Dispatches From the Eye of the Storm

Service Description

Mindfulness can be a powerful creative agent. At the beating heart of mindfulness practice is meditation, which can be summed up in four words: Stop. Be. Look. See. We stop by pausing and breathing. Paused, we have an opportunity to settle our hearts and minds. Settled, we can watch feelings rise and fall from a place of stability and peace. Noticing patterns of thinking and doing, we can change habits that no longer serve us and cultivate a healthier, sustainable, and more vibrant way of living. Over the course of four Sundays, we’ll explore the idea of attention as a sanctuary and an incubator for vivid and authentic writing. Each session will include a demonstration of a new meditation or mindfulness practice, suggestions for its application to the craft of writing, and generative writing prompts to catalyze our creativity. We’ll reflect on our experiences, share our writing, and leave each class with a “care package” of additional mindful writing practices to experiment with during the week. Week 1: Nowhere to Go, Nothing to Do—The Power of Pausing Week 2: Rooted and Ready—Aligning Mind, Heart, and Body Week 3: Eyes Wide Open—The Art of Spacious Perception Week 4: Breaking Free—Changing the Story of Ourselves Participants will come away from the class with new tools for staying grounded in the present moment, calming the inner critic, enhancing the powers of observation, and writing from a place of deep authenticity and vulnerability. This series will benefit writers, educators, researchers, professionals, journalers, and anyone else interested in learning how mindfulness can create calm in the midst of internal and external “storms” and inform and enrich our writing. This class is in-person at PorchLight with two online spots available. Contact jennifer@porchlightliterary.org for details about the online spots. Stephen Pradarelli is the communications director for the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation, a global Buddhist organization founded by Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. In 2016, he founded Winding Path Sangha, which offers regular sitting and walking meditation opportunities. He’s a former journalist, communications strategist, crisis manager, book editor, essayist, and fiction writer. He’s also a private pilot and loves reading, hiking, traveling, and playing guitar.