I know it may feel a little early to think about this, but we all know how it goes … at the end of this month the last wrappings will have been crunched and squashed into the wheelie bin; those dry pine-needles will start troubling you as they lodge in your socks, and even the decorations will be longing to find their way back to the dark attic. But what will you be looking forward to in the dark evenings of January?
These long months of winter are a time when even nature has turned inwards, its movement invisible beneath the cold soil. The last leaves are shed and the trees stand like guardians of the bleak landscape. Now is the time sit with our own reflections, a time to allow the quiet hibernation of winter to hold our inner thoughts, like a seed cocooned in the earth, waiting for a light to draw us out.
Each Monday evening in January a small group of like-minded reflective people will be gathering in the nurturing library space of The Green Door Centre, Bosham, West Sussex. We will be embarking on a Reflective Writing journey; this journey is facilitated by myself, a qualified Creative Arts Therapist. In each session I invite you to start with journaling to empty your thoughts to the page, without self-edits. We then move onto thought provoking creative prompts and use various forms of writing to respond to the prompt – spontaneous prose; poems; letter writing and more. The course continues for four weeks.
What exactly is reflective writing? Reflective writing, in this course, is close to free association/spontaneous writing in response to creative prompts; each prompt is set to a time limit. I think of it rather like the structure of life drawing classes where you work for set amounts of time in order to respond intuitively to the subject. We always start with journaling which is both a way of ‘warming up’ and ‘letting go’ in which we allow ourselves to write anything that is on our minds in that moment. We then move on to other forms of writing (poems, letters, prose, description of objects, and other imaginative ideas). In writing playfully in response to prompts we connect to our creative side and in that the unconscious is free to release a little of its magic.
I wonder if you were to allow yourself to turn inwards and reflect playfully what would you discover? Is your seed of creativity waiting for a light to draw it out?
I invite you to join us for 4 sessions starting Monday 12th January, you may be surprised and sustained by what your inner voice has to say...