
Instructor: Marta Luzim, MS
Maximum Enrollment: 10
Class Term: 03/15/2021 - 04/12/2021
Tuition/Fees
SCN Member: $128.00
Non-Member: $160.00
Class synopsis
Trauma is not in your head; it is in your body. It takes courage to heal. People heal when they are heard with unconditional acceptance. To give voice to your trauma is a homecoming. Trauma is your instinct, intuition, and juicy writing and awakens you to self-love, self-respect, self-acceptance, and self-forgiveness. Your most precious, creative, and body-felt writing will flow onto the page with lovingkindness and heart-felt poetic grace. To start the journey into your beautiful body, you will explore four kinds of love that stir your heart to write your story of trauma.Class description
This four-week course activates a writing journey from your head into your flesh, bones, and heart. Body-felt writing is passionate, instinctual, intuitive and juicy. You will be gently guided into memories, feelings, and active imagining to write your personal trauma-story with compassion, self-love, self-validation, guts and grace.
Class goals
Learn to use writing as a creative path for healing trauma, Claim self-acceptance, self-respect, self-validation and self-love to tell your story
Class communication method
Weekly, 90-minute class sessions via Zoom. Writing material, handouts, and prompts will be given to you during class time. Occasionally, material will be sent in advance to students via email. Students will be invited to share their writing to be received, heard, and seen with supportive feedback. Additional instructor insight for each writer.Class outline
Unit One: Family Love – First Love
You are born and you open your eyes to the very first moment of love–your family. They lay the foundation of love through your sense of time, touch, attention and nurturance. The way a child experiences the love of her family will color the lens of how she gives and receives love of all kinds. So much happens by the time you reach age six. You are born into families that sometimes hurt your hearts rather than nourish your souls. You are taught patterns, beliefs and feelings that are the result of abuse, neglect and abandonment. How did your family love shape the way you grew into relationships of all kinds? Writing about family, love and childhood is the basis of trust and safety in the world.
Unit Two: Romantic Love – Young Love
When does love romantic love awaken? In kindergarten, fifth grade, high school? When did you get your first Valentine’s Day card from a classmate? What movies or songs initiated your romantic dreams? Romantic love is influenced by movies, songs, family relationships and the onset of puberty. Young love is brilliant at its best and heartbreaking when it ends. Writing about romantic love will open you to the innocence of your heartbreak and desire to love and be loved.
Unit Three: Committed Love – Resilient Love
Long term loving relationship is the most challenging of all. How does one give, receive, be independent and interdependent, and stay in love for a life-time? Resilience, courage, choices and commitment set the stage for committed love. In this unit we will look at all of the rites of passage of love and trauma. Heartbreak, grief, desire and sex are the basis of forgiveness.
Unit Four: Self-love – Homecoming to Heart of a Woman
Trauma is your heart’s journey to arousing self-respect, self-acceptance, self-care and self-forgiveness. It is coming home to your body. How does self-love grow in resilience, creativity and self-awareness, in spite of trauma? Self-love is the heart of a woman. It is the healing and forgiveness of trauma. “If you want to give birth to your true self, you are going to have to dig deep down into that body of yours and let your soul howl.” –Gabrielle Roth
Class time commitment
90 minutes per session, with an additional 90 minutes per week for writingInstructor bio
Marta Luzim, MS has been working with women, families, and couples for over forty years. She is a Psychospiritual Therapist with an M.S. in Counseling Psychology and a B.S. in Education. She is an expert in women’s trauma and recovery and a Next Level Practitioner in the field of trauma. She is certified as a Kaizen creative coach, Metaphysician, somatic bodyworker, emotional intuitive, intimacy trainer, and mindfulness breath worker. She is a published writer, artist, and playwright. In 2010, she founded Give Her A Voice, Inc., a 501(c)3 non-profit that creates a multi-media theatrical show of women’s recovery stories. giveheravoice.org. Currently she is working on her own memoir. She is passionate to meet women’s Mad Genius Beauty and evoke their voices to write deep, dark, and daring through her signature Writing Like A Madwoman course. www.womenswayin.com.