A promise ...

… that everything I write here comes from me. It feels weird that it even needs to be said, but times are strange and stringing words together in random and rambling ways is becoming a bit of a radical act. In the AI revolution, I’m finding myself all the more committed to the manual route as a way to preserve my capacity to be inspired and sense nuance in life.

Although I don’t use AI personally, I can already feel the way generated content is starting to filter into my brain. The more minutes I spend on instagram, the harder it feels to get my own words out without feeling like I’m reproducing something I read somewhere, that could equally have been written by a human being or a bot.

In a previous life, I worked writing copy about specialty coffee. Blogs, social media posts and mail outs covering quite practical things but also deeper research pieces, industry opinion, character profiles and interviews. As a paid by the hour employee, those words could have easily been written in half the time, for half the money, with half the personality through the use of AI. Although those posts and articles hardly broke the internet, I hope that those who read them sensed that they had something unique to offer, a slice of genuine insight into the coffee industry. I am thankful I was never asked to use AI and that I was given the freedom to keep writing creatively.

As a yoga teacher I communicate through movement, sound, energetic presence and words. The words we choose evoke feeling. When shared from an authentic place, they shine a spotlight on our innermost self. They help us connect. They show our personality, life experience, identity too, but also offer a window into something more. Our words reach out into the world.

I feel moving my body as a creative process of emergence. The body doesn’t know where to go by scanning data sets and regurgitating for the sake of best performance and efficiency, it just knows. It’s within this creative act that life's richness can be found. Isn’t it true that life's best lessons are in the journey and not the destination?

If I’m looking to describe an embodied experience here on the screen, it makes sense that it must be written as a creative flow too. It’s a small way to embrace being in a question for longer than feels comfortable and keep that analytical and digesting chunk of my brain functioning.

This doesn’t devalue the need to read, study and source from others. Creativity so often seeds from the words I read in a book or hear in practice that become a theme or structure for a movement practice or meditation. It’s very different to chew on the words of someone else and allow them to be tasted through your own experience than to consume an easy digest quickly generated sweeping synopsis.

So this is a very long way to say that all the words on my website, emails, blogs and posts are my own and always will be.