The next sessions of Inwood Writing Workshops will be held on Zoom beginning in September due to COVID restrictions. You can go to website for some more info on how they work, and to read testimonials from past and current participants. There are only one or two spaces available, but I am posting here, since it is unusual for these workshops to be available to people who do not live in New York. If you are interested, contact me via the website and I will give you more details. The workshops are quite intimate (6-7 people), and everyone has a chance to share work that wants to in any session.
If you go to website, you can also see information about my one-on-one coaching work and manuscript reviews, and the wonderful Orkney Isles of Scotland retreat. Only one spot left for 2021 already because all the folks who wanted to come in 2020 have reserved their spot for 2021. Finally, I will begin teaching gentle, healing yoga again in the autumn, also online.
As you can probably guess since I am mentioning all of this, I am finally on the other side of COVID and even—blinking like a hibernating animal emerging from a cave—the worst of post-COVID syndrome. While there are some residual things I have to pay attention to, I can begin to work again. I am taking August off entirely to recalibrate my body and nervous system to be ready for workshops, coaching, and yoga in the autumn. This whole incredibly long (4 month!) journey has taught me a lot about the depth of what real self-care looks like, and how I am so not John Wayne. While I would not wish it on anyone, I am grateful for some of the lessons I have learned and continue to learn. And I think in the end, I may come out of this a healthier person, who is less in love with an illusion of invulnerability and some kind of fake toughness that I think perhaps I have cherished a little too much. I am now taking aspects of my health more seriously than ever before, and since I am in my 50s, that is a necessary realignment.
I am super grateful to all the doctors who have been and are helping me, and also healers of various traditions. I am indebted to my yoga teacher training last year for giving me the tools I have needed and still need to move through this with minimal medications or interventions. Let me be clear: I am not anti-medications or anti-vaccinations or anti-anything that helps. I am simply saying I have tools that have been life-saving on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level. When a doctor says I need a medication, I take it. When they say I don't need it, I stop taking it.
I am equally grateful to friends that have stepped up to help in so many ways I can't even begin to enumerate them. And for John and Ugo, my constant human and feline companions during our time together in a one-bedroom NYC apartment. We have done quite well.
And finally, I am deliriously happy to gradually but measurably be getting my energy back, hence my life. I now have compassion for all the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and other auto-immune disease sufferers on a visceral level. I feel fortunate that COVID did not tip me over permanently into any of those diseases, but the months in post-viral syndrome have been enough to show me what you all go through. Wow. Just wow. All respect.
If you have any questions about working with me in September, please get in touch soon. In August, I will be only infrequently checking email, as I need to go into a calm place to heal.