Recap of "Refuge in Community": Meditation & Writing Workshop

with Felicia Savage Friedman from YogaRoots on Location + Be Where You Are 🙏🏽✨

Welcome to Be Where You Are. I’m a writer & writing teacher exploring meditation & mindfulness & the in-between spaces that are awkward, beautiful & kind of magic in this growing online community. Thank you for being here. 🩵

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Hi, friends. This weekend, Felicia Savage Friedman and I led a meditation and writing workshop together that we called “Refuge in Community.” I’m sharing the video recording below for those of you who couldn’t make it.

It was a powerful experience to be together and to breathe and write and share our words with each other. The workshop got off to a rocky start when I had a massive face-palm moment realizing that I’d sent the wrong link to the YogaRoots team. I was really beating myself up, stuck in my tight-chested-want-to-crawl-under-the-table embarrassment when Felicia said with a wide grin, “It’s ok, this is why we practice!”

I was so grateful to Felicia for her way of meeting that frustrating moment with such clear grace. My shoulders loosened and I tried to follow her gentle words as a way forward.

Felicia led us through meditations that felt deeply grounding and I wove in a writing prompt based on the Alice Walker poem, “While Love is Unfashionable,” which I’ll share below, in case you could use it now.

The participants shared such stirring words at the end that filled me up with the real reason we write:

To pay attention to the voice within us and give it space to speak. To share the stories and the truths that only we can share.

WHILE LOVE IS UNFASHIONABLE

—for Mel

While love is unfashionable 
let us live 
unfashionably. 
Seeing the world 
a complex ball 
in small hands; 
love our blackest garment. 
Let us be poor 
in all but truth, and courage
handed down 
by the old 
spirits. 
Let us be intimate with 
ancestral ghosts 
and music 
of the undead.

While love is dangerous 
let us walk bareheaded 
beside the Great River. 
Let us gather blossoms 
under fire.

—Alice Walker

from Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991.

If you’d like to share anything from your experience with this workshop, please share them in the comments below! We’d love to hear.

If you couldn’t attend the workshop, but still want to donate to YogaRoots on Location to support their work for embodied collective liberation, you can donate at the link below. Thanks to everyone who has donated already!

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Be Where You Are is a newsletter about how to use writing and mindfulness to live more fully where you are. If you have ideas to share for future workshops, you can reach me by replying to this email. I’d love to hear from you! You can also find me on Bluesky or Instagram or find more info at my website. ✨✨