The Tea House Writing Sessions
// June 1st, 2011 // 3 Comments » // metaphor, writing
I used to sit regularly at a Buddhist center back in Australia. One of the members there was a student of the Japanese tea ceremony and she used to hold a tea ceremony for us once a month.
The center was in the inner suburbs of Sydney, and we sat on our meditation cushions in this large but austere room as the sounds of traffic, children playing in their yards, and banging pots and pans from families making dinner swirled around us.
In the middle of all this we created our own enclosed world, where we re-enacted this ancient Japanese ceremony. We sat together in silence as our host taught us to whisk the tea in just the right way, and we would take turns to serve each other as we drank green tea and munched sticky rice cakes filled with sweetened red bean paste.
I was struck by all the elements of the ceremony, the beauty of it, and the contemplative and appreciative state of mind it helped to build.
These are the qualities that I’ve been drawing on as I’ve been developing the new writing sessions I’ll be offering here.
I’ve been hoping to lead some sort of writing project with my blog for a while now, and wanted to come up with a way of working with people that included approaches that have been helpful for me, in a format that is also great fun to work with.
What I’ve come up with is called the Tea House Writing Sessions, and they’re going to be available very soon.
The Tea House Writing Sessions will be offered in the form of either one-on-one sessions or group calls. They will take place over phone (or Skype).
Writing can be fraught with anxiety and isolation, and it’s easy to put off. A Tea House session is a place where you can get some respite from writing anxiety, tap into your own courage and writing smarts, and get a little success on the spot.
I’m using the metaphor of a Japanese Tea Ceremony as a guiding principle for the writing sessions. We create a refuge, a retreat from the world, charged with spaciousness and presence and ease. And we write together from there.
I say “we” because during the session I’ll be writing too. We also have the opportunity to read our work out to each other. (Reading aloud is optional.)
A Tea House Writing Session is not a coaching session or a writing class. It floats somewhere in between (beside, around) those things.
My role is to build a supportive environment for people who would like to write, and to offer myself as a fellow traveller. And there’s a process to help guide you beyond anxiety, procrastination, deadlines, worry–to the joy of actually writing.
The process includes guided visualization, a writing/meditation technique, lots of writing time, and a chance to read back your work and get some appreciative feedback.
In the sessions I’ve held so far, everyone has brought their own gifts and style and life experience with them, and from there they spill out all kinds of alive and surprising material. The emphasis is on feeling safe to write, and when that happens people lean into the edges of their writing and take it to new places.
I’ll be opening up the Tea House sessions for bookings next Monday. Sign up for my newsletter and you’ll get an advanced discount code when they open.
The Tea House Writing Sessions are now available–you can read about them and sign up here.











