Writing the Mind Alive

The Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice

By: Linda Trichter Metcalf

Narrated by: Nina Nikolic

Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

Discover the revolutionary writing practice that can transform your life!

In 1976, Linda Trichter Metcalf, then a university English professor, sat down with pen and paper and intuitively started a self-guided writing practice that helped to bring herself into focus and clarify her life as never before. She and a colleague, Tobin Simon, introduced this original method into their classrooms. They experienced such solid response from their students that, for the last 25 years, they have devoted themselves to teaching what has now become the respected practice of Proprioceptive Writing®–in workshops, secondary and elementary schools, and college psychology and writing classes around the country, among them the New School University.

“Proprioception” comes from the Latin proprius, meaning “one’s own,” and this writing method helps synthesize emotion and imagination, generating authentic insight and catharsis. Proprioceptive Writing® is not formal writing, nor is it automatic or stream-of-consciousness writing. Requiring a regular, disciplined practice in a quiet environment, the method uses several aids to deepen attention and free the writer within: Baroque music, a candle, a pad, and a pen. Presenting Proprioceptive Writing® in book form for the first time, Writing the Mind Alive shows how you, too, can use it to

• Focus awareness, dissolve inhibitions, and build self-trust
• Unburden your mind and resolve emotional conflicts
• Connect more deeply with your spiritual self
• Write and speak with strength and clarity
• Enhance the benefits of psychotherapy
• Awaken your senses and emotions
• Liberate your creative energies

Featuring actual “writes” by students of all ages, Writing the Mind Alive is a catalyst for mental and emotional aliveness that can truly enrich the rest of your life.

©2002 Linda Trichter Metcalf, Ph.D. and Tobin Simon, Ph.D (P)2022 Linda Trichter Metcalf, Ph.D. and Tobin Simon, Ph.D

Move beyond journaling to reveal what you mean.

Here, Ms Trichter Metcalf offers a writing process that does all its title suggests; it enlivens the mind. Listening to my thoughts, writing down word for word what I hear in a journal, is no longer enough for me. Now, I must go beyond stream of consciousness and apply the Proprioceptive Question.

By asking the PQ, “What do I mean by,” my Daily Writes move past gossip, detailed records of my day, personal analysis of political events. I discover stories revealing what matters to me.

What do I mean by matters? By matters, I mean words. Words matter to me. And lately they have been flung around like garbage on the streets of Washington DC.