your thought pattern is circling and not going anywhere near what you need to write. The muse has wandered away. Perhaps, relying on a 3,000-year-old divination technique would invite the muse back in. Stichomancy or bibliomancy is a divination technique where a random line or passage from a book or the bible is selected to help guide a person in life. This technique works well to get outside of your head, and change perspective.
Take a small stone or a coin; open the book of your choice. With your eyes closed drop the object on the open page. Look where it landed, take 5 minutes to write about the selected line or rewrite the text, or write about the topic from a different point of view. Once your creative channels are clear, it’s time to get back to your work.
When you write, it’s easy to get trapped in your perspective especially when you are feeling blocked. Using stichomancy requires you to write from a place that is outside your norm bringing a fresh approach to your creativity. The body journal and breathe technique helps you reconnect to your body, explore your sensations and give them a voice which helps clear the mind and the body of blockages.
These techniques are a great way to break up the monotony of self-judgment and get your writing to flow again. Sometimes, the muse just needs to be taken for a walk through different techniques to open the channels of communication.
Thea Pueschel is a hypnotherapist, yoga/meditation teacher. She writes, creates visual art, and teaches yoga teachers and doulas how to deliver and write meditations in and around L.A. and Orange County. She is committed to submitting, only in a literary capacity with light-hearted yet dark creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.