Giving Words to Experience and Feelings

When our sons were young, and I was in a poetry group, our leader handed out fliers about a Poetry Therapy Weekend with John Fox. It sounded intriguing, and I decided I’d ask my husband that evening if he’d be okay staying with our sons while I attended the workshop. I knew I’d love to get away to delve into my thoughts and deep writing under the expert facilitation of the author of Finding What You Didn’t Lose and Poetic Medicine.

Poetry writing is a pathway to a place within yourself of sensitivity, growth, and transformation. Your writing can encourage a renewed connectedness with nature, with your most essential self, with your daily life, and those you love, with your community, and perhaps with God. By such connection, I’m not suggesting that writing poetry suddenly makes everything wonderful or easy. But when your poems become the container of your truest feelings, you will begin to experience and integrate those feelings more consciously.

Making poetry part of your life can give you a kind of peripheral vision, a new way to see your life and the path you are taking. John Fox, Finding What You Didn’t Lose

I had the privilege of attending a few John Fox workshops, places of safety and the living muse to allow words to bubble up from dark passages inside. John, within these containers of sacred space, witnesses with such grace whatever words participants are called to share.

The workshops I could attend connected me in new ways to myself, to nature, and to a deep well of words inside me aching to find air. I began to write more, allowing repressed feelings of childhood to have their voices. And I found healing begin to enter for some layers of the heavy bag I carried on my shoulders. It was a beginning to the healing that continues…