Self-Blessing with Galway Kinnell
Helping shift our focus from rigorous self-examination towards self-compassion.
This practice seeks to shift our focus from rigorous self-examination towards self-compassion, using a tender approach towards the body in touch and movement. A poem by Galway Kinnell serves as a reference point for re-minding us of the bud of goodness in all things, the opportunity for flowering at any point, and the potential for self-blessing that is only impeded when we forget our true nature
Includes:
-a 60-minute yoga practice, focused on approaching the body with TLC
-a music playlist lovingly chosen to capture the poem's ambiance (carefully crafted match the arc of the physical practice, so you can choose to practice with music)
-a link to the poem and a short reflection capturing its most striking phrases or images
-a distilled skeleton of the sequence (poses, breath exercises, and visualizations) for your reference
*available for 7 days upon registration
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?
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.