July 15, 2025
Collage by Danielle Heyns
Let’s face it, if you could just sit your butt down in a chair and write, you would have done it already
I love the book The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. It works incredibly well as a pep talk when you need one.
The War of Art identifies RESISTANCE as the enemy to creative output.
I’ve seen a lot of videos with the same message recently: If you can just overcome RESISTANCE, you can be the prolific writer you’ve always dreamed of being.
As a writer with procrastination habits myself, I’ve consumed a lot of these resources. But to me, they don’t give me much in terms of practical solutions.
The assumption is that if we just knew what the problem was, and made a mental decision to overcome it, our disciplined nature would automatically kick in, and we’d get on with things.
But realising that what you’re dealing with is resistance is just the first step.
Because let’s face it, if you could just sit your butt down in a chair and write, you’d have done it already.
I’m losing weight at the moment. I’ve lost 5.5kg so far – yay me!
But before that, I’d gained an average of 2.6kg a year for 15 years.
It’s not like I didn’t know that to keep weight off or to lose it, you had to eat healthy food and not too much, exercise, sort out my underlying health problems… that sort of thing. It’s that the challenge of not gaining weight as you get older is complex and highly personalised.
It requires a complete mind-body approach.
Your body needs to come on board, not just your mind
It requires the information I have in my head to be integrated into my body, being and nervous system.
It requires me to identify where the resistance is coming from in the first place, to get up close and personal with my own personal resistance patterns that have become so ingrained that it’s fossilised into my bone at this point.
And then it requires a very complex and individualised path of learning to move through these resistance patterns so I can embody the new way of eating and exercising and being and doing in the world. The same goes for writing.
Knowing something is completely useless without being able to embody it.
Embodying your dream writing practice means:
- To feel it in your body
- To let your nervous system know that it’s safe.
- To know what that safety feels like, and to be able to create it for yourself every day.
- To show our nervous systems how to expand, and ease into these changes
- To teach our body how to integrate and hold onto these changes
- To know what PLEASURE feels like in your body and how to summon that when you’re feeling too flat to write anything at all.
- To know how to face your feelings when writing – the scary ones too – and hold yourself in that moment.
- To learn how to physically move with, as and through the resistance using practical somatic writing tools
- To be able to hold boundaries around your writing time and subject that you can feel in the your spine and your shoulders
Your go-to resistance pattern is deeply wired into your body
Every day, we’re always telling our brains, bodies and nervous systems how to operate in the world.
And most of what we’re telling it runs on automatic patterns written by social norms, family expectations, workplace requirements, past experience and the fear and shame that underlies all of this.
To affect any real change, we must take a long, hard look at all of these things.
To start making adjustments, and to keep going back and tweaking things until we have a sustainable writing practice that will grow with us.
That’s what embodiment coaching for writers is all about. We use somatic writing techniques and embodiment coaching to help you create the writing practice you’ve always wanted – one filled with joy, meaning and depth.
If you’d like to get up close and personal with your own unique resistance pattern and start to dissolve it, I warmly invite book a Move Into Flow session with me.
And here’s a powerful embodied writing practice to help you step into your role of writer:
