How Poetry Can Help You Cultivate Mindful Living, Boost Creativity and Transform Mindsets
Poetry is a vital human endeavour, and has the power to remove our conceptual blinkers and transform our understanding of ourselves and the world. Yet, in today’s world of hustle culture, algorithms and the encroachment of AI, dominated by utilitarian concerns and the “bottom line”, the practice and appreciation of poetry is all too often dismissed as an elitist and marginal aesthetic pastime of little tangible or practical application to other domains of human existence.
This series of workshops invites you to disprove this depressingly widespread assumption, by demonstrating how the study and practice of poetry can equip you with skills that are readily transferrable to other areas of your life – whether you’re on a journey of self-discovery, engaged in creating content that matters, teaching language and culture, or committed to rewiring client mindsets.
HOW THE STUDY OF POETRY CAN HELP YOU
If you’re on a journey of self-discovery and/or wish to cultivate mindful living
- Poetry is the Slow art form par excellence, as it invites you to become attentive to the sensory richness of language, feeling and thought, and to fully inhabit the here-and-now.
- Poetry cultivates open, embodied encounters with thoughts, feelings and life experiences that often go beyond conceptual thinking.
- Poetry is ultimately about the sounds, contours and textures of language, thought and emotion, and thus helps you get out of your head and into your body.
- Poetry has always been at the heart of the world’s contemplative and spiritual traditions: Recall Haiku in Zen Buddhism, the Ghazal in Sufism, or perennial favourites of the Anglophone poetic tradition, such as Emily Dickinson or William Blake.
If you’re a mindset or life coach, poetry can help you or your client:
- Throw off conceptual blinkers, by encouraging a playful, creative approach to tackling thoughts, feelings and life/work situations
- Cultivate open, embodied and mindful encounters with thoughts and feelings that often go beyond conceptual thinking
- Get out of your (their) head(s)
- Slow down, fully inhabit the present, and gain perspective
If you’re an educator or advanced language learner, poetry can help you:
- Gain a deeper insight into the contours, nuances and rhythms of spoken English, as a device for improving mastery of pitch, stress, strong and weak forms, and intonation
- Gain an appreciation of language change in both historical and contemporary contexts, and can also help you or your students engage with the broad spectrum of cultural studies from novel and creative perspectives
- Gain familiarity with varieties of English and “World Englishes”
- Gain mastery of rhetorical and critical-thinking skills, by enabling you or your students to condense complex thoughts, images or concepts into effective and appropriate similes and metaphors that can be of enormous help in presentations, debates and various types of advanced writing
If you’re a content creator, poetry can help you:
- Boost your storytelling prowess, by highlighting interesting parallels and connections between seemingly unrelated topic areas and domains that can help you develop original and novel approaches
- Master rhetorical devices that help you condense complex thoughts, images or concepts into effective and appropriate similes and metaphors
- Clarify and structure thought processes
Details on forthcoming workshops & syllabi: TBA
Text & Images: © Solivagant Wisdom