Retrospective

ABOUT ADULT POETRY WRITING WORKSHOPS

Our poems are the fingerprints of our souls.

Offered to individuals or organizations in retreat, group, church, institutional, and corporate settings, The Inner Writer Program techniques and approaches to personal and organizational transformation through poetry writing are based on the belief that each of us has an intuitive Knower within, and that intuitive Knower knows what we need at any moment to balance, heal, or guide us. It is in the very nature of writing poems that we dissolve the walls inside us—walls that divide our safer public thoughts from our intimate private thoughts, our public feelings from our private feelings. When these walls come down, a channel is opened to the power of intuition, and our intelligence becomes radiant and whole.

These approaches are also based on two concepts found in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
1) that we are symbols, and we inhabit symbols, and
2) the universe is the externalization of the soul.

In other words, the outer world of Nature is a perfectly designed mirror for the inner world of the mind, the emotions, the imagination, and the soul. Uniting these concepts, the Knower within each of us is drawn to the words and images (symbols) it needs for self-expression, self-discovery, and deeper understanding.

Poetry writing is the most portable and easily acquired of all the arts. Using “fishing” (for poems) as a metaphor, poetry writing also introduces participants to the creative process itself and to the attributes of the creative person (openness, quiet, stillness, attentiveness, patience, experimentation, risk-taking, humor, and a tolerance for “mistakes”). Designed by poet-educator Sandy Lyne, these approaches quickly, safely, and comfortably call forth the poet everyone has waiting within.

Benefits of Writing Poetry

• Dissolves the walls between public thought and private thought, public feeling and private feeling, so that the intelligence is “radiant and whole”

• Increases/deepens self-awareness (what makes us happy, what makes us unhappy, what fulfills us, what holds us back, knowing who we really are)

• Increases appreciation for/understanding of others, deepens our empathy and compassion, widens the scope of our caring (people who write and share poems together say that they know each better than people they have known for twenty years)

• Awakens us to the permissions we must recognize and grant ourselves for living happier and more fulfilling lives

• Heightens awareness of life as a “web’ or “fabric” of daily “relationships (self, others, place, season, weather, time of day, animal kingdom, plant kingdom, mineral kingdom, manmade things, celestial things, spiritual things, and the elements of earth, air, fire and water in all their forms)

• Heightens understanding that all aspects of life (home, career, workplace, friendships, marriage and family) create a self-portrait, a mirror of the accumulation of choices

• Expands our sense of what is and what we want things to be (in business, often alters the definition of “the bottom line”); goes beyond “success” to issue of “fulfillment”:

• Heightens awareness that fear, more than anything else, diminishes intelligence and creativity

• And finally, poetry writing is a deep pleasure and joy, the most portable and easily acquired of all the arts. We are designed for it. The universe is designed for it.