Can a Body Scan Help You With Your Writing?

Where the Writing Seasons showed up in my life — and I learned that evolving creatively often begins with a signal, not a plan.

For four years, I spent much of my time in conversation with trees.

This wasn’t the plan, of course.

When we moved to Pine, Colorado, just a few months before the pandemic would hit, the plan wasn’t to shelter in place in a forest.

The cabin was tucked away — 15 minutes off the main highway, at 7,500 feet elevation. As a heartbroken first-time mother moving into isolation, I told myself all kinds of cute stories to assure myself that this wasn’t running away.

Of course we’d host endless mountain sleepovers.

Of course we’d have outdoor barbecues.

Of course we were going to stand outside with neighbors for nighttime sky-watching parties.

All of that optimism took a turn when I found myself at a 16-week maternity check-up and the tech kept swirling the wand across my stomach.

Left, right, up and down. They were pushing down with more pressure than usual, turning dials on the machine, increasing the brightness on the screen.

Maybe she’s just sleeping, I thought.

But I recognized the shift in the room because I’d been here nine months earlier.

That moment when a stranger must tell another stranger the worst news imaginable. It feels the same every time.

It’s like thousands of sharp pins falling from the sky and each one landing right into the center of your heart.

The tech came back with the doctor, and I also knew what that meant.

More gel on my stomach. More waving the wand around.

There was no baby heartbeat. No good news, again. And not much else to say, except: it’s the holidays and now you must drive home as if nothing has happened at all.

We drove into Denver on Christmas Eve for an outpatient procedure and spent the next day curled up in bed, watching parades and avoiding the small red stocking that had been placed hopefully on the tree a few weeks earlier.

I’m not sure this is the day the Season of Rest showed up in my life.

But I do know something was finished inside me.

I was done wrestling with whatever kept me tossing and turning at night.

Everything went silent.

A silence I now recognize as my own way of saying, “We’ve gone too far. Now we must rest.”

I didn’t know it then, but my body was already in a Season of Rest — long before I gave it a name.

The endless stream of ideas about how to be productive disappeared overnight. My hands, once so familiar with a red pen, seemed to forget how to hold it — let alone how to rework a sentence. My appetite changed. My relationship with food became a way to distract and to dull.

I started joining online yoga classes, thinking I could be “productive” again. But every time I sat on the mat before class began, my body shut down. I started asking instructors for the restful poses because I quite literally couldn’t keep my eyes open.

Any time I tried to push through, my body had other plans.

Rest had arrived — and it would not be negotiated with.

When I first began sketching out the Writing Seasons in September 2023, I was drawing from a few places.

I’d spent 15 years editing and advising others on listening, persuasion, audience research and voice — while quietly trying to understand why none of it seemed to unlock my own.

Before that day in the maternity clinic, I’d lived almost entirely inside the Season of Craft. Where the seed of voice is planted and nurtured — where expression is beautiful, where the sentence dances. It’s no surprise I stayed there for so long, while quietly coaching others on how to pivot. It’s the season I knew best.

As I tested the shape and lasting power of the four seasons, I kept wondering:

Are Rest and Musing really different? Couldn’t they just be one?

On paper, they look similar. But in practice, the energy is completely different.

A lot of writers I’ve worked with love the Season of Musing — so much so that they muse and muse and muse … and avoid publishing anything.

But the Season of Rest? Most people bypass it entirely. And I don’t blame us. Where in society do we ever congratulate someone for not being productive?

Yes, Rest and Musing were separate. I knew the Season of Rest had to come first — with respect and patience. Rest allowed me to hear the whisper of what came next.

From this place of loss and Rest, I began to build a daily rhythm around my senses.

I took a mindful, almost devotional approach to textures, scents and sensations — trying to cycle through touch, smell, taste and sound.

Each detail mattered: the way a bottle clicked shut, the feeling of a warm lotion, the scent that lingered in the air after a hot shower. These sensory rituals weren’t just comforting — they were stabilizing. They helped me relate better with a quality I later learned was “shifting,” something I’d long struggled with, as someone who’s autistic (and didn’t yet know it).

Sensory practice became its own kind of resting language — a way to be fully present, without needing to produce.

After months of blankness — spiritual searching, naming my babes, performing grief rituals — the Season of Musing showed up.

Quietly. Like a small nudge from within. A gentle curiosity:

Maybe I’d like to try again… try something?

When the Season of Musing began to whisper, it felt like nervous excitement. Dozens of ideas, all equally good and wonderful — but I didn’t know what to do with them. Which one was worth pursuing? Were any of them meant to be “tackled” into something?

I started to question the whole idea of tackling anything down at all.

Why did everything need to become a thing? Couldn’t a beautiful idea just … move through me?

When I eventually decided to launch an ecommerce store in the middle of the pandemic, I heard a small voice whisper to me on the stairs, “You’re running away from writing again…”

But I didn’t care. (I think our muses know why they’re being put to work.)

Snapped in a photoshoot for my sensory shop. Image Credit: Cole Sigmon.

Musing let me play — with beautifully organized shelves, with the rhythm of gathering, documenting, packaging.

That rhythm — the order of organizing, packaging, labeling — helped regulate my nervous system in a way I couldn’t appreciate for a long time. I gave myself something steady to return to, something I could count on. And in that steadiness, I found just enough space to listen again.

I ran the shop for about a year.

Then I surrendered to the truth: writing is my home. A home I’d moved in and out of more times than I can count — and one that needed real care. A good scrubbing. Furniture. Curtains. Probably a cast iron skillet.

That season — of surrendering with full trust into the Season of Musing — laid the groundwork for the newsletter you’re reading now.

The tiniest spark of life showed up when I started publishing on Substack.

For the first time in years, I read real words from real people, in response to mine. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but something vital inside me had been waiting for that kind of reciprocity. A nervous system need I hadn’t known I had — to feel seen inside the place I valued most.

Even after I closed the shop, I could feel that how I related to my writing had changed.

I wasn’t eager to push every idea or essay into a product or a thing or a totem to the world. I let the muse keep guiding me. I gave her playful wings, whenever possible.

And I think that’s why, when I stumbled upon Substack, I was ready to start figuring out how to give luck a place to land.

In the mountains, I met every season for myself, as myself.

And here’s what I’ve learned: your body often knows the season before your mind does.

There’s a kind of clarity that doesn’t come from thinking harder — it comes from listening more closely.

The tightness in the chest. The drop in energy. Or the buzzing pulse when you’re moving toward something that’s not only good for you — but insightfully right.

And I know from experience: practicing how to find those signals is part of the creative deal — in life, in writing, in publishing online.

Why Somatic Signaling Is Coming to the Founding Membership

For about a year now, I’ve been trying to find a way to invite you to the mountains with me — to a place where we can slow down, get honest about what season we’re in and learn to move through it with more care and clarity.

But this newsletter alone doesn’t allow for the kind of regular, reliable touch points that actually help us hear our own signals — especially if you’re anything like me, juggling projects, navigating your writing practice and still trying to listen to your heart along the way.

That’s why I’m adding a new rhythm to the founding membership:

Somatic Signaling Guide™ sessions.

These monthly sessions are drawn from years of personal practice — working with sensory awareness, body-based decision-making and the quiet wisdom I started to trust in the mountains.

Each session is a chance to:

• Pause and scan for creative signals in the body

• Build awareness of where clarity already lives

• Practice listening before acting

Think of it like a guided body scan — but for the parts of your body where your writing life may not yet have words.

These signals aren’t soft or vague. They’re data. They’re direction. I like to think of them as a creatively grounding GPS — and they often show up before our minds catch up.

I’m adding these monthly sessions to the Publishing Lab queue for all founding members. Because navigating your writing life with your sanity intact — and your creative work still growing — takes real tools, real care and real awareness.

So: can a body scan help you with your Writing Seasons? Your newsletter? Your decision-making?

Yes, I think so.

If what you’re after is clarity.

If what you want is to stay close to the heartbeat of who you are, the season you’re in and confidently make publishing decisions — real ones — in the moments that matter.

That’s what we’re going to start practicing in the Somatic Signaling Guide™ Sessions. (Click that link to register for June’s session.)

Not just planning. Not just posting.

But sensing. Responding. Evolving. Together.

Let’s write the way life actually moves.

Not in perfect order — but in rhythm.

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Want to join the first Somatic Signaling Guide™ Session?

The first one will be open to all readers and then will be offered each month as part of the founding membership on The Publishing Spectrum.