Writing from Your Body Workshop!

"What people don't realize is that writing is physical. It doesn't have to do with thought alone. It has to do with sight, smell, taste, feeling, and everything being alive and activated. The rule for writing practice of 'keeping your hand moving,' not stopping, actually is a way to physically break through your mental resistances and cut through the concept that writing is just about ideas and thinking."

Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

Do you feel and hear all that your body has to tell you? After all, as John Lee writes, your body is “home to all that has happened to [you], and it remembers.” In this hands-on workshop, we will explore the ways in which paying attention to our bodies can deepen our writing and our writing process. By engaging in some breath, movement, and writing exercises we will begin to feel how removing physical blockages in our bodies can in turn dissolve some of the creative blockages we feel when writing. We will also learn to listen to our body's messages and allow these insights to inform our writing.

This is a workshop comprised of doing. We will try not to analyze in this workshop; we’ll give our analytic minds a much-needed siesta. We will write from our guts, our hands, our spleens, our throats, and our blood vessels. We will begin to explore how telling the story of our bodies can help us to reclaim our creative, knowledgeable, and truth-telling physical selves. Come prepared to move, feel, and create with an open mind.

This workshop is for both beginning and seasoned writers.
No experience necessary!

When: Sunday, July 27, 2008; 1:00-5:00pm

Where: Rising Bird Healing Arts (Roosevelt District of Seattle)

Cost: $100 (or $80 if you sign up for the "A Year of Living in Your Body" series)

To Register: Email Courtney Putnam at cputnam@rising-bird.com