Stephanie Renée dos Santos is a Red Wheelbarrow Writer from a distance. She’s been following us for years from her home in Brazil. This summer she’ll be coming back to visit Bellingham and to lead a writing and yoga workshop in Fairhaven.
Writing & Yoga Workshops
By Stephanie Renée dos Santos
Writing and Yoga are soul mates. Yoga reveals insights; Writing is the recorder. Yoga balances rhythms of breath; writing surfs breath through oceans of language. Yoga taps the unconscious mind; writing transcribes the wisdom of the heart. Writing requires work; yoga is the assistant. Writing is an offering to the world; yoga eases the offering’s challenges. Writing is a solo act; yoga provides community.
Yoga supports our writing.
Why not join me for a workshop that combines these two generative activities?
What are the benefits one gains and obtains from attending this type of writing workshop? Writing and yoga workshops aim to kindle your creative fire and liberate your authentic voice and deepest truths. Writers need dedicated time to connect with the Muse, or to bring concentrated effort to begin or complete a project—time that can be hard to come by in everyday life. Everyone’s standards are raised in a community of writers. And getting outside of one’s everyday writing atmosphere can trigger new ideas and imagination. A writing workshop combined with yoga offers an ideal space in which to concentrate on writing without interruptions and to help you relax into your work. Yoga assists in opening space within you for your writing to: flow, burst, seep.
Writers often suffer from physical pain in the shoulders, neck, head, eyes, lower back and hips. Stress in the body can inhibit or block creativity. Yoga helps reverse and relieve bodily tension; when the body is eased, so are the tensions of the mind.
Yoga Benefits for the Writer:
§ Open your chest, bring your shoulders back, loosen up your neck, and increase circulation to your head. Improve your posture after long days at the computer and reading
§ Learn eye exercise to prevent or relieve eye strain
§ Stretch and awaken your mind
§ Open your hips, where creativity and emotions often get trapped
§ Learn to create and access the state that creativity likes to manifest into: A state of empowerment, focus, grounded intuition, strength, compassion
§ Learn to set intentions/goals for your writing and visualize/meditate on them
§ Create balance and develop concentration, which will increase your ability to focus clearly and develop the staying power to write through difficulties
§ Experience community
§ Release your mind and body and open the space for ideas to flow
Participating in a writing workshop is a public declaration of being a writer and demonstrates your courage and willingness to test your ideas—honing, sharing, and readying them for the world. Yoga aides and eases the writing endeavor.
Stephanie Renée dos Santos is a fiction (with a passion for historical fiction) and freelance writer and certified yoga instructor. She leads “Saraswati Writing & Yoga Workshops/Retreats” in the United States, Brazil and abroad.
Next workshop: “Magic and Verve in Your Writing & Yoga” June 20-22, 2015 in Fairhaven, WA USA. *Early Bird Registration open until March 31st 2015…take advantage! For more information about this upcoming workshop: www.stephaniereneedossantos.com. Email Stephanie with questions: stephaniereneedossantos@gmail.com
