A Poetry Workshop for Mercury Retrograde
Stop dating lessons and deepen your capacity for intimacy.
Stop dating lessons…
There is a reason your ex always comes back during a retrograde, and it’s not to get back together.
Or, maybe you’re committed—and it is an argument that returns and returns. And now you feel stuck in this toxic and exhausting cycle.
The return is because you haven’t learned completely the lesson the universe wants you to develop. Retrogrades are opportunities to revise. And this workshop will give you a tool that will transform what returns into resolution. You can return to this writing technique instead of your ex; in order to gain clarity and level up the romance and peace in your relationships.
Poetic form is the integration of logic and emotion. It has specific rules to follow and then each line is decorated with imagery, imagination, music. The limitations force us to enage with our mercurial analytical brain—so what would normally feel overwhelming: trauma, pain, rejection can flow onto the page with more ease.
Feelings are what block us—not logic. Emotion is the lump in your throat when you’re trying to express something too big. We can approach the unapproachable with poetic form. Poetic form is math as much as art.
I chose the sestina because its form corresponds with the energy of retrograde. Each line is revisiting the same meaning but rearranges it. The sestina allows us to reenter the same idea in mulitiple ways. You keep revisiting the line—just like your ex—until it becomes clear what you are meant to understand.
The sestina settles what is unsettling. Shout out to Ellen McGrath Smith who I’m quoting from 2005 when I first took her workshop—that’s 19 years ago and it is still a writing tool I use for this exact purpose.
In Aries, Mercury wants you to be selfish, self-centered, to self-reflect. Mercury in Aries is initiating a deeper identity. Aries is self-confidence. Learning how to write a sestina helps us to reconnect with a deeper foundation of who we are and our self-knowing. The sestina helps to untangle some knots around what we keep doing to doubt ourselves.
In the workshop you will learn how to write a Sestina. Then, we will discuss what happened for us during Mercury’s retrograde—and this will supply us with material to write about. The workshop will occur post retrograde so we can reap from it. I will also give you a prompt to help get you started.
This sestina will help us release self-doubt, clarify our fears around rejection, and all the reasons we may return to toxic relationships that don’t serve us anymore. Write towards clearing whatever negative affirmation you are subconsciously telling yourself that keeps you settling for less than what you deserve.
The timeline to pay attention to: Mercury will retrograde from April 1st until April 25th, 2024. It’s pre-shadow begins March 19th—and post-shadow ends May 13th.
Eclipse season will be over by April 28th, the date of this workshop, and we will still be in the Mercury Retrograde post shadow phase—but this may lend itself.
Live Virtual One Day Workshop: April 28th at 5:00 PM EST is $40 USD to attend
For NEW MOON CLUB MEMBERS $20 USD [discount code below]
Digital worksheet for solitary poets, writers and witches: $10 USD (released April 28th)
Contact Sarah @ sarahheffner@gmail.com with questions
Love,
The Poet Witch
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