NEW DATE 'Peer Support session ‘Movement into Writing: Crossing Thresholds', with Catherine Ravenna

The Orange Collective peer support sessions provide a space for anyone interested in, or already using the arts to support peoples' wellbeing. This is a space to trial a workshop in the safe company of peers and receive feedback to support development of the idea.

Catherine's Peer Support session ‘Movement into Writing: Crossing Thresholds'. Will involve simple, inclusive guided movement on the theme leading into expressive writing from a poetry prompt. From the felt sense into words. Working individually and collaboratively. No prior experience of movement or writing required.

More details about the session: 

Explore new ways of navigating thresholds in your life through guided movement and expressive writing. Both of these have the potential to tap beneath the surface of familiar patterns, bring new insights and expand your repertoire of expression or action. This day is not about performance (though you may be inspired to share movements or writing with a partner), but about allowing yourself to be guided by inner impulses, collaborating within structured exercises which support but don’t confine. You may be facing a particular change: a new life stage, change of circumstance, role, decision, season, identity, purpose, or simply curious to explore transitions in general. The hope is that you will leave having shared an experience in which you have also arrived at a new understanding or response to a threshold you may be meeting or considering.

The workshop will consist of two parts: first some gentle, guided exercises based on everyday movements which you can interpret in your own way and according to your own mobility. You do not need any prior experience or skill to engage with this. It will include exploring the space and pathways, different ways of moving, experimenting with focusing on non-dominant body parts, creating short movement phrases and working with metaphor to develop a body-based vocabulary to enrich your writing. In today’s world which can be fast-paced, head- and list led, it offers the chance to slow down and play, find new forms of expression, and discover your own unwritten language grounded in the felt sense. There will be the chance to reflect and journal before moving onto the second part, which willl focus on expressive writing.

Expressive writing is a form of free, spontaneous writing which is personal and emotional.

This part will begin with some short, simple exercises to get your words flowing and there will be the chance for some ‘poem-making/shaping ’ based on a writing prompt. Again, the focus is on experimentation and experience rather than product: writing as discovery. However, experimenting with form can sharpen awareness or generate unexpected new coincidences.

There will be the chance to give feedback at the end and share anything you have written if you choose, but this is not compulsory.

Catherine's website outlining her writing practice. www.catherineravenna.co.uk

Catherine's experience also includes working as a Integrative and Transpersonal Psychotherapeutic Counsellor with adults, couples and children