Creative Healing - by Cassie Premo Steele

COURSE

Creative Healing

With Cassie Premo Steele

As the work of many writers attests and as scientists are beginning to prove, writing and creativity can help us move past trauma and into more creative, productive lives. Drawing from Cassie Premo Steele’s book, "We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldua and The Poetry of Witness," as well as her award-winning poetry which hundreds of listeners have enjoyed in dozens of her audio tracks and live classes on Insight Timer, this course will introduce participants to strategies for writing their way out of their painful pasts through creative work and allow them to use writing, creativity, and meditation as ways of healing. Over the course of 10 classes, participants will be guided by an award-winning teacher in a comfortable, workshop-style setting that is participatory and interactive. Each class meeting will combine the opportunity to reflect on how writing, meditation, and creative healing exercises help us bear witness to our survival and lead us away from self-doubt and silence and toward our own inner wisdom and strong voice. As with all of Cassie Premo Steele’s teachings on Insight Timer, writing will be kept private, and all efforts will be made to ensure that the class creates a place of trust and safety. Unlike in many writing and art classes, there will be no judgment or critique but instead, the class will support each person’s efforts to journey from pain and into healing.


Meet your Teacher

Cassie Premo Steele is a lesbian, ecofeminist, mother, poet, novelist, and essayist whose writing focuses on the themes of trauma, healing, creativity, mindfulness, and the environment. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Cassie has published 16 books, including six books of poetry and the widely praised scholarly study on trauma and poetry titled "We Heal from Memory." She has taught in university and community settings for over 20 years. Cassie was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award judged by the current US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and she is a recipient of the Archibald Rutledge Prize named after the first Poet Laureate of South Carolina, where she lives with her wife.

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10 Days

510 students

4.8 stars

12 min / day

Performance

English


Lesson 1

Trust Your Inner Voice

In this class, participants will learn about trauma and how memory works. We will explore poetry as a way to access the emotion of an event that is still in a pre-narrative state. Writing exercises will allow for freedom and play in the creative process.

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Lesson 2

Trust Your Poetic Voice

We begin with a guided meditation on "Banishing Doubt." Then participants will build on the lessons from Day 1 and move into writing a poem of their own. This builds the foundation for self-trust that will lead to deep healing.

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Lesson 3

Become A Witness

In this class, participants will learn what a witness is and the difference between an intrasubjective and intersubjective witness. We will journal as a way of becoming comfortable with the uncertainties in the process of the reconstruction of the trauma narrative. Then, we will be led in a guided meditation so we can "witness" our inner voices.

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Lesson 4

Committing To Your Creative Healing

In this class, we will write a vow to our inner witness. This will deepen our relationship with the witness and the creative healing process. This will also allow us to focus on the present moment more clearly as we find that commitment to the creative healing journey opens the possibility for seeing the past as past and letting go.

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Lesson 5

Healing Through The Seasons

This day's class includes a nurturing guided meditation that allows participants to see the different seasons of their life with new eyes. Creative healing means that we bring a loving and accepting vision to our lives, and this opens possibilities for new future paths. We will finish the class with some gentle journaling prompts to bring language to our new visions.

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Lesson 6

Healing Through The Body

This class leads participants in a Body Awareness Meditation that allows us to practice bringing the "inner witness" to our physical selves - seeing them with an open, loving awareness that is incredibly healing. After the meditation, participants will journal about the insight they have now gained about their bodies.

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Lesson 7

Healing Through Our Dreams

In this class, participants build upon the creative healing they've done with their past and present selves to dream a new dream for their lives. In a gentle and supportive guided meditation, listeners will find the patterns, images, and beautiful paths of their life laid out before them so they can move forward with wisdom and grace. Then, they are given an opportunity to write about this new dream.

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Lesson 8

Healing Through Community

Today's class moves participants from seeing their creative healing as an individual experience to something shared by a community. Whether through collective or intergenerational experiences, we pass down what is not witnessed. But when we bring creative healing to our experiences, this heals the whole community. We celebrate the possibility of this healing through a loving-kindness meditation.

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Lesson 9

Healing Through Desire

This class focuses on bringing together many of the themes of creative healing so participants can make their desires for themselves clear and concrete - in writing. We will listen to several poems about the creative healing process and write in our journals in response to prompts after each one.

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Lesson 10

Saying 'YES' To Healing

In the final class, participants do a creative exercise on healthy boundaries in their journals and then we celebrate saying "YES" to our healing through a beautiful and nurturing meditation called "Healing and Wholing the Body and Self."

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4.8 (5)

Recent Reviews

Brian

March 7, 2025

What a great course! Whole person healing of the mind, body, and spirit. Great poems, prompts, Journaling, and meditations promote creative healing. Parts that were evident and some to be revealed that all needed healing. You will find your own and feel better in the end.

Amy

October 25, 2022

Beautifully laid out, thorough and thoughtfully developed and took me through a much deeper healing process than I expected. The best part was Cassie’s feedback. I thought she went way above and beyond. She held space for the depth of the emotional uncensored issues that revealed themselves on the page, while providing support and encouragement for the creative process unfolding in me. Thank you! Amy

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