At Align Your Story Writing School, we bring traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. Join a community of over 25,000 other mindful writers. Get the tools and community to write your best work.
Focus :) Free Mini Retreat Online this Week
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Dear Reader, I hope you're well! I'm spending these last few days of summer in Maine with my husband, Eric, and in this precious pause before the busyness of the fall begins, I've been thinking a lot about silence. One of my teachers, the Buddhist monk and activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, writes: If you don't have silence in yourself, you cannot hear the call of life. Your heart is calling you, but you don't hear. You don't have time to listen to your heart. So many of us don't have the silence and focus that we need to truly listen to our heart. Too often, we are like seagrasses tossed here and there by the waves, unable to really focus. Our contemporary world cultivates attention that is shallow, scattered, and short-term. But we can cultivate a different kind of attention that supports connection and true creativity. Join Me this Thursday for a Free Mini Writing Retreat Online.In this 75-90 minute retreat, I'll guide you to tune in to the silence in yourself so you can listen to your heart and set intentions for your writing this fall. Come with a project you're working on, a question, or just your curiosity about what might want to emerge. You can use the retreat to write in any genre. A FREE Mini Writing Retreat (75-90 minutes)
I'd love to see you there. And feel free to invite any friends who might like to join us. Setting intentions is even more fun with friends :) with love and peace, PS: UPCOMING EVENTSFree Online Mini Writing Retreat: Thursday, August 29th, 3:00pm-4:30pm ET. See more and sign up for free here. Find Joy through Writing Poetry: In-Person Immersive Retreat at the beautiful Omega Campus in Rhinebeck, New York. September 29th-October 4th. Learn more and register here. Poetry of Attention Online Poetry Class (asynchronous) with live coaching, community support, and lifetime access to teaching materials. Fall in love with poetry as a contemplative practice, read, write and live with greater attention, and write your best work. We start October 11th. See more and join the waitlist to be notified when enrollment opens here. |
Hi! I'm Nadia Colburn—writer, teacher, yogi, activist
At Align Your Story Writing School, we bring traditional literary and creative writing studies together with mindfulness, embodied practices, and social and environmental engagement. Join a community of over 25,000 other mindful writers. Get the tools and community to write your best work.
Dear Reader, Happy solstice—the light is returning! In this dark year in our collective history, at this dark time in the year's cycle, it's good to remember other possibilities... I want to share this Solstice poem with you :) On the Shortest Day of the Year from I Say the Sky by Nadia ColburnEven if there is only the smallest doormade of stone,with no handle,bend low,put all your weight into it: it opens onto the wide expanseof where you’ve never been—groundless, blue, and untranslatable,...
Dear Reader, Hello again from Spain, where I'm here with the whole family now :) And happy (almost) Thanksgiving! In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want, first, to thank you for being part of this community! I truly feel grateful and lucky to be connected with you! I also want to share my favorite Thanksgiving prayer: the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s Thanksgiving Address, a deep prayer of thanks for the earth, waters, plants, and animals. I first encountered this address in Robin Wall...
Dear Reader, Hola from Spain! I’m here visiting Simone (my daughter), who’s studying abroad in Granada. Eric and Gabriel will join us tomorrow, but I came early to see Simone and also have a little writing retreat for myself. From our weekend on the coast It’s been a nice respite in many ways, and it's been nice to step outside of the nonstop news cycle of the US. That said, I’m also watching from a distance...the release of the Epstein files (as a sexual abuse survivor, I'm particularly...