Guest Blog for Mandali: Discovering the Poet Within
What is poetry? Forget everything you might have been taught about it, any rules around rhythms or rhymes. Forget the rigid structures and the conditioning that led us to believe only a select few chosen ones could dare call themselves ‘poets’.
Poetry, at its core, is about expressing truth. When written, and especially when read aloud, it is about meeting that edge of our (self-)knowledge, and the tender vulnerability of having stepped just beyond it. Poetry is ‘good’ not when executed as per the rules – it is so when it moves something within the author, and the people reading or hearing it. There truly is a poet in everyone, in everyone who dares to be brave and show their soul just a little bit more.
Embodied poetry is the phrase I have come up with to capture this essence. Over the years, in addition to spontaneously writing poems in my journal since I was a child, I got trained in ‘social poetry’. Social poetry, taught by John Stubley during the Ecosystem Leadership Program of the Presencing Institute, equipped me with a deeper understanding of the power of words, tools to access inner truth, and ways to weave in the collective dimension.
Based on these teachings, learnings from other art-based processes and my personal experience, a body of work is emerging around embodied poetry. It was such an honour to teach two workshops in Mandali! We explored the power of metaphor, and followed it to support each participant in spontaneously, without blockages, write what might be their first poem ever, or their first in a while.
