Writing Your Dharma: Sharing Your Path with Humility and Authenticity

11:00am - 1:00pm EST, Every Saturday: May 6 - June 10 

The world needs to hear your Dharma: your own spiritual journey, expressed with truth, humility, and grace.

In this six-week workshop, we will learn how to share our spiritual paths in writing: how to write with authenticity and vulnerability, how to say what we mean, and how to support others and be supported in the act of creation. Each session will explore another facet of spiritual writing. We will be writing together, examining the works of renowned writers who write about or lace spirituality through their stories, their essays, their poems. We will hear from contemporary artists writing from a spiritual perspective, and have the opportunity to ask them questions and explore our writing with them.

We will discuss and explore how we connect with the mind of meditation and our own, essential creative force. This course is a safe and supportive space to take risks with our writing, and to find a warm community of fellow writers.

Outline of 90-minute Live Sessions: 

Session One

• Introductions, discuss our writing aspirations
• Overview of the course
• Meditation instruction
• Introduction to daily writing process throughout the course
• Group writing exercise
• Choosing weekly cohorts for accountability and sharing, for participants who want them

Session Two

• Guided meditation
• Presentation and discussion: Balancing “Show” and “Tell” in nonfiction writing
• Writing exercise and group share

Session Three

• Guided meditation
• Presentation and discussion: The relationship between connecting with the mind of meditation and writing
• Finding inspiration, and some of the pitfalls of spiritual writing

Session Four

• Meditation
• Writing mindfulness: How to write through sense perceptions and “first thought, best thought”
• Writing exercise and group share

Session Five

• Meditation
• Workshop on storytelling
• Writing exercise and group share

Session Six

• Meditation
• Discussing our experience throughout the course
• Bring a piece of writing to the session, for group workshopping
• Course close, and discussing next steps from here

About the Teachers

Mimi Valiulis has been practicing meditation in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition since 2001. She taught writing in Paris, and was an editor for literary magazines in New York and Paris. Mimi received a MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has worked as the Dean for Shambhala Online, the Director of Shambhala Online, and now serves as the Creative Director. She is passionate about all the ways we can illuminate and share the essence of meditation and the buddhist teachings, as well as having a deep curiosity about the ways the wisdom of Buddhism intersects with other world religions and spiritual traditions.

Gaylon Ferguson, PhD, has led group meditation retreats since 1976. He taught at Stanford, the University of Washington, and Naropa University, where he was a Core Faculty Member for fifteen years. The author of two books, Natural Wakefulness (on the four foundations of mindfulness) and Natural Bravery (on fear and fearlessness as path to manifesting bravery), his articles have appeared in Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, and Buddhadharma magazine. He contributed the foreword to the pioneering collection Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation and Freedom (Shambhala, 2020).

Frederick Meyer is a lifelong Shambhala and Buddhist practitioner. He has worked professionally as a humor writer, blogger, copy editor, and writing coach, and is the director of Writers.com, the internet’s oldest creative writing school. His life goal is to help the Dharma flourish in the West. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, Clara, their daughter, Anna, and their dog, Lucy.