Wildlife Rescue Series!

I’m not really sure what happened yesterday.

I was the last speaker at the Vancouver Public Library’s Canadian Book Camp for Kids, 3:30 to 4:15 time slot, right after they tore down the tents they’d been camping in all week, and right before pizza and cake and the big gala. A magical time slot, if ever there was one.

I’d spent over a week preparing my workshop, and had assembled what I felt was the ideal combination of high-energy physical movement with quieter, reflective work that involved using the body, the right side of the brain, tapping into the subconscious, and channeling the inner guidance that would help carry the campers forward as writers after they exited the structured environment that had made them into full-time writers for a week.

For the first 30 minutes, I bombed. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Gord was there with his conga and 5 or 6 other cool percussion instruments, we brought the 86 kids into the huge room with high energy and excitement, I had everybody (or almost everybody) clapping and the kids at the front dancing … until they turned around and noticed the big kids at the back weren’t participating, and they stopped. At that point, my plans for making connections between mind and body, between the two hemispheres of the brain, and between writing and movement were lost; it became an aerobics class for one: me.

Writers, permit me a moment to soapbox: your stories do not come from your head (any more than money comes out of a machine in the wall, if you need a comparison). Stories are energy, and that energy is shaped and crafted and moulded into logical sequence by your brain, yes. But your stories are held in your body.

You live your experiences with your whole self, body, mind and spirit. Your mind is the instrument that helps you make sense of those experiences, but it is not the repository of them. If you have fought with your best friend, you have felt the burning knot in your stomach; you have felt your heart pound; you have felt your shoulders hunch; if you’re a guy, you may even have felt the pain and the shame of a blow to your body by your friend’s hand, or the simultaneously satisfying connection and sad shame of having punched your friend’s solar plexus with your own fist. You’ve felt the hot squeeze of tears behind your eyes.

The details of the memory of that experience lie in your body. Your mind can only give them words.

You need your body, I mean access to it, and to the experiences and memories it holds, in order to write. Particularly to write well. So those writers who fancy the bohemian life as a bingeing, smoking heroin addict living the cafe life will discover, probably too late, that they’ve destroyed everything that gave them their writing gift in the first place. Those writers who eschew physical activity with the mantra, “I’m an intellectual” will likewise suffer from a lack of access to their emotional and creative centres.

To put it another (maybe a nicer) way, if you’re stuck / blocked / frustrated / bored with your own words, get up and move. Put on Gwen Stefani or the Black Eyed Peas or Rihanna or whoever makes your shake your booty (and here, I age myself, with the Isley Brothers, Michael Jackson, Queen, Aretha Franklin and, well, Gwen Stefani). Wear yourself out. Then sit down and let your warmed-up, integrated, connected body do the writing for a while.

Or try this: put your pen in your non-dominant hand (if you’re a lefty, that’s your right hand, and vice-versa). Now, write. As fast as you can. Don’t stop to think. Ask yourself a question that needs answering before you can move on with your story, and let the other side of your brain — the one that just sits there most of the time, drumming its little grey fingers wondering when you’re going to try to tap into a little more than the 10% of the brain capacity you normally use — do the talking.

Science says:

• we only use 10% of our enormous brain capacity; even Einstein maybe used 15-18%
• the seat of creativity and the link to the subconscious mind rests in the right hemisphere of the brain
• right-handed people predominantly use the left side of the brain, which governs logic and rationality and reason (not creativity and imagination!)
• even left-handed people fall into predictable, repetitive patterns of thinking, learning and behaving that can be shaken up to interesting results by tapping into the left hemisphere of the brain through writing with their right hand

Psychologists and body-mind therapists say:

• there is something called muscle memory, whereby the body acts as a repository for our experiences and memories
• when we process the emotions associated with these experiences in a healthy way, there is little or no negative impact on the body
• when we shut off the emotional tap, particularly after a hurtful or traumatic experience (and we are all trained in this society to do just that), we create an energetic blockage in the body which, over time, can lead to illness or injury
• by writing / journalling / drawing / painting / talking with an empathic listener / expressing, it is possible to help release the hurt or trauma (or any experience, for that matter) stored in the muscles and tissues, and move back to health

No, I did not get into this level of detail with the campers. Maybe I should have. Maybe it would have helped. But I don’t think so. I just wish they’d been more willing to play along — not for my sake, but for theirs. They may have surprised themselves with what they discovered, and they most definitely would have walked away with two very powerful tools to add to their writing toolbox.

In fact, I think some of them did. They were a number of kids in the room who were into what was going on, although there was pressure from the back of the room to stay bored and withheld.

In any case, during the final 15 minutes, in which I told the story of the Shamanic journey that led me to meet my first medicine animal, and in which I led everyone on a similar journey in which they met theirs, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Almost everyone came back with some knowledge of their animal guide, and those who didn’t, I was able to talk to about trying again in a quieter, calmer, less pressured environment. There isn’t anyone on this earth without a guide, so I have every confidence those three I spoke to will find theirs. If they continue to be stymied, I hope they’ll contact me.

And so I learned something, too. Start with a story. One of my stories, something personal. Make a connection first, before I ask workshop participants to move or dance with me. We are so shut down physically, so much of the time, so “in our heads,” as the saying goes, that it has become an intimate request to ask someone to move their body for purposes other than walking, sitting, or Facebooking. And these kids and I, we had just met. We had no relationship. There may not have been distrust, exactly, but neither was there trust of this strange adult who was asking them to move, in front of her, in front of each other.

My next book in Jane Ray’s Wildlife Rescue Series, Gaia Wild, is all about what it means to be wild, even as a human being. For one thing, it means being in our bodies, the way all healthy animals are. Sitting, shoulders slumped, back rounded over, torso and pelvis and legs and feet forgotten, eyes staring, mind spinning and fingers typing — that is not “in the body.”

We cannot remember the Earth if we cannot re-member ourselves. Our bodies are made of her body. We treat her as we treat ourselves. If we think we can get along day to day without connection to our torsos and pelvises and legs and feet, then we believe she can get along just fine without her rivers and forests. But we are wrong. About both. We are wrong.

And I was wrong to think I could reverse that for 86 kids in an afternoon. But I’m learning. I’ll do better next time.

One last thing: no matter how off-the-rails any presentation goes, there is always at least one person in the room who gets it all, exactly as you intended. You hope you’re connecting with a majority of the kids, but sometimes, you’re doing what you’re doing for just one person. And that’s okay, too. One person can make all the difference. Yesterday, that person was Maria. Thank you, Maria. :)