Extended Practice — Working with challenges, working from inspiration

By Elizabeth Maynard

This Exploration is intended to help you notice what your current motivations are, and if necessary to reorient from working from a place of fear, towards working from a place of interest and curiosity. Are you feeling anxious about the next step of your research or writing? Are you unable to motivate despite deadlines? To start with, you are invited to connect with the felt sense of your body, locating where and how potential anxiety, f.e. writer’s block might be manifesting. By gently inquiring into this, you get to know the shape of it, give it space, and potentially begin to loosen its grip. From here, you connect with your sense of the larger stakes of your project, and reconnect with you initial motivation for this research, your original (or shifting) sense of inspiration and interest.

Elizabeth Maynard also contributed two blogs and two other Extended Practices to the Somatics Toolkit:

Blogs: Embodied awareness as pedagogy and practice for academic resilience and The perils of un-physical education

Extended Practice: Finding relief from overwhelm and Working with empathetic fatigue.

Further Reading

Gendlin, E. T. (1978) Focusing. New York: Bantham Books.

Salzberg, S. (2011) Real happiness: a 28-day programme to connect with the power of meditation. New York: Workman Publishing Company.