Taking a break from regular newsletter programming to share that for the first time in a long time, I’m running my own independent workshop in Birmingham. Eeek.
I’ve been facilitating workshops for the past 3-4 years but these are workshops I’ve been hired to facilitate as a freelancer or workshops I’ve delivered as part of my job.
At the start of the year, I felt that this was the year I should start to organise my own public workshops, but I knew I didn’t want them to be generic wellbeing, mental health or arts workshops. I wanted to create a workshop that would be fun creatively, but also provide a space for where people can pause and check-in and really connect to their lives.
I had the idea to run seasonal workshops — workshops based around the seasons that act as checkpoints in the year where we can take a pause and reflect on what’s happening both within and around us, because we don’t often have the time to do that. Life moves so quickly and we move with it, a lot of just ‘get on’ doing the things we need to do and we either miss celebrating a lot of great moments, or miss the opportunity to acknowledge the small moments — not realising we’ve missed both until it shows up later in some way through stress or low mood.
As we have the summer solstice coming up this month, the first workshop is Postcards from Spring on the 20th of June and it is all about slowing down to reflect on the past 3 months of Spring. You can find the details and the description in the flyer below.
My hope is to run similar workshops exploring different creative formats throughout the year at the seasonal checkpoints – the autumn equinox, the winter solstice, the spring equinox.
For this session, I wanted to focus on postcard-making because summer is the time people are often going on holiday. It felt appropriate to have a session where you can create a postcard that captures the essence of the past few months of your life that also carries a message to yourself that you can carry with you into summer. These can be stuck to your fridge, placed in a wallet, stuck in a scrapbook — whatever will feel the most meaningful to you.
If you’re a creative person, a reflective person — or just someone who wants a low pressure wellbeing event to get out to and connect with others, then I would love you to join! Tickets for the workshop can be purchased on Eventbrite here. They are priced at £14 and cover the cost of the event.
Feel free to also save the flyers above and share with people you know who may be interested.
See you there!