…and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard…
Audre Lorde, Litany for Survival
Please join me for an ongoing drop-in writing for healing group that meets one Saturday morning a month in Palo Alto from 10:30AM-2:30PM. No previous writing experience needed. The cost is $75 per meeting.
In this group, we create a safe space to write and share. No critiquing of the writing occurs, rather, there is support, discussion about meaning, and appreciation of each other. I usually bring a poem or two that we read and discuss, and a warm-up writing exercise. Men and women are welcome. Please call me at 415-273-1036 to discuss your interest in the group and for more information. No previous writing experience needed!
From the members:
- For me this group helps my work come alive and my voice to be heard. It validates my right to write despite my inner critic. Phyllis is supportive, empathic, and quite skillful in facilitating the group. She brings the most delightful poems and themes as diving boards from which we can jump off and explore the unknown sea inside us.
- Thank you
for the safety
of your place
that cultivates the courage
to create
beauty.
- Liked: safety, self discovery through response, connection.
Improve: 0
Here are a few of the topics I have presented in the past:
- Rumi and Hafiz: Doorways into the Self, a half-day workshop in Palo Alto.
- Poetry & Meditation: Connecting the Mind, Body, and Spirit through reflection and creativity. A one day workshop that was co-led by Shaila Catherine, Founder of Insight Meditation South Bay.
- Poetic Dialogue: The intimate Connections of Poetry Therapy–Presented at Northern California Group Therapy Association Summer Conference at Asilomar Conference Center.
- Therapist Self-Care—Uniting Mind, Body, and Spirit through Poetry presented at SCV CAMFT therapist well-being retreat.
- Isabella Inspiration: Art and Poetry at the Isabella Stuart Gardiner Museum in Boston, a daylong pre-conference workshop for the National Association for Poetry Therapy Annual conference.
Poetry Therapy, Writing to Heal
A brief description of how writing can heal.
Writing provides a way to cope with physical and emotional pain, a method of connecting with others directly and indirectly, a container for experience and emotions that may feel unbearable in the moment. Creativity of any kind is healing, I believe, because it links us spiritually and emotionally with ourselves and others. Think about reading a poem or essay that moves you, maybe even runs a chill of beauty down your spine, or an “ah” of recognition, that means “Yes, I have also felt this way and when I read this I know I am not alone.” It could be that you are entering into a deep “relationship” with the author who, in speaking her voice, helps you understand yourself. When you write your own words or poems, you are connecting with yourself in this way, and when others hear or read your words, you are giving them the same opportunity to empathetically respond to you.
In poetry therapy we write from our hearts. There is no emphasis on craft or skill, this writing is the kind that springs from another place than the mind alone, and would not want to be stifled. Poetry has been viewed as the carrier of a message from the unconscious to the conscious mind. Sometimes what you write from your heart could contain an important surprise or a seed of great healing. Even just one image can be a powerful soothing balm. For a woman who had just put her cat to sleep, the last line of her friend’s poem was that kind of image (written to the cat about the owner): “her hand will always be upon your back.”
When you write something down, it moves from inside to a safe place contained on a page. You create something that can feel just the way the poet Mary Oliver does when she says she was “hurrying through her soul”.
In another poem, The Buddha’s last instruction Mary Oliver says:… I feel myself turning/into something of inexplicable value… In this excerpt from Rumi’s poem Where Everything is Music, the poet says: Stop the words now./Open the window in the center of your chest,/and let the spirits fly in and out…translated by Coleman Barks. In both excerpts the poets use an interesting and unusual way to express a universal truth about writing. This can delight and invite a response that could have important meaning.