Johnnie Mazzocco Contributes

Johnnie Mazzocco

Writing Through the Body

           One of the many things I love about my writing practice is that it affords me access to my subconscious on a regular basis. I love knowing I can dig deep and mine endless treasures from within doing something I love.  But sometimes I’m slow, and it takes awhile for me to recognize a great idea, even when it’s right there in front of me.

            As a college writing professor, I always told my students to write with their whole selves. I said this over and over. Every term, to every class. Some students would nod, but I don’t know if they – or I – truly understood what I was asking of them.     My eventual understanding would take twenty years to come to light, long after I experienced flow in my own writing on such a deep level that I was permanently transformed. In fact, it saved my life.

            While I was working on the first draft of my novel, Miranda’s Garden, many strangely “coincidental” events occurred that aligned my life with my main character’s life in ways I could never have dreamed. In short, we became a team: I would tell her story with integrity and honesty, and she would help me navigate the most difficult time in my life.

It would take time and reflection to understand that while writing Miranda’s Garden, I had achieved a level of flow that purged me. Since that time, I have been able to lead a more authentic life and have stayed steady on my path of personal evolution. All thanks to my writing. 

Many years after that experience and after creating my Divination Deck based on the seven main chakras of the body, and becoming familiar with the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Candace Pert, I finally had my eureka moment, and the light of my intuition would swell from a soft, but persistent, glow to a full on beacon.

            Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian psychology professor, is known for coining the notion of flow: that experience of performing an activity we love and feeling the rest of the world fall away, time becoming non-existent. Pert, a pharmacologist who was doing significant work in mind/body medicine before she died in 2013 and who became dedicated to understanding where our emotions come from, discovered that they’re generated at nodal points in our bodies in the exact location of the chakras. This led her to make this declaration: “Our body is our subconscious mind.”

And then it hit me: If we’re to write in flow, we must access our subconscious, and if our body is our subconscious mind, we must write through the body.

            After this revelation, I was finally able to create what my intuition had been nudging me to do for nearly two decades: my Writing Through the Body™ process that utilizes the seven main chakras to help others banish writer’s block, achieve flow, and tell their untold stories.

Some days, it’s hard to not think about how many more people I could have helped in the twenty years it took for me understand what my intuition was saying. But truth be told, I wouldn’t have been able to teach the process the way I do now all those years ago.

What I love most about teaching Writing Through the Body™ is showing people how they don’t have to wait for a fickle muse and that they have the power to open themselves up in a deep way to tell more profound stories and to live authentically, with purpose.

Johnnie Mazzocco is a filmmaker, writer, editor, and writing coach, and the creator of Writing Through the Body™. She made a 30-year progression from the mid-west to the west coast and resided in Oregon for 26 years until 2014 when she sold all her belongings, except for what would fit in her car, and set out to house sit in pursuit of her dream: to become an entrepreneur and live her passion and purpose. Little did she know she would find her home at her second house sitting job in Truckee, CA, where she's currently living another dream: to reside in a cabin on a lake in the mountains. Johnnie is fiercely committed to living a life of authenticity, and it is her mission in life to help others do the same. She holds a B.A. in fiction writing, an MA in English and film studies, a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies, and an MFA in Digital Arts.