I’ve just completed a 200-hour teacher certification and am planning on teaching yoga to foster writing with students and clients. I’ve been using yoga in my own writing practice for several years.
I’m moving into a new phase in my professional life, as a midwife for those who want to tell their stories, and yoga is a part of that. Yoga helps me live mindfully, with clarity, which helps both with my own writing and with facilitating writing workshops for others.
I HAVE TWO PROJECTS GESTATING
One is Telling Our Stories, a series of Saturday writing workshops in March, 2020, for survivors of sexual abuse to tell their stories. It’s the silence – often fueled by shame and sometimes by threats – that allows sexual abuse to occur undetected. I believe that it’s only by calling it out that we can stop it. Since writing about both my own experience of staying silent for half a century last year, and then being silenced by Vermont Public Radio, I’ve become aware of how hard it is not just to tell our stories, but to have them heard.
TELLING OUR STORIES
Telling Our Stories is a collaboration with Brooks Memorial Library, the Women’s Freedom Center, and the Commons, and will include information about how to hear a story of sexual abuse if a survivor chooses to entrust you with theirs. The program includes the potential for a public reading, where participants can read their stories themselves or remain anonymous by choosing someone to read it for them. There will also be the possibility for survivors to have their stories published in the Commons, either bylined or with name withheld. More details about this project will be forthcoming.
The other project more directly connects yoga and writing with workshops focused on Writing the Wisdom of the Body. It will combine pranayana (breathing) and asana (physical practice) with themed automatic writing. I’m currently working out the details to offer a series of workshops starting at the beginning of the year. Prior experience with yoga and/or writing is helpful but not necessary.
If either of these programs interests you, please consider subscribing to this blog, where information will be posted, or Contact me, stating your interest
COMMUNITY CLASSES
I will be teaching an all-levels Community Class (by donation) at Newfane Village Yoga this Saturday, October 26, from 10:30 to 11:30 am.
Love the idea of Yoga and writing.
I use to write all the time and the journey helped me deal with the sudden death of my. 22 year old son.
It has been almost 24 years since he left this planet and I have stopped writing.
He wanted to be a writer and was in school in Missula Mt In their writing program. I truly felt he was writing through me.