Hi, I’m Alexandra Panic.
I have been reading the sky and the body my whole life.
I just didn't know, for a long time, that they were saying the same thing.
origin story
I was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1981, into a family that gave me two important educations before I knew either of them fully. My father, a meteorologist, taught me the sky, clouds, atmosphere, the cosmos, and the inevitability of change written in weather patterns. My grandfather, a climatologist, confirmed it: everything shifts, everything moves in cycles, nothing is random. My grandmother, a physical education teacher, taught me the body. Anatomy. Movement. The intelligence that lives below the neck. I grew up between those two wisdoms without knowing they were one. My mother, on the other hand, lead me towards literature. I started writing poetry in elementary school. I began studying astrology at 13. During the hardship of wartime Yugoslavia and the NATO bombing of 1999, literature was my escape — and my survival. Books held what life couldn't. Writing made sense of what sense couldn't reach. Before I was 25, I had published three collections of poetry in Serbian. I wrote them during the years I was also discovering my body — through dance, through love, through the particular aliveness of being young and unafraid of feeling. I had no idea yet that the writing and the body were the same thing. I just knew that when I moved, something opened. And when something opened, I wrote.
In 2009, my husband and I moved to Seattle. And suddenly, the poet in me went silent. I tried everything. Nothing came. So I walked. I learned Seattle by walking — street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood — because my body knew what to do even when my mind didn't.
The same winter, I enrolled in the University of Washington's creative writing programs and started devouring everything I could find on craft. But no matter how hard I tried, nothing I wrote made sense. I discovered writing conferences, local writing workshops, and critique groups, but it all made me even more insecure. I was still lost, mute, living in-between languages.
Then I became pregnant for the first time. And I watched my body change. There was something inexplicable happening — some connection between the body and artmaking that I couldn't yet name. Because of chronic hip pain, I started practicing yoga. And I noticed something strange: during class, instead of meditating, I was writing in my head. The body in motion was unlocking something the desk could never. I became obsessed.
When my daughter was three, I enrolled in an MFA in Creative Writing. And discovered, to my complete surprise, that I was pregnant again. I couldn't separate what my body was doing — growing another human being — from what I was doing: writing my first novel. It was the hardest and most extraordinary two and a half years of my life.
embodiment
While I was in the MFA program, I started a local writing group in Seattle called Mama Writes. At first I offered craft lessons. But slowly, something else emerged — a holistic, body-centered approach I hadn't planned and couldn't yet fully explain. I graduated with my MFA in 2017. A few months later, my father died at 60. I let my body rest and grieve. I was tired even of writing. I taught Mama Writes. I did yoga every day. I let the ground hold me while I figured out what came next.
Then I met Lidia Yuknavitch at an event in Seattle. Her book The Small Backs of Children changed the way I thought about writing. I began taking workshops at the Corporeal Writing Center in Portland, Oregon. What she taught confirmed what my body already knew: the story lives in the flesh before it lives on the page.
alignment
In 2018, after a workshop with Christopher Vogler — who said he wanted to learn more about the chakras and the subtle body to deepen his work on the Hero's Journey — something crystallized for me. I decided to become a yoga teacher so I could help writers create and write from the body, inventing language that had corporeality. My yoga teacher, Heather Falkin, had just launched her own 200-hour program. When I asked her whether I should take it, she said: No matter whether you become a yoga teacher or not, this school will change your life. She was right. During the nine months of my first yoga teacher training, everything aligned. My writing practice and my astrology practice became embodied and inseparable from each other and from the body that had been trying to teach me all along. In 2019, I was genuinely happy. I thought I had it all.
In 2020, we relocated back to Serbia. And I lost it all again — my grounds, my language, my yoga studios, my students, my writing community.
I retreated into my mind and enrolled in a PhD program, because I escape by learning. I chose the transdisciplinary theory of arts and media. I struggled to explain to my academic audience why embodiment matters. Suddenly, I had many projects on the go at once, and I was tired and scattered.
But I knew what I needed to do. I had said it to my students for years: Return to the beginning. Return to the place where you thought you had it all. For me, that place was 2019. And the words I had repeated to my students then — words I hadn't fully claimed as my own — were: The body writes. Not your mind. It is the hand that does the work, not your pen.
This is my return. Not to 2019 exactly — but to what I knew then, and what I carried through everything that came after. The body writes is not a method I invented. It is what I have been living, losing, and finding my entire life again. Now I teach it.
credentials
PhD Candidate, Transdisciplinary Studies of Arts and Media FMK, Faculty of Media and Communications, Belgrade
MFA in Creative Writing, Goddard College, Class of 2017
MA in Italian Language and Literature, University of Belgrade
500-hour Yoga Teacher Certification, specializing in yin yoga and trauma-informed practice (E-RYT® 200, RYT® 500, YACEP®)
Intuitive and Mindfulness Coach
Practicing astrologer professionally since 2000, visit bodyandstars.com
Writing teacher since 2016
ready to begin?
The Body Writes 3-month mentorship is for you who feel the story in your body, and are ready to let it come through.