Renewing the Creative Self
Summer Sessions
30 June ¦ 14 July ¦ 28 July 2023
Fridays, 9-11 AM London, 10 AM – 12 PM Barcelona, 4-6 PM Singapore
online via Zoom
with Catelijne Coopmans and Chuanfei Chin
“This is a quote"
Name Surname
Creativity & renewal in the academic summer
In the time between semesters, you have some much-desired breathing space.
Yet this isn’t always easy to access. Pressure to be productive is often there as well, together with the dreams, and the imperfect realities, of taking time off.
From a sense of urgency, it’s hard to feel creative and even the most energizing plans can strangely start to feel like chores.
To find your way back to authentic engagement, expansive thinking, and inspired action, your Creative Self needs some respite.
In these lighthearted, experiential summer sessions, we take a stance against academic grind culture and for a more human-sized creativity.
Through facilitated inquiry and sharing, you get to air your frustrations, reconnect with your whole academic self, and recover a greater sense of spaciousness.
Session 1: Breathing space
Friday 30 June 2023
In this session, we turn to the feeling of ‘not enough’, of being behind and needing to catch up. Even when it’s not semester time, we can feel so hounded by the pressure to do more.
Transforming this feeling involves bringing warmth to ourselves, and exploring a new stance in relation to that pressure.
Can you let yourself escape?
In this 2-hour session, we help you find breathing space to work more freely on your writing or other projects at this time. What is it to make room to explore, to play, to experiment?
The multi-layered drama of academic writing
Finding a state of relaxed concentration to make progress with your writing can be difficult for many good reasons:
Academic writers can get stuck for many of the same reasons that creative writers do: the work feels overwhelming, the process is full of uncertainty, there’s fear of failure, fear of success, fear of ‘not enough’.
Then there’s the culture of evaluation in academia. Pervasive assessment, changing goalposts, and comparison with others regarding how much you’ve done, where it’s published and how fast, are hard on the nervous system. Structural inequalities add layers of discouragement and uphill battle.
And then there’s everyday life, in which writing needs to find a place alongside, well, everything else that’s going on, and how you feel, and how much energy you have.
If some or all of these layers apply to you, it may be hard to get started or to keep going, or you may find yourself in cycles of avoiding your writing and then pushing through in emergency mode.
The surprising effectiveness of an embodied approach
As it turns out, navigating the drama of academic writing is greatly supported by making your bodily experience of writing a whole lot more interesting than is typical in academic circles.
Most of us don’t think about writing as involving our bodies beyond ergonomic desk arrangements and reminders to get up and walk or stretch.
But the way we habitually approach and feel about our writing is expressed through the body. Because of this, and because our bodies are so well-equipped for self-regulation and for finding freedom in movement, an embodied approach to writing gives you a direct way to tap into your own resourcefulness.
This is the skill you’ll be learning and deepening in this course.
Over eight weeks, you’ll heighten your awareness of writing – your writing – as an embodied practice, using the Four Elements of Earth, Water, Fire and Air as a somatic map. Along the way, you’ll find new options for your writing, ways to work around blocks and challenges, and greater pleasure in expressing yourself in text.
What can I expect?
- To learn short body-based practices so you can immediately find new pathways into your writing and make progress with your project.
- To spot moments when an “all or nothing”-orientation has invaded your approach to your writing, so you can let your body show you a way forward that feels kinder and more doable.
- To develop greater awareness about what your current relationship to your project is, so that times when writing feels hard or impossible start to feel less disheartening, and don’t last as long.
- To reconnect with what feels authentic, so your voice, strengths and gifts can show up in the text.
- To build a personal repertoire of embodied resources that will become part of your writing life.
About Catelijne
This work has very personal origins for me: from the earliest days of my academic career I grew increasingly familiar with writing blocks and struggles: a constant flickering of I can – I can’t in relation to my writing.
Finding it hard to sustain a research career, I found my groove in teaching and nearly gave up writing for publication altogether. But something pulled me back to still wanting to do more of it. And I knew I wanted a different approach.
My second career as a coach and facilitator opened my eyes to working with the body. I started to translate what I learned from my embodiment teachers to the realm of writing, and this felt like a missing piece falling into place! It has allowed me to keep writing and has helped others reclaim their academic writing practice in ways that have been surprising and empowering.
This is what I want for you, too.
Course overview
- In Week 1, the course starts with a workshop around the imaginative question “What does your writing want?”
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Weeks 2-5 are the heart of the course. Weekly workshops and writing get-togethers and daily email prompts (Mon-Fri) invite you into a rhythm of work on your a chosen writing project. We follow the map of the Four Elements:
Week 2: Earth – slowness, steadiness, consistency.
Week 3: Water – fluidity, receptivity, relationality.
Week 4: Fire – desire to express.
Week 5: Air – playfulness, spaciousness. - Weeks 6, 7 and 8 are for consolidation and integration. This is a time to repeat or catch up on embodied writing practices from previous weeks as you continue to work on your project. You’ll meet new challenges and make new discoveries in the process, as well as develop your personal repertoire of embodied resources and reminders to access them.
The course is designed with the intention that you will take at least a week’s break from your writing during these eight weeks.
If you want a better sense, my recorded workshop ‘Carrying on With Your Writing‘ taught live at The Embodiment Conference in October 2020 introduces the approach we’ll be following here.
You don’t need to already have strong bodily awareness, or be confident moving your body (as a result of dance, martial arts, yoga or similar kinds of practice), for this to work for you.
And if you do have such awareness and such confidence, the direct focus on writing will likely bring new discoveries and possibilities.
The point is never to follow a tightly specified ‘right’ way of moving your body, but to have an experience that gives you useful information for how to accompany yourself in your writing.
It may also help to know that I often recommend that people turn their cameras off when we do movement. The Four Elements practices can be done in many variations, and I’ll provide options for differently mobile bodies and different spatial setups.
Costs, times and dates
Costs:
Here we detail the costs…
Time and dates
Meeting days are Tuesdays and Fridays, from 10:15-11:45 Central European (Summer) Time
Live Zoom dates for 2023 – please note these are provisional and still subject to confirmation:
Friday 12 May 2023: Introductory workshop
Fridays 19 & 26 May, 2 & 9 June: 4 x “Four Elements” workshops
Fridays 16 June and 7 July: 2 x Consolidation and deepening workshops
Tuesdays 23 & 30 May, 6, 13, 20 & 27 June: 6 x Writing get-togethers
Want to stay informed about this?
Please subscribe to my mailing list to get announcements about this course.
Also, you can always write to me with any questions you may have.