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Workshop – Automatic Writing: Magic of the Deep
EIGHT WEEK COURSE WITH BARBARA MARTINIOFFERED IN ENGLISH & ITALIAN “After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that lead to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard.”André Breton, from “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 1924 Sharing our lives through writing is a very special thing. It’s an act that touches our deepest inner part and allows us to feel every little detail of our inner movements. Our memories merge with our feelings and allow us to pin down the flow of words erupting and overflowing from our heart and mind, sometimes subdued, sometimes imperious. We are the memory that floats atop an unknown sea, from a system jagged of sensations, feelings and drive that sometimes we try to condense into actions but that always remains, in the words of the great psychoanalyst James Hillman, “wrapped in the cradle of the language that surprises us and belongs to the realms of life and beyond”. To listen to that subtle voice that can constantly describe us it’s an incredibly effective way to get to know ourselves, to enter our most intimate universe and make it become a mark, ink on the paper of our skin, an incessant mirror of growth and evolution. This course, divided in eight classes, it’s a journey into our deeper self designed to learn, through this particular writing technique, parts of our spirituality and our ability to feel and touch deeper parts of ourselves. We will explore the works of four great authors, learning four different modes and approaches to writing and describing, without any censorship, the mysterious being that we are or that we think we are. The course will include selected readings, tailored exercises and short meditations; we will analyze and connect with the work of four important authors. Automatic Writing: an exercise in transparency In this first part we will learn about the origins and philosophy behind this writing technique, born within the spiritualist environment and later adopted and readapted by both the surrealist movement in the 1900s and the psychoanalysis academic system all around the world. We will have an overview on the multiple purposes of the automatic writing technique with the intention of acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the “descriptive modality” that will be used during the whole course. We will learn about the importance of the surrealist movement and automatic writing through the lens of author André Breton’s work. Virginia Wolf: The Poetry of Psychoanalysis In this second segment we will learn about the remarkable life of great author Virginia Wolf, her intimate voice and storytelling, filled with meanings and parallelisms to psychoanalysis, an important message that she was able to project onto a worldwide...
read moreWorkshop – Healing Power of Writing
Two month weekly course with Barbara Martini, offered in english and italian Writing our story means taking a deep listen to our inner truths and to our inner secrets, often revealing a hidden sacred dimension. It means to discover something inside of us that is very much alive and pulsing, something that we didn’t know was there and that is worth nurturing. Maybe it could become something to tell the world about. Re-reading and re-visiting, discovering new dimensions within ourselves put us in a fresh new perspective: we become travelers inside our own mind, into a place that we inhabit but are able to re-discover each time. Every time we tell ourselves the “tale of our life” we do it to make sure that it works again, creating in us the wonderful feeling of being safe and alive. We all are incredible beings hosting memories. We are a living tale. That’s why each encounter of this course will teach us how to stop everything else around us and how to start listening to our inner voice, carefully transferring on paper the messages that we receive. The only things needed will be a pen and some blank pages, or, according to one’s love for writing, a new notebook. During this course we will discover different writing techniques, read short passages from the works of different authors, we will practice with dedicated writing exercises and will have short meditations connected to the topics here below: “Autobiographic Writing: The Enchantment of Paper” We will learn the easiest and at the same time bravest form of writing: the autobiographic one. We will discover how, in a written form, it’s possible to give a new meaning to direct experiences from our life and how empowering and liberating telling a story to a blank page can be; stories that otherwise might be hard to share, even with a close friend. “Epistolary Writing: The Letter I never wrote you” We will learn a writing technique that has been very popular for over a century: epistolary writing. It’s a way of writing that allows us to establish a relationship with another person in a very organic way and opens up a clear communication channel: not just with people close to us, but also with people that we have or had a hard time connecting with, even with people that are no longer with us with whom we didn’t have the chance to share something important. “Automatic Writing: Like a Dream” Automatic writing is a very interesting technique that allows us to give total freedom to our mind and our hand, letting out every thought that comes through. We have a way of telling our story in total freedom, without worrying about grammar nor punctuation, no rules. Like in the wonderful novels of great writers of the Inner Monologue and Stream of Consciousness we can “tell our story on paper exactly like we tell it to ourselves, just like a dream.” “Imaginary Writing: A fable as a friend” Creative writing has also a lot to do with the spontaneous creation of imaginary tales, events that might have never occurred as well as diving into fantastic dimensions that are the matter of fables, part of the oral story-telling tradition, the history of our heritage that is repeated generation after generation....
read moreThe Voice: a Home for the Soul
“The voice lives in the silence of the body, just like the body in the womb. But, in a difference to the body, it returns to it, abolishing itself at every moment as a voice and as a word. As soon as he speaks, the echo of this desert resounds in the void before the break, from where life and peace, death and madness spring. The breath of the voice is creator. Its name is Spirit.” Paul Zumthor Our voice is a wealth of experiences, emotions and behaviors that we all continue to use and perceive every day from the inside and outside of our body as a primary socialization tool. Our soul shows itself in song, in word and in writing and breaks down into the very rich indentations of the sound that we consciously or unconsciously create. This course aims to be a sort of journey to discover your own sound and with it its energetic, vibrational and visceral origins, but also as a tool to discover the effects and the wonderful resonances of the contact with some often-unexplored parts of us. The voice as an identifying element of every human being is also a bridge between thought and physical reality that produces unique and unrepeatable worlds; as unique and unrepeatable as the infinite parts of which we are composed. And it is precisely in this colorful symphony of undulating motion that we can better understand where our voice originates, who is speaking in us and what songs he/she would like to sing. The voice and its expression The voice and the chakras The chakras and the use of color The fifth chakra and its blocks The voice and emotion The voice and color The chorus: the amplification of a ritual The inner voice: a home for the soul Vibrational therapy Guided meditations: finding your inner voice In search of your talent The 3 ways of receiving messages from our...
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To Tell
Telling has a special flavor. It contains an energy that vibrates in the images of the depth that some silent explorer suddenly presents us with: meager, sometimes full of fog but always illuminating, perfumed by the grace that dwells in the territories of the invisible. Each of us has a special story, so unique that it can become a stimulus, a recognition, a prayer. A story so sacred that it becomes beauty.
read moreMusic
When music becomes poetry, it moves sinuously between the folds of the soul. You feel it arrive in the ravines of the heart to nourish, quenching that perennial desire for beauty that does not go away except in some moments. Rare, precious, priceless. Richard Galliano’s accordion tonight in Monteriggioni made me breathe the French rain and the red skirts of the Tanjawa (women of Tangier) in the Argentine barrios. He made me dance in the world of this extraordinary artist until he left me happy with his hands skinned by much applauding, bewitched. Moved. A meal of love full of wonder. An hour and a half in concert that seemed like a minute and an emotion that will last forever. Thanks Richard....
read moreLand
And when you least expect it… the sea. I saw it when I was young, with small feet; the noise, the smell of wood that crowned my foot races in front of the cabins, keeping me company, my lips salty with play, and a large grandmother intent on baking the best stuffed shells in the world… Maybe for me it will always be the sea: eyes that follow you from afar glued to your back as you enter the water. The most beautiful tan I have ever known. A sun so sweet as to embrace all of me while escorting me back to shore. Always. Land.
read morePresentazione libro
Presentazione del libro "Donne nascoste. Ritratti di vite in bianco e nero" alla libreria Salvemini. Piazza Gaetano Salvemini n° 18, Firenze.
30 ottobre 2018 - ore 18.00