“Narrative journaling helps to rewrite your stories with compassion, while sending positive affirmations and goodwill to the person or situation.” - Dr. Chris Lipat
ABOUT
Family trauma often feels isolating. Expressing these stories with the support of a compassionate witness can help with the healing process. This workshop uses personal writing to express difficult family experiences and then to reframe them with new perspectives through gentle guidance and compassionate community witnessing. Processing through writing can improve vagal tone, help us better manage stress, and improve mental well-being by fostering a more balanced autonomic nervous system. We will use brainstorming, narrative journaling, and freewriting; No formal writing experience necessary.
Through an interactive and experiential format, this workshop will provide:
- A container with guides and other fellow BIPOC community members to explore a challenging experience around family
- An opportunity to release the charge of the story by bringing in a new perspective through guided writing prompts
- Ways to dive into an emotionally-charged writing session while being grounded, informed by MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) and vagal tone understanding
- A foundation for a grounding and healing writing routine to take into the winter months to come
DETAILS
This 2-hour workshop for BIPOC is a guided writing journey to help unearth and process our stories.
- Date: Monday, January 19th
- Time: 5:00-7pm PST
- Form: Online via Zoom
- Cost: $25-50 sliding scale (more info below)
WORKSHOP GUIDES
Miro Jooyoung Oh (she/they) has been supporting communities of color / people of the global majority through Mugwort Counseling since 2017 as a therapist. She integrates Process Work, mindfulness, somatic practices, ancestral wisdom, and Buddhist practices through a social justice lens. She is also a co-founder of StudioYellow, a social design consulting group rooted in Revolutionary Love and Racial Justice. Outside her work, she loves foraging, dancing, and writing. Learn more at mugwortcounseling.com.
Joon Ae Haworth-Kaufka (she/they) is a Korean adoptee writer, educator, and community organizer. She is the founder of Ajumama Workshop, a liberation-based writing coaching practice in addition to a cofounder of the Constellation Reading Series and VOICES, a BIPOC Adoptee Community. She is a lucky recipient of numerous honors, including a recent Oregon Humanities storytelling fellowship and an Asian American Journalists Association award. Her work has been published here and there over the years – and she’s incredibly thankful people have cared about the things she writes about. Learn more at ajumamaworkshop.com.