Derek Walcott's "Love after Love": Moving from Fracture to Wholeness
A somatic practice of integration, to nurture, re-align & balance our split selves
Derek Walcott's much-beloved poem "Love after Love" offers a template for how to move a fractured psyche towards wholeness. This practice undertakes a physical exploration care-taking old and new selves, whether grieving discarded or outgrown parts of us, or greeting and welcoming something new but raw. You can expect to emerge with a feeling of integration, balance, and wholeness.
-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? I hope you'll join us!
*please note you have 48 hours to practice as many times as you'd like, after enrolling
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.