Attn: upcoming Berkeley workshop
Cultivating Creativity launches at the Alembic September 21!
Hi all —
This is just a note to share the news that I will be facilitating a limited series of creativity workshops at the Berkeley Alembic this fall. They are Thursday nights, 5—8pm, and the first one is September 21st. Tickets may be purchased here. I will reproduce the event description below. I hope that any of you who are current Bay Area dwellers can come through! If you have friends or family who are in the area and could use some reinvigoration and community around their creative process, I would appreciate if you would send this information along to them. I have asked to keep seats limited to preserve the intimacy of the space, so make sure to reserve yours soon. This first workshop will be held on the eve of Mabon, the autumnal equinox, and therefore we will be working with themes of harvest, gratitude/celebration, and transition into the darker seasons of the year.
Tickets are priced on three tiers: pay what you can. If you are in need of a supportive scholarship to attend this workshop, you may write to the fine people at the Alembic.
I hope to see many of you there!
Would you like to know yourself as a vibrant, creative person? Creativity requires courage, commitment, and compassion to seed, sprout, and bloom. You don’t need a lightning-bolt psychedelic journey, a fancy retreat, or the latest biohack to get these traits: they can be cultivated with a variety of simple, and ancient, practices that train subtle attention.
“Cultivating Creativity” is a workshop designed to help you meet the version of your Self who is a satisfied creative being, and to learn ways to transmute the chaos of doubt into a unique, peaceful container of self-trust. Together, we’ll use updated medieval-mystical contemplative practices to draw out more awareness from the processing mechanism of the Self, and to make deep contact with a reliable well of insight that reconnects you with your trust in the flow of life.
Expect a combination of reading, writing, contemplative spiritual exercises, and discussion. Group ritual practices may include guided visualization, Tarot, poetry, and other imagination-based modes of understanding and expression, plus light movement and energy play to integrate and ground the evening’s transformations.
Please bring a notebook, pen or pencil, and a few small items of personal significance to decorate a temporary altar to your creative being.
(Repeat offenders get best results! These monthly workshops are designed cumulatively, to develop intimacy with yourself and generate deeper transformation over time. But don't worry if you can't make every one; newcomers are always welcome.)
Kayla has guided over 1500 people to and through poetry, in classroom settings and as an individual mentor, for the last fifteen years, teaching and presenting in New York, LA, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Vienna, Bordeaux, and Heidelberg.
She holds two writing degrees (BA, MFA) with a third in progress, a PhD at UC Santa Cruz researching contemplative poetics and mystical consciousness in John Ashbery, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Meister Eckhart.
Her own creative writing has been published by Tin House, the Berkeley Poetry Review, the Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have won an Academy of American Poets Prize and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
A Del Mar native, Kayla currently camps out in Oakland.
