Let This Poem Be A Hand Upon My Shoulder Workshop

This long-established and ground-breaking course for personal and professional development will provide you with an understanding of therapeutic and reflective writing techniques for working personally or with groups.

The course explores the main approaches in therapeutic and reflective writing by encouraging you to explore your own life through writing. Weekly readings offer a theoretical background for those intending to apply their learning to others.

Delivered online over eight weeks, the course has been designed by Lapidus members Victoria Field and Anne Taylor and is tutored by Kate McBarron — three highly experienced facilitators and teachers in the field.

In this workshop, reclaim your voice. Begin testing out what you have to say, and experiment with new metaphors and motifs to do justice to the vastness of your health or care story.

Here our focus is on finding a language, style and voice for your writing about health and illness that best reflects your story. How might you capture living with an illness, being disabled, or providing care using words that adequately reflect the complexity of your experience?

We’ll consider the expressive potential of creative writing as a corrective to prejudice and ignorance. We will also explore texts that write beyond the simple binaries of being well and unwell, life and death, fighter or victim. Contemporary works which upend conventional norms around writing about health and illness will be a stimulus in the reading material we draw from.

Course Outline
– Session two of a series of live zoom workshops, beginning on February 18th, with tutor of expressive and therapeutic writing, and coach, Andrew Kauffmann. Including a combination of reading, discussion and writing exercises.

– Reading material provided outside of the Zoom session

– Resources on telling your story within safe boundaries and the benefits to expressive writing on health and care experiences

Content rooted in the social model of disability, open to all people with health and care needs, and those who provide care

Paced to be a comfortable writing experience, suited to writers of all levels. There will be a short comfort break. There is no expectation to be on camera, if you don’t feel comfortable appearing on camera. Neither will there be any expectations around sharing what you’ve written with other participants. There will be an added focus in this coming series on writing in a range of experimental forms, mixing genres and without constraints or concern for convention on how we might write our story.

A structured 4-week course exploring self-compassion through creative writing and embodied practice. Develop a kinder inner voice, reframe patterns of self-criticism, and build sustainable practices for emotional resilience.

Drawing from Paul Gilbert’s Compassion Focused Therapy, Kristin Neff’s self-compassion research, and person-centred approaches, this course integrates psychological frameworks with creative exploration including two-pen dialogue, visual mapping, embodied awareness, and collaborative poetry.

The course is limited to 8 participants to help foster community and a sense of safety, and all participants receive a comprehensive 47-page companion guide. The guide contains exercises, weekly trackers, frameworks, and written and video resources for ongoing practice.

The course is designed with neurodivergent processing and varied energy levels in mind, with built-in safety supports and permission to adapt.

No previous writing experience required. Limited to 8 participants for intimate, supported exploration. Zoom link will be provided the day before the course starts.

Book direct: https://buy.stripe.com/cNiaEZ9fC6Un1N28KM9Zm08
Or via my website where the full course outline can be downloaded: https://www.katepoll.co.uk/#compassionjournalling

Limited concession rate places available: £149: https://buy.stripe.com/cNiaEZ9fC6Un1N28KM9Zm08