Grassy Genuflections with Mary Oliver
A playful, nature-centered practice of attention as devotion
This playful sequence is designed for grassy outdoor enjoyment, but can be practiced anywhere. Exploring Mary Oliver's ethic of attention as devotion, we'll play with myriad ways to bow down to mama earth. As Oliver's beloved Rumi says, there are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground, and this practice offers a few. We'll move from free-wheeling standing poses, salutations, and backbends to drop down and in, bringing our attention back and again back, to witness the beauty of nature. Expect to emerge feeling more joyful and receptive to the world around you.
*available for 48 hours upon registration
Includes:
-a 60-minute accessible practice guiding you through movement, breath work, and visualizations that give an embodied experience of poetic language
-a music playlist lovingly chosen to capture the poem's ambiance (crafted to match the arc of the physical practice, so you can choose to practice with music)
-a link to the poetry, and a short reflection capturing the most striking phrases, themes, and imagery.
-a distilled skeleton of the sequence (poses, breath exercises, and visualizations) for your reference
In an embodied approach to language, the goal is to generate a spontaneous, authentic experience of a poem that you can hold on to (or, if you're a teacher, one you can share)! When we linger with poems not with our rational "thinky" brain, but with a more primal gut layer of our being, we can absorb their truth and beauty deeper into the psyche. When poems live there, they pop up more regularly in our everyday lives, suffusing our days with new meaning and presence. And isn't this the goal behind any practice?
*available for 48 hours upon registration
Your Instructor
Katy Hawkins, PhD, is a somatics teacher based in Philadelphia. This course is an experiment she undertook during the pandemic, a romp through what she calls "Moving Poetics," exploring poems somatically. In her teaching, Katy uses poems as spells, whose magic holds change-making capacity to alter our reality. In bypassing the rational brain, poetic language drops deeper into our beings, where more subtle transformation can happen. These classes provided fodder for her recent book, called Thinking Feelingly: Somatic Approaches to Poetry. For more on Katy, check out katyhawkins.com and movingpoetics.com.