BRW Studio Time circles welcome everyone. If this will be your first time, see "What is BRW?" below.
Here are the upcoming Studio Time Circles ~
*Saturday, June 1, from 10 am to 12:30 pm ET
*Friday, June 7, from 4 pm to 6:30 pm ET
In the BRW Studio Time Circles, we open with breathing and freewriting off a prompt that relates to creativity writ large and/or to our own ongoing projects. We share our opening freewrites, and then we spend about 60 minutes reading, typing, editing, or otherwise working on our own. Some people use the time to nurture the BRW freewrites waiting in their journals. Others use the time to focus on the poems, stories, or essays they're working on. We gather again for a closing round of breathe - freewrite - share. The sharing can include excerpts from what we were working on, our freewrites, and/or our takes on this process of taking studio time together.
Thank you, Elizabeth Kaye, for the phrase "studio time"! It's astounding how helpful it can be to know I am not writing or editing or contemplating my words alone.
What is Breathe/Read/Write?
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.
Most BRWs happen in Zoom. The circles last two hours.
As Lisa writes in the Zen Studies Center Newsletter:
"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.
