Root Your Writing and Meditation in A Daily Practice as Fall Begins

Every day from Sunday, September 22 - Friday, September 27, from 10 am to 12 pm ET

You can register for one session or multiple sessions. Each circle will both stand alone and build on the previous circles. Sign up for three or more of these daily writes in September and save!

If this is your first Breathe/Read/Write event, scroll down for your introduction to BRW.

As we enter the season of fall, let the structure, companionship, and community of this Breathe/Read/Write series help you stay with your writing and self-expression.

We will build upon last summer's BRW "Time Is...." series and include prompts to help us write about the body and all of the body's limitations, glories, trancience, and surprises.

To sit with Lisa and quiet down, then write, is a great feeling....no one knows what will surface, and the sharing is such a relief from the noise of daily nothings. Highly recommended for poets and for all those who feel. Pamela B.

Breathe/Read/Write combines short periods of meditation with timed free-writes off a prompt. Lisa Freedman facilitates the breathing, the writing, the sharing, and the responding.

BRW circles are open to everyone. Just bring your curiosity.

No meditation or writing experience required. And the free-writing is free, as in wide open, no need to be correct or logical. Just let the pen move non-stop. This opens space to express the vastness of your unfettered mind.

After each round of meditating and free-writing, everyone has the option to read what they’ve written. We listen deeply to one another and briefly reflect back (without evaluation or criticism) what stands out. This is where the BRW magic happens. As June F. says, strangers become family.

The Time Is... BRWs happen in Zoom. They last two hours and include three cycles of meditating, free-writing, sharing, and responding. With larger groups, zoom breakout rooms give everyone a chance to be heard and get encouraging responses.

"It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and reactive these days. Every time we guide our wandering minds back to the breath, we offer ourselves a fresh start. Every time we meditate and then pick up our pens to write in response to a poem, we are in a realm of unlimited possibilities."

Why does BRW have a tree logo?

When Lisa guides the BRW meditations, she channels what she has learned from her teachers, including those who use the Alexander Technique, and she encourages people to let gravity help them settle their bodies into their chairs and to imagine roots growing down through their sit bones and through the bottoms of their feet. As participants are able to rest their attention on the breath, the breath becomes the trunk of the tree, connecting our rooted bodies with our wide open sky level minds.

LISA FREEDMAN

Lisa Freedman is an author, activist, and professor of creative writing at The New School in New York City. She holds an MFA from the New School and is certified as a mindfulness meditation teacher by Dhama Moon/Tibet House. She founded and directs Breathe/Read/Write, an online community where Lisa weaves mindfulness together with writing and revising. As Lisa puts it, meditation is about listening, listening without judgment, and cultivating the ability to open one’s heart to all that is. She also brings this perspective and this pair of practices – meditation and writing – to her work as a writing coach who offers developmental and editorial guidance on a wide range of projects.

Lisa has taught and presented extensively -- for the International Women’s Writing Guild, New York Zen Center, United Nations, Extinction Rebellion, and many others. She collaborated with the International Women’s Writing Guild to create ROOTS/TRUNK/SKY, a collection of writings from the Imagination & Justice Meditation & Free-Writing Circles. Lisa’s poems and prose have appeared in Satya Magazine, The New York Times, the anthology Resist Much, Obey Little, and more.

Links:

LFWritingCoach.com

Breathe/Read/Write

Host or Publisher Breathe Read Write